Queens of the Underworld by Caitlin Davies

Author:Caitlin Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Lilian Goldstein appears to have given up the criminal life in the early 1940s. According to Ruby, she refused to be involved in a £30,000 payroll snatch planned while he was on the run from Dartmoor. ‘You can count me right out,’ she told him, after learning the gang planned to throw a bucket of ammonia over the bank messenger. ‘I wouldn’t drive on a job that meant grievous bodily, Ruby, and you know it … I’ve had this Bandit Queen lark. Crime is for kids … not for grown-ups.’ She was fed up of waiting for him to come out of prison.

In 1943, she divorced Henry Goldstein, and then changed her name back to Kendall, further disassociating herself from her former husband and her own criminal career. She settled down with a bookmaker called Charles Henry Beresford, and died in Brighton in December 1977.

Lilian never wrote her own story or published any confession, unlike Ruby Spark, who, in 1940, accepted £400 from the Sunday Pictorial for the tale of his escape from Dartmoor. It was accompanied by an ‘exclusive’ photograph of ‘Mrs Lilian Goldstein, Spark’s lover’, a bobbed-haired woman in her early forties, with a string of pearls round her neck. But whether the photograph is actually Lilian is open to question, and if it is, then where did the paper get it from? Historian Alyson Brown believes the portrait looks remarkably like those that were used to accompany the ‘confession’ of Joyce Alexandra Powys-Wilson.

In 1938, Nutty Sharpe devoted an entire chapter to the Bobbed Haired Bandit in his memoirs, yet he referred to her only as ‘Gloria’. His tone was admiring, ‘Of all the characters hunted by the Flying Squad when smash-and-grab raiding was at its height the most romantic and highly publicised was a woman.’ But he had no idea what happened to Gloria. She ‘just faded away as mysteriously as she first appeared’. He was wrong, of course, for two years after he published his memoirs Lilian was on trial at the Old Bailey for harbouring an escaped convict.

The Bobbed Haired Bandit also appeared in two books in the 1960s. The first was Detective Inspector Edward Greeno’s memoirs, War on the Underworld, in which he portrayed her as nowhere near as dangerous as she’d been two decades earlier. In the summer of 1940, he’d gone to great lengths to catch Lilian Goldstein, describing her as devious and cunning, and expressing immense satisfaction at her capture. Now he seemed to have changed his mind. Lilian had ‘a romantic reputation’, he wrote rather dismissively, ‘most of which I did not believe, for the daring driving of getaway cars for smash and grab merchants’.

The following year, Ruby Spark published his ghost-written autobiography, Burglar to the Nobility, in which Lilian was portrayed as a tough, ‘game girl’, who ‘wore her silver fox like a duchess’. The couple worked as equals, plotting, planning and carrying out the smash-and-grab raids. She was ‘afraid of nobody’, had nerves like ice and was ‘not the sort of girl to cry unless you stuck a finger in her eye’.

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