by Leigh Straw
The locals knew most of Kate’s gifts for the kids had been knocked off, but they made sure their kids didn’t ask too many questions.
Jack Baker’s grandson, Hal, tells an interesting story about the local practices in Surry Hills. Everyone knew the goods on offer were ‘hot’ – stolen goods – but the crooks kept in with locals and offered them kickbacks. Jack Baker had connections at the markets and butcher’s shop. Hal often didn’t pay for anything:
It was made up and you just took it. So there were favours, returned favours to Grandfather, or Grandfather had paid in advance. But you could lay odds that somewhere along the line Grandfather had done them some kind of favour. Either he’d bought something for them at the right price that was going hot, or he’d lent them money to start the business, or whatever.
As a teenager, Mary Mitchell kept Kate Leigh’s books and got to know her well. She and other locals knew how Kate was making her money. They also knew about the basement in Jack Baker’s Great Buckingham Street house full of stolen goods he was keeping for Kate, but no one told the police. Everyone knew but the Surry Hills community looked out for Kate and Jack. Mary describes community protection well:
… we grew up with rules and regulations of, if a policeman knocks at the door, and you answer the door, and he asks, ‘Do you know where Mrs so and so and Mr so and so live?’, you don’t know anything. You don’t tell the law anything. Their business is their own, and you don’t divulge anything.
Mary Mitchell later married Jack Baker’s son.
Kate Leigh might have been peddling stolen goods to the kids at her Christmas parties but she genuinely cared about the children in her community. Her kitchen was a meeting place for many youngsters, who would roll in and enjoy being fed whatever Kate was making for lunch. She was generous with the kids and hardly turned anyone away, even in later life when money was scarcer than it had ever been.
The local Salvation Army and churches benefited from Kate Leigh’s charity, as did one orphan, Johnny, who was taken in by Kate. Offering charity to the local community is one way criminals seek acceptance. Despite negative portrayals of Leigh’s crimes, the press at times played down her organised crime associations in favour of a flattering, popular image of her assisting her local community. Leigh enjoyed press stories about her appearance at local courts helping out first-time offenders. In fact, she claimed that what she did was in thanks to a community that had helped her when she was ‘down and out’. This community image was based on the egalitarian values of working-class life in Surry Hills and the idea that community members were expected to help each other. Locals praised Leigh in the press for the help she provided for the unemployed during the Depression. Newspapers also used police testimony in court to publicise Kate’s better side. In 1933, one police officer told of Kate Leigh’s ‘good side’, demonstrated in her giving food to the unemployed and paying funeral costs for the deceased wife of a local man.
Despite her criminal history, Kate stood firm on the morals she thought counted the most. Appearing in court in 1943, she argued: ‘Nobody can say anything against my morals.’ As she told People magazine in 1950, she didn’t drink or smoke and couldn’t understand how some young women lost control of their lives: ‘You can’t do nothing for some women.’ She also took advantage of comparisons with her rival, Tilly Devine. She in fact saw herself as a better and more moral woman than Devine. While they had both served numerous prison sentences, Leigh told the press that, unlike Tilly, she had never been convicted for prostitution. And we know that she objected to being called the ‘worst woman’ in Sydney and preferred being called the most ‘notorious’. The difference is important. Notorious suggests she was infamous, outrageous or widely known. The ‘worst woman’ implied Kate was the extreme of female criminals in the city, the lowest of the low.
Personal pride and morals were crucial to Leigh’s image as a matriarch. Her family also publicly supported her moralistic, matriarchal identity. During her bankruptcy case in 1954, Kate’s nephew, William John Beahan, whom she had brought up from a young age, told the courtroom she was a remarkable woman: ‘She puts on parties for the kids … but she has never smoked or drunk in her life.’
Her long-time residence in eastern Sydney made Kate Leigh’s popular community image possible. She was a Surry Hills matriarch who worked, lived in and supported the community: ‘I’ve been in the Landsdowne Street place for 17 years. And I’ve never once missed giving a Christmas party for the kids round here. I love them and they love me.’ Rather than use her money early on in her career to buy a large house in an outlying suburb as Tilly Devine had done, Leigh remained loyal to the community that had welcomed a former reformatory girl with few opportunities in life. As she told the press in 1950, ‘The Hills people were pretty good to me when I had nothing and I won’t leave them now.’
Leigh’s tough, no-nonsense personality fitted perfectly into Surry Hills, where ‘life is characterised by the personalities of people’ forming a community defined in the press by ‘the roughness of jungle justice’. For the children who lived in Surry Hills or visited family there, Kate Leigh was a powerful and admired presence. Hal Baker often visited her in her Devonshire Street home where she would make him lunch. Describing Leigh as a ‘bit of a wag’, Hal recalled the time she gave his grandfather money to purchase Shetland ponies that she used to give kids pony rides on a vacant block of land at Ward Park. Even today, Leigh remains an ‘Australian version of Robin Hood’ for Hal Baker.
Although Kate was accepted as a largely reformed crook, young people knew about her criminal record and were also wary not to mess with her – much like the teenager who told the reporter at the 1948 Christmas party not to tip him off to old Kate.
In the absence of archival records providing insights into Kate Leigh’s private life and perceptions of her criminal career, newspapers fill a void. They allow us to chart her changing public identity from ‘worst woman’ to ‘kindly old trot’. She manipulated this image by making sure reporters knew how she wanted stories to be written and inviting the press to attend her Christmas parties. She was smart in publicising a matriarchal identity that contrasted with her notoriety. It would not have been completely convincing, however, had the locals not shown their support for her. That they came out in their hundreds for her street parties shows a certain degree of acceptance of her criminal career and a willingness to celebrate her as a community identity.
It was this matriarchal community identity that rekindled an old romance for Kate Leigh. Reformed crook Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan jetted into Sydney in November 1949, telling reporters he was there to convince Kate to finally marry him. Kate had won over Shiner with her mellowed community-minded image. She had also convinced the newspapers she had turned over a new leaf. In the newspaper coverage of Shiner’s arrival, Kate is no longer the ‘worst woman’ or a harridan of the underworld. She is ‘Sydney celebrity Kate Leigh’.
HOW MUCH OF HIS LIFE has he spent sitting in a cell and thinking about the outside world? He’s lived this life of forced regulation for too long. He doesn’t really want to know how long. It might break his spirit. What’s left of it anyway. They probably took most of it when they packed him off to the reformatory as a kid and started the abuse.
Fremantle Prison. They made the convicts build this joint. Imagine that. Building your own place of incarceration. Used to flog the prisoners in here and put them in irons. He’s heard the stories about famous escapes. Moondyne Joe and JB O’Reilly. The Fenians were behind O’Reilly’s escape. Took off in a boat and made it to New York! They’ve made sure since then that it’s pretty much impossible to escape. He thinks he could have a good crack at it. He’s broken out of plenty of prisons but what good would it do? They’d catch up with him eventually and he’d serve more time.
He doesn’t want to die in prison.
It’s bloody cold most days. Limestone walls and little light to warm the place. But it’s prison, right? They don’t want you to enjoy your
self.
He knows a few of the inmates but not many. Comes from a life spent running across the country.
He sits on the edge of the bed and starts writing a letter to his fiancée in Sydney. Wonders, too, if anyone else over there remembers him. His old mate is still serving time for that robbery all those years ago. Reckon his spirit will be broken.
There’s a tap at the door and the viewing window opens.
‘True what they say here?’ the warden asks pointing to a newspaper story. ‘You going to marry her then?’
He nods thoughtfully, and goes back to writing the letter.
‘Bit bloody difficult from inside here, mate, but do me a favour, eh? Serve your time and don’t come back here. You marry this woman and set up a new life.’
That’s exactly what he wants to do.
He signs off as Ernie and kisses the paper. He’s a sentimental old bastard.
Now just to convince his fiancée that she should leave Sydney and come to live with him in Fremantle when he’s released.
Could love really make Kate Leigh leave her beloved Surry Hills?
8
‘UNDERWORLD ROMANCE OF THE CENTURY’
In her younger years, Kate Leigh was Samuel Freeman’s girl. She dated the Surry Hills gang leader when she was learning the criminal ways of inner-city Sydney. Their undoing came when Kate tried to provide Samuel with an alibi in 1914 for the attempted murder of a postal worker and for the Eveleigh Heist that followed days later. When Freeman was released from prison 25 years later in 1940, he had spent a total of 40 years in Long Bay Gaol. He was a broken man and Kate had moved on from her Frog Hollow companions a long time ago. Or had she?
While the press retold the story of Kate’s romance with Freeman, another man from Kate’s past resurfaced, and he was closer than anyone had expected to the events of 1914. Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan, the second man behind the heist, was telling everyone that he and Kate were in love and would soon wed. Shiner Ryan was the other man in Kate’s life back in her younger Surry Hills days. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting couple. In the early 1940s, Kate was in her sixties, and Shiner in his late fifties, both well known for their notorious criminal records but largely reformed. Newspapers across the country followed their romance through the 1940s, and Kate enjoyed giving everyone the run-around about whether or not she would marry her old Frog Hollow mate. It was the ‘underworld romance of the century’.
Shiner Ryan had had a lot of time to consider the direction of his life by the time he settled on Kate. By 1944, while serving his last stint inside, Shiner had spent a total of 37 years in prisons across the Australian states. He was already notorious before the press picked up on his love affair with Kate Leigh. He was a well-known inmate of Fremantle Prison and featured in a number of newspaper stories about his life of crime and long punishment record. Yet Ryan remained an unassuming man who preferred his own company and spent much of his free time in gaol creating model ships out of clay, mud or cold porridge. His 1940s life was a far cry from the wayward boy from Adelaide who was institutionalised as one of the worst street youths in the city of churches.
Born in Adelaide, South Australia, in August 1886, Ernest Alexander Ryan first came to the attention of authorities in May 1902 when he was found wandering the streets and up to no good. This was five years after Kate Beahan was hauled before the courts under similar circumstances. Punishment was swift for Ryan. He was whipped and sent off to a reformatory until he turned eighteen. Virtually nothing is known of Shiner’s childhood, but he lacked any form of decent home life. He later recalled the brutal punishment inflicted on him at the reformatory:
I was forced to remove my trousers and was then placed on a form face downwards … The flagellator had a 4ft. birch. At the word ‘One’ from the Supt. the wound-inflictor would proceed with the strokes. Slowly the boss would count. After the eighth stroke one became numb or unconscious. On awakening next morning I found the nightshirt was stuck to the skin.
The reformatory helped Shiner Ryan forge a reputation that would mark his many years of crime. From the moment he first entered the reformatory, the one thing he wanted was to be free. The solution was escape, and Shiner became one of the country’s best escape artists. He absconded from the reformatory on 15 June 1902 and ended up in Broken Hill. The authorities caught up with him there and he was charged with vagrancy and sent to prison. After his release, he began breaking into houses back in his home state before moving to Sydney. In the slum streets of Surry Hills and around the notorious Frog Hollow, he began hanging out with other thieves. Caught on another stealing charge, he went back to South Australia after serving time and kept going further west, arriving in Fremantle in 1905.
It wasn’t long before he was in trouble again, but this time he pushed his luck much further, if he had ever really had any before. Involved in a robbery at a North Fremantle store, Ryan tried to escape from the police and threatened them with a revolver. Ryan’s lawyer found flaws in the indictment, and the two-year sentence was successfully appealed. The appeal was swiftly reviewed, however, when Shiner was involved in another robbery. For this he was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in the notoriously harsh Fremantle Prison. What also worked against him, other than the attempted violence against police, was that he was an ‘undesirable immigrant’ from another state.
Western Australians feared a rise of a dangerous class in Perth and Fremantle from the turn of the 20th century. Buoyed by the gold rushes of the late 19th century and the influx of new residents, the metropolitan area expanded more than ever before. Urban crime was naturally on the radar of police, courts and public opinion. Local newspapers used criminal cases to argue that criminals from outside the state had invaded Western Australia. In May 1904, Perth’s Truth newspaper argued that the gold rushes from the late 19th century turned the state into a ‘dumping ground of notorious criminals from every portion of the globe – especially the Eastern States’. Some of the ‘most expert and daring ruffians in Australia’ reportedly inhabited the streets of Perth and Fremantle, hanging around public houses and forming gangs menacing respectable business owners and residents. Shiner Ryan lived up to the sensationalism. He was yet another eastern states ruffian threatening good order in the west. It was far more settling to blame outsiders for crime than acknowledge the fact that a growing number of men and women born in Western Australia were involved in crime.
When Shiner Ryan was released in 1907, he returned to Adelaide and close police surveillance. He was charged as a vagrant in 1909 and 1910. A charge of vagrancy was one way the police could get known criminals off the streets. What it didn’t guarantee, however, was that Ryan would stay behind bars. He escaped shortly after his incarceration in 1910. When police officers found him, he once again threatened them with a revolver and was sentenced to three years in Yatala Prison in Adelaide. By this stage, Shiner was firmly caught in a cycle of theft, imprisonment and escape.
When he was released from prison in 1926 after serving his time for the 1914 Eveleigh Heist, Ryan was frank in an interview with the Adelaide press. He was ‘embittered and sore’, and understood that people thought he was ‘one of the worst of a bad lot, in fact one of the ne’erdo-wells who neither have the brains nor the ability to do the right thing’. In 1929, Ryan attempted to blow a safe in Adelaide and, in a rush to evade police officers, shot one policeman – who narrowly survived when the bullet hit a whistle hanging over his heart. Ryan was sent away for two years and four months’ hard labour and unsuccessfully appealed the sentence.
Shiner Ryan couldn’t break the cycle of crime and incarceration. After his release from prison in South Australia, he moved back west with a young prostitute. Using the alias Alexander Clemow, he was caught for a robbery in Subiaco in 1932 and sentenced to another prison term. The papers, already well aware of his criminal identity, were quick to report on the robbery:
When chased during the early morning of Sunday, September 11, Ryan did not hesitate to shoot
at his pursuer. He had used a gun in the execution of crimes at other times and has been mentioned by the authorities in connection with recent robberies when shots were fired by the criminals. Not long ago a storekeeper at Bassendean was shot in a leg, and more recently a policeman at Mundaring was fired at when robbers were disturbed.
Having spent too many years in prison, by the middle of the 1930s Shiner was determined to turn his life around. In his story, the press found much to support and rallied to his defence. He had been a dangerous gunman but seemed determined to reform his ways. He was a model prisoner and had not attempted to escape from Fremantle Prison. Pointing to his troubled childhood, a supportive local press in Western Australia was willing to argue that the harsh treatment he had received for petty crimes committed as an adolescent had ‘embittered him and made him determined to prey upon society’. Much of the change in Ryan was captured in his painting ‘The Black Sheep’. It depicts Christ walking away from Fremantle Prison holding a black sheep in his arms. Ryan explained to the press, ‘The black sheep I have put in the arms of Christ is me’ and the closed gates of the prison ‘were those behind which a man locks his inner self’.