These persons sometimes steal flat-irons for ironing clothes at the brokers’ shop-doors, which they carry to other pawnbrokers if not detected. At other times they take them to the leaving-shop of an unlicensed pawnbroker. On depositing them, they get a small sum of money. These leaving-shops are in the lowest localities, and take in articles pawnbrokers would refuse. They are open on Sundays, and at other times when no business is done in pawnbrokers’ shops.
These shops are well known to the police, and give great assistance to these Sneaks in disposing of their stolen property.
A considerable number of depredations are committed at the doors of shoemakers’ shops. They are committed by women of the lower orders, of all ages, some of them very elderly. They come up to the door as tho’ they were shopping, attired generally in an old bonnet and faded shawl. The shoes are hanging inside the door, suspended from an iron rod by a piece of string, and are sometimes hanging on a bar outside the shop.
These parties are much of the same order of thieves already described, possibly many of them the mothers and some the grandmothers of the ragged boys referred to. The greater number of them are Irish cockneys. They come up to the shop-door generally in the afternoon, as if to examine the quality of the shoes or boots, but seldom make any purchase. They observe how the articles are suspended and the best mode of abstracting them. They return in the dusk of the evening and steal them.
The shops from which these robberies are committed are to be found in Lambeth-walk, New-cut, Lower Marsh, Lambeth, Tottenham Court-road, Westminster, Drury-lane, the neighbourhood of St. Giles’s, Petticoat-lane, Spitalfields, Whitecross-street, St. Luke’s, and other localities.
Small articles are occasionally taken from shop windows in the winter evenings, by means of breaking a pane of glass in a very ingenious way. These thefts are committed at the shops of confectioners, tobacconists, and watchmakers, &c., in the quiet by-streets.
Sometimes they are done by the younger ragged-boys, but in most cases by lads of 14 and upwards, belonging to the fraternity of London thieves.
In the dark winter evenings we may sometimes see groups of these ragged boys, assembled around the windows of a small grocery-shop, looking greedily at the almond-rock, lollipops, sugar-candy, barley-sugar, brandy-balls, pies, and tarts, displayed in all their tempting sweetness and in all their gaudy tints. They insert the point of a knife or other sharp instrument into the corner or side of the pane, then give it a wrench, when the pane cracks in a semicircular starlike form around the part punctured. Should a piece of glass large enough to admit the hand not be sufficiently loosened, they apply the sharp instrument at another place in the pane, when the new cracks communicate with the rents already made; on applying a sticking-plaster to the pane, the piece readily adheres to it, and is abstracted. The thief inserts his hand through an opening in the window, seizes a handful of sweets or other goods, and runs away, perhaps followed by the shopman in full chase. These thieves are termed star-glazers.
Such petty robberies are often committed by elder lads at the windows of tobacconists, when cigars and pipes are frequently stolen.
They cut the pane in the manner described, and sometimes get a younger boy to commit the theft, while they get the chief share of the plunder, without having exposed themselves to the danger of being arrested stealing the property.