This story begins in West Hampstead in the 1920s and leads to a study of two famous criminals.
West Hampstead burglaries
In August 1926, West Hampstead Police Station which was then at 90 West End Lane near the Railway Hotel, received a tip-off about an intended local house burglary.
Photo of West Hampstead Police StationDetectives Parlett, Heath and Smith went to Fairfax Road and took up observation. After half an hour they saw a powerful Swift motorcar, license plate LM 7311, arrive with three men and a woman with short bobbed hair. She got out and went into No.4 Fairfax Road which was currently unoccupied. Shortly afterwards she returned to the car and it drove away. The police waited and about 20 minutes later the car returned and parked nearby. Two of the men went into the house while one man pretended to be cleaning the car, and the woman kept watch in the street nearby. After a while, the men returned carrying a suitcase and they started up the car.
Just as it was moving away, the police came out of hiding and one officer jumped onto the running board to tackle the driver and put on the hand brake. There was a struggle, and two of men were pinned to the ground, but the woman and the third man jumped over the back of the car and ran away down Belsize Road.
Four days earlier, another burglary had taken place nearby at 19 Crediton Hill in West Hampstead, the home of Harry Rubens, a surveyor and estate agent. When the police searched Albert Mays’ home in Brecknock Road they found various stolen goods, including items from Crediton Hill.
Who was the Bobbed Hair Bandit?
The woman burglar was following current fashion. The bobbed hair cut had been made popular by the American film star Louise Brooks.
In 1924 Celia Cooney was arrested following a robbing spree in Brooklyn with her husband Ed, and her memoirs were serialised as the ‘Bobbed-Hair Bandit’s Own Story’. The case was well covered in the British press, and soon we had our own bobbed haired bandit here.
Celia Cooney US newspaper headlines
The police had a good description of the woman involved in the Fairfax Road robbery and they soon identified her as Lilian Goldstein. She was born as Lilian Rose Kendall on 4 August 1902 in Noyna Road Tooting Bec. In the 1911 census she was with younger brother Victor and parents at 54 Wardle Road Upper Tooting, where her father Henry Kendall was a housepainter.
In October 1920 eighteen-year old Lilian married jeweler Henry Goldstein aged 24, of Victoria Park Road Hackney. On 15 July he had been charged with living off Lilian’s immoral earnings and sentenced to three months with hard labour. In court Lilian said that she had met Goldstein in September or October 1918, when she was 16 years old and he was working in Hatton Garden. She then left her parents’ house and lived with him at various addresses. In February 1919 he became unemployed and suggested that she should go on the streets. They married after he served his sentence. However, the marriage did not last but there was a child from the relationship.
The motor bandits
During the 20s powerful motorcars were being used for robberies as thieves could travel around the country and outrun the police. London gangs of motor bandits began house robberies in the suburbs and other parts of the country. In July 1927 Victor Kendall (Lilian’s brother), John Wilson and James Rayner were arrested in Southport near Manchester. A policeman on the beat had spotted the wanted car and Major Egan, the Chief Constable of Southport, ordered a fire engine to wait undercover on a narrow country road. As the car approached, he gave the signal and the fire engine pulled out and blocked the road. The motor bandits threw their car into reverse, but they were surrounded and arrested.
Victor was sentenced to 18 months with hard labour, and Wilson and Rayner got three years for house breakings in the area. Lilian, who was John Wilson’s girlfriend, wearing a mink coat from a recent break-in at Lord Sefton’s house, was also charged with receiving stolen goods but she was released as there was insufficient evidence.
The men were sent to Strangeways prison in Manchester, but on 14 August John Wilson and another man escaped by filing through their cell bars and climbing over the walls with a rope made of platted mailbag thread. Lilian helped the men break out, but they were re-captured two days later in an empty house 14 miles away in Leigh.
Lilian’s further escapades and partners
In July 1933 Lilian Goldstein, 30, of Bedford Hill Balham, was convicted of the theft of lingerie from The White House, the famous milliners of 51 New Bond Street. She had concealed numerous items worth £104 under her clothes. Her solicitor said she had been married for 13 years but was separated from her husband and had one child. The police said she was ‘strongly suspected of being the woman described as the bobbed-haired bandit’. She pleaded guilty to the theft and was sentenced to four months with hard labour.
Ruby Sparks
In fact, John Wilson was one of the many aliases of Charles John ‘Ruby’ Sparks. He was born as Charles John Spark (with no final ‘s’), on 24 March 1901 at 39 Kempton Road in Camberwell. His wonderfully named father Oliver Cromwell Spark was a carman and a bare-knuckle fighter and boxer. By 1911 the family had moved a short distance to 11 Tiger Yard near Camberwell Green.
As a young teenager Johnny said that he had robbed a house in Park Lane Mayfair where he found a box of 40 red stones. He took them to a fence who said they were worthless pieces of glass. So, in Soho clubs Sparks gave them away to his friends. The next day he saw in the papers that an Indian Maharaja had lost his valuable rubies worth £40,000. Supposedly, this is how he got his nickname of Ruby Sparks.
In his 1961 autobiography ‘Burglar to Nobility, as told to Norman Price’, Sparks said Kate Meyrick who ran the notorious 43 Club in Gerrard Street, introduced him to George McCraig, the famous Tasmanian-born ‘Human Fly’ or ‘King of the Cat Burglars’. McCraig taught young Ruby how to quietly break into houses.
They got their information from Robert Delaney, an Irishman who pretending to be an Army officer, had married Kate Sharpe, a wealthy widow in December 1915.
Robert and Kate were invited to upper-class parties and afterwards he drew a map of the houses they visited which helped McCraig and Sparks plan their robberies, giving Delaney a cut. When Delaney was arrested, he claimed to have committed the robberies himself and so gained a reputation as a great cat burglar while he served five years in Parkhurst. But George and Ruby said he never took part in any of the raids, they did them all.
In June 1924 McCraig and Sparks stole the fabulous jewel collection of the Wernher family from Bath House at 82 Piccadilly. The problem was the police quickly put out a description of the £250,000 stolen jewels (today worth over £14M), and it was impossible to sell them. A secret arrangement was made between the insurers and the police, that if McCraig and Sparks returned the jewels they would receive a cut of the reward money and immunity. It is thought they received £6,500.
Lilian did not like Ruby risking his life with ‘the climbing lark’ as she called it. Instead, she suggested doing a smash and grab on jewelers’ windows. His first attempt was like something out of a comedy film. Ruby threw a brick at the window of Catchpole and Williams, the crown jewelers at 510 Oxford Street, but it just bounced off. Then Ruby tried three more times without success much to the astonishment of the people watching. Ruby later perfected the technique by using two bricks wrapped in brown paper and claimed he had invented this smash and grab method.
The papers loved Lilian, the glamourous bobbed haired bandit who drove the fast getaway cars. They said, ‘She is often dressed in a red beret and a motoring coat of the same colour, or in an all-green motoring outfit, and she is believed to be the brains behind the recent country house raids’. Alyson Brown (2020) has written a very well-researched chapter looking at how the press covered Lilian and Ruby and she argues that Lilian did not seek publicity and celebrity status, unlike many other criminals.
Photo of Lilian Rose Kendall Goldstein, copyright of Brian McDonald from his book 'Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants'.
Ruby Sparks, known as ‘rubberface’ because of the faces he pulled in police photos, was a habitual criminal. From age 14 he spent three years in Borstal, then joined the Army but soon deserted. During the 1920s he received four sentences for housebreaking, each time receiving longer periods of imprisonment. In 1930 he was given five years in Dartmoor. While serving this sentence, on 22 January 1932, Sparks and 30 other prisoners attempted to escape from Dartmoor in a riot which was stopped by the Army and armed police. Sparks was given four years on his sentence as a leader of the riot. Alyson Brown has also written a very good book about the Dartmoor riot or mutiny.
Sparks had the distinction of being the only man who escaped from both Strangeways and Dartmoor prisons.
On 10 January 1940, with William (Paddy) Nolan and Alec Marsh, Ruby escaped from Dartmoor where he had been sent for a second time. They had filed through the window bars by using a knife into which Sparks had cut saw teeth. He spent months making five master keys (known as ‘twirls’ by criminals), to get through a series of gates.
Alec Marsh was caught six days later when penniless, he went to the office of the Daily Mirror in London asking for £40 to tell his story. Paddy Nolan was free until 20 May when he happened to be recognized by an ex-warder in a café in the Edgware Road and was arrested near Marble Arch. But Sparks was still at large.
Was Joyce Powys-Wilson the bob haired bandit?
In February and March 1940, the Sunday Pictorial ran a series of article claimed to be written by the Bobbed Haired Bandit who said she was a woman called Joyce Powys-Wilson. The police were confused, as this was the real name of a young society woman who matched the pictures in the newspaper. But they soon realised the so-called revelations were fiction by a woman trying to break into films and the real Bobbed Haired Bandit was Lilian Goldstein.
However, Alyson Brown has suggested these articles contain enough accuracy about Ruby Sparks and might have been a smokescreen by Lilian to throw the police off her trail. This was mentioned in an autobiography by ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, a criminal who knew Ruby.
Newspaper photo of Joyce Powys-Wilson
On 6 June 1940, Joyce Powys-Wilson, aka ‘Jeska’, a film artiste, was sentenced to five months hard labour for stealing the wallet of Harry Barley, a cardboard box manufacturer, from her flat at Mount Royal Marble Arch. He had become fascinated by her after the Sunday Pictorial articles appeared. So, Joyce was a society lady, film artiste and a minor criminal.
Ruby Sparks still at large
While Ruby was in hiding, Billy Hill, later the famous gang leader who called himself ‘Boss of the Underworld’, recruited him to help on several raids.
Chief Inspector Ted Greeno set up a special team from the Flying Squad charged with tracking down Sparks who the press called ‘Public Enemy No.1’. He searched for months, before finding Lilian Goldstein who was then living in Wembley under the name of Rose Duggan with her new partner Jim Duggan. He was a member of Billy Hill’s gang who had also worked with Sparks. For nine months Duggan and Lilian lived at 10 Richmond Court in Wembley before moving to the ground floor flat in 58 Wembley Park Drive which he rented on 18 May 1940 according to the landlady, Mary Cahill. But at the same time, Lilian was helping Sparks to stay hidden.
Greeno’s team followed Lilian everywhere, but suspecting she might be followed, she would jump off buses and double back. Eventually on 27 June 1940, near the Ritz Cinema in Neasden the detectives arrested a heavily disguised Ruby Sparks. He protested loudly and produced a forged identity card. Taken to Willesden police station he soon admitted to Ted Greeno that he was Ruby Sparks. He asked Greeno to go easy on Lilian as she had little involvement in helping him to escape.
Brian McDonald’s 2015 book, ‘Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants’, named after the Elephant and Castle area of London, shows how many of the women in the gang were related to the criminals we have already mentioned. Lilian joined the gang as a young girl. Billy Hill’s sister Dolly had married Albert Mays one of the men arrested for the West Hampstead break-ins. Brian has suggested that
Dolly Mays may have been the woman involved in the West Hampstead incident.
Ruby Sparks’ mother Carrie was a fence who melted down stolen gold and silver items brought to her by the gang members.
What happened to Lilian?
After the trial on 16 July 1940 Sparks was sent back to Dartmoor and Lilian was sentenced to six months with hard labour for harboring an escaped criminal. But a sympathetic judge took pity on her; she served less than three weeks imprisonment and was bound over for three years. After this Lilian went straight, saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this bandit queen lark’. In March 1944 Lilian announced in the London Gazette that she was abandoning the name of Goldstein and going back to her maiden name of ‘Lilian Rose Kendall’. From here she disappeared, and we do not know what happened to her.
There is a Lilian Rose Kendall who died in Bromley in 1976, but her date of birth is given as 19 September 1903 which does not match the birth of the bobbed haired bandit.
What happened to Ruby Sparks?
After serving his sentence, in May 1944 Ruby opened the Penguin Club at 27 Rupert Street in Soho, but it had its license revoked for harboring felons or criminals. In 1946 he was managing the Anniversary Club in Southchurch Road Southend, which had been set up by Billy Hill and Jack Spot. Ruby met Annie Mary Belger in the club and they were married in May 1946.
Ruby had promised Annie that he would give up crime, but just after their honeymoon he ran into Paddy Nolan, his old friend from Dartmoor, who said they were a man short for a job robbing a bookmaker’s house. After the raid, which was a disaster and only netted about £35, they were spotted by a squad car and arrested. Ruby was sentenced to four years in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. Annie visited him regularly, and when he came out in June 1949, she had saved £200 which they used to buy what Ruby called ‘a posh sort of ice cream van’.
In the 50s they lived as Charles and Annie Spark at 32 Camden Square NW1. Then in 1960 they opened a newsagent shop at 71 Regents Park Road, Primrose Hill. Ruby refused all offers to do another criminal job, and he died in October 1988 and Annie died in January 1999. They are buried together in Kensington.
Acknowledgements
We would particularly like to thank Professor Alyson Brown of Edge Hill University for sending her chapter, ‘The bobbed-haired bandit and the smash-and-grab raider’ which appears in David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday (Eds) ‘Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles, 1800-1940: Microhistories of Justice and Injustice’ (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Alyson’s book about the Dartmoor riot is ‘Inter-War Crime and Penal Policy in England’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Brian McDonald's book, 'Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants' (2015) looks at the lives of Ruby Sparks and Lilian Goldstein.
Comments
Post a Comment