The daring female thief who led a violent all-girl gang - while moonlighting as a model for one of Britain's most eminent painters: Author BEEZY MARSH on the remarkable world of Mary Carr, Queen of the Forty Thieves

Standing in the dock wrapped in a velvet fur-trimmed cloak, her wide-brimmed hat adorned with five ostrich feathers and with diamond rings sparkling on her fingers, Mary Carr looked every inch the wealthy lady.

But this golden-haired beauty was no stranger to rough justice - she'd first been jailed for petty theft as a 12-year-old girl and had clawed her way from rags to riches after humble beginnings as a flower seller in Covent Garden. 

Now she was in her early thirties, dressed in fine clothes she'd bought with her ill-gotten gains, and she was facing years behind bars. But still she kept her cool.

Newspaper reports unmasked her as the Queen of Thieves, the leader of a gang of determined young women and girls who used deception, cunning and violence to obtain the wealth they craved at the turn of the century.

However, as she appeared in court, day after day, wearing an array of fabulous outfits, including watered-silk blouses cut to emphasise her tiny waist and ample bosom, Mary became known by another soubriquet, 'the Swan-necked beauty'. 

Author BEEZY MARSH reveals the story of Mary Carr, the leader of the notorious all-female Forty Thieves. Above: An etching of Mary

Alice Diamond was Mary Carr's successor as leader of the Forty Thieves. Above: Diamond (top left) with other members of the gang after being captured

On one occasion she took off her hat to reveal her fabulously coiffed hair piled in curls on the top of her head. As word of her good looks spread, crowds came to see this indomitable thief who faced down the judge with grace and poise and not a shred of remorse for her actions.

Mary Carr is mentioned under her married name of Mary Crane in this report in the Daily Mail in 1900

Yet the best was yet to come. There were gasps from the public gallery as details of her double-life as an artist's model to one of the most respected painters of the day emerged. It was a real-life My Fair Lady moment, when the flower seller had become the muse to Lord Frederic Leighton, President of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Mary Carr was without doubt a woman who had captivated not only the hearts and minds of criminal associates but also a pillar of Britain's art establishment in Lord Leighton, who is most famous for his sensuous painting of womanhood, Flaming June - featuring another model, Miss Mary Loyd. Working for Lord Leighton, Mary Carr and all the other girls were expected to strip naked for pencil drawings before he painted them draped in togas or sylph-like garments, which left little to the imagination. Mary Carr was also regularly used as a model by the artist Lady Dorothy Tennant, wife of the explorer Sir Henry Stanley, who created a series of artworks featuring urchins and poor young women from the slums in their everyday clothes, as evidence of their 'happy poverty'.

Although Mary Carr is not named in any of the works by Leighton or Tennant, she used her role as an artist's model as evidence of her good character in court. There are tantalising similarities between some of the pictures of a flower seller in Tennant's works and the court artist's impression of Mary Carr, with her strong jaw and fine features. No photographs of her are thought to exist.

It's unlikely that her meagre pay for working as a muse amounted to much, but it was crucial in helping Mary ply her illegal trade because she learned how to walk and talk with such poise that she was able to fool wealthy gentlemen with her illicit money-making ruses for years.

Her remarkable exploits, which helped inspire my latest novel Queen of Diamonds, are like reading about a real-life Eliza Doolittle. But Mary put the Peaky Blinders into My Fair Lady by combining modelling work with a full-time career as leader of the Forty Thieves, the most feared female gang in London.

Mary Carr also worked as a muse for artist Lord Frederic Leighton, then president of the Royal Academy of Arts

Lord Leighton is most famous for his sensuous painting of womanhood, Flaming June - featuring another model, Miss Mary Loyd

Mary had organised a group of desperately poor girls from Covent Garden and the surrounding slums of the Seven Dials, notorious in Dickens' day as a Hell's Kitchen, to turn them into a force to be reckoned with. These young women were every bit as prepared as Mary to con and steal their way to riches but on their own, they were never going to be a great success. And that's where Mary, a natural leader, who'd already cut her criminal teeth, was prepared to step in.

According to court records and newspaper reports, she helped the gang perfect a form of blackmail, in which wealthy elderly gentlemen were conned into loaning her a bus fare and walking her to the bus stop, via a dark alley in Soho. When she was half-way there, she'd cry out that he'd attacked her, and two of the other gang members would appear, swearing that they'd go to the police as witnesses. Many gents preferred to part with some cash rather than have their reputations ruined and Carr bragged that she'd often make £40 in a week with this ruse, a small fortune in today's money.

If any man refused to pay up, she'd simply snatch his gold fob watch and chain and make off up the warren of alleyways she knew so well. This didn't always go to plan, and she once spent three months in jail for such a theft.

Her family history is shrouded in mystery because like many thieves and con artists, Mary liked to tell a lot of lies. She was born in London to working class parents. When she appeared in court in the spring of 1896, she insisted she was 25 until a prison warder who knew her revealed that the truth; she had been born some seven years earlier, in 1864. She also went by the aliases Polly Carr, Eva Jackson and Annie Leslie, as well as her married name, Mary Crane, making it difficult for police to trace her. She was wed for a time to another criminal, a dubious character called Thomas Crane, before taking up later with a thug, Alf Gorman, who could have walked straight out of the cast of a gangster film, with convictions for robbery and violence.

An etching of Mary Carr showing her surrounded by children 

National Archives records showing the exploits of Mary Carr, who is named under her married name of Crane

Another record in the National Archives showing Mary Carr's name, along with some of her aliases

The sensational court case in which her past as an artist's model for Lord Frederic Leighton was made public involved the shocking charge of Mary stealing a six-year-old boy. She is not known to have had any children of her own, but having seen little blonde-haired Joseph McGee, the son of an Irish traveller, being beaten by his mother at a race meeting, she decided she could offer him a better life. The boy was spirited away by her associates and brought back to London to live with her.

A year later, when a gang member fell out with her, the police were tipped off and the boy was discovered, well-dressed and with toys including an expensive bicycle, at Mary's home, calling her 'Mother'. Doctors found that the boy was suffering from syphilis - a then incurable sexually transmitted disease likely to have been passed on to him at birth by his mother Bridget McGee. During the sentencing, where she was given three years penal servitude, the boy wept and tried to climb into the dock to kiss Mary goodbye. He was never returned to his mother but was instead placed in a children's home.

Police said that Mary was a 'strange mixture of good and evil' who had a soft spot for poor children, often buying them warm clothing, or caring for them if their parents went to prison.

After the child snatching conviction, it wasn't long before Mary was up to her old tricks. This time, she was involved in robberies at West End hotels, in which diamond necklaces and other jewels were stolen. In 1900, she was back in court on a charge of receiving stolen goods, for which she received 20 months hard labour. She politely thanked the judge as she was sent down. After that, she was caught shoplifting in Bournemouth with a female associate in 1905 but is said to have died, penniless, in the mid-1920s, at the age of around 60.

By that point, the Forty Thieves were already in the vice-like grip of her successor, the indomitable Alice Diamond, who stood 6ft tall and wore her diamond rings as a knuckleduster, dishing out punishment to any man or woman foolish enough to cross her. It's likely that Alice knew Mary, or at least knew of her exploits. But her aim as Queen of Thieves was to organise her girls into teams who ran amok through London's most prestigious stores, including Selfridges. They stuffed furs, jewels and silks into their underwear or concealed stolen goods in hidden pockets. The Forty Thieves truly began their heyday under Alice Diamond's careful watch.

Queen of Diamonds was published by Orion on February 29th

Researching my three books about the gang, Queen of Thieves, Queen of Clubs, and Queen of Diamonds, I was shocked to find that the criminal legacy of shoplifting, which The Forty Thieves called 'hoisting', stretched into the 1970s, 1980s and beyond, as descendants of the original gang used the tried and tested method of shoving clothes down their specially-made bloomers which had elastic at the knee. The women of the Forty Thieves were famous all over London for their film-star looks and their beautiful taste in clothing, and many gangsters fell in love with them.

All of them saw nothing wrong with stealing luxury items they could never afford on an honest wage and were determined to carve a career on the wrong side of the law, in a way which was more typical of male-dominated gangland. But as the headlines of the day show, their mixture of immorality mixed with their beauty and daring, proved a heady mix, as they were the original bad girls who refused to see anything wrong in their crimes.

Queen of Diamonds was published by Orion on February 29th.