Crime and the State 411The printed accounts of their trials give no hints as to how they had been ar-
rested, and suggest that, beyond Harper’s testimony, few witnesses appeared
against them. Despite the fact that, as we have seen, reward distributions often
included many more men and women than those immediately concerned in
giving evidence in court, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that the
nine hundred pounds paid in proclamation rewards as a consequence of the
conviction of the nine Black Boy Alley offenders was shared among forty-one
men and a woman.^134 The separate one-hundred pound rewards were split into
a bewildering (and perhaps intentionally confusing) number of shares. Despite
the fact that some of these men were arrested together and convicted on essen-
tially the same evidence, each one-hundred pound reward was divided in a dif-
ferent way from the rest. The reward paid for the conviction of Theophilus
Watson, for example, was shared equally among five men; in the case ofWilliam
Brister, convicted for the same offence as Watson, eight men received twelve
pounds ten shillings each; in that of William Billingsley, also charged with the
same offence, no fewer than twenty-three small shares were distributed. The
one women who benefited from the Black Boy Alley rewards, Anne Wells,
received five portions to a total of seventeen pounds ten shillings. Altogether, the
nine hundred pounds was split into 115 shares (ranging between two pounds ten
shillings and sixty-eight pounds) in a pattern of payments that was almost cer-
tainly worked out among the claimants and accepted by the lord mayor or the
recorder or the judge who presided. Some of the recipients were given one pay-
ment. One man—John Randall—received two of the largest (twenty pounds
and twenty-six pounds five shillings) for unexplained reasons. William Harper,
the accomplice, was given a portion of six of the rewards and in total received
the lion’s share—about seventy-seven pounds—along with a royal pardon.^135
The most striking aspect of the distribution of the Black Boy Alley gang re-
ward money was that almost half the recipients were thief-takers or constables.
Most of them were named in four or more of the reward payments, and each re-
ceived a total of about twenty-two pounds, some a little more, some less. They
included two men (Ralph Mitchell and George Holdernesse) whose centre of
thief-taking tended to be south of the river, the soon-to-be-notorious Stephen
McDaniel and John Berry, at least three men who were or who had been
conclusion of the session and pardoned none. On Christmas Eve 1744 , on what must have been one of
the bloodiest and most gruesome hanging days in London for a very long time, six carts carried the eight-
een condemned men to Tyburn, where they were executed (OBSP, December 1744 , p. 60 ; London Evening
Post, 18 – 20 and 22 – 25 December 1744 ).
(^134) Between 1730 and 1740 , distributions of the £ 100 reward in the City are noted in the last pages of
the so-called Instruction Book of the sessions, (CLRO, vols. 4 – 6 ). After that date and until they were fi-
nally abolished in 1751 , they are set out in the Sessions Minute Books, beginning in CLRO: SM 107. For
rewards paid on the conviction of members of the Black Boy Alley gang, see CLRO: SM 112.
(^135) CLRO: SM 112. The prosecutors of the Black Boy Alley gang would also have received portions
of the proclamation reward at the December 1744 Old Bailey session for a robbery committed on Joseph
Underwood in Middlesex (OBSP, December 1744 , pp. 22 – 6 ), as well as of the parliamentary reward of
£ 40 for each conviction.