A muddy, cold day, people hurrying everywhere, already thinking of Christmas, trying to do a little shopping in between snatching a jostling, crowded lunchtime snack and getting back to the office. Traffic teeming in the roadways, people teeming on the pavements. The usual, chock-a-block, scampering, high-blood-pressure city lunch hour.The usual? No, not quite the usual. For on this day a new page of London’s criminal history was commenced. The page which tells the story of her young postwar gangster boys: the Jenkinses, the Geraghtys, the Ginger Kings and Craigs and Colemans.Even today the nation is still shocked and bewildered by the exploits of its youthful thugs, whose very youth seems to add to their complete callousness. But in December 1944 these monstrous little juveniles were an entirely new experience for London, and people were completely dazed by what happened in that city lunch hour…It was just on two o’clock and the hordes of office workers were hurrying back to their offices.
