PC Leonard Crayford was on night patrol on 3 December 1933. He had joined the Met only 16 months earlier and was stationed at the West Hampstead Police Station where he lived as an unmarried constable.
Shortly after 1am he was passing the Marks and Spencer store in Kilburn High Road when he saw a man inside the shop. He contacted the police station and Station Sergeant Mountfield arrived with a large body of men. PC Draper and the Sergeant climbed onto a flat roof at the back of the store and discovered that a window had been broken and the protecting metal bar had been sawn through. Looking through the window they saw several shadowy figures moving around the store.
One man spotted them and raised the alarm and the gang fled. The police caught a man inside the shop, and followed the others who ran into St Mary’s Primary School on the corner of West End Lane where they barricaded themselves into the teachers’ room. The police broke through and arrested the other three men.
The youngest of the gang was 23-year old Hyman Besser, a tailor’s presser who lived with his parents in nearby Belsize Road. When he saw the police were armed with truncheons he shouted out, ‘Please don’t hit me, I’m only a kid’.
The gang had first broken into the school and carried a teacher’s desk about 50 yards down the narrow road at the back of the High Road shops. Then they had placed a ladder on the desk to gain access to the barred window.
At first sight this looked like the work of a local Kilburn gang and Hyman Besser had previously been a pupil at St Mary’s School. However, the other men turned out to be international criminals: John Melbourne (66) was from Australia, Harry Goodman (48) and Samuel Kleinz (37) were American. They all had numerous aliases.
The police found a large set of specialised tools on the stairs inside the shop, and it looked as though the gang were planning to break open the office safe. But it turned out the shop did not have a safe and the money was banked each day.
At the Old Bailey in January 1934, Besser was sentenced to nine months, Melbourne to three years, Kleinz to four years and Goodman received five years. The judge praised PC Crayford and the other police for their actions.
The International Criminals
Researching the men revealed their long criminal backgrounds.
John Melbourne had over 30 convictions in Australia, South Africa and England and was still robbing into his 70s.
Harry Goodman was an alias of James Hynes who had a fascinating past. He was born in San Francisco but joined the New York gang of Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen who made his money by selling bootleg alcohol to the Broadway clubs during prohibition. On 16 October 1923 Little Augie was walking with his bodyguard Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond on Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side. Three men got out of a black sedan, and opened fire, killing Orgen and wounding Diamond. They were enforcers from Orgen’s own gang who wanted to take over his operations.
Hynes claimed he was with Orgen and Legs Diamond and was shot in the stomach with four sub-machine gun bullets. He was taken to hospital where he recovered and then walked out and decided to come to London. He called the British police ‘fancy pants’ and the criminals ‘sissies’ because they did not carry guns. Using a false passport, he arrived in London and met up with some of the East End criminals.
He joined a gang for a raid on a Newcastle jewelry shop in June 1928. Much to his annoyance, they refused to take part if he was armed. After they broke through the wall of an adjoining shop, they were disturbed by two policemen. Following a fight when the police were hit with a jemmy, Hynes (using the name of Harry Goodman, aged 45) was arrested along with Sam Clyne (32) and Victor Childs (27). A fourth man escaped through a window, by swinging onto a streetlamp and dropping to the pavement. This was George Enright or McCraig (34) who was later arrested in London. While being taken from Pentonville to face trial in Newcastle he jumped out of the express train when it was travelling at 60mph. He was later caught in the fields and sentenced with the other men in Newcastle: Childs got five years, Goodman five years, Enright four years, and because of hitting the constables, Clyne received seven years.
King of the Cat Burglars
Enright, better known as Jimmy McCraig was born in Tasmania, and in London he became known as the ‘King of the Cat Burglars’ because of his climbing skills. He had a luxurious flat in Jermyn Street. He had been a jockey and a Hollywood stunt man. McCraig used his skills and turned to crime in America, where he was called the ‘Human Fly’. He served time in Sing Sing prison, which is about 30 miles north of New York City. After an arrest in San Francisco, he managed to escape from San Quentin prison and return to England.
In June 1924 he pulled off his greatest cat burglary of the fabulous jewel collection of the Wehrner family from their house at 82 Piccadilly. But because the jewelry was so distinctive and valued at £250,000 (today worth over £15M), no fence would touch them. A secret arrangement was made between the insurers and the police, that if McCraig returned the jewels he and his accomplice Ruby Sparks, would receive a cut of the reward money and immunity. It is thought they received £6,500.
See our previous blog story for more about Sparks:
http://kilburnwesthampstead.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-bobbed-haired-bandit-and-ruby-sparks.html
The Green-Eyed Gunman
Robert Fabian in his book ‘Fabian of the Yard’ and Arthur Thorp in ‘Calling Scotland Yard’, both tell the story of their arrest of James Hynes, known as ‘The Green-Eyed Gunman’.
On the morning of 9 November 1937 three masked men rang the bell of Mrs Millicent Hesketh-Wright’s flat in Alford House, Park Lane. When the maid who was expecting the postman, answered the door, they pushed their way in. After tying up the maid they forced Mrs Hesketh-Wright at gunpoint to open the safe. They took £20,000 in jewels, pound notes and French francs.
Detective Inspectors Fabian and Thorp arrived, and Mrs Hesketh-Wright gave them a description of the gunman who had an American accent and distinctive pale green eyes. Searching the methods index in Scotland Yard they found Jimmy Hynes who at first they thought was still in prison, but a check showed he had been released on licence a few weeks earlier.
The police followed Hynes’ girlfriend Jessie Rubin (26) who lived in Edwards Road Bow. They watched her go to a safe deposit box in Liverpool where they found most of the stolen jewels and currency. Jessie was given nine months for handling stolen property. Hynes was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment but died five years later in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight on 12 April 1943.
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The large M&S shop is still at 66-68 Kilburn High Road. It was opened in August 1929 and replaced their small shop on the other side of the road which began there in 1911 as a ‘Penny Bazaar’.
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