A Thief's Progess

It was Charles Peace's custom to spend a few profitable weeks "working" some town before moving on or returning home for a spell in Sheffield. Hull, Manchester and other northern towns were on his beat, but he also visited Bath and Oxford. Neither his biographer, David Ward in King of the Lags nor the Sheffield correspondent who methodically described his life in The Berkshire Chronicle just after he was hanged, mentioned Yateley, but a small village away down in Hampshire was not Peace's usual pattern and clearly this is what he intended too. He could well have visited Yateley soon after his release in 1872.

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