Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld

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The Forty Elephants, named after the thieves in the legend of Ali Baba and their geographical home (Elephant and Castle), were active from about the 1880s. By the mid-1910s, the gang had a new leader, Alice Diamond (alias Diana Black), described in newspapers of the time as “Queen of the Forty Thieves”.

Alice was born in 1896 in the Lambeth workhouse infirmary, and grew up alongside seven siblings in the grim tenements of Southwark, south London. According to the 1911 census, Alice had begun working as a servant when she was just 14 years old.

While this was an age of growing opportunities for some working-class women to move into better-paid employment in factories and offices, others – domestic servants, dressmakers and laundresses – found themselves stuck in low-paid work, unable to participate (legally) in new forms of leisure and consumerism.

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The new West End department stores, with their accessible displays of ready-to-wear clothes, proved an irresistible temptation to many. Some shoplifters worked alone, others formed groups, and for Alice and her gang shoplifting became a career. New members were inducted and trained. All had to abide by a ‘hoisters’ code’, which bound them to support each other, share proceeds equally and abstain from “drinking before a raid”.

A Metropolitan Police detective explained that the women would dress up and “descend upon a West End store like a plague of locusts… practically clean[ing] the place out inside an hour”. Stolen clothes, fabrics and furs were rolled up and stuffed inside their grafter’s bloomers (pants with giant pockets). Getaway cars transported the ladies back to Southwark where they would sell the clothes on as quickly as possible.

Alice didn’t always get away with it. She appeared regularly before the London magistrates and served numerous short prison sentences between 1915 and 1936. Still, at the peak of her career, Alice was making about £30 a week, a small fortune in those days. She spent the money on glamorous clothes, expensive jewellery and entertainment, leaving almost nothing behind when she died in 1952.

Fanny Davies: the cross-dressing con artist with quick fingers, but a loose tongue

On 2 September 1785, cattle dealer John Wigglesworth secured a room at the Sign of the Three Rabbits, an inn in Little Ilford, Essex. Wigglesworth was on his way from his home in Gosfield to Smithfield Market in London to purchase some new stock.

While drinking in the bar, Wigglesworth began a conversation with a young and amiable horse dealer whom Wigglesworth assumed was a man. They shared a pipe of tobacco, and Wigglesworth unwisely disclosed that he had with him a large sum of money to conduct his business. After supper, both retired to their respective rooms. Wigglesworth put his canvas bag containing his money in his breeches and tucked them under his pillow.

Then, “about the hour of one in the night”, his new friend broke into his room, stole his breeches and his bag containing around £1,200, and crept out of the inn. It was an audacious act of thievery – even more so because the young horse dealer was a 21-year-old woman called Fanny Davies.

'About the hour of one in the night', John Wigglesworth's new friend broke into his room, stole his breeches and his bag containing around £1,200, and crept out of the inn

Born in Southwark c1762, Fanny’s early life was marked by great hardship. According to her biographer, by the time Fanny was just five years old, her father had died and her mother had been transported to America. Fanny was apprenticed to a milliner, but supplemented her wages through petty theft and casual prostitution. By the 1780s, she had allegedly become the mistress of a nobleman, the girlfriend of a highwayman, and a cross-dressing thief.

The theft at the Three Rabbits brought Fanny’s exploits in London to an end. Feeling flush, on 4 September Fanny visited a female friend imprisoned in Newgate Gaol and “gave her a guinea and a pair of silver buckles – and boasted of the exploit”. The friend, “being a favourite of the executioner”, informed the authorities. Fanny was arrested.

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At her trial on 6 March 1786, she was convicted of robbery and sentenced to death, the judge warning her that she could not “anticipate a pardon or expect that your sex will protect you from the hand of justice”. Despite this, Fanny’s sentence was commuted to 14 years’ transportation to Australia.

On 31 January 1787, she boarded the Lady Penrhyn at Gravesend with around 100 other convict women, to travel as part of the First Fleet. They remained on the ship for more than a year, disembarking at Sydney Cove on 6 February 1788. Fanny settled in New South Wales, unusually returning to England three times before she died, in her mid-60s, on 11 November 1828.

Sarah Rachel Russell, aka Madame Rachel: the beauty expert with an ugly secret

In the 1860s, the beauty industry was expanding. At the centre of it was a shop at 47a New Bond Street, Mayfair, run by Madame Rachel. Described as a ‘Temple of Renovation’, Madame Rachel’s shop lured in customers with its attractive displays of bottles and soaps, exotic products such as ‘Pearl Powder’, ‘Circassian Beauty Wash’ and ‘Magnetic Rock Dew Water of the Sahara’, and exclusive treatments, including enamelling and Arabian baths.

A sign above the door claimed Madame Rachel was “Purveyor of Arabian Perfumery to the Queen”. In her prolific advertisements, Madame Rachel promised to make customers “beautiful for ever”.

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Madame Rachel was a middle-aged and illiterate woman called Sarah Rachel Russell. She was a former fried-fish seller and a (mostly) single mother of seven children, some of whom worked alongside her in the shop. At a time when youthful looks were highly prized, well-to-do women flocked to see her.

In the pursuit of beauty, some became hooked on Madame Rachel’s expensive treatments and ran up large debts. When they couldn’t pay (married women had limited access to money), Madame Rachel demanded their jewellery in lieu of suing their husbands.

In 1868, Madame Rachel tricked one of her customers, 50-year-old widow Mary Tucker Borradaile, into believing that an aristocrat called Lord Ranelagh had fallen for her. (The subterfuge followed a chance meeting between Borradaile and Ranelagh, and was sustained by forged love letters.) He had also, according to Madame Rachel, proposed marriage, but only if Mrs Borradaile underwent a series of expensive beauty treatments.

The widow was soon broke, and Madame Rachel even had her imprisoned for the debt she owed the beautician. Friends and relatives convinced Mrs Borradaile to prosecute Madame Rachel for obtaining money by false pretences. At the Old Bailey trial, both women were censured by the court, press and public.

Mrs Borradaile was accused of being vain and gullible, and ridiculed for her use of cosmetics, which were still associated with sex workers and other unrespectable women. Madame Rachel was condemned, not just for her crime, but as a retailer in the beauty industry, which was regarded as a devious trade that encouraged women to hide their true appearance, to the detriment of men.

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Madame Rachel was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. On her release, she resumed her thriving business. But in 1878, she was back in court, and this time the true ingredients in her expensive products were exposed.

According to her maid, Madame Rachel’s famous Magnetic Rock Dew of the Sahara combined with water from the river Jordan contained “starch and Fuller’s earth and something out of a paper” put in bottles and mixed with “water from the ordinary water-tap of the house”. Madame Rachel was sentenced to another five years’ penal servitude and died in prison two years later.

Mary Willcocks: the imposter masquerading as the enigmatic Princess Caraboo

On 3 April 1817, a young woman arrived in the quiet village of Almondsbury near Bristol, dressed in “a black stuff gown” with “a black cotton shawl on her head, and a red and black shawl round her shoulders… in imitation of the Asiatic costume”.

She knocked on the door of a cottage. When the inhabitants answered, she began to make signs that suggested she wanted a place to sleep. When she spoke, the “cottagers, not comprehending her language, reported the case to Mrs Worrall”, mistress at the local country estate, Knole Park, and wife of a banker and local magistrate.

Mrs Worrall paid for the woman to stay at the village pub. The next day, Mrs Worrall returned to find the young woman in a state of distress. She took her back to Knole Park, and through perseverance discovered the woman’s name was Caraboo.

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Next, Mrs Worrall found a Portuguese sailor in Bristol who was familiar with Asian languages and willing to interpret. He revealed that the woman was a princess from the island of ‘Javasu’ who had been kidnapped by pirates and escaped when sailing up the Bristol Channel.

Princess Caraboo became an honoured guest at Knole Park. Visitors from all over the country came to see her, bringing exotic items, books with pictures of foreign lands, and dictionaries of languages they hoped she might recognise. Everyone was enchanted with her behaviour. According to one account, “She oftentimes carried a gong on her back… and a tambourine in her hand… and a bow and arrow slung as usual, her head dressed with flowers and feathers.”

But in early June 1817, a Mrs Neale came forward in response to a description in the newspapers and declared that Princess Caraboo was, in fact, her former lodger, an English woman called Mary Willcocks. When it was clear that her game was up, Caraboo, or Mary, told Mrs Worrall the truth.

She was a cobbler’s daughter from Devon, who had worked as a domestic servant in London, suffered the loss of a child, and become a vagrant in Bristol where she learned she could earn more from begging if she wore a turban and pretended to be foreign.

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On hearing her story, Mrs Worrall took pity on Mary, and gave her money for a passage to America. Delighted, Mary left Bristol with ambitions to exhibit herself, with the help of an agent, as Princess Caraboo. The show was a flop. By 1825, Mary had returned to Bristol. In September 1828, she married Richard Baker, a local man, who was a supplier of leeches for the local hospital. Mary joined the business until her death in 1864.

Tilly Devine: The brothel-owning, razor-blade-wielding gangster with more diamonds than Queen Mary

“I’ve been hounded out of Australia. They’ve chased me all over the place. I’m sick of it!” Reading Matilda (Tilly) Devine’s words, uttered to a reporter in 1930, you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was the innocent victim of a cruel system that had never given her a fair crack of the whip. The truth, however, was rather different.

Recent research by historians has demonstrated that female gang members could be every bit as ruthless and violent as their male counterparts – and that they sometimes played a central role in organising criminal activities. That was certainly true of Tilly Devine. In fact, she was so ruthless, so ambitious and so at ease with violence that she became one of the ‘Queens of the Underworld’ in Sydney during the 1920s and 1930s.

Tilly was born thousands of miles from the Antipodes – in Camberwell, south London, in 1900 – and in her teens began making a living as a sex worker on The Strand. It is here that she likely met her future husband, Jim Devine, an Australian serviceman sent to fight in the trenches during the First World War. They married in August 1917, and Tilly followed Jim back to Sydney on the Matatua, a war bride ship, in 1920.

Female gang members could be every bit as ruthless and violent as their male counterparts – and that they sometimes played a central role in organising criminal activities. That was certainly true of Tilly Devine

In Sydney, Jim became Tilly’s pimp and she was described by police as “a prostitute of the worst type”. She was also ambitious, and had dreams of becoming wealthy. Jim and Tilly soon became involved in drug-dealing and sly-grog (unlicensed liquor stores).

After a spell in prison in the mid-1920s, Tilly took advantage of a loophole in the law that made it illegal for men – but not women – to profit from prostitution. She bought a property at 191 Palmer Street in the Darlinghurst suburb of Sydney and set up a brothel. By the late 1920s, she had built an empire of 18 brothels frequented by politicians and businessmen as well as working-class men.

With their increasing wealth, Jim and Tilly bought a house by the sea. Tilly declared that she had more diamond rings than Queen Mary “and better ones too”.

To maintain their ascendancy, Jim and Tilly frequently resorted to violence. While Jim was charged (but acquitted) with the murder of several gangland figures, Tilly took part in the razor wars of the late 1920s (in which the shaving instrument became Sydney gangsters’ weapon of choice). At one point, she was overheard screaming at a police officer: “I will slash your face to pieces on Monday with a razor!”

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In 1930, Tilly was arrested for consorting with known criminals, thanks to new legislation passed to help the police suppress the gangs. To escape conviction, Tilly agreed to return to England, which is when she lamented that she’d been hounded out of Australia. Within a year, she had returned to Australia – and to her criminal business.

In 1955, however, she suffered a huge blow when she was ordered to pay $20,000 in unpaid income tax and she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Tilly sold her last brothel in 1968 and died two years later.

Violet Charlesworth: the fake heiress who faked her own death... then found fame on the stage

On 2 January 1909, a motor car crashed through a safety wall on the coast road near the village of Penmaenmawr, north Wales, coming to a stop a mere 18 inches from the edge of the cliff. The two passengers emerged from the vehicle unharmed, but the driver, Violet Charlesworth, a well-known heiress in the local area, had vanished.

Her notebook and tam-o-shanter hat were found on the rocks, but there was no body and little chance that the sea could have swallowed her. The police soon became suspicious. Superintendent Rees was puzzled that Violet’s family had offered a reward of £20 for the recovery of the body, “but they have not worried me for details of the search. I have had to send to them for details and particulars.”

The crash also took place just before Violet’s 25th birthday on 13 January, the day she was meant to receive a substantial inheritance from a Mr Alexander MacDonald, an Australian of Scottish descent whom she supposedly met at a party when she was 17.

Violet Charlesworth, a well-known heiress in the local area, had vanished. Her notebook and tam-o-shanter hat were found on the rocks, but there was no body and little chance that the sea could have swallowed her. The police soon became suspicious

On the promise of this windfall, Violet, with her mother’s encouragement, had borrowed significant sums from a neighbour called Mrs Smith, and a fiancé, Dr Edward Hughes Jones. Her family had moved from their modest house in Derby to a grand residence in north Wales. Violet had also acquired motor cars and St Bernard dogs, rented further properties in Scotland and Wiltshire, and begun to speculate on the stock market.

In January 1909, it soon became apparent that there was no inheritance and that Violet was a fake heiress. She was found, three days after her 25th birthday, at a hotel in Oban, Scotland, pretending to be a Miss Margaret McLeod. Once discovered, Violet tried to capitalise on her situation.

She sold her story to the Weekly Dispatch, and offered readers the chance to buy a song she had composed, entitled ‘Good-bye Girlie, I Must Go’. She starred in a silent film called The Welsh Cliff Mystery. And she hired an agent who secured for her a major music hall tour to perform a sketch called ‘A Clever Woman’ for £300 per week.

But the music hall tour was a flop and on 12 October 1909 Violet was declared bankrupt. Four months later, Violet and her mother were convicted of fraud against Mrs Smith and Dr Jones and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude (later reduced to three).

In his summing up, the judge described Violet as “an exceedingly clever and ingenious woman… who might have had an honourable, and possibly distinguished career [if] half her ingenuity had been properly directed”. He could probably have said the same about most of the women on this list.

Rosalind Crone is the historical consultant on the BBC Radio 4 series Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley, available on BBC Sounds

This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine