‘The Terror of the People’: Organised Crime in Interwar London

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s the London and national press reported extensively on what appeared to be outbreaks of gang crime bearing a similarity to the forms of organised crime that had recently been reported in Italy and North America. At the start of the 1920s, home-grown gang violence had been mainly confined to the racecourses and cast largely as an unwelcome development of traditional forms of racecourse criminality. By the middle of the decade the incursions of the racing men onto the London streets provoked intense report-age.² In London, violent street conflicts were characterised by press, police and politicians as a form of terrorism. The Evening Standard, for instance, described a tense search for ‘racecourse terrorists’ in the West End, ‘While Scotland Yard is thus rigorously engaged in hunting down the terrorists, the “enemy” is employing a sort of secret service to ascertain the movements of detectives.’³ The Daily Mail presented the conflicts as an underworld threat, levying fear on the lives of civilians, ‘There are many people walking about London maimed because they fell foul of the gangs.’⁴ Moreover, ‘terrorism’ and organised crime would be linked in reports of illicit gambling economies and violent street gangs in other British cities in this period.⁵ Most notably, from the later 1920s, the ‘reign of terror’ associated with the violent conflicts between Glasgow’s street fighting gangs would lead to inauspicious comparisons with Chicago.⁶

Star, 5 December 1922.