The Great Train Robbery (6 page)

“Demands his routine, does he?”

“With a vengeance, he does. He’s a stiff one—the job must be done, and that’s all he cares for. He’s getting on in years,” Rivers said. “And vain, too: grew whiskers longer than yours, he did, on account of the fact he’s losing the hair up top.”

During this period, there was considerable debate about the propriety of whiskers on gentlemen. It was a new fashion, and opinion was divided on its benefits. Similarly, there was a new fashion in smoking, called cigarettes, just introduced, but the most conservative men did not smoke—certainly not in public, or even at
home. And the most conservative men were clean-shaven.

“He has this brush, I hear,” Rivers went on. “Dr. Scott’s electric hairbrush, comes from Paris. You know how dear it is? Twelve shillings sixpence, that’s what it is.”

Rivers would find this expensive: he was paid twelve shillings a week.

“What’s it do?” Pierce inquired.

“Cures headaches, dandruff, and baldness, too,” Rivers said, “or so it’s claimed. Queer little brush. He locks himself into his office and brushes once an hour, punctual.” Here Rivers laughed at the foibles of his employer.

“He must have a large office.”

“Aye, large and comfortable, too. He’s an important man, Mr. Trent is.”

“Keeps it tidy?”

“Aye, the sweeper’s in every night, dusting and arranging just so, and every night as he leaves, Mr. Trent says to the sweeper, ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place,’ and then he leaves, seven o’clock punctual.”

Pierce did not recall the rest of the conversation, for it was of no interest to him. He already knew what he wanted—that Trent did not keep the key in his office. If he did, he would never leave the place to be cleaned in his absence, for sweepers were notoriously easy to bribe, and to the casual eye there was little difference between a thorough cleaning and a thorough search.

But even if the key was not in the office, it might still be kept in the bank. Mr. Trent might choose to lock it in one of the vaults. To determine if this was so, Pierce could strike up a conversation with a different clerk, but he was anxious to avoid this. Instead, he chose another method.

Teddy Burke, twenty-four, was working the Strand at two in the afternoon, the most fashionable hour. Like the other gentlemen, Teddy Burke was decked out, wearing a high hat, a dark frock coat, narrow trousers, and a dark silk choker. This outfit had cost him a pretty, but it was essential to his business, for Teddy Burke was one of the swellest of the swell mobsmen.

In the throng of gentlemen and ladies who browsed among the elegant shops of this thoroughfare, which Disraeli called “the first street in Europe,” no one would notice that Teddy Burke was not alone. In fact, he was working his usual operation, with himself as dipper, a stickman at his side, and two stalls front and back—altogether, four men, each as well-dressed as the next. These four slipped through the crowd, attracting no attention. There was plenty of diversion.

On this fine early summer day, the air was warm and redolent of horse dung, despite the busy working of a dozen street-urchin sweepers. There was heavy traffic of carts, drays, brightly lettered rattling omnibuses, four-wheel and hansom cabs, and from time to time an elegant chariot rode past, with a uniformed coachman in front and liveried servants standing behind. Ragged children darted among the traffic and turned cartwheels under the horses’ hoofs for the amusement of the crowd, some of whom threw a few coppers in their direction.

Teddy Burke was oblivious to the excitement, and to the rich array of goods on display in the shopwindows. His attention was wholly fixed upon the quarry, a fine lady wearing a heavy flounced crinoline skirt of deep purple. In a few moments he would dip her as she walked along the street.

His gang was in formation. One stall had taken up a position three paces ahead; another was five paces back. True to their title, the stalls would create disorder and confusion should anything go wrong with the intended dip.

The quarry was moving, but that did not worry Teddy Burke. He planned to work her on the fly, the most difficult kind of dip, as she moved from one shop to the next.

“Right, here we go,” he said, and the stickman moved alongside him. It was the stickman’s job to take the pogue once Teddy had snaffled it, thus leaving Teddy clean, should there be any hue and cry and a constable to stop him.

Together with the stickman, he moved so close to the woman he could smell her perfume. He was moving along her right side, for a woman’s dress had only one pocket, and that was on the right.

Teddy carried an overcoat draped across his left arm. A sensible person might have asked why a gentleman would carry an overcoat on such a warm day; but the coat looked new, and he could have conceivably just picked it up from a fitting at one of the nearby shops. In any case, the overcoat concealed the movement of his right arm across his body to the woman’s skirt. He fanned the dress delicately, to determine if a purse was there. His fingers touched it; he took a deep breath, praying that the coins would not clink, and lifted it out of the pocket.

Immediately he eased away from the woman, shifted his overcoat to his other arm, and in the course of that
movement passed the purse to the stickman. The stickman drifted off. Ahead and behind, the stalls moved out in different directions. Only Teddy Burke, now clean, continued to walk along the Strand, pausing before a shop that displayed cut-glass and crystal decanters imported from France.

A tall gent with a red beard was admiring the wares in the window. He did not look at Teddy Burke. “Nice pull,” he said.

Teddy Burke blinked.

The speaker was too well-dressed, too square-rigged, to be a plainclothes crusher, and he certainly wasn’t a nose, or informer. Teddy Burke said carefully, “Are you addressing me, sir?”

“Yes,” the man said. “I said that was a very nice pull. You tool her off?”

Teddy Burke was profoundly insulted. A tool was a wire hook that inferior dippers employed to snare a purse if their fingers were too shaky for the job. “Beg your pardon, sir. I don’t know your meaning, sir.”

“I think you do, well enough,” the man said. “Shall we walk awhile?”

Teddy Burke shrugged and fell into step alongside the stranger. After all, he was clean; he had nothing to fear. “Lovely day,” he said.

The stranger did not answer. They walked for some minutes in silence. “Do you think you can be less effective?” the man asked after a time.

“How do you mean, sir?”

“I mean,” the man said, “can you buzz a customer and come out dry?”

“On purpose?” Teddy Burke laughed. “It happens often enough without trying, I can tell you that.”

“There’s five quid for you, if you can prove yourself a prize bungler.”

Teddy Burke’s eyes narrowed. There were plenty of magsmen about, sharp con men who often employed an
unwitting accomplice, setting him up to take a fall in some elaborate scheme. Teddy Burke was nobody’s fool. “Five quid’s no great matter.”

“Ten,” the man said, in a weary voice.

“I have to think of me boys.”

“No,” the man said, “this is you, alone.”

“What’s the lay, then?” Teddy Burke said.

“Lots of bustle, a ruck touch, just enough to set the quarry to worry, make him pat his pockets.”

“And you want me to come up dry?”

“Dry as dust,” the man said.

“Who’s the quarry, then?” Teddy Burke said.

“A gent named Trent. You’ll touch him with a bungler’s dip in front of his offices, just a roughing-up, like.”

“Where’s the office, then?”

“Huddlestone & Bradford Bank.”

Teddy Burke whistled. “Westminster. Sticky, that is. There’s enough crushers about to make a bloody army.”

“But you’ll be dry. All you’ve to do is worry him.”

Teddy Burke walked a few moments, looking this way and that, taking the air and thinking things over. “When will it be, then?”

“Tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock sharp.”

“All right.”

The red-bearded gentleman gave him a five-pound note, and informed him he would get the rest when the job was done.

“What’s it all about, then?” Teddy Burke asked.

“Personal matter,” the man replied, and slipped away into the crowd.

Between 1801 and 1851, London tripled in size. With a population of two and a half million, it was by far the largest city in the world, and every foreign observer was astonished at its dimensions. Nathaniel Hawthorne was speechless; Henry James was fascinated and appalled at its “horrible numerosity”; Dostoevsky found it “as vast as an ocean … a Biblical sight, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your very eyes.”

And yet London continued to grow. At the mid-century, four thousand new dwellings were under construction at any one time, and the city was literally exploding outward. Already, the now familiar pattern of expansion was termed “the flight to the suburbs.” Outlying areas that at the turn of the century had been villages and hamlets—Marylebone, Islington, Camden Town, St. John’s Wood, and Bethnal Green—were thoroughly built up, and the newly affluent middle classes were deserting the central city for these areas, where the air was better, the noise less bothersome, and the atmosphere in general more pleasant and “countrified.”

Of course, some older sections of London retained a character of great elegance and wealth, but these were often cheek by jowl with the most dismal and shocking slums. The proximity of great riches and profound squalor also impressed foreign observers, particularly since the slums, or rookeries, were refuges and breeding places for “the criminal class.” There were sections of
London where a thief might rob a mansion and literally cross a street to disappear into a tangled maze of alleyways and dilapidated buildings crammed with humanity and so dangerous that even an armed policeman did not dare pursue the culprit.

The genesis of slums was poorly understood at the time; indeed, the very term “slums” did not become widely accepted until 1890. But in a vague way the now familiar pattern was recognized: a region of the city would be cut off from circulation by newly constructed thoroughfares that by-passed it; businesses would depart; disagreeable industries would move in, creating local noise and air pollution and further reducing the attractiveness of the area; ultimately, no one with the means to live elsewhere would choose to reside in such a place, and the region would become decrepit, badly maintained, and overpopulated by the lowest classes.

Then, as now, these slums existed in part because they were profitable for landlords. A lodging house of eight rooms might take on a hundred boarders, each paying a shilling or two a week to live in “hugger-mugger promiscuity,” sleeping with as many as twenty members of the same or opposite sex in the same room. (Perhaps the most bizarre example of lodgings of the period was the famous waterfront sailors’ “penny hangs.” Here a drunken seaman slept the night for a penny, draping himself across chest-high ropes, and hanging like clothes on a line.)

While some proprietors of lodging houses, or netherskens, lived in the area—and often accepted stolen goods in lieu of rent—many owners were substantial citizens, landlords
in absentia
who employed a tough deputy to collect the rents and keep some semblance of order.

During this period there were several notorious rookeries, at Seven Dials, Rosemary Lane, Jacob’s Island, and Ratcliffe Highway, but none was more famous than
the six acres in central London that comprised the rookery of St. Giles, called “the Holy Land.” Located near the theatre district of Leicester Square, the prostitute center of the Haymarket, and the fashionable shops of Regent Street, the St. Giles rookery was strategically located for any criminal who wanted to “go to ground.”

Contemporary accounts describe the Holy Land as “a dense mass of houses so old they only seem not to fall, through which narrow and tortuous lanes curve and wind. There is no privacy here, and whoever ventures in this region finds the streets—by courtesy so called—thronged with loiterers, and sees, through half-glazed windows, rooms crowded to suffocation.” There are references to “the stagnant gutters … the filth choking up dark passages … the walls of bleached soot, and doors falling from their hinges … and children swarming everywhere, relieving themselves as they please.”