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'Doing the Business' in Wartime London: Trading Relationships between Detectives and Criminal Entrepreneurs in London’s East End, 1940-1949
| Using official and unofficial sources, this paper examines the trading relationship between criminal entrepreneurs and detectives in London’s East End during the 1940s. This was one of the most important ways in which black marketeers avoided police disruption of their business dealings. To secure immunity from criminal prosecution or, at the very least, advance warning of a police raid, the street ‘spivs’ and black marketeers supplied detectives with information about other criminal activities. In doing this, the paper documents a relationship that the sociologist Dick Hobbs found to be central to the operation of the underground economy in 1980s London, and historicses it. This trading relationship between working-class entrepreneurs on both side of the law played a vital role in shaping the structure of local black markets. Setting this relationship in the historical context of London’s underground economy, the paper shows how the ‘wide boys’ and detectives of the late 1930s were well-placed to exploit the illicit economic opportunities created by the introduction of consumer rationing and price controls in 1940, and how established cultural scripts governing their dealings with one another shaped their interaction during the long black market boom.
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