On 29 June 1905, the American fugitive Annie Gleason—sensationally nicknamed the “Princess of Thieves”—attempted one of London’s most theatrical jewellery substitutions at Christie’s auction rooms on Bond Street. Gleason had escaped an American jail roughly a year earlier, and, according to the later memoir of criminal Mary Anne Duignan, the plot was devised in a Liverpool hotel by Harry Bennett and Baby Thompson. To make Gleason appear to be an affluent American widow and the niece of General Ulysses S. Grant, the conspirators supplied her with a silk dress, carriage, coachman, and footman. After studying a photograph of a pearl necklace scheduled for auction, Gleason visited Christie’s to inspect the original and then went to the Parisian Diamond Company’s Regent Street premises. Relying on her memory, she reportedly described the precise graduation of the pearls well enough for the shop to make a convincing imitation necklace for £5.
Gleason returned to Christie’s, took possession of the genuine necklace, and dropped the imitation from her handkerchief onto the tray in a carefully timed sleight of hand. The substitution might have succeeded had a jewellery merchant named Davis not examined the replacement and noticed that its trade label was white rather than the Parisian Diamond Company’s customary buff label. As Gleason fled, she concealed the real pearls in a doorway, where they were recovered. She was arrested, indicted at the Old Bailey on 25 July 1905 for stealing a necklace reported at different times as worth £1,700, £2,000, £5,000, or $10,000, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment at HMP Aylesbury. The company was not accused of participating in the theft; its imitation pearls had simply been exploited as a remarkably credible prop. Yet the episode demonstrated both the commercial power and criminal potential of increasingly sophisticated paste jewellery, and the Parisian Diamond Company later turned photographs of the substituted pearls into advertising material—transforming an attempted jewel robbery into publicity for its own manufacturing prowess.
