As a result of what goes on daily — thanks to the Crimes Act, thanks to under-policing — Razorhurst grows more and more undesirable as a place of residence for the peaceful and industrious. Unceasingly it attracts to its cesspool every form of life that is vile.
If there was a symbol for these violent times, it was the razor, adopted as a weapon when handguns were banned. Not that there were no shootings; there were, as we will see. But while most criminals did not carry a gun, they invariably concealed on their person at least one razor, usually a cutthroat blade, honed to hair-splitting sharpness, and, as police and hospital records prove, they did not hesitate to use it. There were a number of deaths by razor, but the implement was also unsurpassed as a weapon of intimidation and disfiguration. An inordinate number of wrongdoers back then wore the telltale mark of a razor attack — an L-shaped scar extending down one cheek then across to the mouth. Like the prospect of a shark attack, or of being gnawed by rats or strapped into the electric chair, the thought of a deep cut with a sharp blade evokes a primeval fear, a response that shivers the skin and tingles the spine.
By the time casualties and a rejuvenated police force ended the hostilities of the gangs of Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh, Phil Jeffs and Norman Bruhn, as many as a score of gangsters were dead and hundreds of others razor-scarred and bullet-punctured.
This is the story of the rise and fall of the warriors of Razorhurst.
PART 1
First Offences
1
Slumland
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, developers had been knocking up cheap, badly designed, haphazardly constructed rows of terrace houses and shacks on the hills and hollows to the east of Sydney Town. The dwellings were for the poor who toiled on Sydney's wharves and in its factories, foundries and shops, and needed to live within walking distance of their workplaces. Many of these houses were unfit for human habitation from the day they were built. Often more than twenty people were crammed together in rough timber-and-brick structures that were refrigerators in winter and furnaces in summer when their corrugated-iron roofs magnified the sun's rays and drove temperatures inside to infernal (sometimes life-threatening) levels. By the early years of the twentieth century, much of East Sydney was a teeming slumland of ramshackle, rat-infested and bug-ridden dwellings, set like rotting teeth in a maw of mean streets and sleazy lanes.
True, there were many fine dwellings in Kings Cross, Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst, home in the 1800s and the early 1900s to the city's pioneers and those who prospered by dint of good fortune or hard work. A number of these impressive buildings survive gloriously today. But then, in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, came Sydney's transport revolution, and the ‘slumification’ of Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo, Paddington and Kings Cross was all but complete. With trams, trains, automobiles and improved roads providing quick and easy commuting access to the city from the new garden suburbs of Strathfield, Lane Cove, Hunters Hill, Waverley, Kogarah and Manly, most of the Sydneysiders who could afford to fanned out, abandoning their East Sydney homes primarily to the wretched and the villainous. The evacuees sold their mansions, solid bungalows and terrace houses to developers and slum landlords who divided the dwellings into tiny flats and installed as many tenants as possible. Soon the once-proud homes deteriorated until they were as egregious as any shanty.
In his book Surry Hills: The City's Backyard, Christopher Keating cites a 1902 Sydney Municipal Council survey of housing. The survey noted that in those days the Surry Hills area accounted for about 30 per cent of Sydney's houses and that properties in Surry Hills ‘exhibited all the old defects characteristic of inner-city rental housing’. Nearly half of the houses in Surry Hills had either defective drains and sewer connections or inadequate sanitary facilities. There were seven times fewer indoor toilets in Surry Hills than elsewhere in Sydney and only 8 per cent of dwellings were properly proofed against rising damp. Rooms were perpetually wet and, usually with tiny — or no — windows, poorly ventilated. Typically, a five-room house in Surry Hills or its neighbouring suburbs had just one tap, and it was in the backyard, by the toilet. There was no garden; no gas, no electricity. Food was cooked on wood- or coal-fuelled stoves. Front doors opened onto the street. Roofs were of slate or iron which rusted and leaked. With inadequate or no sewerage and sanitation, household garbage, dead animals and human waste were buried in the backyard or simply piled up, and, the stomach-churning stench notwithstanding, forgotten. Vermin flourished in the filth. And there were epidemics — notably the bubonic plague of 1900 in which 103 Sydneysiders perished and thousands fell ill.
At various times, well-meaning reformers convinced civic fathers to raze particularly obnoxious East Sydney slums. Sometimes new and better housing rose on the vacant site, but more often a smoke-belching factory or noisy workshop was erected. The residents displaced by slum clearance were forced to sublet rooms from neighbours whose homes had been spared, thus exacerbating the problem of overcrowding.
The poor of East Sydney brightened the gloom of their lives by going to the Rugby League and cricket at the Sydney Cricket Ground, to the boxing or wrestling at the Stadium at Rushcutters Bay, to the Moore Park Zoo, the Domain Baths (with its separate sections for men and women), the White City fairgrounds with their fortune-tellers and merry-go-rounds, or the buckjumping in Hyde Park. The annual Royal Easter Show and a visit by the clowns and acrobats of Wirth's Circus were red-letter-day events.
But for many, fun and games could not assuage their despair, and they took solace in drugs, alcohol and random sex. Consequently, drug addiction, drunkenness and venereal disease were rife. To feed themselves and their families, and also fund a few pleasures, people supplemented their meagre wages earned slaving in machinery shops and arsenic factories, unloading ships, brewing beer and catching and killing rats (the City Council, still traumatised by the bubonic plague, for a while paid six shillings a rodent), by gambling what they could not afford to lose, or becoming thieves and muggers. Women — the widowed, the deserted, the unemployed, those with many mouths to feed, or who needed to pay for their alcohol or drug addiction — became prostitutes. Impoverished parents sent their children to work in factories, and child prostitution was rife.
The death rate in the slums of East Sydney in the early years of the twentieth century was 20 per cent higher than in the rest of Sydney. The Sydney Morning Herald branded the area ‘a sort of Alsatia for the criminal, the unfortunate and the very poor’, and called living conditions in Paddington ‘a menace to health and morals’.
Generally, Surry Hills was no better, no worse, than its neighbouring suburbs. It was merely typical. Ruth Park wrote memorably of the Hills in Poor Man's Orange, of how it ‘clung to the proud skirts of Sydney like a ragged, dirty-nosed child’. A folk poet calling himself ‘Bill Rock’ captured the essence of the area:
Truants scooting wooden slopes
Adventure bound,
Persistent hawkers’ raucous hopes
In alleys sound
Little shops on little hills
Tawdry array
Pallid plants in pots on sills
Mock dwellings grey
Landlords rap and rap for rents
Some quietly
Some blind to tenants’ eyes in vents
Fixed furtively
Battered belles fill doorway frames
Shifty-eyed
Stare and laugh down seamy lanes
On Surry side
Of all the wretched traps that festered in East Sydney, the worst was Surry Hills's Frog Hollow, located on and around the sheer cliff that plummeted from the western side of Riley Street, between Ann and Albion streets. In the decade before World War I until the late 1920s, when, mercifully, it was razed, criminals battened themselves to Frog Hollow like fleas to a rat. The frogs which gave the swampy, crater-like gully in the bowels of the Riley Street escarpment its name sensibly departed to more congenial surroundings sometime in
the 1800s, leaving the stinking labyrinth of narrow, dark and airless alleys and higgledy-piggledy, jammed-together hovels to a scabrous collection of blackguards and their barefoot children, mangy pets and vermin. Local clergymen had no trouble evoking a picture of hell for their parishioners — they merely told them to take a stroll to Frog Hollow.
There, lawbreakers schemed robberies and murder, lay low from the police, hid their stolen goods, gathered in the notorious Sunbeam Hotel to grow woozy on opium and cocaine and gut-rot booze, suffered the agony of venereal disease, died of plague, and bashed, raped and otherwise abused one another. The area was headquarters for many mobs, and none more forbidding than the Riley Street Gang, whose ruggedly handsome leader, armed robber Samuel ‘Jewey’ Freeman, lived in a shack there. When he was not robbing people at gunpoint, Freeman's idea of fun was beating senseless the last ragtag manifestations of the old Surry Hills larrikin youth gangs, namely the Forty Thieves and the Big Seven, who attracted a police presence in the Hills that Freeman (with serious villainy of his own to conduct) could well have done without.
In the late 1800s and the first few years of the twentieth century, gangs of larrikins — called ‘pushes’ — roamed the streets. The members of Woolloomooloo's Plunkett Street Push, the Rocks Push and Surry Hills's Forty Thieves and the Big Seven were troublemakers and nuisances, but apart from a little mugging for beer and cigarette money they confined their roguery to catcalling women and well-dressed citizens in the street and raising lumps on each others’ heads with sand-filled socks. They were often recruited by local politicians to menace rivals’ supporters and to swell the numbers at public meetings. These unruly but generally harmless louts were despised and mocked by the district's truly hard criminals, such as Freeman and his Riley Street Gang, and by 1910–1915, the larrikins had been run off.
A frequent ally of Freeman in armed robbery and larrikin-bashing was a weedy con man, safe-cracker and deft picker of locks named Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan. Ryan often dossed in Freeman's lair, and in 1913, the duo was joined by Freeman's latest lover, a wild, thirty-two-year-old thief and prostitute named Kate Leigh.
2
Young Kate
Ned Kelly had been dead just a year when Kate Leigh was born on 10 March 1881 in the cattle town of Dubbo, in central west New South Wales. Near the shanty where she was delivered was a grand new classical courthouse with a gaol and gallows at the rear. The prison, with its isolation cells and the wooden scaffold that was in use until 1904, fascinated little Kathleen Mary Josephine Beahan — not least because her beleaguered parents often warned the cheeky and wilful child that if she didn't mend her ways, Dubbo Gaol was where they'd send her.
Kate, nicknamed ‘Bonnie’, was one of thirteen children of Timothy Beahan, an impoverished cobbler who moonlighted as a horse trainer, and his wife Charlotte. Kate and Charlotte were close, but the child was forever at odds with her father. He thrashed her, and punished her by depriving her of food — which only steeled her rebellious streak. From the age of eight, Kate (who in her long life would notch up 107 criminal convictions and serve thirteen gaol terms) was in strife for stealing from her parents and siblings and from local shops, whacking other children and playing truant.
When she was ten, Kate ran away from home and was despatched to Parramatta Girls Home as a neglected child. After four years, she was released and worked as a waitress and in factories in Glebe and Surry Hills. She was sexually precocious and ran with the wildest youths. Her first criminal conviction was for vagrancy, in effect, being without lawful means of support.
On 2 May 1902, when she was twenty-one, she married a thirty-year-old carpenter, illegal bookmaker and petty crook named Jack Leigh. They had a daughter, Eileen. Jack thought himself a hard man, and was gaoled for beating up and robbing the landlord of their Glebe flat. At her husband's trial, Kate tried to convince the court that Jack had not attacked the landlord in a bid to steal his money, but because he had flown into a jealous rage when he arrived home to find her and the landlord in bed together. She and Jack were so broke, she cried, that she had been reduced to sleeping with the landlord in lieu of paying him rent. The court did not believe her and Kate followed Jack into Darlinghurst Gaol, convicted of perjury and being an accomplice in the assault. It was not the last time Kate Leigh would go down for standing by her man. When Kate and Jack Leigh were released from prison after five years, they parted and, as far as is known, never saw each other again.
For the next few years, from around 1910, Kate provided for herself and Eileen as best she could. She toiled in factories, but soon the long hours and low pay of the straight life grated. She would always deny it in her later years, but police records show that Kate supplemented her legitimate income by running brothels and, in particularly cash-strapped times, prostituting herself on the streets of East Sydney. By 1913, she was strictly illegal. That year, she was convicted of maintaining a house frequented by prostitutes and was placed on a twelve-month good-behaviour bond. By now, good behaviour played little part in Kate Leigh's life.
Those who only knew Kate when she was older and toadlike and blowzy were always incredulous when told that she was the most prized of gangsters’ girls before the Great War. She was petite, at 51 kilograms and 152 centimetres tall, and wore her thick, wavy dark hair in a large bun topped with a floppy hat that trailed ostrich feathers. Her small brown eyes twinkled and her handsome face, in spite of the dark and smoky dens she frequented, retained vestiges of a fresh country glow. Brave, anti-authority and usually in high spirits, this ‘good-looker’ was courted by her criminal peers, both for their own sexual delectation and to snatch a share of her streetwalking takings. Leigh also earned money stealing, fencing and acting as a bail broker. As she had proven in spinning the story that she hoped would get her first husband off his assault charge, she had no qualms about standing up in court and providing false alibis, for which service members of the underworld paid her well.
Kate and Jack would officially divorce in 1922, the year she wed another scoundrel, a Western Australia–born musician named Edward ‘Teddy’ Barry, on 26 September. That marriage ended when Kate surprised Barry in bed with another woman. She battered them both and banished him from her life.
When Kate and Barry split, she would become the consort of a rogues’ gallery of small-time hoods. There was ‘Gaol-Bird Joe’ Denmead, Len Martin and the charming ‘Monkey’ Webb, who delighted in climbing aboard trams and appalling the passengers by devouring raw sausages and barking like a dog.
When Teddy Barry died in 1948, Kate attended his funeral in Sydney wearing an unforgiving expression and an expensive silver-fox fur, as if to somehow show the deceased what a bad career move it had been to cheat on her all those years ago. After divorcing Barry, Kate reverted to the surname ‘Leigh’, which she retained until 1950, when she wed her third husband — of all people, Samuel ‘Jewey’ Freeman's henchman, Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan.
But in mid-1914, she had been Jewey Freeman's girl for about six months, holed up on and off with him, daughter Eileen and Shiner Ryan in Frog Hollow. And it was there, in East Sydney's most foetid slum, that Freeman, Ryan, Leigh and some accomplices planned the great Eveleigh Railway Workshops payroll robbery.
On the morning of 10 June 1914, payday at Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Wilson Street, Redfern, paymaster Fred Miller and an assistant, Norman Twiss, drew up as usual at the factory complex in a horse-drawn wagon. In the tray of the wagon were two chests, one containing £3696/19/6 and the other £3302/13/6. The pair heaved one box into the main office from where its contents would later be distributed to the workers. Then they returned to the wagon where Twiss began manhandling the second chest off the tray.
Suddenly an old drab-grey car driven by Ryan with Freeman in the passenger seat, both men wearing handkerchief masks and driving goggles, sped up and skidded to a halt in the gravel beside the wagon. Freeman leapt out and, holding a revolver to Twiss's head, barked, ‘Don't you move, either of you, or I'll blow
your fucking brains out.’ He shoved Miller to the ground and ordered Twiss to hand over the cash chest. Twiss did so. Freeman loaded the chest into the back of the car, leapt in and was driven away by Ryan. The car, reported the Sydney Morning Herald the next day, ‘progressed citywards, and with great speed’.
The daring heist shocked the nation, not least because it was committed in broad daylight, a weapon was used and, for the first time in Australia, a car was involved in its execution. The Herald feared it would spark a crime wave and called for more police to be put on the beat to deter potential robbers. ‘The Eveleigh holdup is surely unique of its kind in the history of Australia,’ noted its editor on 11 June with what sounded like undisguised admiration for the perpetrators. ‘For audacity of conception and cool effrontery of execution it could hardly have been surpassed [but had there been a policeman about, the robbers may have been apprehended]. We commend to the Government's notice the increase of the police force.’
Meanwhile, a bystander had taken down the getaway car's licence number — 10297 — and the police traced it to a mechanic named Arthur Tatham, who had reported the car stolen from Castlereagh Street in the city the day before. After grilling Tatham, detectives were sure he knew more about the robbery than he had told them. Then, as the police searched for the thieves, the money and the car, paymaster Miller came to them with his suspicions about his colleague, Twiss. To Miller, Twiss had seemed unusually cool when under the gun and being cuffed about by the thief, almost as if he had expected the robbery and had known no harm would come to him. Miller was convinced Twiss was in cahoots with the thieves, and told police so. But before they could interview Twiss, an informer whispered to officers that the ringleader was Freeman, and police concurred that he was clever and foolhardy enough to attempt such a job. They put Freeman under surveillance and, on 24 June, he was arrested at Strathfield Station, in Sydney's western suburbs, as he was boarding the Melbourne Express. Freeman protested his innocence: on the day of the great heist, he said, he had been at the races. Regardless, he was charged with armed robbery and assault.
Razor (Underbelly) Page 3