LONDON GANGS FIGHT

Shannon News, 9 October 1925, Page 4

LONDON GANGS FIGHT

,UNDJERWOI£LD SLASHERS STREET BLOCKED BY FRACAS. LONDON, August 22. A pitched battle between two rival race gangs, each 20 strong, fouglit in the presence of an enormous crowd, in Waterloo Bridge Road, held up traffic for half an hour, and resulted in the wrecking of a hairdresser’s' shop, in which members of the routed gang sought sanctuary. The attackers smashed the doors and windows with crowbars, and lushed inside, attacking th(j defenders with razors. The. customers, including a shrieking, half-shingled woman, fled, panic stricken. Only one arrest has been made. The gangs .started fighting on the ;op of an omnibus in Woodford Road. The conductor was thrown to the toadway and rendered unconscious. The “Morning Post” says: “Things have come to a pretty pass when half a hundred men, armed with razors, can occupy the middle of a main thoroughfare in London, and cut and slash each other, while the traffic is held* up to give them a clear field.” The Home Secretary, Sir Wm. Joynson-Hicks, will introduce a bill in .the House of Commons,' which will enable increased penalties, including beggings, to be imposed on members of race gangs. , It is proposed also to eliminate the necessity of evidence given by independent witnsses, who frequently are ierrorised. Scotland ' Yard is compiling a "black list” of notorious racecourse crooks and pests, to ( enable the police to recognise them on sight, and- is examining hundreds of letters . which have been written threatening witnesscss. Th’omas Benneworth, printer, a respectably dressed man, was remanded to-day on a charge of breaking a window, and causing £4-10/- worth of damage. Suhl, a hairdresser, who was the complainant, gave evidence that he was shingling a woman’s hair, when a man rushed in and slammed the door, breaking the glass. The prisoner was not the intruder. The Magistrate: Then why charge him? Suhl: 1 don’t know.

A detective gave evidence that Benneworth pursued a man from the roadway, flourished a stool, with which he smashed the window and door of the hairdresser’s shop, in which the pursued man had taken refuge. Benneworth threatened, while going to the police station, that, a race gang would murder witness. The "Daily Mail” points out that these gangs are never idle. Each has his allotted task, blackmailing stay-at-home bookmakers , swell crooks, drug-dealers, or the rich habitues of night-clubs. “Pay, or be paid,” is the motto of all the gangs. The victims, who constantly are being maimed, never give the police the names of their assailants. Friends carried off the injure. from the Waterloo Bridge affray. b<e fore the arrival of the police.