The all-female Forty Elephants lived by their own shoplifting and pickpocketing code. Now a new Disney series from the creator of Peaky Blinders tells the wild true story of the gang and its "queen", Mary Carr.

An organised crime gang operating in a capital city is hardly unusual. The Mafia, the yakuza and the triads, to name but a few, have all found rich pickings in cities across the world. What makes the Forty Elephants different, apart from their strange name, is the fact that they were a women-only syndicate. And they were led by a queen.

The story of the first of their leaders is dramatised in a lavish new six-episode Disney series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. A Thousand Blows revolves around Mary Carr, played by Erin Doherty, hitherto best known for her role as Princess Anne in The Crown, and another real historical figure, the gloriously named Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby), a Jamaican man who came to London in the late 19th Century.

Knight was initially approached by the production company set up by husband-and-wife team Stephen Graham and Hannah Walters (who both appear in the series) with the idea of writing a drama about Moscow. "A story about a real person who came from Jamaica with an ambition to become a lion tamer and became a really famous boxer? That's pretty much irresistible," Knight tells the BBC. "And when I dug into it and found out about this person and his experiences, it was very compelling. Before then, for a long time, I'd wanted to tell the story of the Forty Elephants. Both of those true stories are amazing, and the fact is they were both happening at the same time and in the same place. I thought it would be interesting to imagine what would have happened if Mary and Hezekiah had met – and that's what this show is about."

A Thousand Blows opens with Moscow and his friend, newly arrived in the British capital, witnessing Carr and her Elephants operating a pickpocketing scam near the docks. We soon learn that Carr has far grander ambitions and is planning an audacious heist. "Anyone can steal from the bottom," she tells her lieutenants. "It's time we stole from the top." She crosses paths with Moscow at the Blue Coat Boy, a pub owned by Henry 'Sugar' Goodson (Graham) – a fighter and another real historical figure – and she introduces herself as "the Queen of the Forty Elephants, the biggest, fastest, most independent gang of female thieves in the whole of London".

Reliable information about the real Mary Carr is scarce. We know that she was born in 1862 in Holborn, London, and that by 1881 she was an inmate at a female penitentiary in Kent, a strict facility for "fallen women" run by the Church of England. The precise reason for Carr's admission is unclear, but she had been convicted of shoplifting at the age of 14. Her mother was dead by then, and her father, a thief and fraudster, could have been in prison or abroad.

According to Brian McDonald's book Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants, Carr had striking looks and worked as a flower seller in London's Covent Garden. She was also an artist's model for Dorothy Tennant, who published an illustrated book called London Street Arabs, and for Frederic Leighton, whose best-known work is Flaming June. Sometime around 1890, she was elected as "Queen" of the Forty Elephants, an organisation of around 40 women whose origin is shrouded in mystery.

The historian and author Hallie Rubenhold, who has written a number of books about women and crime, is a historical consultant on A........

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