IN the 1800s Londoners had to contend with two very different criminal gangs — a group of East End boxers and another of West End shoplifters. But it was the latter’s fists they feared most.
The 40 Elephants were a band of women who robbed, burgled and swindled their way around the capital’s poshest parts and, if cornered, employed their own brand of knuckle dusters — rows of diamond rings packed on their fingers.
Meanwhile at the other end of the city were the gangs who ran boxing fights which, long before the advent of football and TV, provided the only alpha male entertainment of the day.
Coming between the factions were Jamaicans Hezekiah Moscow and his pal Alec Munroe, and both got sucked into the dangerous but lucrative underworld of bare-knuckle fighting.
Now these incredible stories have been brought together in new drama A Thousand Blows, which features Line of Duty’s Stephen Graham and The Crown actress Erin Doherty.
The Disney+ show, which starts this month, comes from Steven Knight, the heavyweight writer behind acclaimed BBC thriller Peaky Blinders as well as current BBC hit SAS Rogue Heroes.
Steven’s tales normally tackle only one true story from history, but this time he challenged himself with combining two.
He said: “I have intentionally bolted them together — it’s this real piece of history which, as a writer, you wouldn’t dare invent.
“In the 1880s and 1890s there was this very vibrant bare-knuckle boxing scene in the East End of London and there was also the emergence of what we now recognise as boxing with boxing gloves and the Queensberry Rules.
“Then, anarchically, there was the 40 Elephants, a gang of women who operate from the Elephant and Castle part of London.
“They specialised in con tricks and robbery, but also they would enter a department store like Harrods or Selfridges and just invade the place and cause mayhem.
“They’d steal so many clothes and put them on so that when they left they looked like elephants and they could barely get through the doors.
“I’ve wanted to do something about the 40 Elephants for seven or eight years when I first found out about it and these real people who lived extraordinary lives who took no nonsense and were strong and powerful.
“It’s an absolute gift for a writer.”
Amazingly, none of the characters in the new six-parter are fictional.
They all existed in the 1800s, even if the stories that surround them in A Thousand Blows employ some artistic licence.
Stephen plays Sugar Goodson, a gangster and boxer based in the Shoreditch area of East London, where boxing was so prevalent many pubs had rings set up inside bars as basic entertainment.
Although he has played hardmen before, few shows required him to look the part quite like this, so dedicated Stephen hit the gym and turbo-charged his diet.
Stephen said: “I thought: ‘I’m going to eat — literally — sleep and dream this character. It was a solid five days a week of training, five meals a day, loads of protein, ice baths. I became like a proper athlete.
“I’ve never been that big. It changed the way I sat, the way I conducted myself.
“On the first day of filming, the director went, ‘Do you want to look at the playback?’ And I remember going, ‘Is that me?’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Despite his stature, he meets his match in hunky Hezekiah, played by Small Axe’s Malachi Kirby, who became something of a London celebrity through his battles in the ring.
A handful of outstanding men had done the same through fighting, including former US slave Bill Richmond in the 1820s.
After becoming a star, Bill rose so high in society that he was invited to the coronation of King George IV at Westminster Abbey.
In the drama, Hezekiah is the link between the East End gang and 40 Elephants leader Mary Carr, played by Erin Doherty, who finds herself caught up in the intense rivalry that develops between the two boxers.
In real life Mary — known to her band of thieves as The Queen — was a formidable character.
Her group had started out as the wives, girlfriends and sisters of criminal gang The Elephant Mob.
They were responsible for maintaining a standard of living if their husbands got locked up.
That wasn’t easy in an age when women’s only real means of work was as a servant or a prostitute.
So they beat their own path with what they called “hoisting”, often raiding shops and thieving high-end items using pockets sewn inside their dresses.
They played on the stereotypical perceptions of the time. By wearing posh clothes, shop staff would dote on them and often handed them expensive items, which they would then stash in their knickers as one of their number created a sensational distraction.
Other gang members would pose as maids to go into posh houses in the West End before ransacking them.
Remarkably, they had a “Hoisters’ Code of Loyalty” dictating regulations, such as having an early night before “going shopping”, and handing over all they pinched to The Queen.
In return she doled out weekly wages for their thieving, but she insisted they could never steal each other’s boyfriends because it was bad for morale.
Erin, who played Princess Anne in Netflix hit The Crown, said: “She is so strong, she’s so forthright in her ambitions and she doesn’t give a cr*p that she’s a woman. It doesn’t matter.
‘Putting on the posh’
“She knows what she wants and she goes out and gets it and she’s going to be the best. She’s also not afraid about vocalising that which I think we should all take a little bit of — let’s just chase those dreams and uplift ourselves.”
As a result of their joint toil, the 40 Elephants gang lived the high life better than some of the middle and upper- class folk they stole from.
Wearing furs and flashy jewellery, they were often seen in the city’s swankiest venues.
The granddaughter of one gang member once recalled: “My nan was always beautifully turned out. She and her friends looked like film stars when they went out down the pub.
“It gave them a life they could never have afforded.
“I don’t think they felt bad about it. They enjoyed buying nice things with the money and putting on the posh.”
And ordinary folk appeared to welcome the chance to buy the stolen loot.
She added: “There was also a kind of respect for them locally because people could get a nice dress or a pair of stockings cheaply.
“They didn’t see anything wrong in it because these things were too expensive for most people and the shops had insurance.
“My gran liked to go for tea at The Ritz, especially if she could pinch someone’s fur coat from the cloakroom on the way out. She was still hoisting well into her 70s.”
It was this surprising link with recent history that captured the imagination of Knight when he was first creating A Thousands Blows.
He says he felt a similar buzz to the one he got when he devised Peaky Blinders for the BBC in 2013, because it too depicts real-life historic characters.
He said: “They’re hidden or forgotten working-class people that the history books didn’t bother with, yet it’s so much more interesting and fascinating than a lot of the stuff you read or see.
“With this, you just dip back into history and find these incredible characters.”
- A Thousand Blows is out on Disney+ on February 21.
