Razor (Underbelly) Read online

  Shiner Ryan was confident Freeman would not inform on him and remained in Sydney until he had sent two boxes containing his share of the stolen payroll money to his friend Sam Falkiner, a Melbourne bad-hat. Then he caught a train to the Victorian capital to retrieve it. Sadly for Ryan, his scam unravelled when Falkiner absconded to Tasmania with the cash. A furious Ryan complained to a lover about Falkiner's treachery; she, hoping for a reward, told the police. In early July, fourteen detectives and six uniformed officers surrounded a house in Melbourne's Albert Park and called on Ryan to give himself up. At first Ryan threatened to open fire, but thought better of it, threw his gun into the street and was arrested. Officers found £600 in a glass jar hidden in the chimney of the house. This was the only money ever recovered from the Eveleigh robbery. Ryan was extradited to Sydney in handcuffs. With Ryan and Freeman in custody, the police turned to Twiss, who denied being an accomplice but admitted that he had known Freeman years before and had played rugby with him. The police were certain of his complicity in the robbery and kept him in the cells. Tatham, the owner of the ‘stolen’ getaway car, was also charged.

  At Central Criminal Court, Darlinghurst, in September 1914, Freeman, Ryan, Twiss and Tatham pleaded not guilty to assaulting Fred Miller and stealing £3302/13/6. Freeman also faced charges of shooting and wounding Michael McHale, a nightwatchman who had routed him trying to rob the Paddington Post Office in Oxford Street, just four days before the Eveleigh Railway Workshops job. (Freeman had fired point-blank at McHale, the bullet passing through the man's cheek and wounding a tram conductor on the other side of Oxford Street.)

  Twiss was acquitted because of a lack of concrete evidence against him. Elated, he kissed Ryan in the courtroom, waved goodbye and repaired to the Courthouse Hotel across the road in Oxford Street to drown his joy. Tatham was found not guilty of assault and robbery but served three months in gaol for being an accessory to the robbery.

  On the witness stand, Shiner Ryan lied outrageously. He portrayed himself as a struggling inventor who had only come to Sydney to find buyers for his invention: a device for automatically coupling trucks. He had checked into a boarding house for his Sydney stay and, lo, Freeman was living there too. Ryan had had nothing to do with the robbery, he claimed, but on seeing a newspaper drawing of a man wanted in connection with it, felt it resembled him rather closely and that he was being framed by somebody, he couldn't say who. So he fled to Melbourne because ‘with my criminal record, I knew a long sentence was a formality if, somehow, I was convicted’. He blithely ignored the evidence of the informants, his earlier confession to the crime and the money found in his chimney. Ryan's hunch that he faced a long term behind bars was correct. He was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in Parramatta Gaol. In his first days in prison, he tried to slash his left wrist and ankle with a sharp metal object, but his suicide attempt was thwarted by guards and Ryan served the rest of his time quietly.

  It was then Jewey Freeman's turn to test the credulity of the court. Seemingly forgetting he had earlier told police that he had been at the races when the payroll was stolen, he now said he could not have committed the robbery because he had been in bed with his lover, Kate Leigh. When she was called to the stand, a wide-eyed Kate eagerly corroborated Freeman's alibi. Not only that, she embellished it. She swore under oath that after an afternoon's ice-skating together at the Exhibition Rink, she and Freeman went home to Frog Hollow and did not leave the shack for two days. As the Sydney Morning Herald noted:

  Her admission, made in public and on oath, a woman's confession of her own lack of virtue, would have gone far to swing the scales in favour of Freeman. It seemed unbelievable that a woman would publicly parade her shame unless the facts were correct.

  But the jury did not believe Freeman, and it did not believe Kate Leigh. Freeman, like Ryan, was sentenced to ten years in Parramatta Gaol for stealing the Eveleigh payroll. Immediately afterwards, he was sentenced again, for the term of his natural life this time, for shooting Paddington Post Office nightwatchman McHale. The judge asked if Freeman had anything to say before he was taken away. ‘Just this,’ replied the habitual crook, with a grin, ‘do I qualify for leniency under the First Offender's Act?’

  No one knows if Freeman's facetiousness infuriated the judge, but when he came to sentence Kate Leigh for perjury, he threw the book at her. She would, he said, spend the next seven years of her life in Long Bay Gaol. ‘Seven years for stickin’ to a man,’ Kate muttered sourly. ‘I'll swing before I stick to another.’

  Early in 1915, after installing teenaged Eileen in a convent, Kate arrived at the new Female Reformatory at Long Bay Gaol, opened just three years before. She was stripped, searched and fumigated before donning a prison uniform and commencing her sentence. As part of her rehabilitation she had to perform daily tasks which required, according to the new prison's charter, ‘constant effort’. A good cook since girlhood, she soon gravitated to the gaol's kitchen. Daily exercise was enforced, as was the ‘character-building’ cold shower she had to endure winter and summer after callisthenics. At all times, she was required to be ‘bright and cheerful’, exhibit ‘self-control’ and treat her fellow prisoners with ‘politeness and decorum’. When not working, exercising or praying in the prison chapel, she would be confined to her single cell, where she was allowed to read censored versions of letters from the outside and ‘suitable literature’. Leigh must have been a model prisoner, for she was paroled two years early, after serving not quite five years.

  When Kate Leigh was released from Long Bay in late 1919, the world was much changed. A war involving most of the nations on earth had been waged and won, but at a fearful price. Of the 330 000 Australian warriors despatched overseas from the country's population of 4.9 million, 59 432 had died and 166 819 had been wounded in places named Beersheba, Gallipoli and Pozières. William Morris Hughes was the new prime minister. C.J. Dennis's Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and May Gibbs's Snugglepot and Cuddlepie were the runaway literary successes. Thousands had perished in the great flu epidemic of 1919. Les Darcy, a young boxer who lived in Paddington's Lord Dudley Hotel, had looked certain to win the world middleweight title, but he had died of blood poisoning in the United States in 1917, aged just twenty-one. Aviators Ross and Keith Smith had flown all the way from London to Darwin, touching down along the way in Italy, Greece, Egypt, India and Singapore. And, perhaps most interesting of all to Kate, the ALP– Nationalist State Government of William Holman, in response to demands from temperance groups and the church, had decreed that pubs must close their doors at 6 p.m. instead of 11 p.m.

  Kate grabbed the opportunity presented by the new laws. For the next thirty-five years, she cashed in by providing illegal liquor, known as ‘sly grog’, to all those imbibers whom the moral guardians had sought to deprive of a post–6 p.m. drink in a place other than their home. From her savings, she was able to buy a two-storey terrace house for herself and Eileen at 104 Riley Street, East Sydney, just off William Street. She then rented six premises (‘sly-groggeries’) in Surry Hills, rooms at the back of fruit and grocery shops and in nondescript terraces, and sold illegal beer, wine and spirits in the forbidden hours.

  At the height of her career, Kate ran more than twenty sly-groggeries. Some of her sly-grog shops were upmarket and frequented by businessmen; others, said police, ‘catered to the worst class of thieves and prostitutes’. On Friday and Saturday nights, crowds of men milled in the street awaiting admittance to ‘Mum's’, as her establishments were known. Punters could either drink on the premises or take home her booze — albeit at a hefty mark-up on the wholesale prices she paid her hotel and brewery suppliers. (Depending on the groggery's decor and location, this mark-up could have been as much as 100 per cent, costing her customers the princely sum of one shilling and sixpence for a bottle of beer.)

  From the early 1920s until the ′40s, Kate Leigh, as Sydney's leading sly-grogger and with her income protected by her own combative nature and a team of bashers and gunmen,
was one of the wealthiest, and most flamboyant, Sydneysiders. Another key to her success, she always said, was that unlike many of her less-successful rival illicit alcohol sellers, she did not partake of her product. ‘I hate the taste of the bloody stuff!’ she'd bark while filling a customer's glass to the brim.

  Larger than life, greedy, funny when she felt like it and vicious when she needed to be, Kate was like a twentieth-century Long John Silver, a pirate captain aboard the jolly brig Surry Hills. Aside from running the groggeries, she was a standover merchant, a dealer in drugs (for a while she was known as ‘the Snow Queen’), a fence for stolen property and, more for sport than anything else, a deft shoplifter who secreted in her voluminous bloomers the goods she removed from the shelves of Grace Bros and Mark Foys.

  By the mid ′20s, the newspapers would be calling her the ‘Most Evil Woman in Sydney’. Leigh liked to sidle up to pretty working girls and try to entice them into her world. She would tell them of the good times, fine clothes and jewels enjoyed by those smart enough to throw in their lot with her, and add with a gap-toothed grin, ‘It's a nasty world, so it's best to enjoy it while you can.’

  While among the most prominent, Kate was only one of a number of villains who set up shop in post–World War I East Sydney. Sly grog, cocaine and opium, prostitution and gambling formed a lucrative economic base for organised crime. With the onset of the Roaring ′20s, the area was the city's criminal kingdom. Newspapers trumpeted a ‘crime wave’, and with good cause. But compared with the mayhem that followed, to paraphrase Al Jolson, the American singing rage of the time and star of the pioneer talkie The Jazz Singer (which had Sydneysiders queuing for blocks around the old Lyceum theatre) the Harbour City hadn't seen nothin’ yet.

  3

  A Camberwell Lass

  If Surry Hills's Frog Hollow had a London counterpart it may have been the area bounded by Sultan and Hollington streets in Camberwell, a Victorian suburb in the city's south-west. In his landmark survey Life and Labour of the People in London, Charles Booth called these hovel-lined streets ‘one of the vilest slums in the whole of London’. In summer's heat or winter's cold, Booth despaired, the children of the area went shoeless and dressed in rags. They ate scraps, committed crimes and died young. Drunkenness was epidemic among women and men, and assaults were common. Booth was shocked by the housing in Hollington Street, in particular. Number 21, for example, was a ramshackle three-storey dwelling of six rooms in which nineteen people, including eleven children, lived. None of the children attended school. Most of the adults were alcoholic. Booth was disgusted by the smells that suffused Hollington Street. There were still piggeries and cowsheds nearby, and linoleum and glue factories, and adding to the industrial effluvium was the reek of rancid fish that locals smoked over open fires in their backyards. Also, wrote local historian Mary Boast in The Story of Camberwell: ‘Every bit of space was used for stabling ponies and donkeys and storing market barrows. The rotting vegetable rubbish from these added to the sickly atmosphere.’

  Tilly Devine was born Matilda Mary Twiss, at home at No. 57 Hollington Street, Camberwell, on 8 September 1900, the year before Queen Victoria died. Tilly's father, Edward Twiss, was a hand-to-mouth bricklayer's labourer and her mother, Alice (maiden name Tubb), a housewife. Tilly Twiss, whose cherubic features belied a crosspatch temper, grew up in abject poverty. Like the other urchins in her street, she froze and starved. Like them, too, her future at best was bleak.

  With no fun or distractions to be had at home, Tilly roamed Camberwell and got to know it well. It was an area of amazing contrasts. There were the slums of Hollington and Sultan streets, yes, where she had to return each day from her wanderings, and there was school, which she despised; but Camberwell was also a treasure trove of Victorian delights. In summer, she frolicked at the Camberwell Baths and Leisure Centre, opened in 1891, which resembled a castle in a fairy tale. There was the fortress-like South London Art Gallery in Peckham Road, where poor kids such as she were encouraged to enjoy the great works within. If an employee saw a child peeping into the gallery from the street but too intimidated to enter, the staff member was expected to invite the child inside, make a fuss of them and explain the paintings, so encouraging children to return.

  Best of all to young Tilly, were the glittering theatres and music halls where she acquired a love of overblown glitz, ostentatious jewellery and the knees-up, thigh-slapping, handclapping ditties that she would bawl for the rest of her life. One went: ‘I'm the Marquis of Camberwell Green/I'm the downiest dude ever seen/I'm a gusher, I'm a rusher/I'm the Marquis of Camberwell Green’. Camberwell boasted the People's Palace of Varieties, Lovejoy's, the Metropole and the Camberwell Palace, where the little blonde urchin craned to catch a glimpse of vaudevillians Harry Tate, Marie Lloyd, Nellie Wallace and Harry Lauder. Experiencing fine buildings, art and exciting entertainers fired Tilly Twiss with a desire to escape poverty and live in a world of wealth, fine possessions and bright lights.

  But for the twelve-year-old just out of school, riches and the high life were as attainable as flying to Neverland to romp with the fairies and pirates of Peter Pan, the big theatrical event of her youth. Tilly's reality was earning a pound to help her and her family stay warm, clothed and fed. Along the banks of the canal at Camberwell, factories churned out paint, jam, beer and sticky tape, and Watkins & Co. bookbinders bound a million Bibles a year. When she left school, Tilly, like most of the working-class people of Camberwell, slaved twelve hours a day, six days a week in these sweatshops.

  Then, epiphany. Just like Kate Leigh 20 000 kilometres away in prewar Sydney, she came to the conclusion that the straight and narrow was a route for fools. Even a comfortable middle-class existence — let alone the romantic extravagance she demanded from life — was out of reach on a factory worker's wage. So, like numerous young women in her situation, she became a prostitute. As her nephew George Parsons would say more than eighty years later: ‘She was a good-looking, smart young girl. She had no prospects. Her only hope of making it was by selling the only thing she owned — herself.’

  The young prostitute was 160 centimetres tall and weighed 71 kilos. She was pretty, with big blue eyes, and had a well-developed figure for a teenager. She could play the coquette when it suited her, but was also known in London's West End for her foul language and spitfire temper. She was a street fighter, and needed little provocation to weigh in, boots, nails and all. Her main beat was the Strand, that bustling West End thoroughfare sandwiched between Covent Garden to the north, the Thames to the south, Trafalgar Square to the west and Fleet Street to the east. The Strand was, and is, home to the Savoy Hotel (whose guests in Tilly's day included the greatest actors and heads of state) and theatres such as Noël Coward's beloved Adelphi and the Savoy, where Gilbert and Sullivan debuted their light operas. The restaurant Simpsons-on-the-Strand served up traditional English fare, and Charing Cross Railway Station swallowed and disgorged thousands of commuters a day, as well as the servicemen on their way to northern France and the horrors of war.

  Brassy, blonde Tilly Twiss was ubiquitous in the West End in the years of World War I, spending the day carousing in Soho then hitting the wide footpaths of the Strand at night. There she would solicit with a wink and a smile, and a glance at the bulge of their wallets, the toffs in their frock coats and top hats, as well as joining young servicemen from all over the world in some noisy revelry. In those years when the average wage in England was £2–3 a week, Tilly and her sisters could easily gross £15–20.

  The Great War was in its third year when, in 1916, Tilly met and fell in love with an Australian soldier who had fought in the Middle East and was now headquartered at Andover. James Edward Joseph Devine was a tall, hard-muscled sapper in the 4th Tunnelling Company of the Australian Imperial Forces. He was twenty-four, a former shearer, with a criminal record. His hair was brown, his eyes were a piercing, belligerent blue, his complexion was coarse and ruddy. Perhaps it was his blarney that won Tilly's heart, for he tol
d her that he owned a kangaroo farm. Jim and Tilly were opposites who somehow were drawn to each other. He was dour and sullen, she — at least when life was going her way — was flirty, vivacious and always singing. They both liked to drink and gamble and revelled in the criminal milieu of Soho. They fought when they drank, and she gave him as good as she got, although he would settle matters with a slap or a punch. She always forgave him (and would go on forgiving him for the next three decades) and welcomed him back to her capacious bosom. When Jim asked Edward Twiss for his daughter's hand, the doughty south Londoner said yes.

  On 12 August 1917, at the modest Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Camberwell, Matilda Twiss married James Devine. Her age on the wedding certificate is twenty-one, five years older than she in fact was. A Canon Murnane performed the ceremony, and Edward Twiss gave his daughter away while her mother Alice sniffled doe-eyed in her pew. An Alice Wesley was bridesmaid and Richard Hirsch, best man. The newlyweds soon had two children: a daughter, who died at birth, and a son, Frederick James.