On a cool autumn morning, the 10 October 1770, a gang of highway robbers were solemnly led to the gallows at Tyburn to be executed. As the Londoners present surveyed the five criminals filing to the place of their death they would have been drawn to the striking clothing of one of the gang, dressed all in white, with black trimmings on the fabric. Their eyes rested on the stocky, short figure of Mary-Ann Ryan, highway criminal of Georgian London.
Mary-Ann had been convicted at the Old Bailey of robbing William Wright on a highway of Whitechapel with two male assailants, Joseph Josephs and James Simpson. The records of Mary-Ann's trial state that she was a repeat offender - she had been hauled up before the city's justices, according to the person recording her execution, twice before, this third time proving 'fatal'.
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A look through the records of the Old Bailey reveals a previous pick-pocketing incident related to Mary-Ann. She had been lodging at the Black Boy inn in Saltpetre Bank (today's Dock Lane), not far from the Tower of London. On 29 April 1770 William Smith asked there for a room and was taken to one where Mary-Ann was already in bed. William told the innkeeper that he wouldn't get inside the bed with her in it, but laid on top of the sheets fully clothed. He felt Mary-Ann's hand go into his pocket and later found that he was missing 'a six shilling and ninepence, a nine shilling piece and five guineas'. When he alerted the keepers of the inn he was beaten by a man until he was bloody, the woman innkeeper also assaulting him around the head with a red hot poker. On this occasion Mary-Ann was found not guilty, because William could not swear that he saw her take the money.
We hear nothing of Mary-Ann, despite the record in The Annual Register of that year finding her responsible for three offences, until September 1770 when she answered for the robbery of William Wright. The case records give the crime in detail. Mary-Ann approached Wright at the top of Rosemary Lane, on the south side of the Thames on 30 July of that year. He saw her at between 9pm-10pm, when she grabbed his collar and asked where he was going. Wright replied that he was going home, noticing that Mary-Ann had now taken off his watch. Asking for its return, she told him she would give it back to him if he went with her into a nearby passage. Initially he refused, but wanting his watch, he followed her to the entrance of the darker passage. A minor scuffle broke out as he 'began to feel about her' for the watch, and was confronted by Josephs and Simpson. The two men, Wright believing in the darkness that they had loaded pistols pressed into his chest, continued to rob him of the money he had in his pockets and made him take off his waistcoat, coat and hat. Despite Mary-Ann standing by, urging the men to kill him, one of them told him to 'run for your life, or I will blow your brains out'. He ran, but on alerting the watchman and returning to the scene, Mary-Ann and the two men had fled. Later, Mary-Ann would claim she knew nothing of the assault, telling officers that she was 'abed at the time'.
Tyburn had been a place of execution since the twelfth century, with others meeting death here including the Wars of the Roses Pretender Perkin Warbeck and the medieval Scot William Wallace. It was situated on a main road towards the outskirts of the busy city centre, near to where today's Marble Arch stands near Hyde Park. From 1759 hangings took place on a removable gallows, so that it could be taken down and reassembled as cases demanded. Mary-Ann arrived on a cart with convicted burglar Henry Dixon to her left and Charles McDonald, a highway robber who had, in an unrelated event, stolen a silver watch from John Tomlin, on her right. She would have seen her coffin, which was also conveyed to the place of execution with her. Joseph Josephs was Jewish and was accompanied by a man who, the crowd saw, read to him in Hebrew. James Simpson, their accomplice, arrived in the same cart as Joseph but was seen to be 'very ill', although it's not certain if this was physically or mentally, as he anticipated his execution.
Mary-Ann was certainly both harsh and brutal. In three months she went from a relatively minor pick-pocketing incident to a robbery involving weapons, accomplices and with intention to murder. However her story reveals that highway robbers were not only suave, well-spoken gentlemen on horseback wearing a black mask and cloak, as our period dramas and story books tend to show. Robberies on the highways and roads in cities and towns were committed by everyday men and women, and in Mary-Ann's case, using her seemingly vulnerable identity as a woman to lure a victim into the shadows so that her male accomplices could finish the job. The event, meticulously recorded in the criminal records of the period, gives us a realistic, three-dimensional view of eighteenth-century London and reveals the tactics of robbers that waited in the shadows.
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Notes and Sources:
The Annual Register, 1770, vol 13.
Alfred Marks, Tyburn Tree: Its History and Annals
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