by Leigh Straw
Leigh ruled the eastern Sydney crime scene for decades with a tough, no-nonsense approach to criminal enterprise. She was at the centre of razor wars, underworld feuds and the rise of organised crime. In Leigh we see a woman running the show, challenging the assumption that serious crime was a man’s domain. She enjoyed the limelight and the sensational media interest in her life that turned her into a celebrity. Kate Leigh was one of Australia’s first major criminal celebrities, decades before Mark ‘Chopper’ Read and the Melbourne ‘underbelly’ identities. She was also an intelligent crime boss who recognised that her business relied on the goodwill of the local community. The people of eastern Sydney could disown her, but to be successful she needed to engage them and create a favourable local identity. Vice queen Kate Leigh became a Surry Hills matriarch.
Kate Leigh’s life is a quintessentially Australian story. She was a battler from the country who made a fortune in the city – albeit through crime – but retained a certain level of ordinariness. Despite her diamonds, flash cars and wealth, Leigh was accepted in the working-class communities of eastern Sydney. In these streets in the first half of the 20th century, locals were more hostile to the police and outsiders than they were to criminals, as long as they were charitable community members. From this tradition a popular image of Kate Leigh emerged: she was a local crook who championed the battlers of eastern Sydney, never forgetting that she was once in the very same position.
The NSW Police officers tasked with investigating organised crime cared little for Leigh’s standing in any community. To them, no one was beyond the firm grip of law and order. Many a war of words would be waged in court between Kate and the detectives who were intent on running her out of business and out of town. Before they tempered their views and saw Leigh as less of a threat to society, police gave her a title she resented from the first moment it was uttered in court.
‘The worst woman in Sydney’
Lillian Armfield joined the NSW Women’s Police in 1915. She was one of the first female officers tasked with the daily job of keeping an eye on the women of eastern Sydney. Armfield knew Kate Leigh very well. The pair met on several occasions and Lillian was often involved in raids and arrests where Leigh was present or apprehended. Years later, looking back on her long policing career, Armfield remembered Leigh holding a long grudge. If you crossed her, she rarely forgot it. Kate’s longest and most spiteful grudge was against Detective Sergeant Thomas ‘Tom’ Wickham for calling her ‘the worst woman in Sydney’. It was a title that stuck and Kate hated it.
Strangely enough, Leigh wasn’t the only woman to take out the title of ‘worst woman’ about the harbour city. A number of women were described as the ‘worst’ in the early 20th century. They included Maud Powals, who appeared in court in February 1912 charged with being idle and disorderly and having no means of support. The prosecuting sergeant called her ‘the worst woman in Sydney’. Later, in March 1932, Maisie Williams – with more than a hundred convictions to her name – was described as ‘another “worst woman in Sydney” ’.
Kate Leigh became ‘the worst woman in Sydney’ at a time of close surveillance of female behaviour in public. Women who were loud, drunk, loitering or generally leading poor, idle lives could find themselves put away in Long Bay Gaol for up to six months at a time. While both men and women were convicted with offences against public order, women faced a double punishment. They were equally criminal and deviant, suffering strict sentences for moral offences and a lack of conformity to ideals of what a woman should be. Punished with stringent sentences, female offenders were also socially marginalised. It had been a long time coming for Kate Leigh. Her earlier apprehension in Dubbo as a wayward girl in the 1890s – well before the gang violence of the 1920s – set in motion her exclusion from society as an unrespectable female.
Drunk, vagrant, and idle and disorderly women paled in comparison to Kate Leigh. Other women who committed offences against public order didn’t organise or control inner-city criminal syndicates. Leigh was no petty crook. She was a crime boss and a force to be reckoned with in the Sydney underworld.
Some women came close, including Kate’s daughter, Eileen. In June 1947, Eileen was described in the press as ‘the third leg of Sydney’s worst female trio, and daughter of tough old Kate Leigh …’. While Eileen Leigh has been mentioned in previous histories of Kate Leigh and the Sydney underworld, her own criminal history demands greater attention. If she was in fact the third ‘worst female’ alongside her mother and Tilly Devine, then Eileen was a key player in the Sydney crime scene for many decades from the 1920s. She was, quite simply, a chip off the old block. In the telling of Kate Leigh’s story, it is also important, then, to tell Eileen’s. Eileen Leigh didn’t achieve the same positive celebrity status as Kate, and the reason for this is central to understanding Kate Leigh’s popularity with the locals and the creation of a community identity.
Kate Leigh had a high opinion of herself, which is why the ‘worst woman’ title affected her so deeply. For all her criminal activities, Kate was a moralistic woman with her own ideas about what counted the most in a woman’s character. She told People magazine in 1950 that she didn’t drink or smoke, even though it was popular knowledge she was one of the city’s biggest slygroggers. Leigh also argued that she had no convictions for prostitution, saying that was Tilly Devine’s business. Yet Leigh was an underworld regulator of prostitution and owned a number of brothels around eastern Sydney. She was frequently linked to some of the city’s well-known prostitutes, including Nellie Cameron. This didn’t stop her telling journalists she couldn’t understand why young women lost control of their lives, or saying: ‘You can’t do nothing for some women.’ In Kate’s eyes, she had never really lost control of her life. She was firmly in charge of it.
Standing up from the church pew and fixing her dress back into place, Kate Leigh watched Nellie Cameron’s coffin pass by on its way to the hearse outside. There was an important lesson in Nellie’s passing: the razor wars were over and new crooks were muscling their way into eastern Sydney, but everyone carried the scars of the city’s entry into the world of organised crime. Kate Leigh hadn’t yet exited from it either. She was still peddling stolen goods and sly grog. Less than a fortnight after Cameron’s funeral, Kate Leigh was charged with assaulting a man with a rifle. Sydney’s most notorious pensioner wasn’t ready to give up the fight. In the end it would take more than fines and threats of prison to finish one of the most successful criminal careers in Australian history.
THEY RAN HER OUT OF TOWN. Told her not to come within 200 miles of Sydney. If she didn’t stay away, she would end up back in Long Bay Gaol. She smiles and thinks about that. Long Bay is okay, if you know who to pay off and make sure the other women fear you just enough to either avoid you or help you out. It’s not the hell the police want for her.
Watching the harbour city recede from view in the rear window of her car, she feels unsettled, unmoored. Life will go on without her. The city won’t stop just because she’s away from it. But her life will halt. Her greatest rival, that wretched Englishwoman, is already delighting in being left to control crime in eastern Sydney.
Judge Curlewis is a hard bastard. She tried to plead for the chance to visit Sydney for holidays but he shot the suggestion down. No holidays. No visits. Sydney would be free of her for as long as was necessary. Curlewis would prefer her banished for good.
So they’ve sent her packing to the country.
That’s what you get for peddling stolen goods. It wasn’t just that, though. Anyone else stocking up on stolen loot wouldn’t be treated as harshly. Stolen goods were only part of the story. There’s the sly grog, drugs and prostitution. That makes her the most notorious woman in Sydney. Not the worst, you bastards, the most notorious. It’s 1933 and she’s ruled Sydney’s underworld for many years.
Hours later she rolls into town in her Studebaker sedan and stands out like a sore thumb. Locals gather on the street near the parked car and wait
for the visitor to open the door and make an appearance. No one would drive such an outlandish car in Dubbo. They want to know who it is.
The first things they see are two little dogs thrust out of the car. Then a fur cape, a large black hat and a familiar face.
Kathleen Barry, but they know her better as Kate Leigh.
Dubbo. Narromine. It all means the same thing. Tiny towns that are too small for someone like her. Quintessential country towns with a main street, large colonial pub buildings and weatherboard houses. Fifty-two years old and the former wayward girl is being asked to return to the very place from which she had been driven as a teenager.
While the Dubbo locals make a fuss about the fancy car and look knowingly at her, recognising her from newspaper reports from the city, Kate searches for a familiar face. There are still Beahans in town, and one of them is an old favourite. Jack Beahan. Brother and partner in crime all those years ago when they were kids mucking about in the streets.
Pulling the hat down over her forehead and tugging the fur cape a little closer to her body, Kate Leigh wonders how long she will last out here. It’s all very well visiting the place and catching up with family, but this time she’s been ordered to stay away from the city, hopefully to set up a life for herself in country New South Wales.
Kate Beahan is back where it all began.
1
A WAYWARD GIRL
There were no reporters, no locals gawking at the new arrival, no one out to make money from the news. It was one of only a few milestones in Leigh’s life that went unreported in the newspapers. Catherine (Kathleen) Mary Josephine Beahan was born in Dubbo on 10 March 1881, on land traditionally owned by the Tubba-Gah People of the Wiradjuri Nation. Europeans began exploring the area once they found a route through the Blue Mountains in the 1820s. Nestled in the sprawling plains and mountains of central New South Wales almost 400 kilometres from Sydney, Dubbo was funded by large sheep and cattle runs. Later in the 19th century, the isolation of the district was lessened with the laying of railway lines connecting the town to surrounding areas and Sydney. Back when Kate Beahan was born, and as Sydney headed towards a population of 50 000 people, Dubbo eagerly awaited the arrival of its one-thousandth non-Indigenous resident.
The Beahans were like many other struggling families around Dubbo and Narromine. With large families and low wages, parents made ends meet as best they could, but it never seemed enough. Not when you had ten children. Kate was child number eight to Timothy and Charlotte Beahan (née Smith), who were married in Dubbo Court House on 7 September 1868. Timothy was a boot- and shoemaker and Charlotte was a ‘trademan’s daughter’.
While Beahan family history records ancestral links dating back to the Vikings, much of Kate’s fieriness came from her Irish origins. By the 1850s, the Irish were giving the English a run for their money as the leading immigrant group in colonial Australia. From 1839 to 1845, more than half of the immigrants arriving in New South Wales were Irish. In the 1850s, during the years following the devastating Potato Famine, more than 100 000 Irish arrived in the colony. By the end of the century, people of Irish birth accounted for close to 30 per cent of British immigrants to Australia, a much larger proportion than the Scots at about 13 per cent. Kate was proud of her Irish-Australian identity, and it would serve her well later in the ‘Harp in the South’ streets of Surry Hills.
Kate Beahan was pretty, with thick brown hair and piercing blue eyes. She loved to wander about the streets with her brothers, popping into her father’s work, and delighted in her nickname, ‘Bonny’. She was no shrinking violet, though. Kate was a tough, resilient young girl who could hold her own. One day she took her father’s gold watch to school to show off to her friends. The school bully approached Kate and snatched the watch. As the other children watched on, Kate pulled a line of paling off the school fence and clobbered the boy over the head. Not surprisingly, he gave the watch back to Kate and ran a mile, his hand clutching his head. There was no messing with pretty Kate Beahan. She was one of the toughest girls in town.
Kate’s parents had been married for thirteen years and welcomed seven children into the family by the time Kate came along. Charlotte Beahan was pregnant for up to six of those seven years before Kate’s birth. One can imagine the physical and mental strain this would have placed on her. This meant Kate grew up quickly and had to look after herself.
Charlotte and Tim Beahan were too preoccupied with Kate’s older brothers and sisters to notice how well she was growing up. Or how badly. Tim focused most of his attention on his two eldest boys, and Charlotte was often kept busy with the older girls. Kate’s toughness was her way of coping with being overlooked at home, and it developed into delinquency. Kate was closest to her younger brothers, Joseph and Jack. The trio started wagging school and wandering the streets. It wasn’t long before they caught the attention of the local police. Joseph and Jack turned to petty theft and street crime in their teens. Joseph was charged with a variety of offences, including stealing and lewdness. Jack was part of a local boys’ gang and was implicated in a gun-stealing case in 1898.
Local police worried about the way the Beahan children were headed. They had seen it many times before. Large, poor families often faced the added challenge of children who felt left out at home and turned to petty crime. It wasn’t only in Dubbo and Narromine. Across Australia in the late 19th century, children wandering about the streets were regularly brought before the courts. They were both in danger and dangerous, neglected and feared, and almost always from poor families. Children from wealthier families were mainly kept within the home, whereas poorer, working-class children lived life on the streets: they played there, sometimes had small jobs about the place and met with other children as they wandered about. It didn’t mean children from better off families were not involved in crime; their families tended to keep it hidden behind closed doors or had enough community connections that a blind eye could be turned.
Dubbo and Narromine locals were also genuinely concerned about children and teenagers disappearing from the streets. Newspapers featured stories of children wandering off and becoming lost in the bush. Non-Indigenous Australians were anxious about the bush, and this was reflected in popular artworks. Frederick McCubbin’s 1886 painting Lost depicts a young girl collecting mistletoe and almost hidden by the bush around her. We can’t see her face but she has drawn a hand up to her forehead, perhaps to shield it from the heat or to wipe away sweat from the exertion of walking around for a long time.
Dubbo township, with its sandstone buildings, business centre and busy main street, was isolated from other towns and the much larger urban centres. As Kate’s family now recalls, looking back over town photographs, there wasn’t much beyond a few town buildings. It was a place nestled into wide plains shrouded by densely covered mountains, with creeks and rocky gullies. Local anxieties about missing children were well founded. Esther Kate Weston disappeared from her family’s property in 1885. She left a hut with two other children and when they returned home without her, 50 horsemen from the local area set out to find the two-year-old. Her body was found two days later, and the newspapers told the sad story of her sufferings.
Social reformers played into these anxieties by arguing that children were more vulnerable to crime if they were regularly about the streets. The Boys’ Club of Dubbo was formed in the late 19th century and wanted to attract ‘street arabs’ into the club to engage in sports and academic learning. ‘Street arabs’ was the name given to poor children wandering the streets, who were one step away from crime. The club was unsuccessful with the Beahan boys – Joseph was found guilty of stealing sheepskins in February 1900 and was sentenced to two years’ hard labour. It’s not hard to imagine them being coaxed into avoiding the club by their elder sister Kate.
Kate’s parents, Timothy and Charlotte, also ended up on the wrong side of the law. Tim Beahan appeared in court in July 1897 on a charge of breaking and entering at Handover’s Store in town. Bailed and appea
ring again in court in October, he and two other men were found not guilty. Charlotte was convicted of the theft of a pair of shoes from a shop in Dubbo in 1904. The Beahans were very poor so Charlotte may have stolen the shoes to make a little extra money for the family. It’s odd that a cobbler’s wife would have stolen shoes, but the presiding magistrate simply saw Charlotte’s case as yet another example of a local woman being tempted into stealing nice shoes on display at the front of a shop. The reality, too, is that once anyone in the Beahan family caught the attention of the police, the whole family would have been closely watched, especially in a small country town.
Young Kate caused the greatest sensation in the family. She was caught wandering about Dubbo in April 1897, just after her sixteenth birthday, and police hauled her into the local lockup. When Tim and Charlotte arrived, officers told them Kate had been in the company of a ‘well known woman’. They were politely saying she was a known prostitute or offender. Charged as ‘a wanderer’ without any ‘ostensible lawful occupation’, Kate Beahan caused a scandal that reached the local papers.
It was bad timing. Wandering the streets and mixing with members of the opposite sex, working-class children and teenagers were often stereotyped as being excessively sexual. Unsupervised young girls were thought to be at greatest risk and in need of protection from moral danger. A Seduction Punishment Bill was introduced into the NSW Legislative Assembly in 1887 in an effort to make seduction a crime and protect the chastity of young, unmarried women. Although the Bill was not passed, it does show some of the concern at the time, though somewhat extreme, about young women and sex.