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In Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s Hulu/Disney+ show, A Thousand Blows, there are more than a few characters based on historical figures. Set in the grime and crime of 1880s East London, the most overt action takes place in the boxing ring, with real-life Jamaican immigrant Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) taking on the best fighter on the Thames, Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham).
But beyond these matches, a band of stealthy, organised thieves are seizing their own piece of the action — and they’re all women. They’re the Forty Elephants, a real gang led by the charismatic Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), who pilfer the prized possessions of the upper classes by the pocketful.
Credit: Robert Viglasky Photography / Disney
“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 said onstage at A Thousand Blows‘ premiere at the London Film Festival (LFF) in October, fittingly shown at the BFI around the corner 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.”
But who were the Forty Elephants and Mary Carr, and how are they portrayed in Knight’s TV series? Let’s dig into the history books.
Who were the Forty Elephants?
Credit: Robert Viglasky Photography / Disney
As the first organised, all-female shoplifting gang in London, operational from the 1870s to the 1950s, the Forty Elephants (also called the Forty Thieves) might instantly enliven modern feminist imaginations. They’re simply made for the screen. A city-wide, highly organised syndicate of women without the right to vote but seizing the right to everyone’s coin and luxury goods? It’s the stuff of legend, and it makes them deeply compelling characters in A Thousand Blows, cutting the pockets of the aristocracy in both covert, theatrical, and sometimes literal ways.
“The Forty Thieves is the most successful shoplifting gang that Britain’s ever seen,” says historian, author, and BBC journalist Lucy Worsley in a riveting Lady 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 need a formidable leader; the Forty Elephants had a queen.
The Forty Elephants deployed creative means of stealing money, clothes, jewels, and anything else of value, as detailed in author and journalist Brian McDonald’s book Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants — he dug through police detective reports, court transcripts, and newspaper coverage from the time. From blackmail to breaking and entering and assault, their targets reportedly ranged from gentlemen on the street to London’s newly opened department stores and high-end jewellery shops — we see the Elephants’ brazen raid of Harrods in A Thousand Blows‘ second episode.
The gang’s emergence came from a place of “combatting unfairness,” McDonald writes — they were women in the lower echelons of society fighting to survive, not just to vote: “The suffragist movement sought equality with men; shoplifters, jewel thieves and fences sought escape from ritual drudgery.” In fact, according to the Museum of London, shoplifters and suffragettes would have served sentences at Islington’s notorious Holloway Prison around the same time in the early 1900s.
Historian Rosalind Crone explained on Lady Swindlers that professional 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 important of all, organised gangs need a formidable leader; the Forty Elephants had a queen.
Who was Mary Carr of the Forty Elephants?
Credit: Robert Viglasky Photography / Disney
“One of the most dangerous women in the metropolis,” according to a 1900 police report described in McDonald’s book, Mary Carr was the ‘queen’ of the Forty Elephants gang in Victorian London, recruiting girls and women to her shoplifting syndicate.
According to historian, journalist and author Caitlin Davies in her book Queens of the Underworld (Davies also trawled through police transcripts, court reports, and more from the National Archives), Carr was born in 1862 in the central London district of Holborn, and quickly ran afoul of the law by her teens, landing in a Church of England-run penitentiary for “fallen women.” By the 1890s, the author says, Carr was not only an artist’s model but was suspected of crimes ranging from pickpocketing to fencing stolen goods to child kidnapping (really). But she’d be most famous for running the Forty Elephants, teaching young women how to take what they didn’t have.
“As Queen of the Elephants, I travel ’round this city offering poor, lost souls opportunities,” says Carr in A Thousand Blows, played by The Crown‘s Erin Doherty.
Credit: Robert Viglasky Photography / Disney
Finding her own version of the fearless and strategic leader in the show, 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,” said 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 also features Carr’s arguably more famous successor Alice Diamond (played by The Irregulars‘ Darci Shaw), who was the gang’s notorious queen in the 1920s. In a fictionalised scene in A Thousand Blows, Mary and Alice meet during a Harrods raid, and she’s recruited into the gang through a series of trials — it’s a real treat to watch these hypothesised conversations between the two queens throughout the series. In A Thousand Blows, the Forty Elephants are Hannah Walters as Eliza Moody, Nadia Albina as Verity Ross, Morgan Hilaire as Esme Long, Jemma Carlton as Belle Downer and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Anne Glover.
Shirley Pitts, who followed Diamond as the gang’s last queen, isn’t represented in the show, but you should read Dr. Lorraine Gamman’s book Gone Shopping about her.
The theatrical gambits of the Forty Elephants
Credit: Robert Viglasky Photography / Disney
One of the most compelling elements of the Forty Elephants is how organised the operation was — McDonald writes that the gang adhered to a strict code of conduct and worked with a city-wide network of specialist fences, pawnbrokers, and couriers (you’ll see them all in A Thousand Blows). The author quotes the gang’s manifesto during 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.”
But as organised as they were, the gang was also creative.
In the opening scene of A Thousand Blows, we first meet Mary Carr pulling a diabolical heist by pretending to go into labour in the middle of the street, while her gang members pickpocket the crowd. It works like a charm, and it’s the perfect homage to the real gang’s techniques. McDonald writes of the Forty Elephants’ “practice of putting their arm in an affectionate embrace around the necks of their victims, in this case sailors, while rifling their pockets with the other hand. In Lady Swindlers, Worsley talks about Diamond using a type of trouser referred to 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 military 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 store, knives out, smashing and grabbing silver hairbrushes, Chinese silk, hats, furs, and feather boas, and strolling back out the door.
There are great anecdotes in McDonald and Davies’ books about Carr’s gambits, including one in which McDonald says she was sentenced to four months hard labour for stealing a gold watch by pretending to have lost her purse, asking for a bus fare, then snatching the goods. “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 technique the author describes involves the gang members often framing men for assault, then blackmailing them for their valuables “to avoid the embarrassment of a prosecution.” Davies says this technique evolved from a ruse by Ann Duck in the 1740s. Other stories McDonald and Davies write of are Carr swooning in the street, being escorted home by a passing man, then having her aunt burst in on their being unaccompanied, and blackmailing him. While fabricating such claims for blackmail purposes is obviously completely terrible, it’s actually quite surprising this female gang felt confident enough in a judicial system’s possibility of believing women that they used it as a weapon. That might be a modern read, but I’m intrigued.
So, what did they do with all that loot? As well as making ends meet and putting food on the table, the Museum of London has a great answer: “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.”
Despite the drama, these were genuinely risky plays by the Forty Elephants. A Thousand Blows director Nick Murphy told the LFF audience that the show’s events are underpinned by the brutality of everyday life in Victorian London, and the very real risks facing 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 might be the first you hear of this formidable gang — it certainly was for me. For women at the bottom rung of society to climb their way up through theatrical ruses and violence is not a story we’ve heard a lot, and it’s one that deserves its time onscreen.
If you decide to use their shoplifting techniques, we were never here.
A Thousand Blows is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
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A little bit of Victorian London history in Steven Knight’s new Disney+/Hulu show.
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