Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang

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Were the Forty Elephants real?

Yes, the Forty Elephants – also known as the Forty Thieves – were a real, all-female crime gang that operated in London for a considerable length of time.

According to London historian and crime expert Brian McDonald, author of Gangs of London: 100 Years of Mob Warfare (2010), the first mention of the Forty Elephants appeared in newspapers in 1873, and they remained active until the mid-20th century.

When researching, McDonald pored over birth and death records, newspaper articles and out-of-print books in the British Library archives to uncover the women’s modus operandi, and discovered that were incredibly creative in the way they used the fashions of the time to their advantage.

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In the late 1800s and early 1900s, women’s clothing was multi-layered; skirts fell all the way to the ground, while bustles and hoops created an almost tent-like effect, ideal for hiding stolen goods.

The Forty Elephants enhanced their outfits even further, tailoring their dresses to allow them to easily squirrel away expensive items and walk away from high-end department stores unnoticed. They even sewed hidden pockets into their hats to conceal their loot. They were allied with separate male-led gangs – but were largely independent with strict rules and a clear hierarchy.

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Why were they called the Forty Elephants?

The Forty Elephants probably took their name from the district they operated from: Elephant and Castle, in South London. The ‘Forty’ part is a bit less clear, however, but it’s thought that it could possibly refer to the number of women in the gang.

The women didn’t only operate in Elephant and Castle; their crime empire spanned all of London, and even some neighbouring towns.

One of the gang’s main strengths was their skill at ‘fencing’ – a term for reselling – the goods they shoplifted.

McDonald found that items were disposed of through a chain of fences in London. Cheap loot went to street market traders, jewellery to pawnbrokers, and clothes were sold to shady shops that were willing to replace labels and remodel designs.

Who was the real Mary Carr?

Mary Carr (played by Erin Doherty) is one of the central characters in A Thousand Blows and was one of the gang’s first leaders – a founder ‘elephant’, if you will.

Contemporary publication Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper described her as being “noted for her good looks and engaging manners [who] managed to get round her a gang of young women who gave her complete obedience as their leader.”

Carr played an essential role in turning a loosely organised group of petty thieves into the well-oiled machine it eventually became, helping them to refine their strategy. She enforced discipline and turned her home, 118 Stamford Street in south London, into the gang’s first base of operations.

Her leadership saw the gang’s activities become increasingly organised. With increased organisation and activity though, came heightened scrutiny. Sensational trials took place when the gang was implicated in the 1895 abduction of a traveller child, Michael McGee – as well a vicious gang attack of a female rival, Nellie Stanley, that same year.

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Carr was jailed in 1896 for kidnapping. At her trial, two detective sergeants named Gray and Brogden informed the Court that the prisoner was known as “the Queen of the Forty Thieves,” a gang of young females who “infested the Strand.”

What links did the Forty Elephants have to Victorian boxing?

Prize fighting – a no-holds-barred form of bare-knuckle boxing that was particularly attractive to gamblers – was made illegal in England in 1829, but that didn’t stop people continuing the tradition despite the risk of fines and imprisonment. It just drove it underground: into the smoky backrooms of pubs, back yards, hidden basements and – sometimes – remote, rural areas.

For example, crime records show that in mid-1856, a group of London promoters hired a train and transported up to 500 people to a Suffolk village to stage a fight between two men named James Massey and William Hayes. When caught, the pugilists and five members of the prize-ring were charged with breach of the peace and assault, and jailed.

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The illegality of the sport meant that it was interwoven with the rampant gang activity in London at the time, so it’s likely that the Forty Elephants would have had a degree of involvement in it.

Who was Diamond Annie?

Around the same time Mary Carr was jailed in 1986, another gang leader was born: Alice Diamond, later nicknamed Diamond Annie (played by Darci Shaw). The 1911 Census of England and Wales tells us that she was 14 in that year and living with her parents and siblings in Southwark, South London.

By the time she was 17, she already had a string of thievery convictions and in early in WW1 she was arrested for using fake ID to gain access to an ammunition factory – possibly trying to procure explosives with which to explode safes. By 1915, aged just 19, she’d risen through South London’s criminal underworld to become the new “queen” of the Forty Elephants.

The gang perfected their department store theft skills under her reign, terrorising high-end West End shops – including Harrods and Liberty – with their large-scale shoplifting sprees.

Even more ambitiously, the Forty Elephants carried out a series of jewel heists during Diamond’s leadership, where they posed as guests at high-society events. Hidden in plain sight, they pickpocketed jewellery while they were there, and gathered information that they could later use to stage burglaries.

How was Diamond Annie caught?

Such high-profile robberies caused police to intensify attempts to catch the gang, and Diamond was finally arrested in 1925, with the media reporting every twist and turn of the trial, highlighting Diamond’s impressive levels of organisation and control.

The Daily Express wrote that Diamond “used to have information brought to her from all parts of London—daily bulletins of places and people earmarked for plunder—and it was she who directed the entire operations of the gang. Nothing was done unless the ‘queen’ gave the order.”

What happened to the Forty Elephants?

At the conclusion of Alice Diamond’s trial, the Daily Express wrote (rather poetically): “The police smashed up the gang when they trapped the ‘queen.’ But it still drifts in twos and threes across the stage of this theatre of crime.”

The gang didn’t cease to exist when Alice was jailed, but the Forty Elephants did experience a period of decline. A new Queen, Lillian Rose Kendall, eventually took charge – but things were never quite the same for the all-female gang after that. They were rocked by the rise of new, more violent gangs during the Great Depression, and also saw their number dwindle during World War II.

The Forty Elephants had all but vanished by the 1950s. Their activities, particularly in the context of Victorian and Edwardian London, demonstrate that women, even in an era of strict gender norms, could carve out their own space in the criminal world.

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