The Worst Woman in Sydney

by Leigh Straw

  Queensland and Tasmania passed Contagious Diseases Acts in 1868 and 1879, but New South Wales and Victoria failed to pass similar legislation. Yet although a Contagious Diseases Act was not introduced in New South Wales, containment areas were introduced. Elizabeth Street between Liverpool and King streets was a popular area for soliciting, even into the early 20th century, but increasingly women were moved on to the inner-city lanes and suburbs, including Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. Up to the 1890s, Sydney prostitutes continued to favour George, Pitt, Castlereagh, Elizabeth, Phillip and King streets in the city centre.

  Regardless of the efforts of police to contain street prostitution in certain areas, the public trade in sex continued to worry urban planners, politicians and social reformers. By the latter part of the 19th century, prostitutes were characterised as contributing significantly to a decline in morals and respectability in inner-city Sydney. In 1871, an anonymous booklet declared:

  There is a class of girls and young women here – hopeless specimens of whom may be seen airing themselves in the Domain and gardens on Sunday afternoons, and on Sunday nights in George Street, putting even rough modesty to the blush by their shameless speech and acts – sapping the foundations of the State and urging youth to ruin and infamy.

  One church minister told a Christian convention in 1898: ‘There is perhaps not another city on the face of the earth in which vice has more completely established her dominion than the capital of New South Wales.’ In order to tackle the problem of ‘fallen’ women, shelters and homes were established to provide alternatives to a life on the streets. Cheaper than gaols, the homes were mainly concerned with rescuing prostitutes and ‘at risk’ girls. By the 1890s the Sydney Rescue Work Society had an establishment called the Open All Night Refuge for Women. The homes also espoused the heavily moralistic goal of making women repent their fallen lives. Women there were treated equally as ‘Magdalens and moral imbeciles’.

  Prostitution was also targeted through greater police powers and regulation from 1900, around the same time Kate Leigh left the Industrial School for Girls. From the turn of the century, the NSW Police Force had begun lobbying for changes to the law. It wanted soliciting to be punished with up to six months in prison. Men living off prostitution and landlords of houses of ill repute were to face up to twelve months’ imprisonment. Brothel-keeping, police argued, should be punished with twelve months’ imprisonment. The Police Offences (Amendment) Act was enacted in 1908, and with it street prostitution was criminalised. By the second decade of the 20th century, police were largely successful in driving most women off the streets, but regulation of prostitution made it a ‘deviant underworld’. Consorting laws introduced in the Vagrancy Act of 1929 also made it an offence to consort with known criminals and ‘bad characters’. This led to the creation of a police Consorting Squad. Anyone found guilty of consorting faced up to six months in prison. Association with known prostitutes was thus criminalised.

  The 1908 amendments reorganised prostitution ‘into a more professionalized, less visible and therefore less controversial form’. Police favoured underworld regulation, particularly through the containment of prostitution in brothels, but stepped in when business got out of hand or locals complained. The first callgirl establishments had been set up by two Frenchwomen in Kings Cross in the early 20th century, but they were not prosecuted if they carried on discreetly. The professionalisation of prostitution transformed the prostitute into a ‘professional identity’ and led to greater publicity for the underworld managers, who were targeted for their inability to contain and regulate their business.

  Despite the legal restrictions and threat of imprisonment, women continued to solicit on the streets. According to policewoman Lillian Armfield, streetwalkers were a normal part of life on the streets of inner Sydney, and conducted their business ‘from dusk till dawn’. By the 1920s, popular religious figures such as Reverend RBS Hammond claimed: ‘Everybody knows that prostitution is prevalent in Sydney’ and could single out their main thoroughfares. While streetwalkers could be found around the wealthier hotels and flats, they were most visible around King Street and Martin Place in the city centre, and further out around Surry Hills.

  Streetwalkers evaded attempts to regulate their behaviour by keeping close with locals. Prostitutes in the first decades of the 20th century generally lived and worked in, and were a recognised part of, their communities. In the inner-city neighbourhoods of Sydney, prostitutes were resourceful in gaining local acceptance. Some helped their neighbours out and looked after young children while mothers went off to work. Mary Baker remembered the level of acceptance she grew up with in eastern Sydney:

  Oh, there were girls in our street that we knew were on the game, more or less. But strangely enough, I don’t remember that anyone ever looked down on any girls that were involved in prostitution, because they kept their business to themselves, and people didn’t interfere into other people’s business. You said good morning or good afternoon to anyone, irrespective of what people did, as long as they didn’t interfere with you.

  Kate Leigh was right that she had never been in gaol for prostitution. Her criminal record at Long Bay shows no convictions specifically for prostitution or the better known charge of soliciting. Her record does show, however, convictions for ‘offensive behaviour’. This was the charge police most commonly used when dealing with prostitutes in the 1920s. In the early years of her criminal career, Kate Leigh drew the attention of police for the unruliness of her involvement in the sex business. Leigh and her girls were linked to theft cases, and locals didn’t always appreciate their general rowdiness. In December 1913, Leigh was charged with being the ‘holder of a house frequented by prostitutes’. Police reports from 1914 identified her as a ‘shrewd and dangerous woman’ who kept houses ‘frequented by prostitutes’.

  It was only a matter of time before Kate Leigh came to the attention of the Women’s Police. Women were introduced into the police force in Australia in an effort to better deal with ‘wayward’ girls and women deemed to be in need of reform. First established in 1915 in New South Wales and with similar outfits in the other Australian states, the Women’s Police were expected to assist in managing and controlling female public lives and ensure a respectable ideal. Female officers had to prevent young women from entering prostitution, make sure drunken women were escorted home or into care, and look after young girls loitering about the streets. Female police were also used as decoys. They wandered the streets of inner Sydney with plain-clothes male officers and made arrests undetected.

  Lillian Armfield, one of the first officers of the NSW Women’s Police, was at the forefront of police efforts to regulate prostitution. Armfield had previously worked as a nurse in the Hospital for the Insane at Callan Park, where she was in charge of looking after female inmates. Like Kate Leigh, Armfield was a country girl – she grew up in Mittagong in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales – with a tough character that served her well in the police force. She was a tall, well-dressed and confident woman who knew she faced close scrutiny as one of the first female detectives.

  Despite being paid less and ineligible for overtime, Armfield spent three decades working to protect and serve women in inner Sydney. Her work mirrored the moralistic views of respectable society. Armfield believed that a lot of girls went ‘wrong’ through their own recklessness and ‘some streak of evil’, but she retained the hope throughout her policing career that ‘very few girls are bad beyond redemption’. While Armfield frequently met women ‘living as prostitutes’ who were ‘victims of men and poverty’, she was also confronted with women who were ‘quite brazen about it’:

  There are prostitutes who are in their sorry trade for what they regard as an easy living, and who have their own peculiar sense of honour – perhaps it would be better to say a sense of obligation – to those men they solicit. They have their price and they bargain their bodies and they are satisfied with that …

  Kate Le
igh was frequently a target of police efforts to regulate and contain the sex business in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. Lillian Armfield knew her well. While she regarded Tilly Devine, Leigh’s great rival, as ‘even more violent’ and would never arrest her alone, Arm-field also knew Leigh was ‘high up in the list’ of criminal women.

  With the police favouring regulation and wanting to keep sex workers in brothels, Kate Leigh knew how to make money from the restrictions. She would establish brothels around the city in her various houses and drinking establishments. She still needed a ‘front’, however. Police regularly conducted raids on brothels but were still in two minds about Leigh’s establishments. It didn’t always work, but it kept the police busy prosecuting her for associating with thieves and selling sly grog. Leigh’s resourcefulness combined the illicit sale of alcohol and prostitution in an effort to use sly-grogging as a distraction from the other business being conducted in her establishments. She was also effective in making her houses ‘attractive as sites of evening entertainment’.

  We don’t have a lot of descriptions of the inside of the brothels from those who were there, either as prostitutes or customers, but some recollections have survived. Darcy Dugan, a notorious bank robber and escape artist, recorded his impressions of one of Tilly Devine’s brothels in his memoirs. As a teenager, Darcy sold make-up to street prostitutes. One day he found himself welcomed into a brothel by none other than one of the greatest madams of Sydney, Tilly Devine:

  The premises had gaudy wallpaper and furnishings. The carpet in the reception lounge was red, punctuated with bright-green floral patterns. It smelled of stale cigarettes and human sweat. Three heavily made-up women in flimsy, frilly dresses lounged on an enormous settee, smoking.

  Tilly Devine was a notorious brothel madam, but Kate Leigh wasn’t so far removed. She hated the title of madam but was nevertheless involved in the sex business. By the 1920s, she had established a number of brothels around eastern Sydney and was frequently linked to the city’s well-known prostitutes. The local newspapers picked up on these associations. When Maisie Williams was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in 1932 – and thus ‘prevented from capitalising her sex appeal’ – she was linked to Kate Leigh.

  As long as her business didn’t impede the lives of locals, Kate Leigh was tolerated within the poor eastern Sydney neighbourhoods. Leigh had to negotiate public perceptions carefully in order to gain acceptance in the community. While temperance groups targeted sly-grog selling as part of a wider campaign against drunkenness and domestic violence, sly-grogging was largely accepted in the working-class communities of Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. Australian working-class communities were also known to accept a broad range of female sexual identities, prostitution, drinking and general rowdiness. Prostitutes and brothel madams were not always outcasts in local working-class communities as they would have been among middle- and upper-class people. But acceptance was based on a distinction between respectable, semi-respectable and common prostitutes. When a woman was not loud or obscene in public and worked in a less conspicuous manner, she gained greater acceptance in the local community. The ‘appearance of respectability’ was crucial. Kate Leigh sought to legitimise her community identity from the 1930s. She publicly acknowledged her role as a sly-grog seller but denied her part in innercity prostitution.

  It was near impossible, however, for Kate Leigh to disguise her role in the drug trade, with the police openly describing her in court as ‘a principal in the cocaine traffic’. In Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s, prostitution and drugs were linchpins of underworld business, and Leigh was instrumental in both. Her empire was funded by sex and snow. Leigh was a ‘convicted dope trafficker’, and it went hand in hand with her work in prostitution.

  Cocaine is once again a major drug in Sydney. In recent years, the number of cocaine detections at Australian borders has doubled, and there has been a spike in the number of cocaine-related arrests. It’s no longer just the drug of young, rich ‘party-goers’, according to one Sydney newspaper, ‘with tradies, real estate agents, students and even mums and dads just as likely to be among those regularly abusing the white powder’. In 2015, 80 per cent of pubs in Sydney tested positive for regular narcotics use, with cocaine the leading identified drug. Cocaine and Sydney have a long history together, but the dealers used to work out of the chemist shop and doctor’s surgery.

  Cocaine arrived in Australia in the 1860s as a legal medicinal cure. It was mass-produced and sold by chemists over the counter. For years, chemists and newspaper advertisements sold the public the story that opium-based medicines such as Bonnington’s Irish Moss, Ayer’s Sarsaparilla and Godfrey’s Cordial could cure a variety of ailments. Enthralled by the advertisements directly targeted at them, white middle-class women were the largest supporters of medicinal cures for individual and family ailments. Cocaine was also called a wonder drug that, if mixed with snuff, could cure hayfever and asthma. Famed Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud advocated the use of cocaine for heroin addiction, and was a cocaine-user himself.

  Cocaine was also used in patent medicines, and in Coca-Cola until 1906. ‘Secret remedies’ mentioned on the packaging of medicines failed to disclose use of cocaine and left some users unaware they were becoming addicted to the drug. The ‘cocaine habit’ was recognised from the 1880s, and Sydney newspapers included in their pages reports coming out of America that cocaine was a ‘dangerous stimulant’. While cocaine addiction was seen as uncommon, medical professionals were worried about the impacts on mental and physical health.

  By the early years of the 20th century, the medical profession had taken over greater control of medicines and increasingly made decisions about access to drugs based on the need for treatment. Because cocaine was used as a local anaesthetic and helped to advance medical knowledge, doctors tried to convince the public that cocaine addiction was ‘practically impossible’. But it became clear from those who suffered post-treatment addiction that there were serious social side effects to furthering medical knowledge.

  The First World War also led to an increase in the drug traffic in Sydney. Drugs were given to soldiers as relief from injuries and trench trauma, but the traffic in cocaine cigarettes was far worse. While the problem was far more rife among Canadian soldiers, Australian diggers also became involved. Most ex-servicemen gave up drugs after the war – whether as an individual choice or after pressure from family – but some were still in the throes of cocaine addiction and sought out dealers after repatriation.

  Kate Leigh was released from prison around the same time that thousands of men were repatriated from the war. While the sly-grog business had caught her attention and she directed most of her efforts towards it, she was also perceptive enough to see the influence of drugs in eastern Sydney. She set up her groggeries while she waited for an opportunity to enter the world of drug trafficking and profit from the rise of the cocaine trade in Sydney.

  People in general were alerted to the increase in the drug traffic from the early 1920s, when the spotlight was more firmly placed on chemists and dentists pushing cocaine. Unethical practices on the part of chemists led many street prostitutes into drug addiction. Police then used female informants to case out chemist shops and report back on their sale of narcotics. Once the news- papers jumped on the bandwagon, Sydney’s cocaine problem became a pressing state issue of national concern. In April 1923, the Daily Telegraph blamed the police for the rise in Sydney’s cocaine traffic, citing their inability to deal with the problem and the free rein chemists had over supply. In response, the NSW Pharmacy Board turned the spotlight away from chemists, arguing they were no longer responsible for the city’s drug problems. The criminal underworld was to blame.

  Regardless of who was behind it, Sydney had a serious cocaine problem by the middle of the 1920s. The police were left scratching their heads and wondering how they could limit the trade, particularly after the Dangerous Drugs Bill was shelved in 1923. Prostitutes were succumbing to the addictio
n on a much wider scale and, despite the claims of the Pharmacy Board, were supplied by dealers running businesses linked to pharmacies and dental surgeries. Truth claimed in 1924 that at least 75 per cent of the city’s drug addicts were prostitutes. The Drug Squad finally had a win with the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1927. It gave police full power to suppress the narcotics trade.

  For policewoman Lillian Armfield, the drug trade was ‘cruel and vicious and utterly degraded’. In fact, Armfield thought it ‘made prostitution seem respectable’. Drug dealers would try anything to make money from addicts. Armfield and other police regularly came across adulterated packages of cocaine in which the retailers had included particles of ground glass when cocaine supplies were low.

  Leading drug dealers laughed in the face of police claims that crime didn’t pay: it paid incredibly well in the 1920s, and turned many into drug barons. Nevertheless, one cocaine supplier told Lillian Armfield that it wasn’t so easy and had its problems. He was being worked over by any number of local agents who sold the cocaine and dodged paying for it. As the competitors increased, so too did the threats of violence and efforts to run groups out of town.

  The first major drug raids took place in Sydney in 1925. While a number were conducted with the specific intent of finding opium, large quantities of cocaine were also found. Raids in houses in eastern Sydney in August of that year turned up hundreds of pounds worth of opium, along with two tins of cocaine found under the bed of a woman feigning illness. But it wasn’t only in the poor, crime-ridden streets of Surry Hills that police found cocaine. In one house in Kensington, owned by a wealthy couple who employed a number of servants, customs officers discovered 50 bottles containing cocaine.