The Crossley: The Flying Squad’s new crime buster car in the 1920s
WATCH OUT COPPERS ABOUT IN THE FLYING SQUAD’S FIRST CAR
Squad swoops at the Castle Pub
“Police forces are set up by governments to stop others getting a share of what they’ve got!” — Alice Diamond
These were the words of Crime Queen Alice Diamond in the early 1900s telling a London court packed with reporters why her female gang, the much-feared ’40 Elephants’ was so powerful and popular.
The Daily Express carried her picture on Page One saying: “Every morning this woman the police called the most dangerous in London — directed the movements of her gang. She had information brought to her from all parts of the capital — daily bulletins of places and people earmarked for plunder. Nothing was done unless the ‘queen’ gave the order. Members couldn’t even marry.”
For more than 50 years the all-woman gang, terrorised the Elephant and Castle area of the capital shoplifting jewels, clothes and goods worth millions of pounds from top stores such as Harrods, Selfridges and Cartier.
They dressed like film stars, but their weapons were diamond knuckle dusters and solid gold hatpins.
Alice’s second in command Maggie Hughes blinded a copper by sticking her hatpin through his eyeball and Alice would rip the flesh off men’s faces with her sharp diamond cut knuckleduster. At 5ft 10in tall with hands the size of a male boxer, she claimed she was a match for any man in a fight.
Alice, thrown in the workhouse with her six brothers and sisters, by her drunken father when she was a baby, proved it on her first vicious brush with the law when she was 13.
It took three coppers to hold her down after being arrested for stealing a bar of chocolate. She drew blood from all of them and was in jail by the time she was 17.
Now her story is depicted in One Thousand Blows, a new Disney TV series. But Alice had a deadly secret that was eventually to lead to her downfall, and she had fallen in love with one of Britain’s hardest criminals. He was to keep her picture in his pocket until the day he died.
The TV drama focuses on the bare-knuckle boxing world of that time, but the gang grew to much more than that and was even behind the shoplifting crime wave that led to the creation of the Yard’s Flying Squad, claimed the Illustrated Police News.
For The Elephants morphed from organised West End shoplifting into fast cars to span the country committing their crimes on a military scale. They went around in Chryslers and Mercedes while other people were still using bicycles and carriages.
Maggie drove a Ford V8 car with a periscope on the roof, so she could spot police before they saw her. The 40 Elephants became well-known in London’s West End, and when they began to target stores across the country in their powerful cars, it was easy to raid Bath, Brighton, Bristol and the Midlands, and get back before midnight to the South London lock-ups, where they stored their bounty.
In London, draped in diamonds and long fox furs, they sewed hooks and pouches under their dresses before swooping on top stores like Harrods; Selfridges; Whiteleys, Gamage’s and Debenhams looking like wealthy shoppers.
They even had false arms made to make them look as if they were carrying purses, while they tucked stuff away underneath.They danced with royalty and stars and struck fear into the hearts of their male counterparts. “Men got a different perspective on life when a hatpin was just inches from their eyes,” said one reporter.
The gang operated out of the old Elephant and Castle Tavern, set in a poor, working class neighbourhood awash with the slum culture of south London, with decaying houses and poor sanitation just around the corner from the Express building of the Eighties.
They left suitcases and bags at various ‘safe’ houses and hotels around the country to fill for the trips back home and their hierarchy was so strict they lived by a code of Omertà like the mafia. Gang members could not even marry unless Queen Alice granted her permission.
The gang’ s rules included not drinking the night before a raid; not wearing clothes or jewellery that were stolen, and every member had to have an alibi when going on a job. Their women were not allowed to steal other members’ husbands. Or be beaten to “within an inch of their life.”
But in 1919 Scotland Yard told newspaper editors about a new weapon in their fight against the Elephants’ crimewave in London — two high speed motor tenders, Crossleys.
The arrest wagons would track down the gang’s raids and turn up outside stores and pubs with a mobile patrol unit hidden inside, ready to jump out and arrest criminals.
The two Crossley tenders were formerly used by the Royal Flying Corps during World War One, with a top speed of 40mph. And that’s where the name The Flying Squad came from.
At this time, newspapers all over the country such as The Sunderland Daily Echo; The Derby Evening Telegraph; the Liverpool Echo and the Daily Mail, were reporting a shock rise in female crime in the aftermath of the First World War when their men were away.
As new technology became available to the Yard, things started coming to an end for Alice when her lover left to join a notorious gang in New York and the Daily Express and Daily Mail rang the Elephants’ death knell with headlines proclaiming: “Wireless to Link up all Police Forces across Britain”.
Communication was now a powerful weapon. Marconi and his technology had become a crime buster like the Crossley tender and the gangs his victims.
The end dawned when Alice began to secretly lose the use of her arm and realised her fighting days were over. Her condition was getting worse.
On the evening of December 19, 1925, as drunken gang members celebrated Christmas at the Elephant’s local social club, a vicious bar-room brawl broke out. A few nights later at the bar, the word was about unfinished business. The Elephants gathered bottles and lumps of concrete and led by Alice arrived at Bertha’s house also carrying guns and bricks.
Alice knocked at the door and had a jug full of water thrown in her face. She ordered the door broken down and 40 rioters stormed in, some firing guns. Windows were smashed as the riot grew, and police arrived in their Crossleys to what would become branded by the Daily Express as The Battle of Lambeth.
Alice was sentenced to 18 months hard labour for orchestrating the revenge attack and rioting. The punishment was too much for weakening Alice and the golden days were over when she was hardly able to move her arm any more. She went into the brothel business for her pension.
She died of severe multiple sclerosis in her brothel in Southwark, close to East Lane market on April 1, 1952, at the age of 56. She could barely move.
RINGS A BELL!
DID YOU KNOW: That Queen Victoria was the first European monarch to use the telephone and was shown how to use it by its inventor Alexander Bell himself? He gave her two receivers in ivory and gold and she rang the Home Secretary, Sir Henry Matthews, after reading about Jack The Ripper in the national Press in September 1888. (Reporters used to call Matthews ‘the Never At Home Secretary because he never answered their queries). Sounds like the Palace today!).
Do YOU REMEMBER? Fleet Street newspapers reported that All My Loving was played over the sound system at the Roosevelt Hospital Emergency Room in New York when Beatle John Lennon was pronounced dead after being shot on April 8, 1980?
End of the road for Travellin’ Man
I remember the day fading American rock superstar Rick Nelson arrived in Blighty to boost his fading rock career. I had just bought his new album Garden Party and it was a belter. Twelve cracking numbers that put him back in the charts in 1985 after he had suffered the hammer blow of the Swinging Sixties like Elvis. They were thought of as old hat.
Pouty, handsome Rick was doing a series of concerts with Bobby Vee, Del Shannon, Bo Diddley, Frankie Ford and The Marvellettes. Legendary stars, eh? One of his venues was The Manchester Apollo and I was going to book tickets, but I never did. I regret it as it was the last time I would be able to see ‘The All American Boy’ with a reputation of being squeaky clean.
He died, aged 42, a few months later and the curtain lifted on his chaotic lifestyle. He was broke, into cocaine and other drugs. And he left behind a mystery that exists to this day. Did drugs cause his plane crash that killed him? the Press in Britain and America asked. An investigation said not. But the wreckage was so bad it was difficult to investigate.
The death of the poor little rich boy who gave us such hits such as Travellin’ Man and Hello Mary Lou, was marked by the wreckage of the DC3 plane he bought from Jerry Lee Lewis; a stash of burned aerosol cans in the cabin and an explosion mid-air over an Alabama farmhouse.
People on the ground could see the pilot wrestling with the controls as the wings clipped two electric poles one after the other before spinning out of control on New Year’s Eve, 1985. The pilot and co-pilot miraculously escaped but Rick, his fiancée and band died.
An accident report was inconclusive, but the crash could have been due to mechanical problems in a faulty heater. However, Press rumours were rife that the crash was caused by freebasing cocaine — either by Nelson himself or by one of his crew.
It came a few years after Hollywood star Richard Pryor was badly burned while freebasing in Hollywood. Freebasing was the process in which cocaine was mixed with other chemicals, heated, and then drawn deeply into the lungs using a pipe. Nelson was known to turn to cocaine and marijuana when his career went down the pan and traces of cocaine were found in his body.
Rick Nelson was rich before he was a star. His parents Ozzie and Harriet were TV icons who took him into their family show. By the time he went to Hollywood High School in 1954 he was earning $100,000 a year ($1.1million today). He left less than £500,000 when he died. His last song on stage was Rave On’. Something he wouldn’t sadly do any more.
TERRY MANNERS
7 July 2025
