A. J. Raffles

Arthur J. Raffles, fictional ‘cracksman’ by night and England cricketing star by day, burst onto the literary scene in 1898. Created by Ernest William Hornung, brother-in-law of Sherlock Holmes’ author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raffles was Holmes’ antithesis: the fun-loving master thief. Embodying the ‘pleasure culture’ surrounding the burglar, Raffles’ physical attractiveness and athleticism blurred the lines between moral virtue and romantic allure. As the original novels were continually remade in theatre and film and their characters reincarnated in those media, newspapers began to label real burglars ‘Raffles’. This chapter examines how, where criminality was concerned, distinguishing between fact and fiction presented unnecessary (and unheeded) complications to commercial success. Espying an opportunity, ex-criminals appropriated this sympathetic ‘Raffles’ title for themselves, using the idea of ‘real-life Raffles’ to fashion glamorous celebrity personae through lucrative autobiographical writings. The character became an international phenomenon, beloved by audiences across Europe and America who flocked to see his exploits at the cinema and continually identified the burglar as an English ‘hero’, akin to Robin Hood. Yet Raffles was no philanthropist. Keeping the jewels for himself and glorifying in escaping capture by police, Raffles was a figure of danger for many contemporaries, who identified the longevity of his success as a harbinger of popular unrest caused by economic depression that might seduce generations of young people into a life of crime. The chapter historicizes how cultural responses to romanticized versions of burglary were conditioned by critiques of poverty and the habits of the wealthy.

The ‘King of All Burglars’

Chapter 1 charts the emergence of the ‘professional’ London burglar as a masculine, daring, and diabolically clever criminal type, embodied in the exploits of Charles Peace (d. 1879). Peace, a notorious burglar and murderer originally from Sheffield, committed twenty-six burglaries in London’s Blackheath district single-handed in 1878. Using inventive disguises, hand-made tools, and enjoying an extensive and prolific ‘career’, Peace gained a notoriety which endured into the late 1930s. Peace was exceptional. His life and criminal exploits were an anomaly among a much larger number of opportunistic thieves, whose burglaries, from predominantly working-class homes, were few and their rewards meagre. Why, then, did Peace become the archetype of burglars, upon whose legacy police and public were encouraged to dwell when deciding how to regulate the city and secure their homes? Chapter 1 traces how a real-life villain was turned into a legendary criminal, in a process that had profound implications for all subsequent versions of burglary whether legal, criminological, or circulating through popular culture.

Introduction

Until 1968, burglary was defined both legally and culturally as an extraordinary form of theft occurring between the ‘night-time’ hours of nine p.m. and six a.m., entwining the crime with visions of a shadowy, nightmarish nocturnal cityscape. Juxtaposing the horror of victims with the glamorous, sexy breed of ‘gentleman’ burglar gracing international cinema screens in phenomenally successful films such as Raffles (1939), the Introduction explores the vastly contradictory responses to the crime during the period 1860 and 1968. Encompassing not only fear-mongering accounts of the crime, but also those designed to excite, to challenge preconceptions, and to entertain, it maps out how these conflicting versions of burglary and burglars articulated broader social, political, and economic concerns. These included: the advent of mass literacy and growing demand for stories of crime that reflected the concerns of an audience of diverse class, age, and gender; the commercial imperatives of the insurance and entertainment industries as the middle classes expanded, including the development of household insurance and the popularity of the ‘true crime’ genre; the backlash against the evolving women’s movement and its alignment with new forms of criminality; and the evolution of new modes of policing and regulation, particularly forensic science. Following social surveyor Charles Booth’s observation that burglary was London’s ‘most characteristic crime’ in the early 1900s, the Introduction examines how the metropolis became peculiarly identified with burglars’ most daring exploits—and how the city itself was transformed by its association with the crime.

Designing the Burglar-Proof Home

Chapter 6 takes a closer look at the relationship between crime, gender, and the home through analysing the security devices that began populating middle-class houses from the mid-nineteenth century. Designed to be impenetrable and invisible to the wandering eye of the thief, locks and safes were increasingly decorated with particular rooms in mind, especially feminized, sexualized spaces such as the boudoir and the bedroom. The chapter analyses how this reflected the heightened publicity accorded burglaries of women’s jewellery, possessions which held their own gendered, emotional significance as tokens of love and familial bonds. Crime prevention began to reshape domestic space in this era, whether via locks and safe doors hidden beneath gloriously elaborate carvings and intricate metalwork or taking the form of burglar alarms with sensors fitted snugly between carpets, walls, and window-ledges, trailing pressure-points like a net around the home’s perimeter. While existing scholarship on the history of domestic space has thus far treated decoration and security separately, this chapter considers how the design and placement of anti-burglar devices crafted an interplay between boundaries and furnishings that maintained the facade of carefree residential harmony.

Epilogue

In 1965, London-based Turkish-Cypriot author Taner Baybars’ novel A Trap for the Burglar portrayed a metropolitan couple whose marriage was disintegrating through the constant fear of burglary that ruled their lives, eventually making them suspect each other of being the thief. Its motifs of the psycho-sexual trauma inherent in the burglar’s interference in their happy existence anticipated the new legislation enforced under the Theft Act 1968 (still in use today), which explicitly sought to entwine the issues of burglary and rape. Creating a new, severer penalty for burglary-with-rape, it constituted this phenomenon as a distinctive, more serious strand of criminal enterprise. The epilogue considers the legacy of these shifts into the late twentieth century. Night Raiders has sought to demonstrate the depths to which burglary penetrated into the everyday lives of Londoners between 1860 and 1968. Even those who had no direct experience of being burgled were touched by the crime, whether through the accumulation of sensational stories of dramatic burglaries in the press, theatre, and on film, or through the integration of anti-burglar technologies around their homes. Walking around the city at night, catching glimpse of a broken rooftile or a sudden movement near the perimeter of a house, both residents and police would have likely turned their thoughts to thieves.

Defying the Burglar in Post-War London

Burglary in London during the decades after the Second World War continued to emblematize the fears, preoccupations, and experiences of ‘home’ of modern urbanites. Burglars’ prevalence was inextricable from the city’s national and international reputation, a reality that posed a stark criminal contrast to the refrain of Britons’ ‘never having it so good’, as Prime Minister Harold MacMillan declared in 1957. Violence, especially the spiralling rates of sexual violence that tore apart households attempting to recover from the war, created a pronounced association between burglary, rape, and on occasion, murder. Chapter 7 reveals the attempts of police officers and criminal psychologists to rationalize the actions of perpetrators in relation to their childhoods, relationships, and family circumstances, embodied in a series of violent burglaries committed during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yet officials’ observations largely effaced the broader reality of widespread forms of poverty and precarious employment that also fostered crime. The potential for burglars to once more imperil residents’ sense of security had bigger implications for the city’s resurgent economy, damaging the attractiveness of the capital to visiting movie stars and celebrities (and their jewels) who were otherwise drawn to its ‘swinging’ reputation. In response, the Metropolitan Police’s ‘Beat the Burglar’ campaign, created in coordination with security and insurance companies, tried to institute an embryonic form of ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ system. Encouraging citizens to monitor one another and report disturbances, it compromised cherished notions of privacy in the efforts to collapse space and time between police and prey.

Burglary Insurance and the Culture of Fear

Terrifying images of burglars carrying knives and guns, scrambling through windows, or standing silent and masked beside householders’ beds, characterized the marketing strategy of the burglary insurance sector, which sprung into existence during the 1880s. Chapter 5 shows how, by exacerbating homeowners’ fears of the presence of the burglar within the home, and the prevalence of burglary nationally, insurers merged individual and national concerns about the crime in a calculated bid to attract custom. It analyses fear-mongering insurance adverts, with their promise to act as a bastion of security against financial loss, alongside instances when victims of burglary attempted to make a claim. Caveats dealing with the need to prove that burglars had indeed ‘broken’ in were contingent on homeowners fitting sophisticated, branded locks and latches at points of vulnerability on windows and doors. Just as this made securing financial compensation more challenging, it also instilled the idea of burglars’ expertise and professionalism should they conquer these defences. As the self-styled commercial ‘protection’ against burglary, burglary insurance became an ordinary household investment. Its prosperity therefore enables us to identify those ideas about crime and criminal that held currency in the minds of consumers. Crucially, this chapter highlights the intersection of media, state, and market discourse about crime in weaving a specific version of burglary into the very fabric of everyday life, uniting three domains that historians of crime have traditionally treated separately.

Spy-Burglars and Secrets in the Cold War Capital

During the late-1940s a spate of burglaries from residences attached to the Soviet Embassy afforded an unexpected window onto the activities of those engaged in Cold War espionage, both perpetrated by Russian agents living in London and directed against them by British operatives. Thrillingly, they exposed how London’s burglary problem offered a convenient cloak to disguise thefts of information more priceless than jewels. This chapter analyses instances of espionage in which burglary featured, both real and fictive, in order to expose how London’s distinctive criminal character was a factor in shaping international politics in this era. The burglaries of residences attached to the Soviet Embassy in London, and subsequent wrangling over culpability and evidence of the crimes with those involved, mark a little-known aspect of the escalating tensions between the Soviet Union and the Foreign Office under Ernest Bevin. Later intrigues involving burglary reveal another intersection between espionage and what has been termed the ‘cultural’ cold war. It is unsurprising that burglary figured in the hugely popular spy novels of Ian Fleming and John Le Carré; the burglar—especially the ‘spy burglar’, a label coined during the early 1960s—was as much a central protagonist on the stage of the post-war metropolis as the suave ‘man about town’ or the ‘spiv’.

The Cat Burglar as London’s Rooftop Threat

First described in 1907, ‘cat’ burglars’ reputation as extraordinarily athletic thieves and rooftop-dwellers was cemented during the 1920s, when the feline burglars appeared to ransack the West End mansions of the wealthy with frightening regularity—according to the press. Disregarding the regulated concourse of the street to reach their victims via window, wall, and roof, cat burglars forever altered received wisdom on how London as an environment could be manipulated and experienced, and how it needed to be policed. The fact that all this took place at night as well gave added lustre to these thieves’ well-publicized exploits. An entirely new sub-category of crime thus emerged as space, time, and identity became intertwined around burglary. Concurrently, the material residue of cat burglars’ rooftop escapades—broken tiles and drainpipes, soil-marks on walls, etc.—encouraged new modes of policing and regulation based on the developing practice of forensic science. This chapter considers the geographical signifiers associated with burglars’ activities across the ‘public’ spaces of the city. It argues that accounts of burglars’ unusual mobility when travelling to victims’ houses evoked fears surrounding the erosion of London’s social boundaries, through suburbanization bringing working, middle, and upper classes into closer proximity than ever before, and via disruptive new modes of travel such as the car and Underground railway. In so doing, it shows that contemporary understandings of how London as an environment could be manipulated and experienced were fundamentally revised in relation to burglary.

Marvellous Mrs Raffles?

Women burglars were supposedly rare throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. When caught in the act, they were greeted with shock and ridicule, both their triumphs and failures as thieves dismissed as ‘amateurish’ in comparison with those of male burglars. The final chapter of this section unpacks the relationship between gender, crime, and the home. Burglary had always been perpetrated by both sexes, albeit in greater numbers by men—at least, of those burglars who were caught. For a woman to raid someone’s home during a period when the ideology of women’s roles was still intimately entwined with domesticity and family life was seen as a ‘betrayal’ of their ‘nature’. These ‘forays’ into burglary by women consequently met with denial; as ‘freaks’ among their sex they were usually portrayed as spinsters or somehow ‘wronged’ romantically. Burglary was the ultimate symbol of their want of love and the stability of a family. This chapter traces how popular denial of the female burglar responded to fears about women’s greater political and social agency following the rise of the suffragette movement, as well as later symbols of female independence such as the Edwardian ‘new’ woman and the interwar ‘flapper’.