Shoplifting: woman stealing a tube of toothpaste, 1962

(Photo by RDB/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

I recently wrote an article for The Conversation on the history of shoplifting, which has been a research interest of mine for some time now. In the article, I drew on was the memoirs written by women who had been convicted of shoplifting and I wanted to use this article to talk in more depth about the perspectives and insights these kinds of sources may offer us.

Firstly, shoplifting as a crime has kept the press occupied for over a century now and sensationalised news coverage has focussed on the shocking ingenuity and apparent brazenness of shoplifters, especially when they were women. For example, in 1958 the Daily Mirror reported the capture of a shoplifting gang, who, the newspaper claimed, had named themselves ‘the Happy Hoisters’ and who had ‘hoodwinked detectives who tried to trail them when they drove on shoplifting trips throughout the South of England.’ According to the Mirror, ‘once they got out of their car and held out their hands to let the detectives see that they were empty. And they laughed. Another time they led the detectives up a blind alley. And they laughed.’^[1] The shoplifters included the ‘Queen of Shoplifting’ Shirley Pitts, who received a total of only three prison sentences, despite a lifetime career in shoplifting. Shirley’s 1992 funeral in 1992 included a floral tribute in the shape of a Harrods bag, which carried the epitaph ‘Gone Shopping.’ ‘Something of a pioneer,’ claimed the Guardian in its coverage of her funeral, ‘she was carrying out “shopping expeditions” all over the continent long before Ted Heath was urgent active participation in Europe.’^[2]

Shoplifting may have given Shirley some fame and notoriety, but it did not necessarily bring her fortune. Lorraine Gamman, Shirley’s interviewer and biographer recalled, ‘I suggested that the prison sentences – she was jailed three times – the constant aggravation, the messed-up relationships were far too much to bear…she explained how so many ordinary people live with that and worse, and that they didn’t even have the benefit of the extra money of the adrenaline “buzz” she got from the “job”. When I still didn’t agree, she became exasperated and finally blurted out, “Of course, crime pays. It’s getting caught that’s the fucking problem.”’[3] For Shirley, shoplifting was not just a way to obtain material goods, but it had a much deeper meaning and value in her turbulent and difficult life.

Born in South London in 1934, Shirley’s family experienced acute poverty throughout her childhood as her father, Harry, spent long stretches in prison and her mother, Nell, suffered from alcoholism and depression and took refuge in ‘reading her silly love stories.’[4] Shirley’s narrative stressed  the responsibility placed on her at a young age as she was sent out by her mother to steal food and coal. The family increasingly relied on Shirley to keep them warm and fed and she had moved on to shoplifting by the time she as a teenager. Although Shirley’s reputation and career as the ‘Queen of Shoplifters’ marked her out as exceptional, she has not been the only memoirist to talk about shoplifting their perspectives help us understand the role of retail theft more generally in twentieth-century Britain. In particular, we can see a contrast between how working-class writers depict troubled or difficult domestic lives in comparison to their portrayal of shoplifting as liberating, a source of enjoyment, thrill and excitement.  Such as Eileen MacKenney’s 2011 autobiography Borstal Girl, who was a contemporary and shoplifting-associate of Shirley’s. Eileen was born in Rotherhithe, South London, in 1931 where she lived in insanitary and flea-ridden housing surrounded by polluted fog. Ill-health was endemic, ‘we got every fucking thing going’ she recalled, ‘the house always smelled to me of damp and must and overcrowding, like it was on my skin or something, like I just couldn’t get away from it, no matter what I did.’[5]

Shoplifters developed ingenious methods to steal from shops. Image: A store detective showing how a shop-lifter can use a false lining to hide stockings, during a demonstration at ‘Shopshow International’, Earl’s Court, London. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

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Both women’s memoirs stress the fun, laughter and camaraderie they enjoyed during shoplifting trips with their friends. Eileen described one incident when she and a friend were stealing from a shop window when the police arrived. ‘We just stood still as statues,’ she recalled, ‘posing like mannequins… We put our hands up to our mouths to stop ourselves from laughing, then we nicked all the gear out of the window.’[6] Eileen presents what was actually a moment of danger as one of risky excitement and it is one of the few moments in Eileen’s autobiography when she describes herself laughing.  Shirley, too, evoked freedom and adventure, ‘if we got too hot in the West End with all the police looking for us and we’d done too many people,’ she recalled, ‘we’d just go rolling that night to get our expense money, go somewhere else, nick a car and go up to Manchester or Liverpool or Blackpool and do it up there, shoplifting of a day, rolling of a night and make our way through all the towns and back again.’[7] Whereas home and domesticity represented poverty, strife and tensions for Shirley, she depicted shoplifting as empowering and liberating, particularly in her description of shoplifting as a young woman in the mid-1950s: ‘we never ever went away with any clothes, we’d get them on the way. We used to have piles and piles of stuff, furs and trays of rings, everything. You know, we’d walk in the shoe shops, best shoe shops, try on the shoes and walk out the door with them, or take the empty boxes and put our old shoes in them and things like that.’[8] Like Eileen, Shirley linked shoplifting to socialising with friends and laughing, which again, was otherwise relatively rare in Shirley’s autobiography: ‘I think we was quite mad, wasn’t we? One time, I can remember that we undressed a statue on the stairs – took her mink coat off and her mink hat and left her completely naked, in one of the big stores in Devon.’[4] When pregnant with her second child, for Shirley, shoplifting felt freeing, ‘just getting money and just enjoying ourselves. Nothing else… we was really a crazy gang. I mean, we just used to go and clear little shops out of a day and leave them with no stock.’[9]   

We can see similar narratives in memoirs by those who stole to survive extreme childhood hardship. Tommy Rhattigan grew up in poverty in Manchester during the 1960s and described how he and his siblings would regularly go shoplifting together as children and particularly targeted the city centre branch of Woolworths because it was easy to access the goods they wanted. His memoir described one memorable occasion, aged seven, when, in light of the poverty and neglect they experienced, the only option to obtain much-wanted Halloween costumes was via theft: ‘Standing outside the Woolworths store in Longsight, we agreed between us, it was better to go in one at a time so as not to bring any suspicion upon ourselves. Martin was first, coming out a few minutes later with a skeleton outfit stuck down his trousers. I went in next and bagged myself one of the two remaining skeleton outfits, which I hid up under the armpit of my jumper. Bernie and Nabby went in together, coming out moments later with Bernie having bagged the last skeleton outfit and Nabby, sulking as usual, having to make do with one of the last two remaining witch’s outfit’.[10] His account is typical of how shoplifting is presented in his memoir as an everyday occurrence for children in his neighbourhood and part of the youthful adventures he experienced. This story also gives some sense of how within a childhood marred by poverty and neglect, shoplifting was the only way for Terrence and his siblings to redress the difficult circumstances they were faced with but also demonstrates the sense of triumph and the thrilling feeling of getting one over against the cruel world these children inhabited.

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Terrence Rhattigan described stealing from Woolworths as a child, made easier by the display methods and access to goods.

Christmas shoppers looking for bargains at Woolworths in Coventry. 14th December 1957. (Photo by Coventry Telegraph Archive/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

For these writers, stealing from shops was a way to exert control and shape their own lives when they faced tough circumstances in which they generally had little power or autonomy. Whereas Eileen presented shoplifting as liberating, she depicted her domestic life in terms of strife, hardship and tension. This was especially true following her partner’s accident, which left him with brain damage and caused violent mood swings and mental confusion. Eileen recalls that in the aftermath of his accident she ‘was doing this (shoplifting) every day of the week, even weekends.’ Eileen suggests that she ‘must have become addicted to it and I needed to get away from the house, away from Sixer – I mean I loved him, but I was going fucking mad too and it was such a buzz to have a bit of money in my hands.’[11] We can see Eileen’s attempts to emphasise her devotion to Sixer as a way to conform to conventions domesticity and femininity, and she was aware that shoplifting could jeopardise the respect or sympathy that the reader may have for her. Yet her descriptions of shoplifting as a ‘buzz’ and as a refuge from her domestic problems suggest that theft was a form of escapism or relief that is more ordinarily associated with middle-class women who shoplifted and blamed it on ‘kleptomania’. Eileen’s testimony is revealing and demonstrates that although retail theft was primarily a way to earn money, it had an important emotional and psychological role for her, particularly during times of personal upheaval and turmoil. Similarly, Shirley’s shoplifting increased after her brother, Adgie, died in 1967. Following a period of depression, Shirley formed a gang that would visit Amsterdam, Paris and Geneva and stole to cope with her grief. Shirley recalled that she ‘was earning a fortune then, because I didn’t care whether or not to get nicked. I was taking risks I would never have taken before. I was taking more stuff than ever and going back time and time again and slaughtering the same shops.’[12] For Shirley therefore, the risk and danger involved in shoplifting was almost a dangerous coping strategy – perhaps even a form of self-harm – as she sought to cope with the loss of the person to whom she was closest to.

Shoplifters risked arrest, prosecution and custodial sentences and retailers increased surveillance strategies to deter theft.

Marks & Spencer, Middlesbrough, have installed a closed circuit tv system to help it’s security guards identify shoplifters. Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire. 17th August 1993. (Photo by Stephen Elliott/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

Shoplifting was, of course, not without risk. Eileen described having to take her children with her on one occasion and left them in a local café whilst she shoplifted: ‘I hated doing this, but I was desperate; I had to earn the money to feed them the only way I knew how.’ Worrying about her children, she made ‘the beginner’s mistake of looking nervous’ and found herself arrested.[13] She and the children were placed in a holding cell and she was charged with a long list of shoplifting offences after the police searched her house where they found a huge cache of purloined goods hidden under the bed. Eileen pleaded guilty on all counts hoping for light sentence but, to her surprise, the judge called a welfare officer who spoke about her hardship and gave her a 2-year suspended sentence. Narrowly avoiding prison, Eileen took a job serving tea on a building site but struggled to maintain it around her family commitments. Her experiences reflect the ongoing hardships working-class women faced in providing for their families even with the increased support of the post-1945 welfare state.

Although neither women achieved financial stability through shoplifting, it was perhaps its ability to get them through difficult times that made it so fundamental to their lives. Rethinking the role of theft and crime and the reasons and motivations behind these kinds of offences can help us understand why they have remained so central to women’s responses to poverty and domestic problems. Although Eileen and Shirley presented their shoplifting experiences almost as forms of bravado, the crucial issue should be the very challenging problems that they used retail theft to overcome.

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[1] ‘The Theft Trail of the Happy Hoisters,’ Daily Mirror, 22 February 1958, 11.

[2] ‘Queen of shoplifters goes to ground with fame in the bag and a fitting epitaph in flowers,’ The Guardian, 26 March 1992, 22.

[3] Lorraine Gamman, ‘The Queen of Thieves,’ The Observer, 17 March 1996, C1.

[4] Pitts, Gone Shopping, 35

[5] Eileen MacKenney, Borstal Girl (London, 2011), 4.

[6] MacKenney, Borstal Girl, 101.

[2] Shirley appendix 94

[7] Shirley appendix 95.

[8] Shirley appendix 95.

[9] Shirley appendix 96.

[10Tommy Rhattigan, 1963: A slice of bread and Jam (Mirror Books: London, 2017), 203.

[11] MacKenney, Borstal Girl, 182.

[12] Pitts, Queen of Shoplifting, 156.

[13] MacKenney, Borstal Girl, 183.