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CHICK LANE &
THE BLACK BOY ALLEY GANG
(The Georgian Underworld: Criminal Subcultures in
Eighteenth-Century England; Chapter 4)
Rictor Norton
The notoriety of Chick Lane, Holborn was proverbial. Ned Ward in The
London Spy in 1698–9 observed that on the northwest side of the
Bartholomew Fair area ‘music-houses stood as thick one by another as
bawdy-houses in Chick Lane’. If someone’s clothes were stolen, the first
thing they would do was go to the shops that sold old clothes in Chick
Lane, where they were sure to find them. John Price, the official
Executioner at Tyburn who was himself hanged in 1718 for violently
raping and killing a woman, sold the clothes of the persons he executed
to the brokers in Monmouth Street and Chick Lane, and used the money
to get drunk: ‘on every execution-day he had as great a levee as some
persons of quality; being attended on by broom-men for old hats, periwig
makers for old wigs, brokers for old coats, suits and cloak, and cobblers
for old shoes.’
Chick Lane is frequently mentioned in the Old Bailey trial
records. In the early 1730s, in several unrelated trials witnesses deposed
that the criminals were found drinking together at Mr Rhodes’s, at The
Goat in Black Boy Alley, off Chick Lane. The gang of armed robbers
comprising John Robins, Valentine Robins, Henry Barret, Joseph
Charley, Richard Dangerfield and William Norman regularly met at The
Goat to plan their night’s work. When they were apprehended, they all
offered to turn evidence against their partners; Norman was allowed to
give King’s evidence, on which basis the other five were hanged in July
1732. Near The Goat was a house kept by the fiddler Richard Pointer for
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the entertainment of pickpockets. If people advertised for stolen goods
he would direct them to a nearby pawnbroker’s, where they were sure to
find them. Various goods were stolen from the Sexton of Christ Church
in his Vestry in Butcher Hall Lane while he was at the Lord Mayor’s
Show on 29 October 1731. ‘Next day I went in quest of my goods among
the old clothes shops in Chick-Lane, and left a description of what I had
lost.’ Soon after, Patrick Nowland was apprehended offering the
Sexton’s calamanco gown for sale to Mr Savage at the Golden Key, in
Chick Lane. Nowland lodged in Abel’s Buildings in Rosemary Lane –
Rag Fair – and was at the centre of a gang of housebreakers specializing
in clothes, which they disposed of at Rag Fair and various pawnbrokers’
shops; he was hanged, as, eventually, were several of his accomplices,
including his son. Stolen hats and wigs were usually disposed of at
Anthony Lancake’s shop in Chick Lane, though he was clever enough to
avoid being successfully prosecuted for knowingly receiving them as
stolen goods. In December 1733 Lancake was indicted for receiving
stolen hats, which were found in his shop. Susan Jones had sold him a
hat, and offered to fetch three more from the George alehouse, also in
Chick Lane: ‘I went and put them one in another, and brought them on
my head; he blam’d me for bringing them in such a gaping open manner.’
Another man said he frequently saw her in Lancake’s shop selling hats
to him, and he knew she kept ill company. The owner of the hats
identified them as stolen. But Lancake denied even knowing her, and his
neighbours – who also kept shops in Chick Lane – swore he was an
honest man, and he was acquitted.
Chick Lane was full of ‘Hell Fire Clubs’. Hugh Morris, hanged
at the age of 17 with two other Irish lads in November 1730, confessed
to eight robberies and told the Ordinary of Newgate that ‘his total ruin
was owing to some places about Chick-Lane, where numbers of the vilest
miscreants, street robbers, thieves, pick-pockets, house-breakers, shop-
lifters, and other monsters of wickedness, meet in great companies, and
there they drink and carouse in a most intemperate manner; then (having
got musicians of their own kidney), they fall a dancing, and crying out
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like so many pigs and geese, and often, as drink comes in, wit goes out,
they fall a fighting, beating, and tearing one another.’
Domestic violence was common in the area. Richard Lamb, who
lived in Nicholas Alley off Chick Lane, beat his wife Christian to death
in September 1732. The neighbours testified that he regularly beat her,
but they were too afraid to interfere, even though the beatings sometimes
took place in the street in front of their house. Mr Lee, an apothecary /
surgeon who lived not far from them, said ‘I have many times had her as
a patient, with violent bruises and cuts, when she has been beaten by her
husband, and I have often told her, he would certainly kill her sometime
or other.’
There was a hill off Chick Lane where twenty or thirty –
sometimes even as many as fifty – men and women would sit together,
smoking their pipes and drinking. By the 1740s many of the men had
been apprehended by the law, and the people who congregated there
were mostly loose women, who generally made pests of themselves to
any gentlemen passing that way, and who dared anyone to arrest them.
The character of Chick Lane did not improve over the course of the
century. One night in September 1758 the pistol-carrying gang of robbers
Robert Bridges, Andrew Socket, William Gibbs, John Brinklow and
John Curd went out together from Chick Lane to rob people in the streets;
they knocked a man down with a stick in Ludgate Street and took his hat,
shoes and buckles, which their companion Ann Fin sold to the Jewish
pawnbroker Gabriel Lazarus and they divided the money between them.
Many of the buildings along the lane were either alehouses or shops
where people bought and sold second-hand goods, with a high
concentration of pawn shops in the neighbourhood. The small-time
thieves Thomas Coltis, John Smith and Joseph Blaze all met one another
at an alehouse in Chick Lane, and formed an association specializing in
stealing from grocers and chandlers shops, then disposing of their goods,
mainly tea and sugar, at the chandlers kept by Francis Feathers at the end
of Black Boy Alley; they were prosecuted for numerous thefts (and
Feathers for being the receiver) in 1759. Another trial in 1759 reveals
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that the prostitutes of the neighbourhood would stand outside the
Chequers alehouse in Chick Lane, in groups of two or three, and grab
drunken men by their coats and offer them sex, then bring them to a
ruinous old house opposite the Chequers, upstairs to a room where the
panel of the door had been broken in, where they had sex and then robbed
them. One of these women, Anne Bennet, who scraped together a living
by buying and selling old clothes, was easily apprehended by the
constable because he knew that she went to the Chequers every evening
at 9 o’clock for her daily dinner of bread and cheese.
Chick Lane area (see top centre of map)
The reputation of the area remained the same throughout the
century. The London Chronicle regularly reported the activities of ‘the
Black-Boy-Alley ladies’. For example, in June 1764 two of the Black
Boy Alley ladies picked a gentleman’s pocket of his gold watch in Chick
Lane, and when they were arrested and taken to Wood Street Compter,
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as they were being conveyed thither, their bully managed to pick the
constable’s pocket of his handkerchief.
The Black Boy Alley Gang
We can form a greater appreciation for the area if we concentrate on just
one alley that runs off Chick Lane: Black Boy Alley, the centre of oper-
ations of the Black Boy Alley Gang, which constitutes a miniature por-
trait of the criminal subculture of eighteenth-century London. One day
in autumn 1744 the Headborough Alexandar Forfar together with a
constable and four assistants went to Joseph Field’s house in Black Boy
Alley to arrest two disorderly persons. But when they got there they were
afraid to break open the door because the occupants ‘held candles out of
the window and showed cutlasses to us in order to terrify us, and threw
brickbats and glass bottles at us’. A mob began to rise. A boy called
Lippy (because he had a hare-lip) shoved Forfar down and was caught
and given to the constable, but the mob grew so large that the constable
was forced to let him go, and most of the officials had to retreat. Forfar
and an assistant who remained were chased to Cow Cross and White
Lion in Clerkenwell, where Forfar was wounded in the head with a
cutlass and then beaten by the gang of men, women and children ‘with
bludgeons, pokers, tongs, and other things’. He suffered nineteen
wounds to his head, and one of his fingers was almost cut off. The
persons who particularly assaulted him were Ann Duck – who shouted
‘Hamstring the dog!’ – and Thomas Wells. Wells lived in Black Boy
Alley but kept a gaming house at Black Mary’s Hole. One person
recalled that he passed his door every day ‘with a gang of gamblers and
pickpockets, and such as they call street robbers’.
At the trial in October, Thomas Wells, Ann Duck, Theophilus
Watson, and the boys Joshua Barnes and Thomas Kirby (both aged 12 or
13) – with Ann Collier not yet taken (she had been tried but acquitted at
a previous Session for being a lock and fence and keeper of a house of
ill fame) – were charged with assaulting and robbing Forfar (because
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they took his powder horn). Ann Duck had previously been tried in both
the January and the June Sessions for similar robberies and had been
acquitted. They were all acquitted once again, because the robbery (a
felony) could not be proved. The Jury nevertheless advised the Judge that
‘it was a pity such dangerous persons should slip out of the hands of
justice, and desired they might be prosecuted in another manner’. A
constable at Mulberry Garden, Clerkenwell, also told the court he hoped
they would not discharge Wells, because on the Monday after the
incident mentioned above, he and twelve others of the gang came to the
constable’s house with drawn cutlasses and pistols cocked, and Wells
said ‘Damn their eyes and blood, we will have him out of his house, for
we will have his head, and this night his brains shall be broiled in Black
Boy Alley.’ The prisoners were therefore detained while a Bill of
Indictment could be raised against them for assault and wounding (a
misdemeanour). At the subsequent trial the two men and two boys were
found guilty and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment in Newgate and
to pay a fine of one shilling each.
Ann Duck was excluded from this new trial, because she was
capitally convicted on another separate indictment, as were two of her
women friends. Ann Gwyn and Ann Barefoot (with two other women
not caught) had pulled a man into a private house in Black Boy Alley as
he was going along with a load of glass bottles, and assaulted him and
stole his money. A next-door neighbour who witnessed the crime said ‘I
am sure I have seen forty robberies committed in that place; it is a very
bye place [i.e. out of the way], I don’t doubt but there have been 500
robberies committed there, and I believe some murders too if they were
known.’ All the neighbours knew about this empty house, which was
used by a carpenter for storing his timber. The women regularly used to
pick up men, take them there, then rob them and beat them ‘and turn
them about their business’. At the same Session Ann Duck and Ann
Barefoot (with a third woman not caught) were charged with assaulting
and robbing a cutler in Thatched Alley, an L-shaped alley running off
both Chick Lane and Black Boy Alley. They had attacked him in the
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street, hitting him with a stone or brickbat, nearly blinding him in one
eye. The man made his way back to his own lodgings in Cross Keys
Court off Chick Lane, where his landlady used a needle and thread to
sew up his torn eyelid. The next day he went to Freeman’s alehouse in
Chick Lane to get help identifying the women, but the owners ‘told me
they durst not tell me their names for fear of having damage done them’.
His landlady told the Court that ‘Mrs. Freeman, who keeps an ale-house
in the neighbourhood, knows [these women], but she will not come
without she is fetched [i.e. unless she is compelled to appear], because
she thinks as she lives in the neighbourhood it will be a prejudice to her.’
This is the kind of fear that lay behind the apparent solidarity of local
communities where criminals preponderate. The three women were
sentenced to death. The Daily Gazetteer reported very briefly and
misleadingly that Duck was to be executed for robbing a man of
fourpence, which has prompted at least one modern historian to cite her
execution as an example of ‘the barbarism inflicted on violators of
private property’. The fact is that she was capitally convicted because of
the violence she used in this robbery, and for a long history of violent
robberies.
At yet another Session, Bess Nash appeared as evidence against
her friends Ann Duck and Elizabeth Dawney for killing a man whom
Bess Nash had picked up in Cow Cross Lane. She, Ann Duck and
Elizabeth Dawney took him to an empty house in White Lion Court off
Turnmill Street, where they fell upon him and threw him upon his back.
Bess Dawney put her knee against his throat, Ann Duck sat on his
stomach, and Bess Nash sat on his legs and took three guineas and twelve
shillings from his pocket. When they got up Bess Dawney gave him a
kick in the head. Ann Duck cried Damn the Blood of a Bitch, he is not
dead. Bess Dawney answered, Damn him but he is, as dead as a door
nail. God forbid, said Bess Nash, wherefore did you kill the man? To
which Ann Duck answered, without any concern, God damn you, what
else did you bring him for, but first to rob, and then murder him? They
then left the body and retired to the house of Ann Collier and ordered a
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pint of gin and went upstairs to ‘snack the cole’, that is share out their
booty. Yet another woman alleged to be part of ‘the Black Boy Alley
crew’ was Judith Tilly, who in July 1745, together with four other
women not captured, knocked down the jeweller Ford Bolley in Aaron’s
Alley in Whitechapel, and after stealing his money deliberately cut him
across the nose with an edged tool or knife. She was sentenced to death.
James Guthrie, the Ordinary of Newgate, believed that ‘three
such vile women as Duck, Barefoot, and Gwyn, were hardly ever seen
together within the walls of Newgate’ during the many years he was its
Chaplain. Ann Gwyn, now 27 years old, had been born to poor parents
in the parish of St Luke’s, Middlesex, now both dead. She was employed
as a servant, then as a washerwoman, before she fell into bad company,
and became a common streetwalker for some years, ‘and seldom left a
man whom she had pick’d up, without robbing him of something’.
Ann Barefoot, now about 25, was born in Cambridge, then lived
with an aunt in Bishopsgate Street, then with a brewer’s servant and had
two children (now dead). Some years ago she was apprehended for
walking the streets, and was committed to hard labour in Bishopsgate
Workhouse for a month. There she made friends with a fellow
streetwalker, who was discharged at the same time she was, and invited
her to lodge with her in Chick Lane. She became a noted thief as well as
streetwalker, and became acquainted with a wide circle of thieves,
whores and pickpockets. She took a house in Thatched Court in Chick
Lane, where she set up her own boozing ken, which she kept for about a
year. But custom wasn’t very good so she gave it up, and took up
lodgings at Mr Gray’s, in Black Boy Alley. There she met Ann Duck,
Ann Gwyn and Thomas Wells (currently in prison for wounding
Alexander Forfar, as discussed earlier), and passed as his wife, assuming
his name.
Ann Duck, about 25, was born in Little White’s Alley, Chancery
Lane. Her father was a black man, who had been well known for teaching
gentlemen in the Inns of Court ‘the use of the small sword, of which he
was a very good master’. Her mother, a white woman, could not control
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her daughter. Ann ‘first became a servant at a bawdy house; then walk’d
the streets on her own account; next commenc’d pickpocket’; and at
length became a bold and resolute street-robber. She confessed to
numerous robberies, beginning in December 1741 in company with Ann
Barefoot, with whom she generally walked out. She laid hold of a man
who was walking along the street, and cried out to Barefoot to come to
her assistance, and held her arm around him while Barefoot dived into
his pocket. ‘After we had got the money, we cried out George! George!
which we did on purpose to frighten the old man, that we might have an
opportunity of making our escapes.’ In June 1743, with Elizabeth Yates,
she picked up a man and brought him into the house of Mary Ballat, or
Ballard, in Thatched Alley, had a dram, took him upstairs, threw him
down by force on the bed, dived into his pocket, and when he struggled
she gave a knock on the floor with her foot, and her bully came up and
swore he’d throw the man out the window if he made any disturbance;
he left, but came back with a constable and she was committed to
Newgate. Another time, with Alice Norman ‘on our usual walks’, she
brought a man to the house in Thatched Alley, threw him by force on the
bed and picked his pocket, gave a knock with her foot, the same
prearranged signal as before, and their bully came up, pretending the
women were his wife and sister. Their victim came back three days later
and they were sent to Newgate, but he didn’t appear to prosecute, so they
were discharged. She recounted several other robberies, usually
involving the infamous house in Thatched Alley and following the same
pattern. She and her female companions were frequently sent to the
Compter, but their victims seldom appeared to prosecute later. (When
the Daily Gazetteer reported her execution, it noted that she had been
tried nineteen times.) In prison, she wrote letters to her cousin and to her
mother, and wrote an account of her robberies:
I acknowledge I have been in almost all the gaols in London, viz.
Wood-street and the Poultry Compters; New-Prison, Clerkenwell
Bridewell, three times in the London Work-House, once in
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Bridewell Hospital, and several times in Newgate. I hope none
will reflect on my poor mother, for if I had taken her advice, I had
not brought myself to such an unhappy end. I hope my sister will
take warning by me, and take care what company she keeps, for
ill company has been the ruin of me. So the Lord have Mercy on
my poor soul.
Ann Duck.
From my Cell in Newgate,
Nov. 1st, 1744.
The three women did not behave very penitently in prison, even
after the Dead Warrant arrived. When Ann Duck went to Chapel, she
‘would much rather talk with her old companions thro’ the lattice, than
attend to the more serious affair, the welfare of her soul’. The three
women went together in the same cart to Tyburn on 7 November 1744.
(Seven men – four of them Jewish – were hanged the same day.) At the
place of execution Ann Duck denied the specific crime for which she
was condemned (a comparative trifle, stealing four pence from a man she
had assaulted and put in fear), ‘but own’d she had been a most wicked
creature, and had done many robberies’. Ann Barefoot and Ann Gwyn
both owned the robbery for which they were to die. ‘They were all very
serious and devout at prayers, wept plentifully, and went off the stage
crying out, Lord have mercy upon us, Lord Jesus receive our spirits.’
One of the thieves living in Black Boy Alley, Ann Wildair or
Wilder, alias Hawkins, was transported for theft in 1744, but she returned
and eventually became famous for her frequent appearances at the Old
Bailey. In May 1765 she was charged with theft but acquitted (though
two men who lodged at her house in Black Boy Alley were convicted).
In May 1769 she gave evidence against Louise Smith, alias Lucy Locket,
who was sentenced to death for robbery with violence. Her death was
noted in the Morning Chronicle on 18 February 1773: ‘Tuesday was
buried from Black Boy Alley, the famous Mrs. Ann Wildair, supposed
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one of the largest women in Britain, famous at the old Bailey, and over
whose memory charity directs us to draw a veil.’
The ‘Black Boy Alley Gang’ (as it was dubbed by contem-
poraries) comprised twenty to thirty young men and boys, and five or six
women, and rampaged through the streets of Holborn during 1744.
About two years earlier Joseph Field was captured by a man whom he
and William Billingsley were trying to rob near Temple Bar. Billingsley
went back to Black Boy Alley and raised a posse of six to rescue Field.
Carrying large broomsticks, at Holborn Bars they met up with the coach
carrying Field to gaol and forced it to stop, opened the door, and carried
Field off in triumph. Although Field and others had been thieves since
five years earlier, from that point they organized themselves into a gang,
and armed themselves with pistols, hangers and cutlasses. Generally they
robbed in groups of six to ten. The pattern usually involved mobbing a
man while Henry Gadd, a little boy, dived into his pocket to steal his
watch.
A dozen youths from the gang attacked and robbed several men
during Bartholomew Fair on 24 August 1744, between the George Inn
and the Swan. One of their first victims thought they were ‘a parcel of
frolicksome young sparks’ and didn’t realize they were street robbers:
‘they made a noise like a parcel of ravening wolves. I did not imagine
that a robbery was committed; it was done in a quarter of a minute, and
then they went about their business.’ However, before the night was over
eleven of the gang had beaten and cut the man in Bartholomew Fair for
offering resistance. The following night some of them walked up and
down the Strand, and five of them stole a watch from a man while they
held him. Later seven of them went drinking at a public house in Cross
Lane, then set out to rescue one Edward Young, who had been captured
earlier, first going to Black Boy Alley to fetch more of their accomplices.
Then they went to Woodstreet Compter and spoke to Young to decide
how to make the rescue, using their pistols and cutlasses, but nothing
came of it, though they did attack and rob a man on Woodstreet. The next
night ten of them attacked and robbed a liveried servant in Charterhouse
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Lane; then attacked a gentleman in Aldersgate street and knocked him
down; then robbed several persons in Cheapside; then a man at the
bottom of King Street; then stole a gold watch from a man in Catherine
Street; then robbed a man in Fenchurch Street, when Field was captured
but the others managed to rescue him; then stole a watch from a man in
Bishopsgate Street; and lastly stopped another man in Bloomsbury
Square, whom they cut with their hangers (short swords) and nearly
killed. This was a single evening’s work. A few evenings later they
gathered in the Piazza in Covent Garden, hanging around the playhouse
door, and were shot at by a soldier, who accidentally killed a chairman
nearby. Later they went up and down the Strand picking pockets,
drawing their hangers and cutlasses when they met any resistance. One
of them was captured and taken to the Watch House, but the others
attacked it bearing choppers and pokers, broke it open, fired pistols at the
neighbours who stuck their heads from the windows shouting Murder!
Murder!, and rescued him.
The Black Boy Alley gang became increasingly violent as
September progressed, often cutting their victims. On one occasion
Billingsley attacked a family, and meaning to hit the man with his
bludgeon accidentally killed a child. Billingsley one night ran up to a
man to take his watch, who pushed him away, whereupon Billingsley
punched him in the face and drew his cutlass and almost cut his fingers
off. The next evening they attacked a man in Leicester Fields and fell
upon him with their bludgeons and fists when he tried to take Field, then
went to Long Acre where they attacked another man, then dispersed
before meeting up again at their rendezvous in Black Boy Alley. The
next day they heard that Country Dick (who was later executed) and Ann
Duck had been taken together with others for tossing up for money in
Black Boy Alley, and heard that a party of soldiers was coming to break
up the gang. Four of them fled to Queenhithe where they hid out for a
few days. One who didn’t flee was caught and eventually transported.
Then they fled to Hackney, then to a house in Rosemary Lane, then
eventually they holed up in a house in Drury Lane for several nights to
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avoid more searches. The gang was now breaking up and panicking. Five
of them nevertheless found time to break open a house and steal large
quantities of linen and silverware, and go to Black Boy Alley to share
their booty. As a last desperate act seventeen of the gang one night went
to Copenhagen House with the intention of killing a constable and a
Headborough and Jones the City Marshall and others, but failed. Gadd
was of this party.
On 24 December 1744, six carts carried seventeen men and one
woman to be hanged at Tyburn. Nine of the men were members of the
Black Boy Alley Gang (four other members were sentenced to death but
not captured). William Billingsley, nicknamed Gugg, age 21, had been a
lamplighter about Newgate Street. Thomas Wells, age 23, was also a
lamplighter in the same precinct, and ‘husband’ of Ann Barefoot
(executed in November). William Brister, nicknamed Dillsey, age 24,
had been apprenticed to a waterman; the Ordinary of Newgate said ‘He
was very poor and naked, and a miserable object to look upon.’ Joseph
(or John) Field, nicknamed Nobby, age 22, was an apprentice to a
carpenter. His companion William Norwel, nicknamed Long Will
because he was a bit taller than the rest, age 30, was apprenticed to a
brick maker, and owned that he had been a street-robber for the past
seven years. James Roberts, age 30, had no trade, just loitered about the
streets. Theophilus Watson, age 25, was a Roman Catholic. John
Potbury, nicknamed Jack the Sailor, age 19, sometimes worked on ships
with his father, a seaman. These all confessed their crimes, and also their
cruelty to their victims.
The ninth person hanged was Henry Gadd, nicknamed Scampey
or Scamper. He was about 14 years old, and sold rabbits in Clare Market.
He had joined the gang when he was about 10 or 11, and was employed
for special jobs suitable to his diminutive stature, such as picking
pockets. He was very surly tempered and refused to confess any of his
crimes. The Ordinary of Newgate was shocked and grieved by
Scampey’s lack of religion. ‘He was ask’d, Who made him? and he could
not tell. I inform’d him, that the great God created him, and all the world.
14
A second question was, Who redeem’d him? he hesitated a while, and at
last he said, The Devil.’
Most of these youths were convicted on the evidence of their
older accomplice Richard Harper, nicknamed Old Daddy, who was
granted immunity for helping the authorities to break up the gang. First
he bred them, then he broke them. One of the men Harper testified
against, William Norman, was acquitted in July 1745 because Harper
seemed indecisive about identifying him. An associate, Charles
Remmington, nicknamed Long Charles, said that Harper told him that
‘he had hanged men enough already, and he did not care to hang any
more for fear of being killed.’ Another older member of the gang who
turned King’s evidence was James Bye. In July 1745 Sarah Lambert, the
wife of Jack the Sailor, was prosecuted for breaking and entering, but she
was acquitted since the only evidence came from her accomplice James
Bye. Their lodgings were at the house of Joseph Lucas, in Blue Anchor
Court off Whitecross Street. Lucas used to bring stolen goods to be
fenced by Ann Collier (mentioned earlier). When his house was
searched, piles of goods were discovered, whose owners were never
located. Lucas had previously been convicted in Chelmsford under the
name of Ninn, and prior to that he had been transported for seven years.
Partly on Bye’s evidence, Lucas was hanged in July 1745 for burglary,
together with his accomplices John Jeff and Richard Horton, nicknamed
Toss-off Dick. Bye also testified that he and Jeff used to rob together
with gang member John Martin, who was convicted and transported in
July. The Black Boy Alley Gang was totally broken up by the end of
1745. One member, Richard Worris nicknamed The Irishman, was not
prosecuted until 1748, by which time Harper, the main evidence, had
died, and there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Worris of several
street robberies.
While the memory of the Black Boy Alley Gang became part of
the thieves’ heritage, the area itself remained a notorious den of thieves
throughout the remainder of the century. In late June 1773, for example,
the London Evening Post reported that six men and boys and three
15
women were arrested in Black Boy Alley for picking pockets, and taken
before the Lord Mayor. He committed them to Bridewell, and they
demanded to be treated like the criminal aristocracy: ‘They swore they
would have a carriage; upon which the executioner was sent for, who
procured them a cart, into which, after being tied together, they were put,
the hangman rode upon the copse; and in that manner they were carried
to the above prison amidst a vast crowd of spectators.’
(Copyright © 2011, 2016 Rictor Norton. Reproduction for sale or profit
prohibited. All rights reserved.)
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