Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  A Tangled Matrimonial Skein

  When I first sat down to talk with Terry Lewis in early 2010 in his cream brick house at Winton Street, Stafford Heights, the loose plan was to begin with his birth and early childhood in Ipswich, and move forward through the chronology of his life. He had essentially been a Depression child, and I was looking forward to hearing about his earliest memories. About his mother, Mona Ellen Lewis, nee Hanlon, and his father George Murry Lewis, a storeman at the local railway workshop.

  Immediately, Lewis painted a dour picture of formative years affected by the times – little money, the struggle to put food on the table, no toys, the long walk to and from school. It was no different from the experience of many thousands of other Australians during the 1930s, although Lewis’s history had its own unique colour.

  He said his mother – born and raised in a horseracing family, and always close to the track – found Ipswich too parochial. According to Lewis she had agitated for George and their two children, Terry and Lanna, to move closer to Brisbane. The Hanlon family were littered with horse owners, trainers and jockeys, and Mona loved nothing more than going to the races.

  Ultimately, the Lewises settled in Corinda, in the city’s south-west. George Lewis was forced to commute daily to work in Ipswich. Lewis claimed that when he was about ten years old, he came home from school one day to find that his mother and only sister had packed up and left the humble family home. He proceeded to offer a story that cast his mother as the architect of this family upheaval, and his father as a gentle parent who seemed unable to provide the marital excitement to keep Mona at home. In essence, Lewis had been abandoned as a child by his own mother.

  ‘When we moved to Corinda it was a real burden on my father because they were … well nearly everyone had to work really early in those days, he had to catch the train from Corinda to Ipswich and then over to the workshop and the same back,’ Lewis told me. He said that his mother could have jumped on a train to ‘visit her folks and go to the races much easier’.

  ‘I can’t remember any arguments; I think she [Mona] just did her thing and he was pretty accepting.’

  ‘So, when did they separate?’ I asked Lewis.

  ‘1938.’

  ‘Who was the disciplinarian in the home, was it your mother?’

  ‘Yeah, it would have been my mother … our father was more kindly disposed, if that’s the word, more kindly, well not kindly … was much more gentle a person than my mother.’

  ‘Do you remember those as happy years?’ I asked him in the first hour of our formal interviews.

  ‘Not really, no,’ Lewis said. ‘My mother left one day, she took my sister with her and I don’t even remember her saying … I think I was at school and when I came home she was not there, and ah … I don’t think my father probably would have known either. It was very, very hurried, I know that. I’m sure at ten years of age I would have remembered if she had come and said I’m going …’

  ‘So you went to school one morning and got home and …’

  ‘She wasn’t there,’ said Lewis.

  ‘How did your father explain what was happening, do you remember that?’

  ‘No. I think he was just terribly shocked and no I don’t remember him trying to explain that.’

  ‘Was it not a glamorous enough life, do you think, for your mother?’ I asked.

  ‘I think the bright lights of Brisbane were much more attractive,’ Lewis said. ‘I think over the years, I felt that we were … that I was sort of abandoned. Not abandoned, that might be too strong a word.’

  ‘Rejected?’

  ‘Yeah, well that’s a better word … my dad was a very caring sort of a bloke.’

  Lewis said after his mother left the family home his father returned to Ipswich and took his son with him. They lived in George’s mother’s house with four of Lewis’s uncles.

  ‘One of them was a fella called Jimmy and he was a very, very hard man. He had a bicycle and nobody could touch the bike, but of course being a boy I thought I could and I got a real good belting off him,’ Lewis said. ‘I never got one off my father but I used to get it from Jimmy.’

  Lewis soon decided he didn’t like his new living arrangements. ‘Not long after, I can’t tell you exactly, I decided I didn’t like it there so I packed a suitcase and got on a train and came down to Brisbane,’ Lewis recalled. ‘I knew where my grandparents were so I went to them and they must have put me in touch with my mother. At that stage she had met a fella, he was of Jewish decent, [Maurice] Cronenberg, and I’d say she, well, obviously moved in with him. So whether she knew him when she left Corinda or not I’d never know. I must have been 11.’

  Lewis said he was given a cot on the verandah. ‘I don’t ever recall a warm welcome,’ he said. ‘I think it was a tolerance and she never in any way disabused my thought of going to work.’

  By 12, Lewis had found himself a job working as a shop assistant at the Greer and Jamieson men’s clothing store in Queen Street.

  What’s astonishing about this story – the abandonment by his mother, the gentle and heartbroken father, the abusive uncle, and the monumental decision as a child to light off on his own and find his mother in Brisbane, despite the fact that she had turned her back on him – was that it was hugely at odds with another version of the tragic Lewis marriage that played out in Brisbane’s Supreme Court in January 1951.

  The sad story of Mona and George was reported in local newspapers. By this time, Lewis had been in the police force for two years, having been inducted at the Petrie Terrace Barracks on

  17 January 1949.

  The Brisbane Truth told its readers that the case of Mona Ellen Lewis, of Lytton Road, Morningside, petitioning for a divorce from husband, George, was one whose ‘tangled matrimonial skein may pose some difficult knots for legal fingers’.

  Mona had tried to divorce George before, in 1944. That was within the ambit of the statutory requirement of five years to prove desertion. In that earlier hearing, she claimed that she was first deserted by her husband in January 1939. The petition failed, so it seemed, because George had been ‘involuntarily confined in a mental hospital’ from 1939 to 1942.

  The Truth continued: ‘A person so confined, says the Law, in effect, cannot be said to be a deserting party for such period as he is deprived of his normal freedom of movement.’

  To complicate matters, Mona admitted during her first petition before Judge Mansfield, that during her husband’s incarceration in the mental facility she had ‘misconducted herself with a man who had befriended her, and had borne him a child’. She had been the housekeeper for the man. The child was born in April 1942.

  So which matrimonial offence was committed first? Mona’s misconduct, or George’s confinement? The hearing in the Supreme Court before Justice Stanley went on to reveal shocking facts about the marriage that were entirely absent from Lewis’s own recollections to me 60 years later.

  Mona said when the family was living at Thorn Street, Ipswich, her husband was ‘keeping late hours and drinking heavily’. She told the court, ‘He took me out only twice in all our married life.’

  Once, when she was talking over the fence to a neighbour, Mona alleged that George, coming home from work, hit her with a paper. ‘Go inside, you,’ he supposedly said. ‘That’s your place.’

  ‘Once,’ Mona told the court, ‘our eight-year-old son [Terry] hit him on the back of the head when he was hitting me. He turned round and struck the child.

  ‘Whenever he hit me he would use his fists, and always seemed to try to hit me on the eyes. Several times I had two black eyes. One Christmas Eve he gave me a belting and hurt my eye so badly that I had to have seven specialists for it.’

  She explained to the court that in January 1939 she was doing the washing when George attacked her with a bread knife, cutting her on the wrist. ‘Then he punched into me, blackened m
y eyes, and locked me in a room,’ Mona said. ‘I got out through the window and rang my brother, who came and took me away.’

  The next morning when she returned to the house – they were at that point living in Corinda – she found George loading furniture onto a truck. Mona’s father asked him where he was going and he said, ‘Back to Ipswich’.

  ‘What about your wife?’ Mona’s father allegedly asked.

  ‘She can go to—’ George replied.

  Mona said she had one of her eyes removed in 1941 by leading eye surgeon Dr T. Mansfield. She told the court that after the operation she wrote to her husband offering to return if he would stop drinking and ‘find her a home’. There was no reply.

  Mona’s second petition for divorce was successful. She later settled into family life with Maurice Cronenberg and her children Lanna, Terry and Gary at 168 Hawthorne Road, Hawthorne.

  Meanwhile, the young Lewis had taken up a new job at Pike Brothers men’s outfitters, also in Queen Street. Decades later he would rhapsodise over the American soldiers who were based in Brisbane during the Second World War. Lewis said: ‘… I worked in what they called the shirt making sections, I was on the counter – I was not in the making bit, the factory was upstairs. I met many officers of all ranks and they’d have these, what do they call them … pink, suntan and navy – they had three colours and they could order these shirts and trousers and boy, they were really, really nice.’

  Lewis never once spoke to me of his half-brother Gary, although in later interviews with several police, including Lewis’s former personal assistant Greg Early, he would be mentioned. Early recalled Mona calling the Commissioner’s office on several occasions. ‘I just picked up over the years that he was a step-brother to Terry,’ said Early. ‘He [Terry] never ever said much about Gary. I never used to tell him about Mona ringing up … ’

  Gary, it seemed, didn’t formally exist. One local who used to babysit him as a boy said he never recalled Gary ever going to school. Indeed, in the newspaper notice for Lewis’s wedding to Hazel Gould in 1952, it stated that the groom, Lewis, was the ‘only son’ of Mona Lewis.

  A contemporary of Lewis’s, who lived in the Hawthorne neighbourhood at the same time as Mona and Cronenberg, remembered Gary well. ‘I had a lot of time for Gary,’ he said.

  After Lewis’s stint at Pike Brothers, he had brief tenure as a messenger clerk for the Small Ships Branch, Water Transport Division, Transportation Corps, United States Army at the navy base in Bulimba. After that, he worked in a corner store owned by Maurice Cronenberg at Logan Road, Buranda.

  I asked Lewis if he got along well with Cronenberg.

  ‘Not very well,’ he said. ‘We never really … became friends, although I stayed with them on and off … over a number of years. They moved around a bit and I moved around with them … in various places and then he bought a shop after the war and I worked for him in there, and I really did work.

  ‘I used to get up early in the morning and go into the markets and buy the stuff and we had an old car that we would load up and bring it home. The shop would be open from about 7 a.m. to 7 or 8 p.m., little mixed business, 138 Logan Road.’

  A friend of that time recalled Lewis working in the shop. ‘Terry was domineering to Gary, he was always ordering him around,’ the friend said. ‘Gary would go in and take lollies and chocolates.

  I remember one day I was in there fixing an iron and there were some exposed wires I had my hand on, and Gary jumped up and flicked the power switch on. I could’ve been electrocuted. I jumped back and it pulled the cord out of the wall. I used to nurse Gary.’

  During my years of research on the Lewis books several sources, both from within the police force and among the racing fraternity, claimed that the father of Gary Lewis was local conman and track regular Malcolm McGregor-Lowndes.

  McGregor-Lowndes established himself as a recidivist conman during the Depression, a ‘scally’ with a permanent eye out for the quick buck. In a bankruptcy hearing in early 1936, his colourful background was outlined to the court.

  The Brisbane Telegraph reported that one of McGregor-Lowndes’ earliest scams was as ‘Argos the Prophet’. He had picked up the name from an act at the local Lyceum Theatre in George Street, and started a mail-order fortune-telling business. Clients would send McGregor-Lowndes a number of questions, and money, and he would post back his predictions for the future.

  He was a bookmaker at Bundamba and Kedron. At one point he was a tobacconist and had a hairdressing business. He was a herbalist through his company Australian Research Laboratories. He also had a matrimonial business, and it was rumoured he’d paint small birds yellow and try to sell them as canaries. The Telegraph reported: ‘He carried on over a dozen other businesses, including that of a naturalist – the selling of birds. He also carried on business as the Paris Import Agency, and had dealt in several racecourse systems.’

  A Lewis family friend told me: ‘Mona Lewis worked for McGregor-Lowndes. She was there in his place at Holland Park, filling and licking the envelopes for him.’

  At some point in the early 1950s, Mona and Cronenberg separated. By this time, Lewis, now a police officer, had married Hazel and they’d started their life together. ‘I stayed with them until I married, joined the police and paid my own way, did my own washing and ironing. I’m still good at ironing,’ Lewis told me.

  Then in the 1950s, Cronenberg disappeared. A family friend was told he had slipped over to San Bernardino, California, in the United States and changed his name to Cronen. Indeed, an obituary published in January 1980 in a local San Bernardino newspaper seemed to confirm the story. ‘Eadie O’Brien, 66, 23-year resident of San Bernardino, died in Loma Linda Hospital. She was born in Australia and was an Australian war bride. Survivors include her husband Walter, son Daniel, of Reno, Nevada, and a brother Maurice Cronen. Two sisters, Sarah Billings and Rebecca Banks, of Australia.’

  It appears Maurice had settled to be close to his sister. He would die there in 1988, and be buried in the Samaritan Cemetery. So, what had seen Cronenberg take leave of Mona and the children?

  An unusual court dispute may have played a role in some marital discord. In late 1948, the Cronenberg brothers, Maurice and Isaac, ended up in the Supreme Court pitted against Mona’s brother, horse trainer William L. Hanlon, over the ownership of a racehorse. It was a case that Justice Brennan described as having ‘something fishy’ about it.

  In short, William Hanlon saw something in the horse – Pearl Pin – and set out to buy it off the deceased estate of one Terry Ahern in July 1946. The asking price was 950 guineas. As Hanlon only had about 600 guineas in ready cash, he asked Isaac Cronenberg to loan him the difference. Isaac was a builder by trade, and owned a furniture factory in West End. He also ran a Golden Casket agency in the city, trading under the name of ‘T.W.Griffiths’.

  ‘Griffo’s’, as it was known, had such a high number of winners buying tickets from its premises, the story made the newspapers. Brisbane’s The Daily Standard reported in August 1933: ‘Luck is undoubtedly with Griffo’s. The agency has so far sold over 70 of the big prizes, and the total value of the money is over 600,000 pounds.’

  The court heard that Isaac Cronenberg had loaned Hanlon the money he needed to purchase the promising Pearl Pin, agreeing to transfer full ownership to him at a later date. Hanlon would train Pearl Pin.

  In October 1948, Cronenberg approached Hanlon and demanded that the horse be legally transferred to him. But Hanlon refused, allegedly remarking: ‘Rather than let the horse get out of my yard, I will shoot it.’

  Hanlon’s affidavit stated that when Cronenberg went to Hanlon’s stables, his son Lionel told the visitor: ‘Don’t talk to my father like that. Get out of the yard, or I will hit you in the big bingy.’ (Lewis’s own paperwork on the Hanlon side of his family states that William Lawrence Hanlon, of Shakespeare Street, Bulimba, had no children, although his broth
er Lionel did have a son, Lionel Junior.)

  In the end, Justice Brennan ordered that the horse be removed from Hanlon and placed in the care of an independent trainer until the dispute could be resolved. ‘Why not give the horse to someone to train?’ Justice Brennan remarked. ‘Why not give it to a third party? The horse will be too old to race by the time the litigation is over.’

  Had this public brawl severed any relationship between the Cronenbergs and the Hanlons? Given that Pearl Pin had won some big races, and may have had a few more left in him, it was, of course, all about money – one of the great and persistent themes of the Lewis saga.

  Interestingly, the West End furniture factory owned and operated by Isaac Cronenberg and his son, Isaac Junior, was destroyed by a huge blaze late one night in January 1950. Isaac Junior, living in a house next door, escaped with his life, but the business was completely wiped out.

  By that stage, the young constable, Terry Lewis, was patrolling the streets of Brisbane. Senior detective Frank Bischof was collecting corrupt monies from the city brothels, two of the most profitable operating at Lanfear Street and Knott Street, both in West End.

  Was the factory fire suspicious? We will never know.

  Fast-forward almost 35 years, and a well-placed source told me that Lewis’s mother, Mona, was at the Eagle Farm racecourse in Brisbane on 18 August 1984 when the notorious Fine Cotton thoroughbred substitution scandal broke. The Commerce Novice (2nd division) Handicap was a 1500-metre race in which Fine Cotton was substituted with Bold Personality, a seven-year-old gelding half-owned by Malcolm McGregor-Lowndes.

  ‘I was there,’ the source said. ‘I saw it with my own eyes. Mona Lewis arrived and left the track with Malcolm McGregor-Lowndes that day – arm in arm.’

  If those old newspaper court reports are accurate, the description of the Lewis marriage flies in the face of the version Lewis wanted put forward to the public – that the breakdown was the fault of a racing-obsessed mother who cared little for her husband, a quiet, genteel father, who never raised a voice let alone a hand in anger.