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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.

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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

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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.)