London in the Twentieth Century by Jerry White

Author:Jerry White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

Bombs, ‘The Black’, Chivs and Shooters:

Crime, 1940–55

On the afternoon of Tuesday 29 April 1947, Jay’s jeweller’s in Charlotte Street, Tottenham Court Road, was held up by three men wearing scarves round their faces and carrying handguns. The shopmen, both elderly, refused to do as they were told, pressed a burglar alarm and threw a stool at the men. Shots were fired, passers-by became inquisitive, the robbers panicked and ran. They found their stolen getaway car blocked in by a lorry and all three took to their heels. That was how Alec de Antiquis, a garage mechanic riding home on his motor cycle, came upon them. He apparently attempted to slide his machine into the robbers’ path and was shot in the head at close range.

Through a combination of good fortune, skilled detective work and the settling of an underworld grudge, the three men involved were tracked down, arrested, charged with murder and convicted at the Old Bailey. Their leader, twenty-three-year-old Harry Jenkins from Bermondsey, had just come out of borstal. His brother was serving eight years for manslaughter for his part in the killing of another ‘have-a-go hero’, Captain Binney, run down by a getaway car in 1945. Jenkins’s two younger accomplices, Chris Geraghty, twenty-one, and Terry Rolt, seventeen, both had criminal records too, Geraghty having escaped twice from borstal. They had broken into a gunsmith’s for their pistols and ammunition. Jenkins and Geraghty, who had fired the bullet that killed Antiquis, were hanged at Pentonville that September; Rolt, too young, was detained at His Majesty’s pleasure. Detective Superintendent Robert Fabian, in charge of the police investigation, thought the hangings had done much good. Two of the three handguns used in the shooting had been found in the Thames at Wapping low-tide; and ‘For weeks after the hanging of Jenkins and Geraghty we began to find guns … abandoned in parks under bushes, in dustbins, dropped through the floors of bombed houses, fished up by Thames River patrolmen in nets from the low-tide mud. The men of the underworld had decided to think twice about using guns in London.’16

A passing pressman had photographed the dying Antiquis crumpled in the gutter, his head cushioned on a shopman’s jacket, in a picture wired round the world. But it was not just this potent image which made the Antiquis murder so significant. For the new anxieties of post-war London seemed to converge and crystallize in those few moments of drama and agony in Charlotte Street.

Key among them was the crisis of London youth. This was, of course, no new problem. The first official investigation into juvenile delinquency in London was published in 1816; the turn-of-the-century ‘hooligans’ of Lambeth Walk had found a chronicler in Clarence Rook; and between the wars many writers had rediscovered the difficulties of London’s Bad Boys and Boys in Trouble. The percentage of first offenders in London aged under thirty rose from 57 per cent to 70 per cent between 1927 and 1932 and the Home Secretary decided to inquire into the problems of juvenile crime in London in 1938.

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