The Evening Standard, long a vocal critic of street fundraising in London, was forced to change its tune last week after two of the robbers who foiled the jewellery store robbery in Kensington turned out to be on-duty chuggers.

Robert Dennis (pictured), 27, a team leader for Gift Fundraising, and his colleague Scott Adams were fundraising for the NSPCC outside the Ernest Jones shop in Kensington High Street last Thursday when a motorcycle gang stormed the shop with sledgehammers. Dennis and Adams were among the first members of the public to tackle the five-man gang, and Dennis manged to trip one of them up so he could be pinned down until police arrived.

While the other four robbers managed to escape, they panicked and fled without most of their haul.  Dennis returned a bag of watches to staff who had taken refuge in the store during the robbery.

The Evening Standard interviewed Dennis after the event and reported his comments in that evening’s newspaper.  But funnily enough it described him not as a ‘chugger’ or ‘charity mugger’, its usual phraseology when covering face-to-face fundraising, but as a ‘charity worker’.  Presumably a chugger couldn’t also be a hero…

And the day’s successes didn’t end there for the plucky fundraisers, either. One onlooker signed up for a direct debit because he said he had been so impressed by their heroics. By the end of the day the team had secured £2,000 worth of pledges.