Alice Diamond’s all-female shoplifting syndicate raided the West End for decades. There is now a cocktail bar honouring them, in the West End.
The Forty Elephants were an all-female crime syndicate from Elephant and Castle who spent roughly eighty years systematically looting the department stores of the West End. They were, in the words of a police detective in 1920, the cleverest shoplifters in the country.
There is now a cocktail bar named after them. It is in the West End. It is a few minutes’ walk from the stores they robbed.
Alice Diamond
Born in the Lambeth workhouse infirmary in 1896, eldest of seven, first cautioned at sixteen for stealing chocolate. By nineteen she was Queen of the Forty Thieves.
She was five foot eight at a time when the average man was five foot six. She wore diamond rings on the fingers of both hands and used them as knuckledusters. She ran the gang like a corporation – cells with assigned territories, coordinated simultaneous raids so the police could not keep up, getaway cars, a network of fences on commission, and a retained roster of dodgy lawyers.
She vetted her members’ relationships. When one married without permission in 1925, the gang attacked the husband in his own home with bricks and bottles, and the resulting fight with police became known as the Battle of Lambeth. Alice got eighteen months in Holloway.
She never married. She died in 1952, aged fifty-five, of multiple sclerosis.
The clothes
This is the detail that stays with you. The gang’s method depended on garments modified with hidden pockets – coats, cloaks, muffs, cummerbunds, skirts, bloomers, hats, all engineered to hold stolen silk and furs. The practice was called clouting.
And it worked because of Victorian and Edwardian propriety. Female customers were afforded privacy from staff. A well-dressed woman in a department store was not searched, was not followed, was not suspected. The Forty Elephants weaponised respectability, dressed like film stars, and walked out of Selfridges with hundreds of pounds a day on their bodies.
The Prat’s crime desk notes, without further comment, that the gang was finally broken not by policing but by the arrival of better shop security in the 1950s. It took a technology to stop them. It never took a man.
The bar
Twenty to fifty pounds a head, 168 reviews, 4.6 stars. Dark, small, well-made cocktails, a Prohibition-adjacent aesthetic that in this case is actually earned, because the source material is genuinely a story about women, crime and glamour rather than a mood board.
It is very good. It is also, in the way of these things, entirely comfortable, and there is a slight vertigo in drinking an expensive cocktail named after women who stole to get out of the Lambeth workhouse.
Verdict
Excellent bar, magnificent name, and the only themed venue in this survey whose theme is a genuinely great and genuinely under-told London story. Go, drink, and look up Alice Diamond afterwards, and note that she has a cocktail bar and no statue, and that this is roughly how England handles its women.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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