George Parsons says that in later life she became a friend of East Sydney Labor politicians and officials such as Eddie Ward. ‘I don't know if Tilly ever articulated a political philosophy, but she was working class and she voted Labor. She believed in levelling up, that everyone is as good as every one else. People need opportunities. She said, “Crime is a result of social conditions.” If social conditions changed, the crime scene would change. That could have been a rationalisation for her own activities. She could never answer one question that my father would put to her: “If you steal because you're poor, why don't all the poor steal?” ‘
Kate actually politicked on behalf of the Labor candidates of Surry Hills. There is a 1931 photo of her seated at a wooden table and handing out political pamphlets. Any thirsty socialist knew they could always get a free drink after hours at Kate's grog shops. If a similar spirit of generosity existed at Tilly's establishments it is unrecorded. Tilly believed that Kate supported the local politicians for other than ideological reasons. ‘Kate,’ she once said, ‘got away with her dope-pushing and white slaving by means of Labor contacts in municipal politics.’
If Tilly's charge was true, Kate's connections did her scant good in 1933 when the police, possibly embarrassed into action by her growing folk-hero status (‘My sly-grogging has kept half of Sydney's poor alive,’ she'd crow, and the Daily Telegraph once called her ‘a kindly provider of a social service in a repressive era’), decided it was time they made an example of her. In February, she was hauled into Newtown court on a plethora of charges from sly-grog selling to stealing, including the theft of seven boxes of plants and five baskets of ferns from outside a Marrickville home.
Standing in the dock, shrouded in a heavy silver-fox fur despite high summer's heat, and wearing many rings and a huge hat, she chuckled as the prosecution described how she was being driven by her minions Ronald Williams and John McIntyre when she saw the plants and decided they would be exactly what she needed to spruce up her groggeries. She ordered her sidekicks to stop the car and steal the plants. They did so, but were seen by neighbours and the numberplate of her limousine was noted and reported to police. When the three were remanded for breaking, entering and stealing, she called to her supporters in the courtroom: ‘Hurry up and get my bloody bail fixed up! I don't want to hang around all day!’
While free on bail for those charges, in June, she faced trial on another. The previous December she and her sometime lover and bodyguard, hard-eyed, broken-nosed Henry ‘Jack’ Baker, had broken into a store in Newtown and stolen groceries. Someone informed on them and the police came calling. In court, however, just as she and Baker were about to be gaoled, Kate's plant-stealing accomplices Williams and McIntyre stood up and confessed to the crime.
A week later, Kate, redefining the term ‘incorrigible’, was again in the dock, at Sydney Quarter Sessions, charged with receiving groceries and meat stolen by Baker and another underling named Walter Saari from a store in the western Sydney suburb of Liverpool in January. A Detective Tolley had entered Kate's premises in Bourke Street, Surry Hills, and found the pilfered goods. Kate conducted her own defence and made the court laugh when she accused Tolley of eating the evidence, namely a large slice of cheese. She also reduced the gallery to gales of laughter by producing a meatless hambone and challenging the Liverpool storekeeper to identify it as the one stolen from his shop. In spite of her best comic efforts, the jury in the end failed to see the funny side and found Kate, Baker and Saari guilty. Saari was sentenced to twenty-three months in prison, and Baker to three years because, said Judge Curlewis, he was an habitual criminal and ‘a rotter’ besides.
Knowing that she, too, would surely be sentenced to a lengthy spell in Long Bay, Kate begged leave to strike a bargain with Curlewis. After piteously explaining that her long criminal career, which dated back to 1897, was ‘all a result of my never having been given a chance’, she promised the judge that if he spared her from incarceration this time, she would leave Sydney for five years. Her daughter Eileen had been banished from Sydney the year before in lieu of a prison term for prostitution. The judge mused that in Kate's case, too, rustication, the legal term for banishment, would indeed save the taxpayer the cost of accommodating her in Long Bay and agreed, with the proviso: ‘You are bound over in your own recognisance to refrain from dishonesty and from associating with criminals, and also that you will not come within 200 miles of Sydney for a period of five years. If you do, you will probably be sent to gaol for five years.’
Kate was visibly relieved and thanked the judge, but still could not help chirping, ‘Can't I come down just once for a holiday?’
Curlewis grinned, ‘Yes, but if you do, you may find yourself staying here for quite a long time.’
With much fanfare, parties, and teary farewells, Kate Leigh packed her bags, put her various sly-groggeries and other enterprises in the hands of trusted employees, and departed Surry Hills for her hometown of Dubbo.
To nobody's real surprise, her rustication did not last. In the first week of August, she was spotted in Surry Hills by a Detective Sergeant Bowie, who arrested her on the spot. This time an angry Judge Curlewis sentenced her to two years in Long Bay for breaking her recognisance. At that news, she bounded from the dock and, to Curlewis's great discomfort, embraced him and Bowie, as if to say ‘better gaol than Dubbo’.
‘Them mugs couldn't get me out of Sydney without they took Sydney away somewhere and buried it!’ she chortled to a fellow prisoner during her first week inside. ‘I'm here, and while I'm here I'll have a good time. It's better than being stuck away somewhere in the blasted bush.’ In prison she was reunited with daughter Eileen, who, like her mother, had defied her rustification order, returned to Sydney and been caught.
Tilly Devine was behind bars then too, serving six months for consorting, robbery, assaulting a policeman and resisting arrest. (At Tilly's sentencing at the Appeals Court, Judge Edwards had to clear a large space on his desk to accommodate the numerous files that comprised her criminal record. ‘Goodness me,’ he gasped. ‘Is this all hers?’ When her lawyer attempted to explain that many of the charges had arisen from good-hearted rowdiness at his client's birthday parties, the judge declared, ‘Well, she must be a very old woman!’)
It is not known whether Tilly and Kate fraternised in prison. Most likely, each gave the other a wide berth as they fell back on their comfortable Long Bay lives of plentiful food, cushy tasks and regular visitors who briefed the celebrated prisoners on their various criminal enterprises, and never left the gaol without instructions on how to administer the rorts and rackets in their absence. There is a report of Kate lolling in the sunshine on a prison lawn conditioning her long greying tresses with a paste made of mashed onion, cream and Condy's Crystals.
In the mid 1930s, Kate was in her fifties. Her buccaneer spirit still burned, but she was slowing down. She was vastly overweight and, after a half century of bad diet, late nights and the stress only lawbreakers know, beginning to suffer from the ills of old age. Conversely Tilly, nineteen years younger and in her mid thirties, was in her prime. She cut a lightning strike of colour in drab Depression days. Her hair, often dyed platinum-white à la Hollywood's Mae West — whom, with her sexy brassiness, Tilly reminded many people of — was a soufflé of lacquer-fixed kiss-curls and wavy ringlets that fell to her shoulders. Often her crowning glory was topped by a smart cloche hat. She plastered her eyes, eyes that could be limpid and laughing, or mean pit-bull slits when she was angry, with mascara in an age when few women did. Like Kate Leigh, even in summer's swelter she swathed herself in bulky furs. She wore diamonds and rings on every finger and even on a few toes. Her tight little mouth was painted into a bow shape. But unlike the more pragmatic Kate — who kept an expensive pianola on her premises, not to play but as a surety against bail — Tilly regarded her possessions as affirmations of how far she had come from Camberwell. She boasted endlessly of her art, furniture and jewellery.
Despite not h
aving a telephone because she was paranoid about foes tracking her down, in her heyday in the 1930s Tilly ran a vice empire the likes of which Australia had never seen. Her operation was three-tiered. The best-looking, classiest, most experienced prostitutes administered to the well-heeled: celebrities, businessmen, politicians and senior police officers. They operated out of a handful of sumptuously furnished and decorated Darlinghurst terrace houses, complete with phonogram and bar, or in hotel rooms, or went to the customer's own home or office. They charged the premium rate, which, in the 1930s, was £2–5 a time plus a generous tip. Generally, Tilly would take one-third of this fee and allow the prostitute to keep the tip. When they were not in her employ, many of Tilly's topline sex workers were restaurant waitresses, theatre usherettes or salesgirls supplementing their wages from the major department stores.
To cater for less-wealthy factory workers and tradesmen, Devine installed in her seedy Palmer Street terrace-house brothels her ‘tenement girls’. Often they were victims of the Depression: poverty-stricken young women; deserted unmarried mothers; wives from the suburbs with families to feed, who came to Darlinghurst by train or tram and returned to their homes at night; women from the bush; or young nurses and domestic staff working in St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney Hospital and Crown Street Women's Hospital. Tilly's offsiders would approach such women and tell them they knew a nice lady who might be able to help them. That nice lady, of course, was Tilly Devine. The ‘tenement girls’ gave their total earnings to Tilly, who banked for them four shillings out of every twenty they earned, and, from the remaining sixteen shillings, paid for their accommodation, food and medical supplies, doled out pocket money and bought them clothes, and still had a nice sum left over for herself.
Then there was the ‘boat squad’. They were older, hardened prostitutes or rough-and-ready young women from the local factories, who, for a few shillings a time, gave rough-and-ready comfort to visiting merchant seamen and servicemen in squalid dockside rooms and flats, or sometimes in the sailors’ tiny bunks on-board ship. These women were skilled gingerers, but, operating as they did in the more dangerous realms of prostitution, they were often beaten, abused and themselves robbed by their customers.
Tilly's prostitutes moonlighted as her shoplifting team. She would often send them out to steal from David Jones or Mark Foys, from corner shops and the Harbour wharves. Tilly would sell the stolen goods at a little less than half the retail price to friends in the trade or at the markets. Nor was she above sending her workers out to roll and rob drunks or pick the pockets of people in the crowd at cinemas, at the races, the Rugby League and cricket, and at the boxing and wrestling matches at Sydney Stadium. Stealing the clothes, wallets and personal belongings of people swimming at the Domain Baths was another popular scam.
Tilly was a benevolent despot. When one of her ‘girls’ was gaoled, she would arrive at Long Bay on visiting days laden with food parcels. And she would invite the more presentable of her prostitutes to add racy glamour to her many parties at Torrington Road and various Palmer Street hangouts. Inveterate party girl Tilly never needed an excuse for a celebration. She called them ‘shivoos’. A birthday, the release of a friend from gaol, a bail-raising bash to help a friend in trouble with the law or fundraisers for pals down on their luck — anything would be a good reason to knock the top off a bottle or two. One of her biggest celebrations was in the mid ′30s when she and Jim hosted a bail-raising party at the Maccabean Hall, Darlinghurst, for a criminal named Kelly who had been charged with attempted murder.
Tilly's parties were raucous, raunchy affairs where guests sang and danced to the piano or a gramophone playing graphite records (known as ′78s’ for the number of times per minute the turntable spun). People played two-up and conspired to commit crime, and snorted cocaine and made love. At some stage at every shivoo, Tilly would fling her skirt about and (warble in a voice not quite as good as she believed it to be) the music-hall hits of her London youth.
For all the fun, given the nature of those present, there were regular outbreaks of violence. Guests always ran a risk of being stabbed or shot at a Tilly Devine party. At one Palmer Street event in the early 1930s, Tilly was pestered relentlessly by an amorous drunk. At first she played along, teasing and flirting with him. But when he began to grab at her, Tilly's coquettish smile vanished. Without warning, she picked up a pair of tailor's shears lying on a sewing machine and drove the sharp end into the man's left cheek, spraying blood over his shirt and onto the wall beside him. He ran from the house with the scissors hanging, like a banderilla in a bull's flank, from his face, and Tilly kicking him and screaming abuse. When her victim had been taken to hospital for stitching, Tilly calmed down and partied on as if nothing had happened. ‘There's only one way to deal with blokes who go the grope,’ she declared.
In February 1934, Tilly and Jim visited Melbourne. They were in trouble almost from the moment they arrived. Big Jim got into a fight at the Palestine Club in Exhibition Road. He was hit on the head with a heavy object but not before he had knocked one man cold. Days later, Tilly was arrested for administering a brothel in Carlton with prostitute Dolly Quinn, an old friend from Palmer Street. Police had raided the bawdyhouse, which was rented by Quinn, to apprehend her and, seeing Tilly there, arrested them both. In court, Tilly claimed it was all a terrible mistake. She had no idea Dolly was running a brothel. She had decided to remain in Melbourne for a month or two and saw a newspaper ad offering a room to rent. Lo and behold, when she applied, the landlady was good old Dolly. The judge was unconvinced and sentenced Tilly to a year in gaol. Dolly Quinn received six months. Tilly sought leave to appeal. Judge Hauser agreed and asked for £100 bail.
While she was waiting for the appeal to be heard, Tilly fled home to Sydney. ‘Twelve months’ prison for gossiping on the street corner,’ she carped on her return. ‘I wasn't about to hang around for that.’ In 1934 and 1935, she was arrested eleven times, for consorting, using indecent language in the street, and five times for resisting arrest.
Kate Leigh had a scare of her own in 1935. With the wowsers seemingly distracted by some other social iniquity, the State Government eyed its much-reduced revenue since closing the pubs at 6 p.m. and seriously considered extending opening hours until nine or ten. Proponents of the change argued that Queensland's hotels shut their doors at 8 p.m. and Western Australia's at nine, and neither state was Sodom or Gomorrah because of it. In England and the Continent, pubs stayed open until late and society had not collapsed there either; whereas in the United States, where total prohibition was enforced, gangsters were running riot. As well, said the trade unions, six o'clock closing discriminated against workers whose shift ended later in the evening. Moreover, early closing was encouraging drinkers to break the law by driving them into sly-grog shops, argued those who sought to liberalise the licensing laws.
But just when it seemed that the government would vote to extend licensing hours, the temperance and church groups found a second wind, complained noisily, and the situation remained as it was. Kate heaved a sigh of relief and declared that the drinks were on the house.
PART 3
Colourful Identities
25
An Uneasy Truce
Kate and Tilly had been deadly foes for nearly seven years. Gunman Gaffney, Fred Moffitt, Barney Dalton, Snowy Prendergast and others were dead because of the women's feud. Countless lieutenants — such as Frank Green, Bruce Higgs and Wally Tomlinson — had been slashed, beaten, stabbed and shot. Then in 1936, one of William Mackay's first acts when he became police commissioner was to read the riot act to Tilly and Kate, calling the warring women into headquarters for a meeting with himself and other senior police.
Mackay told them he was not so stupid that he didn't realise what just about everybody else but the wowsers did — that selling sly grog and running brothels were victimless crimes, and that there was a demand by many, many God-fearing and respectable Sydneysiders for the services Kate and Tilly provided. He
was not about to be a spoilsport and deprive the people of their fun. Heaven knew, he liked a wee drop himself.
Then came the ultimatum: if Kate could run her groggeries and Tilly her brothels quietly and cleanly and without violence, if they agreed to inform the police about the activities of other, less-favoured gangs, the present, manageable level of police harassment of Tilly and Kate (with its occasional raids, arrests and quick release from prison) would continue. But, and it is easy to imagine Mackay glowering at the pair as he spoke, the shootings and slashings and every other form of mayhem they'd been perpetrating on each other for so long had to cease immediately. Likewise the cocaine selling by Kate and Jim Devine. And the stealing, too. And no more gingering by Tilly's girls. If Tilly and Kate chose not to comply, Mackay reportedly made clear, he'd close every brothel and groggery and put both women in gaol for twenty years. He had enough on his hands coping with a spate of domestic razor-slashings and murders, and a new generation of young thugs, often in their teens, who were shooting and bashing police and the public around Central Station and Newtown.
The old enemies saw reason that day. Life, they realised, would be easier without the warfare and, of course, customers would be more likely to spend their money in places where there was not a fair chance that they'd make their exit on a stretcher. Kate and Tilly promised Mackay that they would do their best to quieten down and get along.
In the decades left to them, they mostly kept their promise. There would be many more prison terms for each — in the following months alone, Kate served four weeks for shoplifting a cardigan worth eight shillings and sixpence from McDowells, and Tilly was locked away twice for consorting. Tilly and her prostitutes did continue to ginger customers, if perhaps not as often or as brazenly, and Kate still dabbled in cocaine, though in lesser quantities. There would be public flare-ups between Tilly and Kate themselves, but from now on there was an element of gleeful street theatre in their catcalling and shoving matches. There was the odd punch-up between their gang members, for, inevitably, a lot of wounds remained open after years of eye-for-an-eye retribution. But there were no more killings or mutilations.
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