Thieving was better than sex
New series Joan dramatises the life of a woman with more balls – and nous – than the male blaggers, geezers and wideboys we often see glamourised on TV
In 2024, there were 87,869 men and 3,635 women in prisons in England and Wales.
Women don’t commit anything like as many crimes as men, their exploits rarely being depicted in TV dramas. Many are serving short spells, often on remand.
The story of Joan Hannington is clearly out of the ordinary, however, and it is easy to see why it has been dramatised by ITV.
The channel’s six-parter, Joan, starring Sophie Turner, started this week and has attracted a lot of media attention.
Like many women who end up in prison, Hannington had a tough upbringing. Money was tight in her family of six siblings in Acton, west London. Her father was brutal with his fists and sadistic in his control of the household.
Reading her memoir, I Am What I Am, you feel that the bleakness of her home and school life was such that it was either going to crush her or forge a resourceful personality with attitude. Hannington came out of it with attitude.
In her memoir, she relates how she dropped out of school at 13 after a particularly fearsome beating from dad. She married her first husband, a convicted armed robber, at 17. Seven months later, she gave birth to her daughter, Debbie.
When Debbie was four, Hannington’s husband was in jail, and in a desperate moment she asked social services to place her girl in foster care. Desperate to reconnect with her daughter, Hannington stole a car to visit her but was caught by the police.
In the 1980s, she landed a job in a London jeweller’s. Having learnt a lot about gems, and in a bid to prove herself stable and solvent enough to get her daughter back from social services, she leaves that job and takes her first steps to becoming a master jewel thief. Over the years, she became so skilled that she apparently stole millions of pounds worth of assets.
I Am What I Am gives a flavour of the real Joan. She describes working alone and how pinching diamonds became ‘my life, my buzz, my drug’.
‘I couldn’t read or write properly, but I could be skint one minute and 50 grand richer the next.’
She would pilfer rings and loose stones, and her MO was simple but sharp. She would go to Bond Street, eye up a diamond ring worth tens of thousands of pounds, and then get an imitation of it made in Hatton Garden, with a glass stone as stand-in for the diamond.
She would turn up at the jewellery shop, all furs, cleavage and New York accent. She would flirt with the shop assistant – ‘he was never sure whether he wanted to sell me the ring or fuck me’ – swap rings and swallow the real one. Pulling a theft like this, she says, was ‘better than sex’.
While she loved dressing up to pull her scams – fur coats, wigs, fake tans – once the job was done she was back in Doc Martens, football shirt and baseball cap. No flash.
‘We were supposed to stay home and make babies or cook nice dinners,’ she writes. ‘Well, not Joan Harrington. I tried that and the system fucked me. Now I was fucking the lot of them…’
For me, her story has added colour because she ended up living on my manor, so to speak. She stayed on Upper Street, Islington, for a while. Then she turned up on Mildmay Grove, near Dalston, before landing a council flat on Tufnell Park Road.
And what a brilliant cover her modest flat was. While living there and dressing casually like everyone else in this area off Holloway Road, she says she had £800,000 worth of stolen diamonds buried in a tin near the walls of Wormword Scrubs.
You have to go back to 1983 and Lynda La Plante’s Widows, also on ITV (remade as a movie by director Steve McQueen in 2016), for one of the first portrayals of women going over to the criminal side on TV.
According to professor of television studies Milly Buonanno, who wrote a book entitled Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama, the depiction of women on the wrong side of the law really gathered pace in the 1990s.
It was then, she argued, that ‘the rule of male prominence and power [was] challenged by a wave of anti-heroines who have made inroads into the criminal underworlds and have provided evidence of women’s capacity to be “good at being bad” against the myth of female innocence’.
Again La Plante was ahead of the game with her creation Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) in Prime Suspect. This was followed by the likes of Alice (Ruth Wilson) in Luther and Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in Killing Eve.
Joan was certainly good at being a thief and shrewd enough to avoid the pitfalls of crime beloved by her male counterparts. She worked alone, kept her mouth shut, no guns, no vendettas, no drama, no lavish living.
As for the TV series? It tells an engrossing story of survival and I gulped down the first three episodes in one sitting.
Sophie Turner must be delighted to have left behind the dragons and X-Men for now. She emits star wattage as the chameleon, vulnerable Joan, switching accents and disguises, fronting up to disdainful men.
She is reckless and impulsive. But there is something powerful about a person with little education from an abusive background who has the will to fight back for a life with her daughter.
As Hannington writes in her book: ‘To me, the world was my stage and I played my roles to perfection. I never got the Oscar – I got the diamond instead. Every time and with no regrets.’
Viewers in the UK can watch Joan here