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Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
bricolaged together from the remnants of more respectable wardrobes. For the
more solvent, the proliferation of tailors’ shops in the district provided the sharper
suits of gangs such as the Titanic Mob who Harding describes as “well dressed
fellows” who concentrated on robbing men at race meetings, in theatres, and at
boxing matches. Their “heroic” sartorial image must partly have been derived as
a means to blend in with crowds composed of men whom Thomas Wright
described thirty years before, though its threatening precision also positioned its
adherents at the head of a local criminal hierarchy:
They are great in slang, always speaking of the features of the human face in the technical
phraseology of the day – according to which the nose is the beak or conk, the eyes ogles
or peepers, the teeth ivories, and the mouth the kisser or tater-trap . . . Meantime they
have their hair cut short, and when off work wear fancy caps and mufflers and suits of
the latest sporting cut; in which they assume the swaggering walk of the minor sporting
celebrities whom they are occasionally permitted to associate with and treat. 58
George Ingram provided corroborative detail of the mob in his romantic recollection
Cockney Cavalcade when he stated that
most of them were dressed in the fashions of the day, with caps, jackets and waistcoats
of lurid colorings and fantastic cut. The jacket was acutely waisted, had perpendicular
pockets with buttons topping slits at the back, and well pressed pleats . . . Waistcoats had
weird styles of their own, unknown outside the select circles and tailors who catered for
them. 59
Such distinctive garb would also have distinguished them from, and competed with
the local Satini boys, an Italian rival gang who
were flashily dressed in expensive suits, light colors predominating. No waistcoats
seemed to be the rule, but touches of brilliant coloring were supplied by an expanse of
silk handkerchief . . . Not a few possessed heavy gold . . . watch chains that flopped
loosely from the button hole. 60
Paterson’s Bermondsey monkey paraders, the boys cited at the head of this
section, who found it difficult to resist the “showy tailor’s windows with offers of
cheap ready made suits,” were aiming for a similar loudness in their dress, though
theirs was a choice much more reliant on the provisions of the local market. It was
also closer to the blandishments of a consumer culture that encouraged young men
to compare their image with that of sporting stars and vaudeville acts. The frisson
of criminality merely added surface glitter to the finished effect. The main purpose
of dressing up probably conformed more closely to Paterson’s own opinion,
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