Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  In the old days, Kate and Tilly would have despatched their thugs to drive the newcomers away. There would have been gang war. But with advancing age, they were softening, growing tired of endless conflict, seeking a less stressful existence. Not only that, but even if they had been of a mind to battle for their turf, they would have had their work cut out — for Gunman Gaffney, Barney Dalton and Guido Calletti were all dead, and Frank Green, Wally Tomlinson and Big Jim Devine were middle-aged now, and hobbled by the effects of bullet and razor wounds, drugs and booze.

  Still, Tilly and Kate were too wily and determined to be put totally out of business by the interlopers, and they would rank among Sydney's wealthiest for a while yet. (Around this time, in the early war years, Lua Niall arrested Tilly, ‘and she opened her purse in front of me and if there wasn't a couple of thousand pounds in it, then I'm no judge.’) But in the ′40s, after ruling Sydney's crime roost for more than a decade, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh were just two more snouts in an increasingly crowded trough.

  30

  Bumper and the Rugged Angel

  Among Tilly and Kate's principal tormentors were two of the most colourful and, in their different ways, effective law enforcers Australia has seen, every bit as good at their trade as the women themselves: Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell and Lillian Armfield.

  It was July 1945, and with the Axis forces all but routed, Australia was abuzz with talk that World War II was at last in its dying days. Then Bumper Farrell gave Sydneysiders something else to talk about. The famous Darlinghurst cop was playing front row for Newtown first-grade Rugby League team, as usual wearing his big, baggy shorts and with his socks down around his ankles, when, fifteen minutes into the match against St George, a scrum broke up in a flurry of fists and cursing and Farrell's rival prop Bill McRitchie reeled backwards, clutching a gaping wound where his ear had been. The ear was hanging loose, attached only by a flap of skin. ‘Look what he's done to my ear!’ screamed McRitchie, pointing at Farrell.

  Farrell's snack was front-page news. Bumper denied biting McRitchie's ear — denied it for as long as he lived — but few believed him. At a New South Wales Rugby League inquiry into the incident, McRitchie testified that ‘while my head was in the scrum, Farrell bit me severely on the ear. As I was suffering, I clawed at his face with my right hand. I said to him, “For God's sake, let go!” but he continued to bite me.’ Farrell, for his part, said he could not have severed McRitchie's ear because the only teeth in his head were ten on his bottom jaw. He then whipped out his upper denture to illustrate the point. McRitchie, his head swathed in a bandage, was unconvinced. ‘The teeth you have were enough for you to do the job, Mr Farrell,’ he snapped. Amazingly, Farrell was cleared of guilt on a vote of fifteen to twelve. McRitchie endured five months of skin grafts to remould his mutilated ear. In sporting circles, until he retired from Rugby League in 1951, Farrell would be known as ‘the Cannibal’.

  Born in Surry Hills in 1916, Farrell attended Redfern Patrician Brothers and Marist Brothers, Kogarah, where he got his nickname of ‘Bumper’ for his habit of smoking cigarette bumpers (butts) he'd find on the ground. After school, in the Depression, Farrell was an apprentice boilermaker in Marrickville and worked at Garden Island, but he quit to join the police force. Not especially tall, but stocky and strong, Farrell resembled Punch in a Punch and Judy show, with his arched beetle brows, florid complexion and hooked nose. But of all Farrell's physical characteristics, none compared with his heavily cauliflowered ears, gnarled bricks of cartilage courtesy of a thousand football whacks.

  Farrell's energy, ruthlessness with criminals and the air of menace that he exuded in spite of his Luna Park grin saw him rise swiftly through the police ranks. Nor did his fame as a Rugby League star for Newtown and Australia hinder his progress. After cutting his teeth (so to speak) as a probationary constable in Darlinghurst in the mid-1930s, he became chief of the vice squad in Darlinghurst in the 1940s and dealt rough justice to local hoods. Tough as they were, Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh and their crews did not relish confrontations with Farrell.

  Anecdotes about him abound. ‘Bumper was a terrific cop,’ laughs Lua Niall, his sometime Darlinghurst colleague, ‘but he was as rough as bags. In the late ′30s and ′40s, Darlinghurst Division No. 3 was the most dangerous beat in Australia. Brawls were commonplace. On Friday nights and weekends there would be drunks sprawled all over the place. Drunkenness was right out of hand. Farrell and his colleagues would stop the fights and pile all the boozers into a big paddy-wagon. We had to pick up the drunks because if we left them unconscious on the ground, the criminals would go through their pockets and steal their money.’

  Farrell himself was a prodigious drinker. Niall remembers him imbibing heroically after finishing work on a Friday night. ‘It was nothing for him to drink a dozen bottles or so, and then go down to Bondi for a swim at five or six in the morning. He'd be drunk when he dived in, then he'd swim straight out to sea, but by the time he swam back in he'd be stone-cold sober.’

  He inspired fear in crooks. ‘Once on a nice, sunny September day, a detective at Darlinghurst named Cec Holmes and I pinched Tilly Devine in Palmer Street,’ Niall recounts. ‘When we tried to take her in, she collapsed to the ground and was screaming so loud you could hear her at Circular Quay. She was crying and kicking her legs, yelling to the growing crowd that we were roughing her up. This went on for ten minutes. We could have made a fortune if we'd taken a hat around to the audience that gathered for her performance. Then Farrell passed in a police car. He saw us struggling with Tilly and got out. He said, “Now, Til, what the hell are you up to? Come on, get on your feet and into my car.” Like a little schoolgirl, she did exactly as he said without any more fuss. Many of the prostitutes were informers for Farrell. He called them by their Christian name and they called him “Mr Farrell”. He treated them properly.’

  Bumper Farrell and Kate Leigh shared Irish ancestry, but in spite of being two high-profile characters of the same East Sydney patch, they were never friends. Farrell earned Kate Leigh's lasting enmity when he ordered a mid ′40s blitz on her sly-grog dens. ‘I was always on the attack and Kate was always on the defensive,’ said Farrell years later. While on her frequent excursions to court, Kate would hail all and sundry, sharing a joke and a chat with judges, lawyers, solicitors, police and the public, but whenever she came face to face with Frank Farrell, she skewered him with a pained grimace, as if something rancid had been passed in front of her nose. ‘That bloody Bumper,’ she'd mutter.

  Former policeman and police historian Lance Hoban first knew Farrell in 1940. He says that the wrongdoers in East Sydney knew him by sight. ‘He was the eyes and ears of Darlo, and they kept out of his way. Whenever there was real trouble, a brawl at the notorious Fifty-Fifty Club, an eruption at Kate Leigh's, a misunderstanding at Matilda Devine's, or upheavals at any of the sixty-two hotels and wine bars in the patrol, it was always, “Quick, find Bumper, this looks heavy. Is Bumper on? Well, get him down there.” On these occasions, Farrell was always cool and calm, rarely returning to No. 3 Station without a vanload of “guests”.’

  Hoban says Farrell was ‘fearless, he could use his fists and he was always in good nick. He swam all year round, and he could run. He sang, too, but badly. Every Friday night we'd go to the Dolphin Hotel in Surry Hills and Frank always sang Irish songs. ‘”The Isle of Innisfree” was a favourite. He was always off-key. Someone said to him, “Frank, that song you sang haunted me all night.” Frank said, “Well, it bloody well ought to have. I murdered it!” ‘

  Hoban says that while prostitutes were in awe of Farrell, they had no love for him. ‘Frank knew Tilly and her girls very well,’ he says. ‘They were his forte in vice. They considered him to be as indigestible as a Hasty Tasty hamburger. The Hasty Tasty was a restaurant in the Cross that sold terrible burgers. The joke was that if you survived a Hasty Tasty hamburger you had an iron constitution. Same with Bumper.’

  Bill Harris was another detective who had the
opportunity to observe Farrell at close hand. ‘Bumper would bend and stretch the rules,’ he says. ‘Detective Ray Kelly, the famous Ray Kelly, told me when I was at the CIB that the reason Farrell was able to get away with what he did for all those years was that he knew everything that was going on in Darlinghurst and the Cross. He had incredible inside information and intelligence about all the criminals, who did what to whom, when and why. He had this information because of his network of informants whom he'd pay and bully. The prostitutes were scared of him, and with reason, because he wasn't easy on them. And, being a footballer, he wasn't gentle when he put you into the back of a police van. You went in and you went in quick! A businessman one day saw Bumper roughly manhandling villains into the back of his van and protested, “Officer, you shouldn't be so rough.” Farrell said, “Oh, I shouldn't, eh? Well, come ‘ere, you're in too!” and threw the bystander into the van. Bumper got away with it all. Nothing was ever done to him, he was never reprimanded, because he was so valuable.’

  Bill Harris, who was a skilled acrobat when young and wrestled with Bumper in the ring at police training, also attests to Farrell's value in a street fight: ‘One night he was being driven through the Cross by a young constable when they came upon a huge blue in progress outside a nightclub. There were thirty or forty blokes involved. Bumper ordered the constable to do a U-ey and pull up. The young bloke did so and Bumper piled out of the van and waded in and he was punching and kicking and knocking blokes down. He was having the time of his life. He loved to fight. He'd flatten you as soon as look at you. That was Bumper.’

  Greg Brown's association with the legendary policeman, who, it's said, was never bested in a streetfight, began in the mid ′30s when they cruised together in a patrol car. In Wentworth Avenue one evening in the late ′30s, Brown, Farrell and a colleague named Clive Tierney found themselves battling a dozen thugs in Wentworth Avenue. Tierney was wielding his baton and inadvertently hit Farrell on the forehead, splitting his head open. Brown laughs now: ‘All Bumper did, blood streaming down his face, was turn to Tierney and ask him to please be more careful when he's swinging his baton. Bumper went on with his annihilation. He wore his hair parted in the middle and that night in Wentworth Avenue it was parted good and proper!’

  These days, older Sydneysiders appalled by the latest outbreak of juvenile delinquency like to cluck about how such antics wouldn't have happened in Farrell's day. No mollycoddling for Bumper, they say. He'd give us a boot up the rear and send us home to our parents. If every middle-aged or elderly man who claims to have once worn Farrell's bootprint is telling the truth, the policeman could scarcely have had time to do anything else but chase children off the street. One whose backside did make the acquaintance of Farrell's boot is former South Sydney and Australian Rugby League player and coach Bernie Purcell. He recalls vividly how, as a young teenager, he and a group of mates were walking from their home turf in Redfern to Luna Park. Early in their trek, a paddy-wagon cruised to a halt nearby. Farrell climbed out and advanced on the boys. ‘Where are you blokes going?’ he demanded to know.

  Purcell told him, ‘Luna Park, sir.’

  ‘Oh no, you're bloody well not,’ growled Farrell, ‘you're going right back to Redfern.’

  At that, says Purcell, ‘Bumper planted his boot right up my bum.’

  Purcell got his revenge years later when he was playing against Farrell. During the game, the big policeman was wrestling on the ground with Souths’ captain Clive Churchill when Farrell lashed out with his boot and kicked Churchill in the face. Purcell raced in and socked Farrell on his prominent proboscis. The referee sent Purcell and Farrell from the field. As they trudged off to the hoots of the crowd, Farrell said in a wounded tone, ‘What did you hit me for, Bern? I was only paying that little bastard Churchill back for kicking me in the balls.’ Purcell explained that his punch had nothing to do with Churchill, and everything to do with that long-ago incident when Farrell discouraged him from walking to Luna Park.

  As Bill McRitchie, his St George opponent would attest, there was a dark side to Farrell. In veteran Sydney journalist Geoff Allen's 1999 memoirs, Gullible's Travails, Allen claims that McRitchie was not the only footballer to be ripped and torn by Farrell's gnashers. Allen writes that he was covering the Newtown–Balmain Rugby League match at Sydney Cricket Ground in May 1945, two months before the McRitchie incident, when Balmain captain Tommy Bourke was escorted from the field just before half-time with a deep gash on his cheek. ‘As he passed me on the way to the dressing room,’ writes Allen, ‘he said, “That bastard Bumper bit me.” ‘ Allen recalls Bourke returning to the field, his face bandaged. The journalist rushed back to his office at the Sun to write the scoop of how Bourke had been bitten.

  As he was typing the story, Joe Williams, who manned the newspaper's front desk, had said to him, ‘They're gunning for you, Geoff.’ At that, Allen reported, ‘two thuggish-looking’ detectives materialised in his office and told Allen he'd be wise not to write the story. ‘I contacted two executives of the paper,’ says Allen, ‘who called in the office legal adviser, a barrister. I pleaded with them to use the story but they were adamant and said, “Forget about the scoop, your life is at stake.” A check of newspaper reports of the match confirm that Tommy Bourke suffered a facial cut that required stitching.

  Investigative journalist Phillip Knightley in his autobiography A Hack's Progress recalls that when he was working as a copy boy at Sir Frank Packer's Australian Consolidated Press, there was a Daily Telegraph police reporter named Sam White who sported the first pair of suede desert boots seen in Sydney. To Knightley, White was courageous because ‘the toughest cop on the Vice Squad, Bumper Farrell, had decreed that only poofters wore suede shoes, and therefore anyone wearing them could be arrested for homosexuality.’

  On his retirement from the force after thirty-eight years’ service in August 1976, Inspector Farrell reminisced to a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, gazing out of the window of his office at Darlinghurst Police Station.

  Is Darlinghurst better or worse now than in the early days? You have the advent of the motor car and that sort of thing, and the crims are not concentrated like they used to be. Criminals were more physical in my day. Today you have the con-man type. The crims I knew years ago would meet you face to face. Now it's more the knife in the back. The biggest problem facing police today is the drug problem. I suppose prostitution and the like will always be around. It always has been.

  Bumper died in his sleep in April 1985, aged sixty-eight, having long outlived all his old Razorhurst adversaries. His funeral at St Joseph's Church, Narrabeen, where Farrell prayed each day at 2 p.m. after his retirement, was sumptuous. The surviving members of his Newtown and Australian Rugby League sides attended, and there was a police honour guard led by Deputy Commissioner Barney Ross. A police band played mournful airs and a selection of Irish songs. The former archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Sir James Freeman, and Bishop Edward Kelly, Bishop of Toowoomba, a lifelong friend of the policeman, co-celebrated a requiem mass.

  Farrell's old friend and fellow football champion Len Smith remembers the day as a sad one, but with lots of laughs as memories of Farrell were traded: ‘Kate Leigh never liked Bumper, but she always had enormous respect for him, and that doesn't surprise me. His sincerity, his kindness. Even though he had a hard face and a hard outlook, he did many good and kind things that nobody ever knew about. Francis Michael Farrell, he was a legend.’

  Lillian Armfield, Sydney's pioneer policewoman, was born in Mittagong in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales in 1885. She was a psychiatric nurse at Callan Park hospital in the Sydney suburb of Ryde in 1915 when she saw a newspaper advertisement seeking applicants for a proposed new force of women police officers. The pay would be seven shillings and sixpence a day, the work would be gruelling, and no married women need apply. (No such stipulation about marital status applied to males.) She and another woman named Maude Rhodes were the only applicants to pass muster and bec
ame Australia's first policewomen. Rhodes soon left, but Armfield had found her life's work.

  Armfield's brief was to ‘lend a hand in any case — from murder to shoplifting — in which a woman is concerned, whether criminally or as a witness’. Working at her always-uncluttered desk, perfectionist Armfield threw herself into her work. She recruited a dozen or so other policewomen. They were replicas of herself: no-nonsense, tough, dedicated and unmarried.

  In 1916, Armfield established the so-called ‘dawn patrol’, rescuing homeless women from the streets. After a ritual pep talk at her desk, she would offer them food and shelter and help them find employment. Stern but fair, she came into her own when interrogating prostitutes and other women offenders who felt uncomfortable being grilled by a male. She also, curiously, took it upon herself to cut a swathe through the bogus fortune-tellers ubiquitous in Sydney in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

  Another task close to her heart was taking charge of abandoned babies. She would try to trace their parents, and, if unsuccessful, supervise adoption or care. The incidence of mothers leaving their unwanted babies at hospitals, police stations and other public places where they would be found and taken on by others was common in those years of no access to contraceptives — and became even more so in the Depression when many women could not even afford to feed themselves. Armfield was renowned for bestowing exotic names on the foundlings in her care. One, left by her mother in the foyer of a theatre in a busy city street, she christened ‘Royal Castlereagh’.