London In the Nineteenth Century by Jerry White

Author:Jerry White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446477113
Publisher: Random House

Magsmen, Cracksmen, Hoisters and Fogle-hunters

London for sharpers, Brummagem for thieves, Paris for flymen, Sheffield for pitchers of snyde, signed by Darkey, the gun, from Wandsworth Road, for a bust.21

There were other candidates for the archetypal London crook but Darkey’s choice of cheat was – all in all, remembering the wiles of City men and Grub Street hacks and costermongers and beggars and street children – the right one. Cheating exploited the Londoners’ unique capacity for sharp wit, shrewd psychology and talented tongue. These were abilities that crossed all classes. The little library of London detectives’ memoirs that began at the end of the nineteenth century showcased sharpers most of all: Chief Inspector Greenham’s of 1904 typically has a chapter headed ‘Aristocratic Swindler’.22

The guides aimed at visitors to the city warn most against the London cheat. Baedeker, as late as 1905, repeats earlier advice that ‘It is even prudent to avoid speaking to strangers in the street.’ A hundred years earlier and Barrington’s New London Spy gave a frightening list of the ‘Frauds and Cheats daily practised on the unwary tradesman, mechanic, and deluded countryman’. There were duffers selling false silk at street corners and elsewhere; fortune-tellers and ‘conjurors’ (astrologers); professional gamblers, ‘hangers-on’ and ‘spungers’; ‘intelligencers’ giving false information about jobs, insolvents cheating creditors, lottery-office keepers welshing if numbers came up, mock auctioneers dealing in false bargains; ‘money-droppers’ and ‘ring-droppers’ (devices to lure into conversation or pass bad money and false jewellery); ‘pretended friends’ and quack doctors; sharpers and swindlers of ‘genteel education’ pretending ‘to be men of quality, or independent fortunes, many of whom keep their equipages and filles de joie, without a foot of land, or shilling in the funds’. A decade or so later and the warnings extended to ‘pretended porters or clerks’ who haunted the coaching inns watching for new arrivals, to street sellers and hackney coachmen ‘ringing the changes’ (befuddling the customer with short change) or passing bad money. Throughout the century, any stunning event – the Great Exhibition, say, or the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 – ‘brought the aristocracy of the criminal world’ to London, including many magsmen, confidence tricksters playing for high stakes or low.23

Sharpers tended to stick with the tricks they knew best, and the same was true of thieves in general. Men and women specialised, had been apprenticed perhaps when boys and girls. And as in all trades and professions, some were more skilled and successful than others. Take that other great London terror about which Baedeker warned travellers – pickpockets. They were legion throughout the century. John Binny thought that almost all had ‘sprung from the dregs of society’. But there were pickpockets and pickpockets. The most skilled were as adept in sleight of hand as any music-hall magician, and scarcely less well rewarded. No snotter-haulers or fogle-hunters these, to be satisfied with a silk handkerchief or two. Here were men in search of red-toys or red-kettles (gold watches). The best pickings were found in crowds. All crowds were meat and drink to the dip.

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