Sowerbutt's Haul

"Berry Blackmore ran a pawnshop in High Bob for years," the retired writer for the East London Pioneer, who still has the notebook from his early 1960s interview with Jimmy Sowerbutt, said. "During the Depression, you'd see the housewives pawning their bits and pieces on Mondays and Tuesdays to tide them over, then reclaiming them on Thursdays - pay day. Berry opened up the shop a couple of weeks before Easter 1946 to find he'd been robbed. Called the police, but the best they could do was circulate the long list of stolen items - no fingerprints or clues. Berry dropped round to see Jimmy, with whom he had done a lot of business over the years - fencing jewellery and so on. One thing Jimmy didn't appreciate was criminals coming into his patch, particularly when his friends were robbed. Took him 24 hours to find the culprit - a chancer from over Hammersmith way. The chancer turned up, black and blue and stark nnaked, tied to a post outside the local nick with a signed confession nailed to the fence. Two bags with the stolen goods mysteriously turned up at Berry's shop. Case solved."http://www.amazon.co.uk/Colour-of-Red-ebook/dp/B00B1CWM5M/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1358353851&sr=1-1