Gangs Of London Quotes

Hun ba for de døde og sendte lykkønskningsbrev til de levende hver gang det var bryllup eller barnedåp - akkurat som engelskmennene i koloniene, som drakk seg fulle i all ensomhet hver gang London feiret dronningens fødselsdag.

We wanted to select our own labour.  In another year the time will be up for most of the original gang.  You see, they were recruited during the first year of Berande, and their contracts expire on different months. 

She felt the State of Rock was symbolised by the stadium-type concerts given earlier that summer by the likes of the Who the Stones and Elton John, causing her to opine, 'The time is right for an aggressive infusion of life blood.' She also claimed the new London punk scene had not been inspired by the New York new wave, but was instead developing parallel to it.

Well, I personally don’t plan to do much. But if you think our little gang of Jason Stillborns’ll pass up the chance to mount their own private op, you’ve forgotten what testosterone smells like. I’ve already had Dander in here wanting to know if she can have a gun.

When a press gang surrounded a church in London, in 1755, in pursuit of a seaman inside, he managed, according to a newspaper report, to slip away disguised in “an old gentlewoman’s long cloak, hood and bonnet.

There were some places, and streets, where he did not venture since he had learnt that others had claims there greater than his own - not the gangs of meths drinkers who lived in no place and no time, nor the growing number of the young who moved on restlessly across the face of the city, but vagrants like himself who, despite the name which the world has given them, had ceased to wander and now associated themselves with one territory or 'province' rather than another. All of them led solitary lives, hardly moving from their own warren of streets and buildings: it is not known whether they chose the area, or whether the area itself had callen them and taken them in, but they had become the guardian spirits (as it were) of each place. Ned now knew some of their names: Watercress Joe, who haunted the streets by St Mary Woolnoth, Black Sam who lived and slept beside the Commercial Road between Whitechapel and Limehouse, Harry the Goblin who was seen only by Spitalfields and Artillery Lane, Mad Frank who walked continually through the streets of Bloomsbury, Italian Audrey who was always to be found in the dockside area of Wapping (it was she who had visited Ned in his shelter many years before), and 'Alligator' who never moved from Greenwich.

On Gangs: "... This ain't a scrap, fellows. It's murder, an' we ought to stop it." But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on wearily with his one arm, battering away at a bloody something before him that was not a face but a horror, an oscillating, hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that persisted before his wavering vision and would not go away. And he punched on and on, slower and slower, as the last shreds of vitality oozed from him, through centuries and eons and enormous lapses of time, until, in a dim way, he became aware that the nameless thing was sinking, slowly sinking down to the rough board-planking of the bridge....

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as ‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence. Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. The fact that yellow-on-yellow crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.

It was 1977. Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero. In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

At one point the worst thing to happen was the odd stabbing or slashing, the violence that we live with nowadays used to only be seen in Hollywood gangster movies such as Gangs of New York, Menace to Society and Boys and the Hood. Even when we were reading about the crack hitting London, no one in Scotland would have thought in their wildest dreams that it would have taken off in our cities, towns and now even highland villages.

In most parts of the world, people go to sleep without fearing that in the middle of the night a neighbouring tribe might surround their village and slaughter everyone. Well-off British subjects travel daily from Nottingham to London through Sherwood Forest without fear that a gang of merry green-clad brigands will ambush them and take their money to give to the poor (or, more likely, murder them and take the money for themselves). Students brook no canings from their teachers, children need not fear that they will be sold into slavery when their parents can’t pay their bills, and women know that the law forbids their husbands from beating them and forcing them to stay at home. Increasingly, around the world, these expectations are fulfilled.

You’re dressed now,” Merripen remarked, as if he were surprised that she wasn’t parading naked through the lobby. “This is a walking dress,” she said. “As you can see, I’m going out for some air.” “Who’s escorting you?” he asked, even though he could see the footman standing a few feet away. “Charles,” she replied. “Only Charles?” Merripen looked outraged. “You need more protection than that.” “We’re only walking to Marble Arch,” she said, amused. “Are you out of your mind, woman? Do you have any idea what could happen to you at Hyde Park? There are pickpockets, cutpurses, confidence tricksters, and gangs, all ready for a nice little pigeon like you to pluck.” Rather than take offense, Charles said eagerly, “Perhaps Mr. Merripen has a point, Miss Hathaway. It is rather far … and one never knows …” “Are you offering to go in his stead?” Win asked Merripen. As she had expected, he put on a show of grumbling reluctance. “I suppose so, if the alternative is to see you traipsing through the streets of London and tempting every criminal in sight.” He frowned at Charles. “You needn’t go with us. I’d rather not have to look after you, too.” “Yes, sir,” came the footman’s grateful reply, and he went back up the stairs with considerably more enthusiasm than he had shown while descending them.

We lived in a safe, family-friendly area, but parts of London were rough, as you’d expect from any large city. Mark had a knack for attracting muggers. One time, we were in a train station and a little kid--no more than about eight years old--came up to him: “Oi, mate, give me your phone.” We always carried the cool Nokia phones with the Snake game on them, and they were the hot item. It was like inviting trouble carrying one around, but we didn’t care. Mark thought the mini-mugger was crazy: “Are you kidding me? No way.” Then he looked over his shoulder and realized the kid wasn’t alone; he had a whole gang with him. So Mark handed over his phone and the kid ran off. I never let him live down the fact that an eight-year-old had mugged him. I had my own incident as well, but I handled it a little differently. I got off the train at Herne Hill station and noticed that two guys were following me. I could hear their footsteps getting closer and closer. “Give us your backpack,” they threatened me. “Why? All I have is my homework in here,” I tried to reason with them. They had seen me on the train with my minidisc player and they knew I was holding out on them. “Give it,” they threatened. My bag was covered with key chains and buttons, and as I took it off my shoulder, pretending to give it to them, I swung it hard in their faces. All that hardware knocked one of them to the ground and stunned the other. With my bag in my hand, I ran the mile home without ever looking back. Not bad for a skinny kid in a school uniform.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere

You have to understand," he told her. "Sometimes, insanity is not a tragedy. Sometimes, it's a strategy for survival. Sometimes . . . it's a triumph." He hesitated. "Do you know what a black-gang is?" Mutely, she shook her head. "Something I picked up in a museum in London, once. Way back in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, on Earth, they used to have ships that sailed across the tops of the oceans, that were powered by steam engines. The heat for the steam engines came from great coal fires in the bellies of the ships. And they had to have these suckers down there to stoke the coal into the furnaces. Down in the filth and the heat and the sweat and the stink. The coal made them black, so they were called the black-gang. And the officers and fine ladies up above would have nothing to do with these poor grotty thugs, socially. But without them, nothing moved. Nothing burned. Nothing lived. No steam. The black-gang. Unsung heroes. Ugly lower-class fellows.

I’m excited to announce that Book 2 of our series, My Job: More People at Work Around the World, is in production. Having met hundreds of people in fascinating jobs, I faced an enormous challenge in selecting the stories to include in Book 2 . . . but I believe this collection will surprise and delight you. It covers a range of jobs in the following sections: Health and Recovery Education and Finance Agribusiness and Food Processing Arts and Culture Activism and Diplomacy The book allows you to experience what it’s like to be an addiction-recovery counselor trained as a clown in London, an art teacher working with gang members in Chicago, a midwife working in rural villages in Guatemala, or a mobile-banking agent making her first million in Zambia. Book 2 will take you places you’ve never been, from the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia to a serene beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, and take you deep into the true stories of what it’s like to work at jobs as disparate as teaching a grieving widow to dance, to negotiating with a terrorist. The book will publish in March and is available for preorder at Amazon.

First published in its entirety in the March 1914 edition of Munsey’s Magazine, this novel tells the tale of a small boy that is abandoned in a Parisian hotel and falls under the spell of a crook. The crook takes to him and teaches him the ways of his business and soon the student, who has adopted the name Michael Lanyard, becomes greater than his master. After a job in London, which nets him a valuable jewel and aeroplane plans that a German spy had stolen from a French inventor, Lanyard falls in love and decides to renounce his ways. But ‘The Pack’ — an organised crime gang — wants the Lone Wolf to join them and won’t take no for an answer…

His wife mentioned that they visited museums during their grand tour of Europe. Perhaps enquiries should be made as to whether they have had any thefts or orders.’ ‘You could get a ship from Dover to Calais and follow the grand tour route. I understand Paris, Rome, Naples and Venice are the main stops. I could arrange a letter of credit from my London bank so you could present it in the major cities. It is too risky to carry too much money on your journey.’ ‘Me? I have no wish to leave at this moment. Our agreement was to find the person who finances the gang. My work here is ended. It is time for me to move

This isn’t bad at all. But how do we convince Connie Johnson that we’re a big London gang?’ Ron motions to himself, offended. ‘I just show up, don’t I? Whack on a suit. Tell ’em I’m Billy Baxter or Jimmy Jackson, down from Camden. Flash the tattoos, flash the diamonds.’ ‘Hmmm,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I’m not sure that gangsters have Chairman Mao tattoos,’ says Joyce.

In some areas of London and Manchester the gangs were becoming more of a cultural transmission of America’s Crips and Bloods.

Mid June 2012 …Continuing Bernard’s story, the adolescent did not adjust well to his first foster home. I spend time with him whenever I could. The poor boy was bullied relentlessly in school and I feared that the bullies, like KiWi and his gang of 3 would eventually drive the boy to suicidal attempts. One day when we met he was crying uncontrollably. After inviting him to have high tea with me at my hostel, he finally confided his secret. Besides suffering the wrath of his father’s drunken beatings; his older brother Jack was as much a tyrant like the old man. Jack had raped the adolescent when he refused his brother’s advances. Bernard was afraid to tell the Reverend in case the minister confronts the brother and he was petrified that his older sibling would come for revenge. By now Bernard was shaking uncontrollably. I had to embrace the boy to calm his distress. It was my duty to report this violent act to Pastor Rick which I did. The Reverend like me was astonished that there was so much abuse in the dysfunctional McGee household. Besides being afraid of his brother and father, Bernard was also bullied by an older boy in his foster home. Nick was taking advantage of the meek and genteel Bernard, ordering him around when his parents were not in the house. My heart reached out to my friend. I offered to assist him anyway I could. He ended up staying with me at the hostel for two months before I departed for London. By then, the Pastor had found the boy a stable family where he was well taken care of.

Me boat’s on the slipway, and I don’t want Old Bill clambering all over it. I’ll be up for the funeral, see you then.’ Joe was examining the tightly packed envelopes in the bag. ‘Get rid of them quick, Yos,’ he warned. With that, he left, that stocky little loyal sailor who had come to the end of his life of crime. At midnight after the bar had closed, the rest of the boys gathered in the office. That red-headed

The Gang of Four consisted of: Bidyut Sen, the group’s mastermind in New York; Steve Benardete, a politically connected New Yorker and former treasurer of the key derivatives lobbying group, ISDA—the International Swaps Dealers Association; George James, head of the London office; and Paul Daniel, leader of the booming East Asian offices, headquartered in Hong Kong.

Scholars have argued whether Tacitus, who first records the Latin form of the name Londinium was recording this from the Celtic Lugdunum (fortress of Lug) or from another Celtic word, a word still surviving in the Irish root, londo – the wild place. London, as a Celtic trading town of the Trinovantes, stood on the north bank of the Thames, or Tamesis, as it was recorded. Tamesis means “the dark river”, cognate with the Sanskrit Tamesa, meaning exactly the same. Now the River Tamesa is a tributary of the Ganges, a sacred river of the Hindus, in which votive offerings were placed.

The British people were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence, and the people of London astonished foreign visitors by their lack of deference. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century are punctuated by riot, occasioned by bread prices, turnpikes and tolls, excise, ‘rescue’, strikes, new machinery, enclosures, press-gangs and a score of other grievances.

Immigrant parents were poorly equipped for the challenges of contemporary parenting in the urban twenty-first-century Europe. They behaved as though they were still back at home in Bangladesh or Ethiopia, where there was a surrounding cushion of extended family and friends supporting their parenting, casting a protective eye on all the children around them, because that is the way children had always been raised, collectively. In London, there was no such protection; there were gangs and knife crime, predators on Facebook and Instagram, whole collections of virtual and physical threats. These parents assumed the mosque and Quran classes were safe spaces, but the reality was that there were no safe spaces left, period, online or in the real world.

P.S. By the by, Frank and I almost got hanged today and were robbed by a charming gang of thieves so there is no need for you to worry that I will feel homesick for old London. P.P.S. I hope you agree my first letter is not devoid of interest and worth a guinea.

Crimping or Shanghaiing was the act of kidnapping unsuspecting men to serve aboard ships usually destined to sail to the far east. In most cases this happened on the waterfront of cities such as London, Bristol and Hull in England and San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Port Townsend on the West Coast and New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore on the on the East Coast of the United States. Portland, Oregon. In the mid-19th century eventually became the most infamously known city for shanghaiing. People engaged in this form of kidnapping were known as crimps and those members of a ship’s crew that were acquired in this way were referred to as being part of a ships “press gang.” This term had its origin Great Britain's Royal Navy. The need for Shanghaiing grew from shortage of sailors first in the British navy in England and then on merchant ships sailing on the lengthy trade routes primarily to China. With many seamen jumping ship along the west coast and joining the California Gold Rush it developed a cottage industry for boarding masters known as crimps, who found crews for ships. Being paid for every person they delivered there was a strong incentive to find as many seamen as possible and for this they were paid what was named blood money. Records show that these crimps could receive a percentage of the man’s pay or in some cases thousands of dollars of advance pay against the seaman’s pay for the voyage. In 1884 the practice of Crimping or Shanghaiing was curtailed when the Dingley Act came into effect. This law prohibited the taking advantage of the seamen, although some loopholes allowed the practice to continue into the 20th century.