{"id":3702,"date":"2025-11-27T12:42:29","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T12:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=3702"},"modified":"2025-11-27T12:49:56","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T12:49:56","slug":"alice-diamond-queen-of-the-terrors-in-the-interwar-london-underworld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=3702","title":{"rendered":"Alice Diamond, ‘Queen of the Terrors\u2019 in the interwar London underworld"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Newspaper<\/a>

Newspaper photograph of Alice Diamond<\/p><\/div>\n

Emily Burgess, who studied for PhD in history at the University of Portsmouth, has had a paper published in Women’s History Review<\/em> which is free to read here<\/a>.\u00a0 The paper looks at press depiction of Alice Diamond, leader of the interwar Forty Thieves gang.\u00a0 By mythmaking, framing Diamond as an \u2018Underworld Amazon\u2019, \u2018Giant\u2019, and \u2018Queen of the Terrors\u2019, the press was able to project female gangsterism as a form of \u2018internal terror\u2019 to fuel fears over gender, post-war brutalisation and the changing interwar landscape.See a previous post about Emily’s work on London’s female gangsters here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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Emily is a graduate of the University, having studied for a BA (Hons) History degree between 2017 and 2020 (awarded First Class honours) and an MRes in History between 2020 and 2021 (Distinction). She received her PhD in History from the University of Portsmouth in 2025. Her thesis, entitled \u2018The \u201cUnderworld\u201d Paradox: The Dissemination of Female Gangsterism into the Popular Consciousness, 1890\u20131940\u2019 explored the complexities of organised crime, space, genderand criminogenic \u2018otherness\u2019. She worked as a Research Assistant for the University of Portsmouth\u2019s Faculty of Humanities and Social Science and the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries. Emily was also the recipient of the Robbie Gray Memorial Prize (2020).<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emily Burgess, who studied for PhD in history at the University of Portsmouth, has had a paper published in Women’s History Review which is free to read here.\u00a0 The paper looks at press depiction of Alice Diamond, leader of the interwar Forty Thieves gang.\u00a0 By mythmaking, framing Diamond as an \u2018Underworld Amazon\u2019, \u2018Giant\u2019, and \u2018Queen of the Terrors\u2019, the press was able to project female gangsterism as a form of \u2018internal terror\u2019 to fuel fears over gender, post-war brutalisation and the changing interwar landscape.See a previous post about Emily’s work on London’s female gangsters here. Emily is a graduate of the University, having studied for a BA (Hons) History degree […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[540,5,2,4,1],"tags":[554,657,408,549,17,742,98,632],"class_list":["post-3702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-learning_in_focus","category-new_publications","category-research-in-focus","category-uncategorized","tag-crime","tag-criminal-gangs","tag-london","tag-newspapers","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-press","tag-twentieth-century","tag-womens-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p91PlX-XI","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3702"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3711,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3702\/revisions\/3711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}