by Leigh Straw
Sadly, it didn’t last. Shiner Ryan was charged with breaking and entering a shop in Gingin and stealing cash and goods. He found himself back inside prison for another three years. By the early 1940s, Shiner was living in a small house near Alma Street in Fremantle, working as a watchmaker who also often mended broken toys for the local kids. Ron Davidson, son of the editor of the Perth Mirror newspaper, tells one humorous story about Ryan’s popularity with the Fremantle kids:
He carried around a bag of sweets which he gave away to kids, many of whom also received their first balloons at parties Shiner helped organise at Fremantle Town Hall. The fact that real balloons were unobtainable in post–World War Fremantle and that these were inflated condoms did nothing to deflate the youngsters’ delight.
Shiner had finally reformed his ways and would not return to Fremantle Prison as an inmate. Instead, he set his sights on wooing the woman of his youth. They wrote letters to each other while Shiner was in prison. He knew he had to have his wits about him, though. His sweetheart was still running her own criminal business in Sydney. Shiner Ryan was in love with Kate Leigh.
Kate Leigh told the story that she had waited for Shiner Ryan for ten years after he went down for his part in the Eveleigh Heist in 1914. Shiner said Kate had wanted to marry him in 1920 but he had taken off to Western Australia. They kept in touch through letters for many years afterwards, but with Ryan in and out of prison, a love affair was difficult to sustain. By the early 1940s, though, both Kate and Shiner were increasingly public about their plans to marry.
It was a rough wooing by some accounts. Hal Baker recalls an interesting lunch he shared with Shiner and Kate in the late 1940s. Seated in Kate’s kitchen in her Devonshire Street house, Hal munched on some food while Shiner Ryan struck up a conversation with Kate. Leigh continued cooking in the frying pan but didn’t appreciate Ryan’s use of bad language. She turned quickly and clobbered him across the head with the pan. Kate then told Shiner off for using bad language in front of a child.
Nevertheless, there was much that united Kate and Shiner. Both had been sent to a reformatory when they were young and had later started associating with gangs in Surry Hills. They lived together in those early hard years in Frog Hollow, and would most likely have not felt there was much of an option but to turn to crime to better their lives. Yet what was different about their criminal experiences was that Shiner was more prone to being arrested for stealing and for threatening violence. Once he had a track record for firing a revolver at police, prison terms were naturally going to be heftier each time. Kate Leigh had a long list of convictions but she could pay off most of her fines. Aside from her long stint in prison after the Eveleigh Heist, she had not spent most of her life in gaol.
Stalled by Ryan’s time inside and Leigh’s marriage to Teddy Barry and relationship with Jack Baker, Kate and Shiner’s love affair took off once more from the early 1940s. There seems to have been an overlap in her relationship with Baker, but Truth newspaper reported in July 1942 that Kate Leigh was ready to marry Shiner Ryan. According to Kate, he had proposed to her in a letter smuggled out of Fremantle Prison. Kate played it up for the press photographer, who took photos of her showing off a wedding frock. Reporters also listened in to her at a gathering in St David’s Church in Surry Hills, where she shared her news and announced that she planned to marry Ryan in St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.
Kate relished the interest excited by her romance. She showed the reporters letters from ‘Ernie’ that she kept in her large handbag. He wrote every day, and when she asked him if he had gone grey – having not set eyes on him for eighteen years – he sent her a lock of his hair. Ryan wrote of dreaming of ‘the day to be’ and convinced Kate he was behaving himself by not drinking or gambling. Glowing after sharing his words, Kate delighted in also imparting that Shiner still called her Bonny. This affection for her youthful nickname was another long connection between the two.
It was a long engagement. Shiner Ryan visited Kate Leigh in Sydney, but a wedding seemed to be off the books for years. In November 1949, Shiner flew into Sydney to visit Kate, and it seemed the wedding was back on. Kate waited excitedly on the tarmac for her beau. Teasing him about other women – and clearly playing up for the papers – she said: ‘I’ve known that mug for nearly 40 years, but I haven’t seen him since he did the Eveleigh job.’ The banter continued between the two – when Shiner tried to convince the reporters that Kate had ‘the softest heart in Australia’, she told him to shut up.
Later that month, Kate stirred up interest again when she travelled to Adelaide under the pseudonym ‘Mrs Brennan’. When the press caught up with her, she denied she was off to marry Shiner. Instead, she said she was simply meeting up with her ‘man friend’ Ernie Ryan. Yet Kate Leigh wasn’t known to make long trips across the country, so the newspapers knew something was afoot.
The second Kate set foot in Perth airport, the press was there with dozens of questions and camera flashes lighting up her entry. Wearing more than £1000 (the equivalent of about $52 000 today) worth of jewellery and wrapped in fox furs, Kate was an unmissable sight as she walked through the small airport in Guildford. Feigning tiredness after her long journey across the continent, Kate promised the reporters she would speak to them soon: ‘I don’t feel too well – I can’t tell yer nothin’.’ She knew exactly how to keep the press at bay by piquing their curiosity.
The wedding took place on 18 January 1950 at St John’s Church in the heart of Fremantle. Stepping out of the Pontiac wedding car and acknowledging the waiting crowd, Kate impressed the reporters with her sky-blue dress teamed with white shoes, gloves and handbag. Sydney’s queen of the underworld was getting married in Fremantle, and the locals were in a frenzy as great as any experienced by reporters on the scene. Fremantle had not welcomed a criminal of Kate Leigh’s notoriety since Shiner moved west in the 1930s.
Kate Leigh and Shiner Ryan after their wedding, 1950. Newspix
The media attention given to the wedding, particularly the lead-up to it, shows the heights of Kate Leigh’s celebrity status by then. Even in Western Australia, on the other side of the continent from her hometown of Sydney, Kate was well known. It was a celebrity wedding and regarded as the social event of the year. The union of two of the most notorious criminals in 20th-century Australia was big news. The newlyweds were even reportedly going to celebrate their wedding afterwards in Sydney at the Celebrity Night Club.
While newspapers made mention of Kate’s ‘former life’, she was distanced from her underworld past. Newspaper editors were reluctant to identify her as a criminal. She was described as a ‘Sydney businesswoman’ and ‘one of Australia’s wealthiest women’. In an earlier story, announcing the plans for a wedding back in 1942, Perth’s Daily News described Kate as a ‘prominent social worker’. Her wealth and status were highlighted over any underworld dealings. Headlines screamed: ‘Kate Leigh Here – Wearing £1,000 Worth of Jewellery’. The romantic angle was also emphasised, with newspapers declaring the wedding the result of a ‘Romance of Many Years’.
Shiner Ryan was keen to play down Leigh’s notoriety for the public. As the media speculated about their future, adding to their celebrity, Ryan told reporters he wanted Kate to sell her businesses and lead ‘the life of an ordinary housewife’. Kate had other plans, however. She told the press they might set up a business in Fremantle, saying: ‘There’s always plenty of money in flowers.’ For anyone with knowledge of Kate’s previous convictions, suspicions would be raised about a flower shop, given she used shops as a front for her sly-grog business.
After all the years of waiting, the many love letters sent and romantic reunions from across the country, Kate Leigh and Shiner Ryan didn’t last more than a year as a married couple. The ‘underworld romance of the century’ proved one thing: Shiner and Kate were more in love with the thought of romance. Their distance apart played into heightened expectations and romanticised their long friendship. Like long-distance lovers who finally
meet, the reality of their life together was far removed from the idealised version of Kate and Shiner in their heads.
Truth reported in January 1951 that the marriage was ‘heading for the rocks’. Kate couldn’t stay in Fremantle and needed to return home. Shiner moved into her house in Surry Hills but six months later was seemingly over his ‘wedded bliss’. Kate told the papers that Shiner had bolted back to Western Australia. She sent a package to The Mirror in Perth containing three shirts and some underpants belonging to him. In the note accompanying the clothing, Kate wrote: ‘Give these to Ryan. I don’t know where he is. You probably do.’
Kate got her revenge by sending a summons as a Christmas present and requesting Shiner appear in court in Sydney to respond to her claims for maintenance. Shiner and Kate were set to appear in court on 18 January, exactly one year after marrying in Fremantle. Kate claimed there was a ‘big story behind this’ but told Truth reporters they would have to ask Shiner about that. No one ever found out what the ‘big story’ was. The greatest challenge the Ryans faced was that neither wanted to move to the other side of the country. Shiner had finally settled, reformed and made a home for himself in Fremantle, and Surry Hills probably brought back too many memories from which he had worked to distance himself.
Why, then, had Kate and Shiner even married in the first place? Rumours circulated around Kate Leigh’s taxation record and whether marriage might have helped should the Taxation Department work up a case against her. Marriage allowed her to claim her money came from Shiner’s work too, and not completely from sly grog or stolen goods.
After a very public tussle from opposite sides of the country, neither Kate nor Shiner filed for divorce. If they remained married, Kate could still claim maintenance from Shiner, but it was clear he had no money. Kate was also a strong-willed woman who was not afraid to cast men aside. Perhaps neither could afford the legal fees required to end the marriage officially. Kate would certainly have been feeling the pinch once the tax case against her started.
By 1953, Shiner Ryan was living in a room at a stable in South Fremantle, making battery whips for horse trainers so he could pay the rent. He told the courts he was unable to maintain his estranged wife in Sydney. They were now regarded as a warring couple who couldn’t sort out their differences. Shiner was on the pension and suffering from asthma. He was only too happy to tell the papers he couldn’t foot the maintenance bill, saying: ‘There’s a woman with thousands – and she wants me to support her.’
Wendy Wilson grew up in South Fremantle, close to South Beach and next door to Shiner Ryan. Back in the early 1950s, Shiner had very little money and was living at the back of the stables. Wendy and her friends used to visit Shiner: ‘his gate went into the stable and that’s how we used to go and visit him’. She recalls a short man, softly spoken and happy to let the kids from the neigh-bourhood watch him working as he made items for the horses. For Wendy, he was a well-liked local: ‘He used to walk along the Terrace and talk with everyone.’ Wendy didn’t know anything of Shiner’s criminal life when she was a child and simply looked upon him as a ‘bit of a character’.
Most people in Fremantle, especially around South Fremantle, respected the fact that Ryan had turned his life around and helped out where he could with community work. He had become a local identity. But Shiner had lived a hard life, and it took its toll on his slight frame. He had spent too many years in and out of prison and on the run across the country. Shiner Ryan died in Fremantle on 26 June 1957, aged 70. He had enjoyed his longest stretch of freedom from prison but it had lasted less than twenty years. Ryan was buried in Fremantle Cemetery; Frederick Samson (later Sir), the Mayor of Fremantle, was a pallbearer at the funeral.
When Frank Davidson, the former editor of Perth’s Mirror, called Kate Leigh with the news, she reminisced about a man who had been an important part of her life and had known her in her ‘Bonny’ days. She told Frank: ‘His brain was in his fingertips.’ Shiner Ryan could pick any lock but turned his talents to art and toymaking in later life. Still known on paper as Mrs Ryan, Kate was listed as the grantee for Shiner’s burial plot. Despite the shortness of their marriage and the animosity of their separation, Kate was sentimental about ‘Ernie’.
Every year until her death, Kate Leigh marked the anniversary of Shiner’s death with a few lines of verse sent to a Sydney newspaper. Frank Davidson may have helped Kate with the words, but the sentiments were hers:
Shiner,
We cannot clasp our heads together sweetheart,
Thy face I cannot see,
But let this token tell,
I still remember thee.
Kathleen Ryan.
9
REMEMBERING KATE LEIGH
Half a century after her arrival in eastern Sydney, and nearing the age of 70, Kate Leigh sat down with a journalist from People magazine and reflected on her ‘colourful’ life. It’s not hard to imagine this larger than life woman sitting back, smiling, laughing, and turning the large rings on her fingers as she considers how best to tell her story. In the published article, Leigh is named the ‘uncrowned Queen of Sydney’s slumland’. Tilly Devine is also mentioned – a ‘retired woman with a tough past’ – but Surry Hills is Kate’s ‘kingdom’. The article allows Leigh to paint a picture of Surry Hills as a quiet place that has overcome its criminal past: ‘You could fire a gun in the Hills at night and you wouldn’t hit a soul.’ Kate fired a gun and shot a man dead in 1930, but not now, not in the quiet, sentimental Surry Hills of her later years.
By 1950, Kate Leigh’s time as one of the most notorious crooks in Sydney had passed. Most people around Darlinghurst and Surry Hills knew she had been a leading underworld figure and still had criminal connections, but she was more of a legend about the place by then. In April 1953, her appearance in court on sly-grog charges was reported with humour:
A well-known Sydney woman today told the Quarter Sessions Appeal Court how she had locked the chief of the vice squad, Sgt Ron Walden, in her bedroom. She is Kathleen Barry, also known as Kathleen Ryan and Kate Leigh, who said Walden was searching her house in Surry Hills at the time. She said that when he went into the bedroom, she put the bolt on it and said: ‘You might as well search it properly.’ She left him there. Barry said she ‘had only done it for a joke, as we are old friends.’
It mattered, too, that the 1950s witnessed the rise of other organised crime groups in Sydney. New crime figures such as Abe Saffron and the Balmain boys – Lenny McPherson and Stan Smith – posed a greater threat than the elderly Kate Leigh. Saffron wasn’t doing anything drastically different from Leigh. He built his empire on the back of real estate purchases, illicit booze, drugs, stolen goods and prostitution. What set him apart from her, and made him a greater threat by the 1950s, was that he had little desire to win over the eastern Sydney locals. Kate also simply couldn’t compete in business with Saffron. No one would have taken her seriously if she wanted to start controlling some of the new nightclubs popping up across the place and making a fortune for Saffron. Kate was in her seventies and was losing associates to the new crime groups.
There was, however, a lot of fight left in the elderly Kate Leigh. A year after the incident with the sergeant, Kate was charged with assaulting a taxidriver. Electrical fitter Roy Fowler-Glover gave evidence that the whole incident had started when he bought two bottles of beer from Kate’s Devonshire Street house, only to find they contained water. Roy headed back to Kate’s place in a taxi and confronted ‘Mum’ at the front door. Defending Kate, Roy told the courtroom he thought it was one of Kate’s ‘coots’ that robbed him of his beer. When Kate refused to give him replacements, Roy stood back on the footpath, ready to throw the bottles through the front window of the house. When 73-year-old Kate Leigh ran back inside, Roy knew it was bad news. She came bounding back out moments later, pointing a gun at the taxidriver and allegedly telling him, ‘Get going, you mug, or I’ll blow your brains out.’ Roy and the taxidriver quickly took off in the direction o
f Darlinghurst. When a detective questioned Kate, she replied, ‘Wouldn’t you take a gun to them? The mug was going to throw a bottle through my window.’ On closer inspection, the detective found the gun was unloaded. Kate avoided a conviction for assault but was fined for sly-grog selling.
Roy Fowler-Glover’s misfortune shows that an elderly Kate Leigh could still intimidate much younger men. She had retained the affectionate title of ‘Mum’, but there was no messing with her. The unloaded gun is the giveaway here – in her younger years, Kate would have made sure it was loaded.
Kate Leigh had a long track record for sly-grog selling, but she prided herself on selling quality booze, and charging an arm and a leg for it. The water scandal in 1954 was a clear indication that Kate’s mainstay – sly grog – was no longer sustaining her luxurious lifestyle. That same year, Kate was declared bankrupt. It came after she was questioned over unpaid tax estimated to be in the thousands of pounds. The taxation department brought down many underworld figures in the United States in the years following the Roaring Twenties, including the infamous Chicago crime boss Al Capone. The Australian authorities learned a great deal from their American counterparts. When organised crime bosses such as Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine were finally held accountable for unpaid taxes, their grip on crime permanently loosened.
Appearing in the Bankruptcy Court in August 1954, Kate Leigh pleaded poverty: ‘You could turn the place from Sydney to England and you would not find a penny piece belonging to me. I am stony broke.’ It would have been more convincing had she not been wearing expensive rings and furs, yet it was clear that her circumstances were now far removed from what Truth called the ‘popular legend’.
The State Receiver wanted to take over her house at 212 Devonshire Street to pay her debts, which amounted to seven times her assets. Kate claimed she sold alcohol on the ‘sly’ but had ‘gained nothing by it’ in years. Police, she reckoned, were the real money makers, raking in fines. When asked how she had paid back a large sum of money to the tax office, Leigh claimed it came from old friends.