Gangs Of London 100 Years Of Mob Warfare

Decades before the Krays, London was plagued by gang warfare as vicious and terrifying as anything that was to come. Territorial tribes fought pitched battles for honour and pride. As the Bethnal Green Boys hunted Hackney’s Broadway Boys, Clerkenwell fought Somers Town, the Red Hands haunted Deptford and the Silver Hatchets terrorised Islington, the police and courts seemed powerless to cope.


This first ever history of these intriguing street mobs traces them from Jonathan Wild, the original gang leader and archetype for Dickens’s Fagin, to sprawling super-mobs like the Titanic from east London and the infamous Elephant and Castle Gang. It tells the full story of the ferocious Racecourse Wars, when Darby Sabini, Billy Kimber, Freddie Gilbert and others slugged it out for control of bookmakers pitches, and of such big hitters as George Sage, the guv’nor of Camden Town, Tommy Benneworth and Dodger Mullins.