Freddie Foreman - The Godfather of British Crime. Freddie Foreman
going to make you a fighter pilot!’
I creased up – it made it very difficult for me to keep a straight face back in front of the panel.
We had to come back a second time. Following George’s excellent tuition, I again sat on the edge of the seat, gaping open-mouthed, and the medical board obviously thought I needed help. ‘This young man needs some treatment,’ they told George. They assessed me as Grade 4, which exempted me from doing National Service, and recommended that I attend Cane Hill mental institution in Surrey for electric-shock treatment! Maybe they were right.
In some ways, I regretted not doing National Service with my mates. Lots of my friends were sent all over the world – like Micky Regan, who went to Suez, and Freddie Puttnam, who went to Malaya. Patsy Toomey and Lenny White joined the Army and became PTIs and fought in the Army Boxing Championships so, in a way, I later felt that I had missed out.
Money was in short supply back then, and most of my friends had secure jobs in Smithfield meat market, Spitalfields, Billingsgate or Covent Garden. Being a market porter was quite the ‘in thing’ to be those days, and I did it myself for a short time. I had bigger ambitions, though.
At around the age of 18, I teamed up with a load of girls known as the Forty Thieves. You virtually had to be born into it to become a member of this gang. All the girls were hoisters, and followed their mothers’ footsteps in professional shoplifting. (They used to call shoplifting ‘clouting’, which was Old English for ‘drawers’. The amount of goods those girls could stash away in bloomers under their dresses was unbelievable…)
My job was to graft with girls like Mae Mae Cooper, Annie Revel and Nellie Donovan, and make sure they got away after shoplifting from top stores like Harrods. You would bump into the guy who was going to give them a pull, or give him a right-hander if he got too clever. We met the girls in the local pubs. Their mothers, all from the Elephant and Kennington, were the original Forty Thieves. Though they had cockney accents, they knew how to talk lah-di-dah, putting on the upper-crust voice whenever the situation demanded. They wore their clothes better than titled ladies and really looked the part. They were stunning girls, well known throughout London.
When they got nicked, they got it hard. Some of these girls were sent to Holloway for two to three years, even though they were mothers with children. They were not treated gently but they were tough and did their lump of bird. Like fellas, they risked their liberty every day of the week to get a pound note.
A lot of them were scarred up, because they could also be vicious bastards and were often in fights and rows, cutting each other up. When they let their hair down, they were totally outrageous. Sexually, some of them were hot stuff. People who live on the edge can be – as I’ve said before, they lived life to the full and knew how to make a man happy. When they tired of their man, they’d kick him out and move on to the next one. They were real characters. I still see a few of these lovely ladies, beautifully turned out and probably still grafting. It’s in their blood.
Working with the girls was only a part-time activity. It was fun to do and I enjoyed the company of these larger-than-life ladies, each of them a colourful character in her own right. But there were bigger prizes to be had.
I’m moving on too quickly here. Let me go back and tell you of my teenage years at Wandsworth Road, which were amongst the happiest of my life. At 18, while still living at my mum’s, I became a full-time thief. My social life was exciting and fulfilling and I was fit and ready to take on the world.
My mates Lennie and Patsy loved staying at my place, mainly because my house was the general meeting place and also local girls joined us for sexual adventures in the drying rooms at the top of the block. We used to hang around the entrance to the flats late at night while Rosie, one of the girls I fancied, would come by. I’d greet her and offer to escort her home. Of course, there was a diversion. A gentle tug on the arm would be enough to change direction and I’d lead her up to the drying rooms. Her protests were never meant to carry much weight and we’d soon be at it with a knee-trembler against the wall. Lennie used to tail me off minutes afterwards. The routine was: handkerchief out of the pocket, wave it so Lennie could see, and give a little cough to signal the changeover. Rosie would act startled: ‘Who’s that?’ I’d tell her it was my mate Lennie and, a little indignantly, she’d threaten to go home. But the thrill of a further sexual adventure was too strong and she stayed. Lennie would slip up behind and take over from where I’d left off. This became a right regular occurrence.
On another note, I was still worried about my George’s health shovelling coal and breathing in all that dust in the barges. Even though he was older than me, I suggested he pack the job in and join my little firm. ‘You’ll be dead in five years if you don’t,’ I warned him. The pollution outside the power station was bad enough. A fine layer of coal dust covered the roads and footpaths, so when you walked down Nine Elms Lane to the power station you left a trail of footprints. I couldn’t bear to think what this did to my George’s lungs and reckoned his chances of survival would be better with me. In those days these was no social security, so you only had two choices: to work or to thieve. I thought thieving was the lesser of two evils.
After working with the Forty Thieves, I progressed to the jump-up. This involved stealing the goods from a commercial traveller’s car or from a lorry and driving them to an arranged meet where they were loaded into another van and sold on my behalf. I bought a five-hundredweight Ford van and, through trial and error, taught myself to drive it. Driving licences were provided by a friend in County Hall.
Just after the war there was good money to be made from the black market in rationed goods. The profits were better still if you didn’t have to pay for the rations in the first place. The canteen at George’s power station catered for hundreds of people and was given a large allocation of tea, which was very much in demand. Every three or four months they would get eight or nine chests, some of which would probably go to other canteens. You could get double the price for it on the black market, so I decided we had to have it and asked Lennie and George to help. We broke into the building one night, made our way to the canteen and got the tea chests out without any problem. It was a good night’s work.
The night watchman was alerted to us, but it was nothing to tie him up, the work of only a few minutes. Much better than battering him unconscious. People are normally so surprised and shocked by a sudden hold-up or threat that they freeze and are easily subdued. George said he earned more from that night than working for several months at the gasworks, and that convinced him to turn his job in and join me. Soon we had organised people in different factories to sell our bits of gear to their large workforces, and people began approaching us with orders for items in demand. I was always being asked for spare lorry wheels with plenty of meat on the tyres. They came to between £10 and £20 each, which was a lot of money then. We stored the tyres in George’s house in Wickersley Road – until we broke the floorboards bouncing tyres into the backyard. The final straw came when we broke the staircase. George’s Rita was not amused.
We used to nick anything and everything. We’d follow a travelling salesman and, as soon as he went into the house selling goods on the never-never, the jump-up would happen. You’d use a screwdriver to open the quarterlight window of his motor, up went the catch, open the door, start the car up with a flat key and drive off. Lenny or George would follow in our van to a quiet street, preferably a cul-de-sac with a wall on either side, load up the gear and leave the salesman’s motor there.
We got plenty of Twining’s vans loaded with tea chests and a couple of drivers even let us have all their goods by parking up outside a café. While they were having a cup of tea we’d jump up and drive it away. Some drivers would even approach us and ask if we’d rob them for a percentage of the take. One of my relations offered to let us have his truck, which we ‘nicked’ from him at the Lyons Corner House by the