‘Good Samaritan’ gang rob playwright Alan Bennett of £1,500

PLAYWRIGHT Alan Bennett says he has lost faith in the “kindness of strangers” after falling victim to two pickpockets posing as Good Samaritans.

Alan Bennett says he has lost faith in the kindness of strangers Alan Bennett says he has lost faith in the “kindness of strangers”

The 76-year-old author of The History Boys said the encounter with the women, suspected to be Romanian, left him wary of people offering to help strangers in trouble.

After approaching him in Marks & Spencer in Camden Town, north London, they said he had ice-cream down his back and offered to clean it off.

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They claimed it had dripped everywhere and convinced him to remove his jacket.

It contained £1,500 he had just taken out of the bank. When he returned to his car he realised the money had been taken.

“They very kindly helped me to clean it up with tissues from one of their handbags and another man, English, I think, big and in his fifties, goes away and comes back with more tissues,” he wrote in The London Review of Books.

“The ice-cream (coffee-flavoured) seems to have got everywhere and they keep finding fresh smears of it so that I take my jacket off too to clean it up. No more being found, I put my jacket on again, thanking the women profusely, though they brush off my gratitude and abruptly disappear.

“I go back to the car, thinking how good it is that there are still people who, though total strangers, can be so selflessly helpful.

“It’s only when I’m about to get into the car that I remember the money, look in my inside pocket to find, of course, that the envelope has gone.”

He reported the incident to the police who told him the thieves may have been Romanian. Crediting them for being “very good at their job, Mr Bennett added: “The casualty, though, is trust, so that I am now less ready to believe in the kindness of strangers.”

He chose not to reveal his experience at the time but has since told the story in the annual diary he writes for the review.

Bennett has played the Good Samaritan himself in the past, allowing a down and out woman live in a camper van in his London driveway for years and telling the story in his widely-acclaimed book The Lady In The Van.

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