‘A Thousand Blows’: Who had been the Forty Elephants gang and their thief ‘queen’ Mary Carr?

In Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s Hulu/Disney+ present, A Thousand Blows, there are quite a lot of characters primarily based on historic figures. Set within the grime and crime of Eighties East London, essentially the most overt motion takes place within the boxing ring, with real-life Jamaican immigrant Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) taking up one of the best fighter on the Thames, Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham).

However past these matches, a band of stealthy, organised thieves are seizing their very own piece of the motion — and so they’re all girls. They’re the Forty Elephants, an actual gang led by the charismatic Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), who pilfer the prized possessions of the higher courses by the pocketful.

“I wanted for a long time to do the story of the Forty Elephants, which is a true story of a gang of female-only criminals who were led by someone called Mary Carr,” Knight stated onstage at A Thousand Blows‘ premiere on the London Movie Competition (LFF) in October, fittingly proven on the BFI across the nook from the Embankment pub named for the gang. He referred to the story as “working class history…that is just remarkable, astonishing, and needed to be told.”

However who had been the Forty Elephants and Mary Carr, and the way are they portrayed in Knight’s TV sequence? Let’s dig into the historical past books.

Who had been the Forty Elephants?

As the primary organised, all-female shoplifting gang in London, operational from the 1870s to the Fifties, the Forty Elephants (additionally referred to as the Forty Thieves) would possibly immediately enliven fashionable feminist imaginations. They’re merely made for the display screen. A city-wide, extremely organised syndicate of ladies with out the correct to vote however seizing the correct to everybody’s coin and luxurious items? It is the stuff of legend, and it makes them deeply compelling characters in A Thousand Blows, chopping the pockets of the aristocracy in each covert, theatrical, and generally literal methods.

“The Forty Thieves is the most successful shoplifting gang that Britain’s ever seen,” says historian, writer, and BBC journalist Lucy Worsley in a riveting Woman Swindlers podcast episode on the Forty Elephants. “It has a mirror image of itself in the form of the male Elephant and Castle gang, which includes relative, lovers, and husbands. But the Forty Thieves are proud of their financial independence from the men, and they certainly don’t share their proceeds with them.”

Organised gangs want a formidable chief; the Forty Elephants had a queen.

The Forty Elephants deployed inventive technique of stealing cash, garments, jewels, and the rest of worth, as detailed in writer and journalist Brian McDonald’s ebook Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants — he dug by means of police detective reviews, court docket transcripts, and newspaper protection from the time. From blackmail to breaking and coming into and assault, their targets reportedly ranged from gents on the road to London’s newly opened shops and high-end jewelry outlets — we see the Elephants’ brazen raid of Harrods in A Thousand Blows‘ second episode.

The gang’s emergence got here from a spot of “combatting unfairness,” McDonald writes — they had been girls within the decrease echelons of society preventing to outlive, not simply to vote: “The suffragist movement sought equality with men; shoplifters, jewel thieves and fences sought escape from ritual drudgery.” In actual fact, in keeping with the Museum of London, shoplifters and suffragettes would have served sentences at Islington’s infamous Holloway Jail across the similar time within the early 1900s.

Historian Rosalind Crone defined on Woman Swindlers that skilled shoplifting “provided an option for women who were failing or struggling to benefit from the new opportunities opening up in the early 20th century to have some of the luxury, to have a career and to have economic independence from men. So in other words, this was an alternative route to become a modern woman.”

Most vital of all, organised gangs want a formidable chief; the Forty Elephants had a queen.

Who was Mary Carr of the Forty Elephants?

“One of the most dangerous women in the metropolis,” in keeping with a 1900 police report described in McDonald’s ebook, Mary Carr was the ‘queen’ of the Forty Elephants gang in Victorian London, recruiting women and girls to her shoplifting syndicate.

In line with historian, journalist and writer Caitlin Davies in her ebook Queens of the Underworld (Davies additionally trawled by means of police transcripts, court docket reviews, and extra from the Nationwide Archives), Carr was born in 1862 within the central London district of Holborn, and rapidly ran afoul of the legislation by her teenagers, touchdown in a Church of England-run penitentiary for “fallen women.” By the Nineties, the writer says, Carr was not solely an artist’s mannequin however was suspected of crimes starting from pickpocketing to fencing stolen items to youngster kidnapping (actually). However she’d be most well-known for operating the Forty Elephants, instructing younger girls tips on how to take what they did not have.

Mashable High Tales

“As Queen of the Elephants, I travel ’round this city offering poor, lost souls opportunities,” says Carr in A Thousand Blows, performed by The Crown‘s Erin Doherty.

Discovering her personal model of the fearless and strategic chief within the present, Doherty views her brazen character with utter respect. “I just wanted to be just a morsel of the reason why people get to find out about these women. I was genuinely just really inspired by what they did, and I just wanted to be a part of Mary. Embracing her and embodying her, really, has been a gift for me,” stated the actor onstage at LFF.

“I just really respected that they took these missions with complete seriousness, and they took it with pride,” Doherty added. “This was the only opportunity that they were given, so they were going to do it to the best of their ability.”

A Thousand Blows additionally options Carr’s arguably extra well-known successor Alice Diamond (performed by The Irregulars‘ Darci Shaw), who was the gang’s infamous queen within the Nineteen Twenties. In a fictionalised scene in A Thousand Blows, Mary and Alice meet throughout a Harrods raid, and he or she’s recruited into the gang by means of a sequence of trials — it is an actual deal with to observe these hypothesised conversations between the 2 queens all through the sequence. In A Thousand Blows, the Forty Elephants are Hannah Walters as Eliza Moody, Nadia Albina as Verity Ross, Morgan Hilaire as Esme Lengthy, Jemma Carlton as Belle Downer and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Anne Glover.

Shirley Pitts, who adopted Diamond because the gang’s final queen, is not represented within the present, however you must learn Dr. Lorraine Gamman’s ebook Gone Purchasing about her.

The theatrical gambits of the Forty Elephants

Some of the compelling parts of the Forty Elephants is how organised the operation was — McDonald writes that the gang adhered to a strict code of conduct and labored with a city-wide community of specialist fences, pawnbrokers, and couriers (you may see all of them in A Thousand Blows). The writer quotes the gang’s manifesto throughout Diamond’s time as queen: “Discipline is expected, no drinking before a raid, and early hours to bed. Proceeds from a job are equally shared by the group members involved no matter what their role members must not steal from each other. Families must be looked after when a member is in prison.”

However as organised as they had been, the gang was additionally inventive.

Within the opening scene of A Thousand Blows, we first meet Mary Carr pulling a diabolical heist by pretending to enter labour in the course of the road, whereas her gang members pickpocket the gang. It really works like a appeal, and it is the proper homage to the true gang’s strategies. McDonald writes of the Forty Elephants’ “follow of placing their arm in an affectionate embrace across the necks of their victims, on this case sailors, whereas rifling their pockets with the opposite hand. In Woman Swindlers, Worsley talks about Diamond utilizing a kind of trouser known as “grafters bloomers” with extremely deep pockets to rob Selfridges, and she quotes a detective from the Metropolitan Police describing how the gang would rob department stores “with navy precision”:

“Dressed to kill, these girls would descend on a West End store like a swarm of locusts. They’d roll up in taxis and chauffeur-driven limousines and practically clean the place out inside an hour. In 1914, there were 15 arrests in Selfridges alone in one single day, but most of the time, Alice and the gang got away with it.”

“Dressed to kill, these girls would descend on a West End store like a swarm of locusts.”

The Harrods scene in episode 2 of A Thousand Blows sees Mary Carr and her gang swan into the palatial retailer, knives out, smashing and grabbing silver hairbrushes, Chinese language silk, hats, furs, and feather boas, and strolling again out the door.

There are nice anecdotes in McDonald and Davies’ books about Carr’s gambits, together with one by which McDonald says she was sentenced to 4 months exhausting labour for stealing a gold watch by pretending to have misplaced her purse, asking for a bus fare, then snatching the products. “Mary Carr used her youthful looks to full advantage by dressing in exquisite clothes, her golden locks hanging over her shoulders, and acting the part of a teenage girl who could not find her way to her lodgings,” McDonald writes. “This was for the benefit of prosperous-looking gentlemen who offered directions to guide her and when she was too upset to comprehend the instructions consented to walk with her. Carr would then turn from demure damsel to forceful harridan when her gang of girls responded to her cries for help.”

This method the writer describes includes the gang members typically framing males for assault, then blackmailing them for his or her valuables “to avoid the embarrassment of a prosecution.” Davies says this method developed from a ruse by Ann Duck within the 1740s. Different tales McDonald and Davies write of are Carr swooning on the street, being escorted dwelling by a passing man, then having her aunt burst in on their being unaccompanied, and blackmailing him. Whereas fabricating such claims for blackmail functions is clearly utterly horrible, it’s really fairly shocking this feminine gang felt assured sufficient in a judicial system’s chance of believing girls that they used it as a weapon. That may be a contemporary learn, however I am intrigued.

So, what did they do with all that loot? In addition to making ends meet and placing meals on the desk, the Museum of London has an excellent reply: “The gang were known for their extravagant style, but you wouldn’t catch them wearing most of the items they’d nicked. Instead, they’d flog them to their network of specialist ‘fencers’, people who buy stolen goods to sell at a profit. The Forties would get money on a commission basis. They spent their money on high fashion and fun. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the clan gathered in London entertainment venues like music halls.”

Regardless of the drama, these had been genuinely dangerous performs by the Forty Elephants. A Thousand Blows director Nick Murphy informed the LFF viewers that the present’s occasions are underpinned by the brutality of on a regular basis life in Victorian London, and the very actual dangers going through the Forty Elephants. “Like Mary says, ‘One slip, London will kill you.’ That’s it. There’s no social security. There’s no backup. Everybody knows that one slip and it’s done…These women get caught, they’ll fucking hang. That’s it, and it’s serious.”

The portrayal of Mary Carr and the Forty Elephants in A Thousand Blows may be the primary you hear of this formidable gang — it actually was for me. For girls on the backside rung of society to climb their approach up by means of theatrical ruses and violence just isn’t a narrative we have heard lots, and it is one which deserves its time onscreen.

Should you resolve to make use of their shoplifting strategies, we had been by no means right here.

A Thousand Blows is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.