The Story

Shirley’s life was inherently dramatic, right from the beginning - she was a breach birth and felt she was “born to run”. The story never stops moving and brims with humour, pathos, action and sadness. It was a life full of contradictions. Shirley knew terrible poverty and pain and good times - enjoying the best champagne whilst dressed from head to toe in mink or designer labels she had stolen. She took only the best clothes from Harrods, Harvey Nichols and other Kensington shops she loved to rob, because she had a real sense of style. Perhaps also she needed the best because she knew inside what it was to have nothing. Dressed in designer labels she never felt poor – even when she was absolutely skint…

Gone Shopping locates Shirley’s career in context of her up bringing in South London. Her dad was a criminal, who died in prison, and she grew up understanding law breaking as part of normal existence, as well as survival. She was shown how to shoplift – the crime she called her “bread and butter” trade – by women in a gang called the “forty thieves” who operated in South London in the post war period. She spent her teenage years in reform school, before moving on to “rolling” (quasi prostitution), shoplifting (her regular trade), bank robbery and occasionally even bigger scams; she was hardly caught and spent only three years of her entire life in prison.

It was this history that made Shirley Pitts take herself seriously as a criminal and believe she had a unique story to tell. It was a lifetime of negotiation with her brothers and other men involved in criminal subculture of both South and East London, that made her an astute judge of character as well as smooth talking and successful criminal. The only reason she told her story to Lorraine Gamman in the end was because of the trust between them and the fact that she knew she was dying of breast cancer and could not be prosecuted by telling her story.

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