Taters Chatham

Chatham was born in Fulham, London, on 3 April 1912.[1] He was the son of George Chatham, who was then a coffee house waiter, and his wife Jenny (née Hewson).[2] Chatham's father came from a middle-class background and had formerly been a civil engineer.[3] Chatham aspired to a career as a professional footballer.[1] He played for England Schoolboys and had a trial at Queen's Park Rangers but was not asked to join the team.[2]

The Victoria & Albert Museum

Chatham turned to crime and was first convicted for theft in 1931, being sentenced to three years' imprisonment.[3][2] He married Elsa Johanne on 2 March 1935, stating his occupation on the marriage certificate as "hardware salesman".[2] By the end of the 1930s he favoured burglary of the London town houses of the wealthy, often using the London smog for cover.[4][2] Chatham was initially careful in his burglaries, researching his targets in Burke's Peerage, Country Life and Tatler and receiving tip-offs from insurance clerks and aristocrats.[1] His calm-headedness led to his nickname, from the Cockney rhyming slang for cold ("taters in the mould").[2] Chatham's only daughter was killed in Norway during the Second World War.[3]

In the post-war years Chatham became more prolific, becoming known as "Britain’s busiest jewel thief". He enjoyed reading the reporting of his heists in the press.[5]

In 1948 he committed his most famous crime, the theft of two jewel-encrusted ceremonial swords from the Victoria & Albert Museum.[3] Chatham used two ladders tied together to reach a 40-foot (12 m) high window to access the museum.[4] The swords had belonged to the Duke of Wellington, one commemorated his victories in India and the other was a gift from Russian Tsar Alexander I.[2] This was his first theft of several from the museum and Chatham was never convicted of it.[2] The swords, which were never recovered, had an estimated value of £5 million in 1997 (equivalent to £9,680,908 in 2021).[1] Chatham had become a gambling addict by this time and many of the jewels were lost at casinos (on one occasion he prised a jewel from a sword hilt whilst sitting at a card table), in horse-racing bets or given to girlfriends.[3][1]

A replica of Nelson's chelengk

In 1951 Chatham broke into the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and stole a jewelled chelengk. The chelengk had been presented to the British admiral Horatio Nelson by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for his victory over the French at the 1798 Battle of the Nile. The 300-diamond piece was sold by Chatham for just a few thousand pounds and was never recovered.[6][7][8]

Chatham became associated with the gangster Billy Hill and often lost large amounts of money at his rigged casino tables.[1] Chatham took part in the 1952 Eastcastle Street robbery, an armed robbery (his first) of a Post Office van. The six robbers escaped with £287,000 (equivalent to £8,785,446 in 2021) after assaulting three Post Office employees. Chatham's share came to £15,000 (equivalent to £459,170 in 2021) which he quickly lost on Hill's tables.[1] Chatham made an attempt to break into Hill's safe which was thwarted but escaped punishment as Hill knew he would return to the casino to lose more money.[2][9] On another occasion Chatham threatened to shoot Hill.[3]

Gambling losses made Chatham increasingly reckless.[1] He had a reputation for losing all his money at a casino before leaving and returning, minutes later, with freshly stolen collateral.[2] Sometimes he would break into one expensive house and, if he found nothing worth taking, would then break into the house next door.[3] A friend described Chatham as the "Attila the Hun of the pillaging game".[10] In his younger years he owned a Lagonda and a Mercedes-Benz and spent his money lavishly.[3]

Chatham was imprisoned many times and was said to have had a prison cell named in his honour.[4] He successfully escaped from Brixton Prison and, while attempting to evade capture, severely wounded a police officer with a jemmy.[11] During one spell of imprisonment in 1957 he met fellow thief and gambling addict Peter Scott, beginning a 30-year association between the men.[1][12][13]

Harvey Nichols, London

Chatham was regarded as the most famous cat burglar in London by the late 1950s. Together with Scott he stole millions of pounds worth of goods from jewellery stores in Bond Street and art galleries in Mayfair.[12] Chatham once stole several hundreds of thousands of pounds of furs from Harvey Nichols, accessing the shop by its roof.[1] He participated in at least 26 raids on art galleries, sometimes stealing paintings to order.[3] He sold a Matisse he stole for just £7,500 and a Renoir for £5,000.[1] Chatham undertook many of his raids alone and armed only with "a bit of wire and a knowledge of how to bend glass doors", but the contemporary media attributed many of his raids to a sophisticated international gang of art thieves.[1]

Chatham also continued to be involved in domestic burglary, stealing from the Maharaja of Jaipur, Lady Rothermere, Madame Prunier and Raymond Bessone.[1] He took £80,000 from the Maharaja's safe in his home at East Grinstead.[1] He was persuaded to return a fur coat taken from Rothermere by an editorial in one of her husband's newspapers.[3] Chatham was hospitalised for six weeks after falling from the fourth-storey-high roof of the home of the Countess of Dartmouth.[1] He returned to burglary whilst still recovering and was caught by a maid in a house whilst swathed in bandages and sporting a cast.[1][3] Chatham said "I was a rebel against authority and I had no respect for the police. If I could outwit them in any way, I would ... They were usually very, very rich people, millionaires. Some of them regarded it as a nice thing to talk about at dinner parties."[1]

Chatham was convicted for the theft of £37,000 from the safe at the H. A. Byworth and Co jewellery factory in Mayfair after he was apprehended in the course of a domestic burglary. The police found Chatham in possession of a piece of rope identical to one left at the factory and linked dust on his comb to that found in the safe. Chatham was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for the theft.[11]

Chatham remained a thief into his later years, being caught stealing furs in his 60s and attempting a rooftop burglary on the Victoria & Albert Museum at the age of 70, the latter attempt being abandoned due to a blizzard.[1] He was arrested during another theft at the age of 73, having scaled a 50-foot (15 m) tall building.[2] At the age of 76 he was caught shoplifting a piece of bone china from Harvey Nichols and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment.[1] His last crime was an attempted theft from an art gallery, during which he slipped and fell, when aged 81.[14]

Despite his high-profile crimes Chatham lived in poverty in his later years, in a dilapidated ground floor flat in Fulham.[3] He made an unsuccessful attempt at writing an autobiography and was interviewed for the BBC documentary series The Underworld in 1994.[3] Chatham died from motor neurone disease in a Battersea nursing home on 5 June 1997; he was penniless at the time of his death.[2][1] His wife had predeceased him.[2] Shortly after his death a death mask was cast by the sculptor Nick Reynolds.[15] At the time of his death it was estimated that he had stolen goods worth £100 million (equivalent to £193,618,169 in 2021) during his criminal career and been sentenced to a total of 35 years' imprisonment.[1]