406 Crime and the State
deserved any part of the proclamation reward. No danger, no pay, was Thom-
son’s simple solution to the problem of entrapment.^113
Thomson made his suggestion public—at least it was reported in the press—
perhaps as a way of countering the criticism of a crime-fighting policy he con-
tinued to support. The treasury board adopted it.^114 But any effect it might have
had was clearly short-lived. Complaints continued about the evil effects oflarge
rewards—particularly that they encouraged malicious prosecution and made
juries reluctant to convict because of their suspicions about the motives of pros-
ecutors and their witnesses.^115 An anonymous writer complained about rewards
in general as ‘modern Methodsof detecting and punishing Vice, which have come
into Usein Proportion as the old constitutional oneshave grown out of Date!’ They
seemed to this writer to reveal the decay of public virtue and public service, and
the private interests they served and encouraged would create, he warned, ‘no
little Danger even to the innocent’.^116
Anxieties of this kind no doubt help to explain why the policy oflarge sup-
plementary rewards was eventually abandoned—though an interest on the part
of the treasury in saving money in the middle of a war should not be discounted.
The change in policy came at the end of 1744 , when the proclamation was again
reissued to encourage prosecutions because of a sudden and serious panic about
violent attacks being committed by a group of young men known as the Black
Boy Alley gang from their base off Chick Lane in the ward of Farringdon With-
out, a notoriously dangerous part of the City. Despite a broad and continuing
fall in prosecutions for offences in London during the war that had begun in
1739 ,^117 the London press in the autumn of 1744 was full of accounts of robberies
and of attacks in the streets carried out by a group of armed men (and a few
women) who were all too ready to wound and maim their victims. They went
about in the streets, in the words of the proclamation, ‘armed with fire-arms,
cutlasses, bludgeons and other offensive weapons... and in a daring and inso-
lent Manner, and in open Defiance of the Laws, attacked, robbed, and wounded
many of our Subjects.. .’.^118 They appeared to be beyond the reach of the
peace-keeping forces: at least they dealt violently with the constables and other
peace officers who tried to arrest them. Alexander Forfar—a headborough of
St James, Clerkenwell, and as we will see an active thief-taker as well as peace
officer—took a party of constables and assistants to a public house in Black Boy
Alley to arrest some of the gang at the end of September and was repulsed vio-
lently and slashed several times with a cutlass.^119 The Gentleman’s Magazine
(^113) PRO, T 29 / 27 / 162. (^114) Read’s Weekly Journal, 14 October 1732 ; PRO, T 1 / 279 / 66.
(^115) Gentleman’s Magazine, 2 ( 1732 ), 1029.
(^116) An Enquiry into the Causes of the Encrease and Miseries of the Poor of England;... by the Author of the Dissuasive
from Party and Religious Animosities( 1738 ), 49 ; quoted in Radzinowicz, History, ii. 88.
(^117) See Chapter 1 , Figure 1. 1. (^118) London Gazette, 6 – 10 November 1744.
(^119) OBSP, October 1744 , pp. 229 – 31 (Nos. 431 – 5 ). Forfar prosecuted four men and a woman for rob-
bery (on the grounds that having attacked him they then took his powder horn and pistol). The jury re-
sisted that obviously exaggerated charge, but urged the court to indict ‘such dangerous persons... in