The Worst Woman in Sydney

by Leigh Straw

  Attending court again in October 1954 and still pleading poverty by documenting charity from friends, Leigh remained a tough old sort. She told reporters from the witness stand: ‘I ought to punch you on the nose.’ The registrar, still unconvinced by Kate’s tales of poverty, wanted to know how friendly charity had allowed her to pay back a portion of the money owed to the Taxation Department. Kate then claimed she had saved the money, but only a fraction had come from sly grog in the preceding months.

  Even if the taxman hadn’t come calling, Kate Leigh’s time as the country’s biggest sly-grog seller was well and truly over. In February 1955, the NSW government introduced a 10 pm closing time, effectively doing away with the ‘six o’clock swill’. While the papers lamented that the liquor referendum had not been an ‘earth-shaking clash between the beer-barons and wowsers’, late closing was the final nail in the coffin for Kate Leigh’s time as the wealthy sly-grogger of Surry Hills. The locals to whom Kate had supplied back-door booze for many years could now purchase beer and other drinks in pubs later into the evening. There was no more rushing to drink as much as they could in the hour after the end of the working day. They could settle in at the local pub for a few hours without fear of a police raid.

  For all her fame and recognition in the community, Kate retreated from public life in her last years. There were most likely some untruths in her court evidence about her finances – not wanting to pay more tax bills – but the demise of her sly-grog business and sidelining from city crime meant she had very little off which to live. Kate Leigh hadn’t been beaten by a razor or bullets or police investigations. She was eventually brought to heel by the Taxation Department. The taxman turned out to be her greatest foe.

  Leigh’s Devonshire Street house was a shadow of its former self, with rooms let out to other tenants. The Taxation Department had taken most of her assets, and her daughter, Eileen, had very little to spare for her ageing mother. In her last years, Kate lived with a family member – perhaps Eileen or Kate’s nephew William Beahan – in Devonshire Street.

  A massive stroke ended one of the most successful criminal careers in Australian history. Leigh took her last breath at the hospital that had been the scene of so many bloodied arrivals during the worst years of the razor wars. Huddled in a bed in St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst, she died on 4 February 1964, one month shy of her 83rd birthday.

  Three days later, a motley crew of ex-cons, young crooks, family members and neighbours gathered to farewell Kate Leigh at St Peters Church on Devonshire Street, Surry Hills. Her coffin was taken into the church only metres away from her home and former sly-grog shop. Tilly Devine, now in her 64th year, looked frail and thin as she walked up the steps of the church. She sat down inside next to journalist Bill Jenkings, and when he asked if she was paying her last respects to Kate, replied, ‘No, Bill, I’m here sticky-beaking like you.’ Police were in a forgiving and sentimental mood that day. Detectives and senior police overlooked the violent, cunning woman of her youth to eulogise Kate Leigh as having ‘another side to her life’. She was a helper of first-time offenders and warned them against the futility of crime. Kate died having redeemed herself even in the eyes of a police force that had viewed her as one of the worst women in Sydney.

  Eileen Ranson, Kate’s daughter, farewelled her mother and watched as she was buried with full Catholic rites at Botany Cemetery in Matraville. Eileen’s husband would die a decade later and Eileen would live to see the 1980s, dying at the age of 87 in 1987. Like her mother, Eileen died in her eighties and outlived her third husband by just over a decade. Eileen disappeared from public view in the years after Kate’s death. Little is known of her life after the 1960s.

  Kate Leigh continues to fascinate more than half a century after her death. Her story gained wider attention from 2001 through Larry Writer’s book Razor: Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh and the Razor Gangs. When the producers of the true-crime television series Underbelly used Writer’s book as the main source for Underbelly: Razor in 2011, Leigh’s popularity was rejuvenated for a new generation of Australians. Kate Leigh also features in a one-woman cabaret show developed by Vashti Hughes and performed to regular audiences at the Bordello Theatre in the Kings Cross Hotel. When the City of Sydney decided to launch a cultural project using plaques to tell Sydney’s story around important landmarks, Kate Leigh was included as a significant historical figure.

  Part of Leigh’s ongoing appeal lies in her connection to eastern Sydney histories from the 1920s and 1930s, largely romanticised by the passing of time. Ruth Park’s character Delie Stock is probably a closer representation of Kate Leigh than the glamorised Razor television adaptation. Nevertheless, Danielle Cormack, the actor who played Leigh in Razor, researched Kate Leigh and tried to bring some authenticity to her portrayal. She told Melbourne’s Time Out that she thought of Kate as ‘hearty, fearless, formidable, ruthless, menacing, loving’. For Cormack, there was more to Leigh than her label as a notorious criminal woman: ‘despite the terror she instilled, there are also tales of her kindness that make you think twice about who she really was and how she became this legend’.

  Some criminals have the advantage of being born in the right place at the right time. Social and political strains, change, instability and repression can create a context in which criminals are celebrated as reacting against these circumstances. By the 1920s, eastern Sydney was the heartland of the prostitution, drugs, gambling and sly-grog underworlds. Kate Leigh appealed to a repressed working-class eastern Sydney public who were convinced by the favourable image she created for herself.

  Kate Leigh was something of an urban bandit. Aspects of her criminality, notably her sly-grog selling, were created in protest against the restrictive politics of her day. Locals in eastern Sydney believed they were oppressed and had suffered injustices in the close monitoring of their lives, such as going to the local pub. Leigh was prosecuted for her underworld business in sly grog, drugs and prostitution, but she represented the interests of the very poor of Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. She also argued that she was justified in any violence she ever used and that she regretted it. This is all part of an outlaw tradition, most commonly known to Australians through the antics of popular bushrangers and men such as Ned Kelly. I would argue, however, that while Kate Leigh can’t be regarded as an outlaw in the same mould as Ned Kelly, much of her support came from the oppressed locals around her. The outlaw is seen as a ‘friend of the poor downtrodden’, and this is what happened with Leigh.

  A tradition developed around the life of Kate Leigh – and was supported by her interview with People in 1950 – which portrayed her as providing for the poor in a repressive era. Her crimes may have included drugs and prostitution, but she hadn’t been that bad after all. Leigh gave it back to the authorities, whether it was through illegally selling alcohol or resisting their attempts to reform her. She was her own woman, looking after a community she loved, and for this the locals supported her. Hers is a redemption story.

  Family members have also played into the ‘matriarch’ image perpetuated by Kate Leigh and sustained in community memories. Leigh’s great-niece, Gloria Millgate, remembers a diamond-clad rich lady who ‘had a good side as well to her’. Kate often visited her brother Jack Beahan, the two having been close since childhood, when they wandered the streets of Dubbo together. For Gloria, Kate was generous and looked after her family, finding work for her nephews.

  Despite her propensity for violence and the role she played in the early years of organised crime in Australia, Leigh has largely been remembered as an old Australian character from the working-class slums of Surry Hills. Her journey from poverty in Dubbo to establishing an underworld empire in Sydney was a criminal success story, but there is something quintessentially Australian in the telling of this story, too: Kate Leigh has been popularised as a larrikin crook and a crime boss with a heart of gold. While it doesn’t always stack up against her criminal record, it is exactly what Leigh would have hoped for.
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br />   Tilly Devine did not enjoy the same resonance in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. When Devine died in November 1970, one patron at the Tradesman’s Arms in Surry Hills proposed a toast, remembering it as one of Tilly’s favourite drinking spots. No one else lifted a glass. In direct contrast to police descriptions of Kate Leigh on her death, Police Commissioner Norman Allan described Tilly as a ‘villain’. Ron Saw, writing for the Daily Telegraph, labelled Tilly a ‘vicious, grasping, high-priestess of savagery, venery, obscenity and whoredom’. For Saw, the former rascal Kate Leigh was ‘a kindly and generous old trot with many friends’, while Tilly Devine was a ‘wretched woman’ missed by no one. Leigh was eulogised as a woman who, despite her years of crime, did all she could for the community in which she lived. Kate Leigh’s Australian background aided her local appeal in a way Tilly could never match.

  What was it, then, that was ‘quintessentially Australian’ about Kate Leigh? One recent description is interesting:

  She expresses an unashamed sassiness in police and press photographs: grinning, gap-toothed, posing like she’s on the red carpet in a 1930 mug shot, hugging a surprised Devine in 1948. She had her own sense of decency and morality, even if she was the ‘Most Evil Woman in Sydney’ for a while. Leigh was a working class girl, with an R&W [reading and writing] education, who saw a market and made the most of it; giving the men a run for their money … And for all that there is something quintessentially Australian about the woman she was … whatever that means.

  Despite her wealth and running a criminal empire, she was ‘a working class girl’ from eastern Sydney who gave ‘the men a run for their money’. Journalist George Blaikie thought there was something ‘ocker’ about Kate. Writing about her exploits a few years after her death, Blaikie said: ‘No scholar is likely to find Kate Leigh’s name among Australia’s major, or even minor, poets. But she did emit one line which deserves recording in the “ocker” section of our literature.’ Facing the Bankruptcy Court and looking for an explanation for her loss of wealth, Kate said: ‘The bloom has gone off the grog.’

  Historian Russel Ward tried to define the ‘typical Australian’ in 1958, six years before Kate Leigh’s death. The imagery he used related to an Australian legend, more myth than reality, but nonetheless representative of parts of the Australian identity. While it was disputed in the years following Leigh’s death, in part because it was a male national character exclusive of female identities, there is much in Ward’s description that would fit Kate Leigh. The ‘typical Australian’ is practical, ‘rough and ready’, ‘swears hard and consistently’, is ‘fiercely independent’ and ‘hates officiousness and authority, especially when these qualities are embodied in military officers and policemen’. This Australian is also ‘hospitable and, above all, will stick to his mates through thick and thin, even if he thinks they may be in the wrong’.

  Kate Leigh’s celebrated identity also raises the issue of ‘convenient fictions’. While her criminal career does not employ the imaginary, elements of her story indicate artful untruths utilised by the media and accepted by the public as part of Leigh’s appeal. Media narratives about Kate Leigh, based on a popular image, appealed to the poor and oppressed in eastern Sydney. Leigh’s management of her image is evidence of the way criminals will take advantage of artful untruths to resonate with the public.

  The Hills matriarch image allowed Leigh to legitimise her place within the community. This public image resonated more with the public than the reality of a life of crime profiting from standover tactics, drug addiction and prostitution. The criminal celebrity can be instrumental in influencing popular perceptions of their place in history. In her final years, reflecting back on her life, Kate Leigh still believed in her popular identity as a sly-grogger who had never really committed any serious crimes. She said: ‘The only lesson I’ve learned is the old one that crime – if you can call sly grogging crime – doesn’t pay.’

  Kate Leigh’s notoriety in the 1920s was based on her central involvement with criminal groups and the birth of organised crime, but as a woman she challenged preconceived notions about crime. Women were not expected to run criminal syndicates, but Leigh showed they could – and could do it very well. Few have matched her criminal record and hold over organised crime. And she was doing it all at a time when even the idea of organised crime was new.

  It’s not difficult to imagine the bygone days of Kate Leigh in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. While the houses have been renovated and the areas rejuvenated for a modern, wealthier buyer’s market, the terrace houses, former factories and old pubs allow us to imagine what it might have been like back then. But it’s still a far cry from the slumlands Kate Leigh knew and called home. In fact, the area has changed considerably even in the decade since I lived there. I have often wondered what Kate would make of the place now. Tilly Devine’s Maroubra home was demolished in 2009, but you can still visit where Kate Leigh lived in Devonshire Street, Surry Hills. As we have seen, her former home has been turned into a trendy cafe called Sly. This was the home Kate desperately tried to hold onto when the taxman came calling in the 1950s. It sold in 2015 for $1.7 million.

  Kate Leigh used crime to profit in life. She was a tough, violent criminal operator who knew how to hold her own and look after herself. She benefited from addiction, whether to alcohol, cocaine or women. Yet seeing Kate solely as a hardened criminal who made money from booze, drugs and sex doesn’t consider the whole picture. Kate Leigh profited from crime but she gave back to the community. She never forgot that the ‘Hills people’ looked after her when she had nothing. She organised Christmas parties for the local kids, gave money to charities and boys’ homes, and made sure she could offer bail to young offenders in an attempt to prevent them from entering a life of crime. Her good side was celebrated and is still a part of her traditional image in Surry Hills today.

  Kate Leigh has told us her story. It’s there in the People magazine article from 1950. The journalist noted her ‘piercing eyes’, fixed in the distance as she considered the sum of her life. There is no denial of her criminal career. She was a leader of the underworld, regularly at war with her rival, Tilly Devine, and ready to defend her empire. The times changed, the bloom went off the grog, but Leigh remained in the community that had looked after her for so many years. She was the unruly teenager from the country who became a Surry Hills identity, the underdog who battled against the system and came out on top. But she never forgot the people who had made it possible for her. She was no tall poppy: ‘The Hills people were pretty good to me.’

  Kate Leigh at one of the Surry Hills Christmas parties for local kids, 1953. Newspix

  The telling of Kate Leigh’s adult life centres around the eastern Sydney streets of Darlinghurst and Surry Hills, but for the people of Dubbo and Narromine, Kate is also one of their own. When the NSW Police Western Region decided to celebrate 150 years of policing, they included Kate’s old Studebaker car in a display at the Dubbo Showgrounds. The newspaper article features a local police officer in front of Kate’s old car, and the headline reads: ‘Dubbo Crime Queen’s Car’. Leigh also features in a Dubbo heritage tour.

  There is much to draw us into the life of a larrikin crook. Joseph ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, a Melbourne gangster who died during a gun battle in 1927, has been popularised as a larrikin crook, but I think Kate Leigh better represents the ways larrikin crooks have been defined and redefined in Australian culture. Leigh was the quintessential larrikin crook in her younger years in eastern Sydney. She was a member of a gang and wore colourful clothing to stand out in the crowd. She was a delinquent. Over the course of the 20th century, the word larrikin took on other meanings and came to be accepted as a part of Australian identity. The larrikin became a likeable rogue. This is essentially what happened with Kate Leigh. In her changing identity we see a young woman develop from a disorderly, violent ‘push’ gang member and crime boss into an irreverent ex-con who was romanticised as a community matriarch. Leigh is the larrikin of
popular Australian identity – flouting authority, cheeky and bold. She even had a dog called Shifty. One policewoman, a contemporary of Leigh’s, has wistfully reflected: ‘When Kate died I felt, well, there’s a bit of good old Australian history that’s gone’. Kate really was a ‘bit of a wag’, a larger than life character who fitted perfectly into the working-class ethos of eastern Sydney.

  Devonshire Street in Surry Hills is a visible reminder of Kate Leigh’s life and crimes. Across Devonshire Street from where she was farewelled in St Peters Church, Trinity Bar and Bistro has devoted most of the wall space in its upstairs restaurant to retelling the history of the razor wars through photographs and newspaper clippings. Here, Kate Leigh is once more queen of the underworld and a notorious crime boss.

  Leigh was ruthless in running her crime empire and not averse to using violence against her competitors. As an underworld regulator of prostitution, she profited from combining sex with drugs and was responsible for supplying the cocaine that destroyed many young lives, particularly those of some of the young women who worked for her.

  But there’s more to this story. On the other side of Devonshire Street, further down towards Central Railway Station, Kate Leigh looks out at customers from the framed oil-pastel drawing of her on the cafe wall of Sly. In this artistic rendering, Leigh lives on in the public memory as a tough, matriarchal local. This is the other Kate Leigh, who confronts us with greater complexity than the criminal story.

  Kate Leigh never bowed to convention, and remained fiercely independent. She knew she had to prove herself in the underworld, but you don’t survive growing up in a large family, being sent to a reformatory and then doing hard time for your lover without putting some of that resentment to good use. Resentment paved the way for resilience and a fighting spirit that put many to shame in the crime streets of eastern Sydney.