by James Morton
The taller man of the two was about 5’ 6” in height, of slight build and fairly well made. He wore a brown felt hat. The smaller man was 5’ 4” high and of similar build to his companion. He wore a cap but I cannot distinguish his clothes.
I think I would know the voice of the first man if I heard it again. It was that of a youth just entering manhood.
A week after the robbery, with the police saying they had no clues, the sales of guns had tripled. Householders were buying neat little Belgian guns, meaning that, over time, there would be more weapons on the market for the likes of Taylor.
Western Australian police still regarded Thompson as a relatively minor criminal who was not up to a ‘big job’, but in Adelaide in 1906, he had received a three-month sentence for assaulting the police and his fingerprints had been taken. They were found on a windowsill at Trotter’s home and Thompson was arrested, along with his girlfriend Flossie Harris, in a house in Jones Lane off Little Bourke Street. Thompson was, reported the newspapers, given ‘a vigorous examination’, whatever that may have meant. There was other evidence: he had been seen loitering nearby, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, and was known to carry a pistol. Squizzy Taylor and Dolly Gray promptly decamped to Adelaide.
Fingerprinting was still in its infancy worldwide and it had not been until the previous year that the admissibility of fingerprints as evidence in Australia was finally decided. Victoria’s sole fingerprint expert, Detective Sergeant Lionel Potter of the Criminal Investigation Branch, told the court he was certain the print was Thompson’s even though it did not tally with the one taken while he was awaiting trial in South Australia. Although the prosecution had experts from South Australia and New South Wales to back Potter up, Thompson’s counsel, George Maxwell, blew smoke all round the court, asking how Potter could tell the difference between the fingerprint of a Chinaman or of a Mongolian. The jurors were given a magnifying glass and asked to compare the prints themselves. Thompson had done what he could, by rubbing his fingers on a cell wall to smooth the skin and taking a bite out of one finger.
From afar, Squizzy Taylor arranged other matters. Thompson’s girlfriend Flossie, who was at one time suspected of being the smaller person involved in the robbery, alibied him to an extent and Mrs Trotter was no longer so confident in her identification. After retiring for four hours, and to great applause from the public gallery, the jury acquitted Thompson, who was again loudly cheered in the street outside.
He left for New Zealand, where he served a short sentence for theft, and then in August 1913 went to Charters Towers in Queensland, where he was arrested for being an idle person. The charge was withdrawn when he undertook to leave Queensland. He had with him a doll from a Christmas pudding that he claimed was his mascot of twenty years. And so Thompson continued his peripatetic life, with, after returning to Melbourne, ticket snatching at the Easter meeting at Williamstown racecourse in 1914, and being charged with attempted pickpocketing in 1915. He and a James Darcy hid in a crowd returning from the races, removing wallets from people boarding trams.
Perhaps the Western Australian police had been right all along and Thompson was not a big-time crim. On the other hand, over the next decade, Squizzy Taylor, now generally thought to have been the second man in the Trotter robbery, acquired an almost iconic status.
First came the Trades Hall robbery.
EXECUTION OF JACKSON
Melbourne, Jan. 24.
The execution of John Jackson for the murder of Constable David Edward McGrath in October last was carried out at the Melbourne Gaol at 10 o’clock this morning. Jackson, who was shot in the leg in the shooting encounter with the police at the Trades Hall, Carlton, when Constable McGrath was shot dead, limped on to the gallows, and when asked if he had anything to say, exclaimed in loud, firm tones: ‘I only wish to thank the gaol authorities and warders for their kindness to me, one and all.’ In less than twenty seconds Jackson was a dead man. He weighed 10st. 1lb, and was given a drop of 7ft. 11½in., his death being instantaneous. He certainly died bravely. For some time prior to his execution he had been penitent, and took a deep interest in the ministrations of the Rev. Forbes. Jackson was 51 years of age, and leaves a widow and two children for whom he showed the utmost devotion.
This had been John Jackson’s first and last conviction; he was a man the police regarded as a master of his craft and one of the most talented safebreakers of the time. Along with his offsider Edward Parker, better known as Patrick Hegarty, he had been suspected of the June 1907 robbery at the Victoria Mint—when some £1300 of gold was taken—particularly after well-known fence and putter-up Thomas Glanville admitted that he had bought the gold from them. It had been stolen hours after a local businessman, EM Pascoe, had deposited it at the mint. Glanville said that the robbery had been executed with a duplicate key taken from the original supplied by a police constable but the locksmiths said this was impossible. On 13 June Senior Constable Barclay was fined £2 for not taking sufficient care to guard the safe. He had, it appears, failed to lock the door to the office containing it. Glanville had offered to sell Pascoe’s gold back to him at a reduced price but this had been refused. However, in October the government refused to compensate Pascoe. When depositing the gold, he had signed an indemnity absolving the mint for any losses.
In early 1912 Jackson and Hegarty were again arrested, this time for a robbery at the jewellers Webster & Cohen in Little Collins Street. Now, in accordance with the new procedures, on their arrest their fingerprints were taken. On 14 February no evidence was offered against Jackson but Hegarty was not as fortunate. His fingerprint had been found on a ginger beer bottle at the shop. Detective Sergeant Lionel Potter gave evidence that the print matched Hegarty’s. Potter, who claimed to have already examined 29 000 fingerprints, was given a thorough going-over regarding the reliability of his tests.
Hegarty was found guilty, and Judge Johnson sentenced him to seven years’ imprisonment, to be followed by detention in a reformatory prison. Hegarty appealed and the chief justice held that, while he believed Potter to be honest, he could not accept that no two people’s imprints could possibly be alike. The other two justices dissented and Hegarty’s conviction was upheld.
In May 1912 Jackson went on trial for a jewellery robbery in January 1905 at Ayres, Henry and Co in Swanston Street. Three safes had been cracked and some watches stolen. On the face of a watch that had been left behind was a thumbprint, which Potter and Inspector Childs, the New South Wales fingerprint expert, said was Jackson’s. However, Jackson, with no previous convictions, produced a magnifying glass for the jury to examine the prints, telling them that he made his money gambling and had never set foot in the shop. He also did well with the judge, who told the jury that they had to be sure that Potter was right about the print. It would, he said, be very hard to convict a man on a print taken seven years earlier. Jackson was acquitted.
His last great success was probably the ‘Eight Hours Day’ robbery at Melbourne’s Exhibition Building. The takings from a union carnival, said to be between £300 and £400, deposited in a safe at the Trades Hall on 26 April 1915, were stolen during the night. The thieves had also helped themselves to biscuits, cheese, wine and stout in the secretary’s office. No charges were brought but it was generally thought that Jackson was involved, and that, with his regular offsider Hegarty doing time, his new helpmate was Richard Buckley.
Quite what induced Jackson to go on the October Trades Hall robbery in which Constable McGrath was shot is a mystery. He should have been comfortably off for the present and he was always the number one suspect in any similar job that went off in the city. He should have called it a day while he was ahead and, indeed, his solicitor Napthali Sonenberg had offered to invest Jackson’s savings in a newsagency for him but he had declined. Perhaps he had come to believe that, at the age of fifty-one, he was untouchable.
This time Jackson’s offsiders were Alexander Ward and, once again, Buckley, who had a long record of violence. Buckle
y had been sent to the Jika Reformatory at the age of fifteen and from then on it was one sentence after another, until in December 1883 he was sentenced to four years and ordered to have three whippings, one a month in each of the first, third and sixth months of his sentence. This was for a street robbery in which a mattress maker, William Murray, was robbed of 25 shillings. He identified Buckley, then known as Summers, at a very rudimentary identification parade. Buckley called an alibi in the form of a mixed-race prostitute, Emma Thomas (also known as Quin Ding), and a thief, Ah Chong, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, were not believed. Sentencing Buckley, the judge told him:
It is monstrous that respectable persons can not be allowed to walk in the public streets of Melbourne in broad daylight without being assaulted and ill treated. I have to inflict such a punishment as will not only be a warning to you, but will make others tremble.
Buckley had received the whippings before he received a free pardon in January 1885. He was given no compensation and it left him a bitter man. By February 1897 he had eleven previous convictions when he received six years for a post office robbery. In April he received a further sixteen years, to be served consecutively, for another receiving charge and for beating an old man who was the acting caretaker on premises he had robbed. He had been found not guilty of yet another armed robbery. Now he told the judge about his wrongful conviction for which he had had no compensation and this time he was asking for some leniency. The judge thought he was being lenient:
If I liked I could order you to be kept in irons for three or four years for the way in which you assaulted the old man Stewart or I could order you to be flogged.
Buckley had known Alexander Ward while in Pentridge, when Ward was serving fourteen years, imposed in September 1902, including twelve for shooting at a police constable with intent to kill. They had tried to escape, which merely added to their sentences.
In the roman à clef Power Without Glory, Frank Hardy placed Snoopy Tanner, a thinly disguised version of Squizzy Taylor, firmly at the scene of the October Trades Hall robbery. In his version, it was orchestrated by bookmaker and fixer John Wren (John West, in Hardy’s novel) to get the union account books that could tell him where illegal payments were going, as well as the ballot box from a recent election. West and Tanner waited around the corner on the night of the burglary, monitoring its progress. However, a contemporary journalist, Hugh Buggy, who closely followed Taylor’s career believed this was one of the few such occasions he was not actually a participant. It may be that Jackson thought there would be similarly rich pickings in the Trades Hall as those from a few months earlier. Unless Hardy’s theory was correct, even if the robbery had been successful, they would have been disappointed. There was only £30 in the safe.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on 2 October, while making his rounds, Sub Inspector Charles McKenna heard tapping, which seemed to him to come from the Trades Hall, as he stood on the corner of Victoria and Lygon streets. When he and Senior Constable Warren went to inspect the premises, they saw two windows open. Warren stayed there, while McKenna ran to Russell Street police station, from where Constables Dent and David McGrath were sent to help Warren. They climbed in through a window, McGrath switched on the lights for the hallway and courtyard, and they began to search the building.
Papers, account books and registers were scattered through the typographical office, lending some credence to Hardy’s theory. As well, the safe had been ripped open at the back. McGrath called out that he was a police officer, and the answer was a volley of shots, one of which hit him in the throat. A total of twenty-six shots were fired by the robbers and police, and Buckley was hit in the neck and thigh. For a time, it was thought he would not survive. Jackson was hit in the leg. Ward managed to climb out of a window and was found edging along a parapet.
At their trial for McGrath’s murder, Jackson ran the unpromising defence that he had shot at the constable to save his own life. Buckley, in a statement to the jury, said that he tried to find an opening at the back of the hall on the top floor. He could not do so, and came back. He rushed past McGrath and did not fire a shot until he was out of the passage. He fired in the air, and not to shoot any of the constables. Ward in his statement claimed he did not know why he took the revolver with him, but that it was certainly not to kill anyone. He was outside the building and knew nothing about the shooting; he had never fired a shot. After retiring for nearly six hours, the jury foreman told the judge that they had agreed on a verdict in the case of one man, but had not been able to agree in the case of the other two and there was no chance of their agreeing. His Honour then said that he would take the verdict arrived at.
The Foreman: We find John Jackson guilty.
Before passing the death sentence, the judge told Jackson there was no hope that he could look to. The final decision did not rest with him, but he urged Jackson to make the best of his time on earth. Ward and Buckley were remanded for a retrial. Jackson appealed.
Meanwhile, on 29 November the Crown had asked for a special jury, an application that Mr Justice Hood granted. It did them no good. On 13 December the jury again disagreed. The general opinion has always been that this was due to Taylor’s interference. However, in his summing up Mr Justice Hodges did leave open the possibility of a not guilty verdict. He told the jury that if the accused did not fire a shot but authorised the firing, they were equal participants with Jackson. If they had been determined to shoot, if necessary, they were equally guilty. If the jury felt that there was such a plan but that one had abandoned it, he should be given the benefit of the doubt. If the jury thought their intention was simply to frighten, then they were not guilty.
Finally, at the third trial, bargains had been struck. No evidence was offered on the murder charge, and Ward and Buckley pleaded guilty to committing a felony, for which they received five and six years’ hard labour respectively. Given their records, these were remarkably lenient sentences that more than wiped out Buckley’s wrongful whipping. After his release, he became a Taylor stalwart.
When Jackson’s appeal came before the State Full Court on 17 December, it was clear from the outset it was going nowhere. His counsel, Mr McFarlane, argued that when Jackson came face to face with McGrath, the officer had shot him through the leg and that as he was about to shoot him again, Jackson had aimed at the officer’s hand or arm but had instead fatally shot him.
Chief Justice: His business was to surrender.
McFarlane went on to argue that McGrath had no right to fire the second shot.
Chief Justice: If he could not otherwise arrest him he had the right to shoot.
There was never going to be a reprieve. Sonenberg offered to put £100 of his own money into trying to take things to the Privy Council but Jackson asked him to give it to his wife instead. He was hanged at the Melbourne Gaol, less than two hundred yards from the Trades Hall. James Cosgrove, serving ten years commuted from the death penalty for a 1909 rape, acted as executioner, so receiving a partial remission of his sentence.
There may have been doubt about Taylor’s involvement in the Trades Hall robbery but there is no doubt that on 29 February 1916, he and another of his gang, John Williamson, hired a taxi driver, William Patrick Haines (who worked for the Globe Motor and Taxi Company at Camberwell and Essendon, and was the grandson of the first prem ier of Victoria, William Clark) for a drive in the country. With them, they took false number plates, suitcases, and wore glasses as a disguise. The intention was to rob a bank employee who was taking money from Doncaster to Templestowe Bank, which had a branch in Bulleen. Haines apparently would not go along with their plan and was shot. At about 11.45 that morning, his body, covered with a blanket, was found inside the cab. Nearby was a partly dug grave and at a waterhole, false moustaches, dungarees, spirit gum and the glasses. Three witnesses who had seen the pair with Haines gave detailed descriptions.
Within days, Taylor and Williamson were arrested at Flemington racecourse, on holding charges of ‘being without means’.
Now witnesses came forward to make positive identifications, and it was a small step to a charge of murder.
The prosecution particularly relied on the fact that the taxi was hired to collect a man, named L’Estrange from Cliveden Mansions. There was no L’Estrange at the flats, but opposite Taylor’s home was a shingle for a well-known solicitor, L’Estrange. Taylor had refused to answer the police questions and there was now what might be described as a rather poor attempt at verballing. The police matron said she had heard Taylor say to Williamson, ‘They cannot very well pot us if they do not identify us’.
Taylor set about putting together an alibi and also having the prosecution witnesses spoken to. The man for that was another offsider, Henry Stokes, who went to see Taylor in the Melbourne Gaol. Would Stokes say he had seen him at around 11 a.m. the day Haines was shot? Of course he would, and he would do better than that, he would find some more witnesses. One of them was a barmaid, Alice Bell, who was prepared to say she had been with Taylor the night before. Then there was a barber who said Taylor had come over to his shop in his pyjamas to be shaved. When questioned, Williamson had told the police that he had slept at the place where he lived, and that he did not get up until nine o’clock when he then had a conversation with the woman of the house.
At the trial in April, Mr Justice Hood dealt fairly with the so-called verbal, saying of the ‘pot us’ comment, ‘[It] is either a perfectly innocent remark or an admission of guilt. It might be said by an innocent man.’ Regarding the witnesses, he was less happy: