Queens of the Underworld

A Journey into the Lives of Female Crooks

Caitlin Davies

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781803992846, 9780750993173
• eBook ISBN: 9780750999113
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

'This book is an extremely important part of women's social history. Read it!' - Maxine Peake

Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Ronnie Biggs, the Krays … All have become folk heroes, glamorised and romanticised, even when they killed. But where are their female equivalents? Where are the street robbers, gang leaders, diamond thieves, gold smugglers and bank robbers?

Queens of the Underworld reveals the incredible story of female crooks from the seventeenth century to the present. From Moll Cutpurse to the Black Boy Alley Ladies, from jewel thief Emily Lawrence to bandit leader Elsie Carey and burglar Zoe Progl, these were charismatic women at the top of their game. But female criminals have long been dismissed as either not 'real women' or not 'real criminals', and in the process their stories have been lost.

Caitlin Davies unravels the myths, confronts the lies and tracks down modern-day descendants in order to tell the truth about their lives for the first time.

1

MARY FRITH JACOBEAN PICKPOCKET AND FENCE

At the upper entrance to Shoe Lane, an ancient alley in the City of London, roadworks are blocking the traffic. A lorry attempts to deliver a load of gravel and as a bus inches its way onto Charterhouse Street, drivers begin sounding their horns. I head down Shoe Lane and away from the noise, passing modern office blocks with walls of reflective glass and then the medieval church of St Andrew Holborn. The lane is wide, but no one is about, aside from a woman rattling the wheels of her suitcase along the pavement.

Back in the seventeenth century, this alley was cobbled, and lamp lit, a claustrophobic passage lined with timber-framed houses that would be burnt to cinders in the Great Fire of London. There were tenements here, as well as businesses belonging to signwriters and broadsheet designers. Street vendors gathered to sell their wares on Shoe Lane – the fishwives, orange-women and gingerbread men – while visitors flocked to the local cockpit and alehouses. Diarist Samuel Pepys, who was born nearby, described one as ‘a place I am ashamed to be seen to go into’.

The area was known for thieves and ‘bad women’ and featured in several criminal trials. One afternoon, a gentleman strolling down Shoe Lane was thrown to the ground by a gang of pickpockets, and a few seconds later, his valuable watch was gone.

The City of London was home to around 200,000 people in the early 1600s, but there was no police force as such. Watchmen, largely untrained and ill-equipped, patrolled the dark alleys with staffs and lanterns, while parish constables arrested people after they’d already been caught. Most victims of crime had to catch the perpetrator themselves, to raise the ‘hue and cry’ and call for constables and passers-by to help, then take the offender to court at their own expense. If they couldn’t find assistance in time, the thief simply escaped through the narrow, twisting streets.

I carry on down Shoe Lane and the alley opens up, a nearby bar advertises a five o’clock cocktail club, while a woman sits on the pavement holding a sign that says ‘hungry’. The lane narrows again, and I come to a security booth and rows of City of London bollards set across the width of the street. The City has traditionally been London’s financial heart, and this is a sensitive area in terms of security.

Today, Shoe Lane is home to accountancy, law and banking firms, including the European headquarters of the American giant Goldman Sachs. I look down the lane and see a man suddenly stop and take a card from his pocket, then he flicks it against a black shiny wall. Part of the wall opens, the man slips inside, then the door closes and becomes a blank wall again.

It seems like a very secretive way to go to work, and I approach the security booth to ask if the building is part of Goldman Sachs. But the guard inside doesn’t answer. Instead, he looks over my shoulder as if I’m a decoy whose job it is to distract him. I point down the alley and ask again, ‘Is that shiny black wall part of Goldman Sachs?’ Still the security guard doesn’t answer. I tell him I’m looking for where the infamous Moll Cutpurse once ran her business. Isn’t it funny, I ask, that the country’s most notorious criminal worked here and now it’s home to investment bankers?

The security man finally relaxes. ‘Nothing changes,’ he laughs, ‘nothing changes.’

A few moments later, I emerge onto Fleet Street, with the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in the distance. On my right is the front entrance to Goldman Sachs, an enormous columned building adorned with a gold-rimmed clock. On the other side of the road, and almost directly opposite, is Salisbury Court. So it was here, somewhere on this spot, that the most famous female criminal of the seventeenth century ran her business.

The story of Moll Cutpurse has appeared in numerous books and articles, and she is one of very few female criminals still, to some extent, known today. Yet, the reported details of her life are frequently contradictory and confusing. Her real name was Mary Frith and she was born in 1584, just north-east of Fleet Street. Her father was a respectable shoemaker, and her parents lavished their only child with tenderness and love. But Mary displayed a ‘boyish, boisterous disposition’ right from the start, and she couldn’t endure the sedentary life expected of girls. She was a ‘tomrig’ – a rude, wild tomboy, who delighted only in boys’ play and pastimes. While other girls were content to sit and hem a kerchief, Mary escaped to the Bear Garden in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, to enjoy the sport of bear baiting and other manly pursuits. ‘Why crouch over the fire with a pack of gossips,’ she apparently asked, ‘when the highway invites you to romance?’

In the summer of 1600, at the age of 15, Mary Frith was charged with stealing 2s 11d from a man in Clerkenwell, snatching a purse from his breast pocket. She was arrested with two other women, Jane Hill and Jane Styles. Two years later, she was arrested again, this time alone, for stealing a purse. Mary was then put on a ship bound for the English colony of Virginia in North America in an attempt to reform her, but she escaped before it set sail and returned to London. Here, she joined a different sort of colony, a nation of land pirates – the cutpurses and pickpockets who haunted the city’s theatres and streets. ‘I could not but foresee the danger,’ she recalled, ‘but was loath to relinquish the profit.’

It was around this time that Mary also became an entertainer, performing inside taverns, alehouses and tobacco shops, as well as on the streets. She dressed in men’s breeches and doublet, held a sword in her hands and accompanied herself on a lute. Crowds gathered to watch, while her pickpocket gang stole the onlookers’ watches and gold.

Mary didn’t just dress in male attire, she was said to have the manner and ways of a man. Her voice and speech were ‘masculine’, she loved to swear and drink ale, and claimed to be the first woman to smoke tobacco. Soon she earned the name Moll (or Mal) Cutpurse – Moll was a nickname for Mary, as well as a common term for a disreputable young woman or prostitute.

Mary’s habit of wearing men’s clothes was regarded by many as a sin. Preachers condemned the practice from the pulpit and quoted from the Old Testament: ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.’

Dress was carefully regulated in Jacobean England; clothes indicated rank and social class. Only queens and kings, for example, could wear purple silk, gold cloth, or garments trimmed with ermine. Dress also served as a way to ‘to discern betwixt sex and sex’, as Philip Stubbs, a Puritan pamphleteer, explained. Women who violated the rules were ‘monsters of both kinds, half women, half men’. Breeches revealed legs and a crotch, normally hidden by long skirts, and so a woman who dressed like a man was regarded as promiscuous and sexually insatiable.

A young servant in Perth was imprisoned for ‘putting on men’s clothes upon her’, while one London woman was made to stand on the pillory after travelling round the City ‘appareled in man’s attire’. In 1620, two pamphlets were published to address the issue, Hic Mulier: or The Man-Woman, and Haec-Vir: or The Womanish Man. The first criticised women for becoming too masculine – in dress, mood, speech and action – while the second argued that times had changed and so had custom and fashion. If men were dressing up in ruffs and earrings, fans and feathers, then what could women do but ‘gather up those garments you have proudly cast away’?

Some women donned men’s clothes to follow the latest trends, while others used them in order to escape – from a violent marriage, capture or prison. On a practical level, men’s clothes gave more freedom of movement; it was easier to walk, run and ride a horse in breeches than a cumbersome skirt.

Mary Frith appears to have worn men’s attire both to pursue a career as an entertainer and to further her criminal activities. Soon, she attracted the attention of the nation’s playwrights and in 1611, she inspired the central character in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s comedy, The Roaring Girl. It was performed at the Fortune Theatre, one of the largest and best-known theatres just outside the City of London. The Roaring Girl was an outlandish figure, a ‘Mad Moll’, a ‘Mistress/Master’, who frequented taverns, mocked the police and was well known in the underworld. But she also provided the moral heart of the play, saving two star-crossed lovers who’d been forbidden to marry.

Moll herself was chaste and swore more than once that she would never marry. ‘A wife, you know, ought to be obedient,’ she explained, ‘but I fear me I am too headstrong to obey, therefore I’ll ne’er go about it.’

In April 1611, Mary Frith herself took to the stage of the Fortune Theatre in an afterpiece to sing, play the flute and banter with the 2,000-strong audience. But although she wore men’s clothes, Mary told the spectators that if any of them thought she was a man they could come to her lodgings where ‘they should finde that she is a woman’. So scandalous was her behaviour – women would not be allowed to perform on the English stage until 1660 – that Mary was arrested and sent to Bridewell, a prison on the banks of the Fleet River.

Not long after her release, however, a showman bet £20 that she wouldn’t ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch on horseback, in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs. Mary accepted the challenge and added a trumpet and banner as well. She set out from Charing Cross on Marocco, a famous performing animal, and it was only as she reached Bishopsgate that an orange seller recognised her and set up the cry, ‘Mal Cutpurse on horseback!’ Instantly, she was surrounded by a noisy mob ‘hooting and hollowing as if they had been mad’. ‘Come down, thou shame of women!’ they cried. ‘Or we will pull thee down.’ Mary spurred on her horse, managed to reach Shoreditch, and claimed her £20.

But she was soon back in Bridewell again. On Christmas Day 1611, Mary Frith was arrested with ‘her petticoat tucked up about her in the fashion of a man’ and taken to prison. A few days later, she was summoned before the Bishop of London to answer charges of public immorality by wearing ‘undecent and manly apparel’. She confessed to having frequented most of the ‘disorderly & licentious places in this Cittie’ and appearing at the Fortune Theatre ‘in mans apparel & in her boots & with a sword by her side’. She admitted swearing and cursing, associating with ruffians and getting drunk, but she vehemently denied the charges of being a prostitute and pimp who drew ‘other women to lewdnes’. Mary was ‘heartely sory’ for her dissolute life and earnestly promised to ‘carry & behave her selfe ever from hence forwarde honestly soberly & womanly’.

Her punishment came on 9 February 1612. She was made to do penance standing in a white sheet at Paul’s Cross, an open-air pulpit in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral, during Sunday service. ‘She wept bitterly and seemed very penitent,’ noted one observer, ‘but it is since doubted she was maudlin drunk.’ Her gang, meanwhile, were busy slashing the clothes of the onlookers, stealing their goods and sending them home half-naked.

By the end of that year, Mary Frith had turned her back on the world of entertainment and in March 1614, she married Lewknor Markham in Southwark. He may have been the son of Gervase Markham, author of The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman. But it’s unclear if Mary ever lived with her husband. Instead, it appears to have been a marriage of convenience for she kept her legal status as a single woman. As a feme sole, she had the right to own property, make contracts and run a business. But when she was later sued for unpaid bills, Mary claimed the status of a feme covert – a married woman. This meant she was effectively a child with no legal liability for any criminal act; a defence that would be used by female crooks right into the nineteenth century.

Within a few years of her marriage, Mary Frith established herself in a new form of crime by turning her house on Fleet Street into a warehouse for stolen goods. The house stood two doors from the Globe Tavern, a popular watering hole on the north side of Fleet Street, near the corner of Shoe Lane. It became a ‘kind of Brokery’, she explained, for jewels, rings and watches, all of which had been ‘pinched or stolen any manner of way, at never so great distances from any person’. Highwaymen and cutpurses brought in stolen watches and jewellery to sell, while those who’d been robbed came looking for their property. Mary compared her business to the Custom House, with its detailed record of imported goods, and boasted that she had regulated the process of crime by introducing ‘rules and orders’. When a victim came for help, they were questioned about the circumstances of the theft, then Mary circulated a description of the missing item to her ‘agents’. The victim was invited to call back in a day or so, to retrieve their stolen property and pay Mary a finder’s fee.

The business bordered ‘between illicit and convenient’, she admitted, but it provided a better service for victims than the forces of law and order. If a robbery was committed in London one evening, then Mary knew all about it by early the next day – and had a full inventory of what had been taken. Among the stolen goods were gemstones, then arriving in London from all over the world, whether sapphires from India, rubies from Burma, or emeralds from Colombia.

The early seventeenth century was a time of conspicuous consumption, the city’s merchants wore rich, colourful clothes adorned with diamonds, and for a thief there could be easy pickings. Most jewellery, however, was stolen through burglary or housebreaking. In 1590, a well-known gang of women – all called Elizabeth – were found guilty of stealing rings set with rubies and emeralds from houses in north London. All three were found guilty and hanged.

Mary Frith ran her Fleet Street business perfectly openly. It wasn’t until 1691 that a receiver of stolen goods could be prosecuted as an accessory to theft, and only then after the thief had been convicted. She was also a useful contact for the authorities, as she knew all the thieves and cutpurses in London.

In February 1621, a gentleman called Henry Killigrew was robbed one Saturday night, and the very next day he came to Mary’s house, aware that she’d helped many people who’d ‘had their purses cut or goods stolen’. Henry had been propositioned by a ‘nightwalker’ while strolling down Blackhorse Alley, and as he was doing up his trouser buttons, he realised eight pieces of gold were missing from his pockets. The parish constable arrested the suspected thief, Margaret Dell, and took her to the Fleet Street brokery to be cross-examined. When Margaret’s furious husband demanded her release, Mary explained she had a licence to examine and interrogate suspected thieves and advised him to leave before he was beaten up.

But then a farmer was robbed on Shoe Lane and when he came to Mary’s house for help, he spied his own watch hanging in her window. The farmer returned with a constable, and this time Mary Frith was sent to the most feared prison in London, Newgate. She pleaded not guilty, the farmer had made a mistake, it wasn’t his watch at all. When the constable attempted to produce the crucial piece of evidence, the watch had gone, stolen out of his pocket by one of Mary’s thieves. The Lord Mayor was ‘very much incensed at this affront’, and she was warned to behave, ‘which I took very good heed of, resolving to come no more into their Clutches, and to be more reserved and wary in my way and practise’. The jury were forced to acquit her, and Mary Frith went straight back to thieving. Considering she had now been operating as a criminal for some twenty years, her time in prison had been brief, for she had contacts within the judiciary and constables and prison turnkeys ‘retained to my service’.

She made friends with a new sort of thieves, the Heavers, who stole shop books as they lay on a counter, and the Kings Takers, who ran by shops at dusk to ‘catch up any of the Wares or Goods’. Once again, Mary mediated between thief and owner, returning the shop books, which included a record of sales, orders and receipts, to shopkeepers for a fee. She also expanded into forgery, and apparently worked as a pimp, procuring young women for men and, more unusually, male ‘stallions’ for middle-class wives, chosen to ‘satiate their desires’.

Mary was an outlandish criminal, but she was also portrayed as a staunch Royalist who committed ‘many great robberies’ against the Roundheads during the Civil War. When she heard that General Fairfax, their commander-in-chief, was en route to Hounslow Heath,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: Blonde Mickie
• Introduction: Woman of the Underworld
• 1 Mary Frith: Jacobean Pickpocket and Fence
• 2 Ann Duck: Eighteenth-Century Street Robber
• 3 A Conscious Mistress of Crime
• 4 Ladies Go A-Thieving
• 5 Emily Lawrence: Victorian Jewel Thief
• 6 Mary Carr: Queen of the Forty Thieves
• 7 Alice Diamond and Maggie Hughes: The Forty Elephants
• 8 Lady Jack: Shop Breaker
• 9 Queenie Day: The Terror of Soho
• 10 Rescued from the Footnotes
• 11 Lilian Goldstein: Smash-and-Grab Raider
• 12 The Forty Elephants Bar
• 13 Noreen Harbord: Queen of the Contraband Coast
• 14 Zoe Progl: No. 1 Woman Burglar
• 15 The Great Escape
• 16 Shirley Pitts: Queen of the Shoplifters
• 17 The Criminal Masquerade
• 18 Liberation of the Female Criminal
• 19 Chris Tchaikovsky: Queen of Charisma
• 20 Looking for Trouble
• 21 Gangsters’ Molls
• 22 Joyti De-Laurey: Queen of Cash
• 23 Lady Justice
• Sources
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Other Titles by Caitlin Davies