Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  I spent weeks going through the criminal registers and records in Sydney's Justice and Police Museum and photostatting the newspapers on microfilm at the City of Sydney Library. Ace police researcher Michelle Linder combed the archives of the New South Wales State Library for me. After I was interviewed by broadcaster Michaela Perske for her 1999 ABC Radio National Hindsight documentary on Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh, Dulcie Markham and Nellie Cameron, Michaela graciously made her research and contact details available to me. I travelled to London to find out about Tilly's life and criminal career before she emigrated to Australia in 1920. My home study became a repository of books and notebooks, tapes, transcripts, photographs and documents, the fruits of two years’ research.

  I walked the streets of East Sydney, alone and with historian Brian Kelleher, an authority on crime in the area. The wondrous thing about the hive of suburbs once known as Razorhurst is that today, seventy-odd years later, it requires only a little imagination to mind-travel back to those long-gone wild years.

  Charlotte Lane, near the Australian Museum, Police Headquarters and Sydney Grammar School, is a nondescript clutch of tiny terraces, offices and small factories. But in the dead of night when the office workers and factory hands have departed, it bristles with a claustrophobic chill that recalls its years as an epicentre of vice. One can almost picture the laneway's cobblestones sticky-wet with the blood of Norman Bruhn, leader of the original razor gang, who was ambushed and gunned down in 1927, and hear his cries, ‘Help, I'm shot! Oh, I'm shot!'

  Stroll along Kellett Street, Kings Cross, and you'll see a strip of restaurants and coffee houses, pastel-painted terrace homes and a few discreet and legal brothels frequented by respectable, if furtive, businessmen. On 8 August 1929, Kellett Street was the site of a vicious and prolonged brawl between the warring gangs of Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine that ended with shopfronts and cars destroyed, windows smashed, and a dozen combatants hospitalised with serious razor slashes and gunshot wounds. Stand there, perhaps touching the bricks of the same buildings showered by bullets in that skirmish, and it is possible to conjure up the din of breaking glass and thwacking fists.

  Drive south along Malabar Road to the corner of Torrington Road at Maroubra, where Tilly Devine and her husband Jim lived. This was where ‘Big Jim’ shot two men dead and wounded many more. The house there today looks nothing like the dwelling Tilly and Jim lived in, it having been much changed down the years by renovations, but to this writer (and perhaps anyone else au fait with the goings-on here in the later ’20s and the ’30s), what remains exudes real menace.

  In Nimrod Street, at the top of William Street on the cusp of Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst, where Tilly once prowled and gangsters lounged in cafes, is the Stables Theatre. There in 1998, Ken Horler's play Tilly's Turn, starring Lynette Curran as the brothel-keeper, was staged. Two hundred metres down William Street towards the city is the Strand Hotel, now a watering hole for executives and office workers. It was here that Frank ‘the Little Gunman’ Green blasted Barney Dalton to oblivion in 1931. The pub has been painted brightly, but its structure is as it was.

  Also in William Street, in the Chard building that lately housed the studios of the ABC, Phil Jeffs ran Sydney's most iniquitous drug and illegal liquor den, the Fifty-Fifty Club. The edifice has been renovated, but it is the same block that jumped with the jazz of its inhouse combo and the squeals of revellers. Oxford Street, Paddington, one of the hippest shopping precincts in the land, was where Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh once whaled away at each other, Tilly tearing Kate's wide-brimmed floppy hat from her head and Kate flailing at her sworn enemy like a dervish while their curses turned the air blue.

  In Palmer Street, Darlinghurst, stands a stylish pub called the East Village. It is fashionably decorated and its buffed waiters serve exotic cocktails, fine wine and good food to the wealthy and sophisticated young business and creative people of East Sydney. But stand outside and look to the top of the building's facade, and see in brick the words ‘Tradesman's Arms 1918’. In the 1920s and ’30s, the East Village was ‘the Arms', a bloodhouse with sawdust on the floor to soak up the spit and vomit, hard stools at the bar and a dozen cheap wooden tables with chairs scattered around. The air was thick with coarse language, raucous laughter and the cigarette smoke pumped out by the Arms's clientele — the factory workers and bakers from the nearby Sergeants pie factory, prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, muggers, con men, SP (starting-price) bookies and drug dealers. There was a World War I veteran who sat by the door and blew on a harmonica. At his feet was a wooden bowl for the pennies of those who appreciated his energetic, if discordant, renditions of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ and Jack O'Hagan's new bush ballad ‘Along the Road to Gundagai’. Pinched-faced children, affecting the silver-screen swagger of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, mooched change from drinkers. Cards and two-up were played in a back bar — ‘Come in, spinner!’ Fights erupted regularly, which was no surprise, for the Tradesman's Arms was the hotel of choice of Guido Calletti, cigarette stuck to his lower lip and his jaw thrust out like Mussolini's. Calletti would case the crowd for victims to befriend then rob. Dulcie Markham, Nellie Cameron, Jim Devine and Frank Green were regulars. Tilly Devine called in to transact business, since the Arms was in the heart of her red-light stamping ground, and just across the street from her brothel and sometime home at 191 Palmer Street, today a popular restaurant, Bonne Femme.

  Likewise, Kippax and Forbes streets and Barcom Avenue in Darlinghurst; Woolloomooloo's Brougham and Harmer streets and Butlers Stairs; Darlinghurst and Bayswater roads and Craigend Street in Kings Cross; Kippax and Devonshire streets, Surry Hills (with terrace houses stacked together so tightly that it seemed that if one were plucked from its position in the row, the entire street of dwellings would come crashing down) were mob battlegrounds. Nowadays, all these thoroughfares to a greater or lesser degree have been prettified. They belong to a different, in most ways better, Sydney. But each, in certain corners, at certain times of the day and night, retains a trace of Razorhurst.

  But why was there unprecedented savagery in East Sydney from 1927 until the outbreak of World War II, the period that encompassed the so-called razor-gang wars? Razorhurst was the result of an ill-starred confluence of between-the-wars social conditions, well-intended but wrong-headed laws, and a truly extraordinary group of ambitious and ruthless crime entrepreneurs determined to cash in on vices beloved of Australians. Given the collision of these elements, Razorhurst could never not have been.

  Until the early years of the twentieth century, all-day drinking and narcotics use, street prostitution, handgun ownership, off–race course betting and gambling were either legal or tolerated in New South Wales. Then in the fresh flush of the new age, the church, temperance organisations and moral reformers pressured the State Government to cleanse Sydney of vice. The solons who passed the amended Vagrancy Act of 1905, the Gaming and Betting Act of 1906, the wide-ranging Police Offences (Amendment) Act of 1908 and other later laws (including the Liquor Act of 1916 and the Dangerous Drugs Amendment Act of 1927), banning, variously, street prostitution, gambling, alcohol sales after 6 p.m. and narcotics, failed to understand that indulging these vices was second nature to many Sydneysiders. Eradicating them was as feasible as stopping the breakers from crashing onto the sands of Bondi Beach.

  Unwittingly, by their determination to protect the public from itself, the wowsers, and the politicians who appeased them, constructed the legal platform on which syndicated crime was built. There were riches on offer for highly organised criminal entrepreneurs smart and ruthless enough to circumvent the laws, and give the public what they wanted and were prepared to pay for.

  When gambling was banned — including the Digger's favourite, two-up — illegal gaming dens, like Thommo's (in operation around Central Station since 1908), proliferated. When off-course betting was made a crime, bookmakers, catering to people's abiding need to gamble on horses, resorted to operating out of pubs and private houses,
the wireless and telephone boons to their cause.

  In criminalising street prostitution because the practice, as one reformer declared, ‘corrupted the sons of Australia and led to the spread of venereal disease', and making it illegal for men (but, as Tilly Devine gleefully noted, not women) to operate brothels, those who passed the Police Offences (Amendment) Act of 1908 ignored the reality that there would always be lonely men or blokes on a spree happy to pay for sex (not to mention women keen to cash in by selling it). Ridding the streets of prostitutes, far from stopping the trade, just drove it underground. Streetwalkers flocked to brothel-keepers, like Tilly Devine, who exacted heavy tolls from the sex workers’ daily takings for the privilege of allowing them to service clients in her seedy rooms. Out of sight of the police, drug use by prostitutes, violence to them by clients, and stealing (both the prostitute from her client and the client from his prostitute) became rife.

  Sly-grogger Kate Leigh's long and lucrative criminal career path was paved by the do-gooders. At the outset of World War I in 1914, the Salvation Army, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, alarmed at what they believed were escalating levels of public drunkenness and domestic discord caused by the breadwinner spending all his wages on alcohol, combined to serve politicians with massive petitions demanding reduced hours during which ‘the demon drink’ could be sold. They saw a curfew as the precursor to prohibition. Premier William Holman resisted, mindful of the taxes his government raked in from liquor sales and the popularity of drinking among his constituents, whose goodwill he could not afford to lose. The average Sydney tippler refused to take seriously the reformers’ determination to cruel their fun — and ordered another round.

  Then, on 14 February 1916, came a godsend for the wowsers when about 5000 Lighthorsemen and other members of the Australian Infantry Forces headquartered at Casula (near Liverpool in Sydney's south-west) went on a drunken rampage. The soldiers were unhappy about harsh conditions and a new training edict that increased their drill hours from thirty-six to forty-and-a-half hours a week. To express their disgust they marched on Liverpool, where hundreds set up camp in the bar of the Commercial Hotel. They drank the pub dry, without paying a penny for their pleasure. The rioters guzzled £2000 worth of alcohol at the Commercial then decamped to the Golden Fleece Hotel and drank that dry too. Soldiers sat sozzled in the street slurping liquor from pots, pans and any other receptacle that did not leak. They then rushed the railway station, planning to catch a train to Sydney, but their officers had posted a guardsman there who repelled the renegades with rifle fire. The guard shot one rioter dead and wounded six. The mutineers fell back, then rallied, returning fire. They managed to commandeer a train and steamed to Sydney's Central Station. In the city, with an outnumbered police force powerless to stop the men, the havoc continued. The German Club in Phillip Street was sacked, and Grace Bros department store in Broadway, Kleisdorff's tobacco store in Hunter Street and numerous restaurants and hotels were looted. The soldiers overturned fruit-and-vegetable barrows, and assaulted women and men at random. The bender continued until they dropped in their tracks three days later, exhausted and paralytic with drink.

  When the men awoke, they learned that the Holman government had invoked a War Precautions Act that enabled it to close indefinitely the doors of every hotel in the metropolitan area. Premier Holman, shaken by the unbridled, booze-fuelled violence, and buffeted by the now more strident than ever anti-liquor lobby, caved in to pressure. Australia being Australia and not America, William Holman was never going to ban alcohol completely, but he did announce that on 10 June 1916 the people of New South Wales would vote in a referendum that would determine whether pubs would continue to remain open until 11 p.m. or close their doors at six.

  Then, another fillip to the anti-liquor brigade: just three days before the referendum, Britain's Lord Kitchener — the warlord whose stern visage glowered from the famous ‘Your Country Needs You’ recruitment posters — perished along with his staff when the HMS Hampshire was sunk en route to Russia and the Battle of Jutland. The church wasted no time in turning the tragedy to its own end. ‘In this solemn hour of the Empire's need every true patriot should vote for 6 o'clock closing!’ it intoned. Wowsers urged Australians to ‘abstain from all intoxicants, and encourage others to do the same'; 6 p.m. became ‘the Patriotic Hour’. At their rallies, the pro–early closing forces would chant a poem entitled ‘6 O'Clock':

  'Tis after six and he's not in!

  The children hear her voice grow sad,

  And wonder if they should begin

  Their tea — or wait for dad!

  'Tis pay-day; but despair not yet!

  She'll keep the good meal warm awhile.

  But seven strikes, her eyes grow wet,

  And all have ceased to smile.

  The children settled safe in bed

  She sits alone, with fear to start

  And ev'ry hour, with tons of lead

  Seems striking at her heart.

  Then on her knees, distraught in mind

  She prays, while words and sobs o'er mix,

  'Oh, God, grant laws of any kind

  That send men home at six.'

  The publicans and the liquor trade tried to argue that Australian, British and French troops had always fought bravely when issued with alcohol rations. And dedicated drinkers countered with doggerel of their own:

  Delightful visitant, with thee

  We'd hail the time of flowers,

  Could you but tell us of a pub

  Where they sell grog after hours.

  Sweet bird! Thy bower is ever green,

  Thy sky is ever clear,

  Thy hast no sorrow in thy song,

  Thou art not fond of beer.

  Oh, could I fly, I'd fly with thee,

  With feathered chums to mix,

  For this will be a rotten place

  With pubs all closed at 6.

  The anti-liquor legions prevailed. At the referendum, 60 per cent of New South Welshmen voted for 6 p.m. closing; just 1 per cent wanted to retain the status quo closing time of 11 p.m. The Liquor Act of 1916 was passed. From then until 1955, when the law was repealed and 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. closing introduced, New South Wales pubs were only allowed to serve customers from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. But anybody keen to drink on after closing time could be assured of a warm welcome at any of Kate Leigh's slygrog shops.

  Anti-drug laws enacted between 1924 and 1927 prohibited narcotics — including the most popular, cocaine, whose users had been able to buy it freely from chemists as easily as purchasing aspirin or toothpaste. Cocaine was mostly used in tiny quantities as a nerve soother, much as Bex, Vincent's APC powders and aspirin were in later years. In 1927, after the passing of the Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act, ‘snowdroppers’ could no longer buy cocaine and other drugs from pharmacists and physicians. So drug users turned to organised underworld drug rings.

  Another byproduct of laws which created circumstances where underworld entrepreneurs could grow rich on the profits of their illegal enterprises, was the growth of a small army of ‘standover’ men, who preyed on the earnings of the brothel-keepers, the sly-groggers, the bookies and drug dealers. Unable to complain to the police, most of the entrepreneurs were easy game for these armed and dangerous extortionists. A few fought back. Phil Jeffs, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh defended their empires, and the bloody gang warfare that stained Sydney was the inevitable result.

  The muckraking Sydney weekly tabloid newspaper Truth, mindful of the doings of gang lord Al Capone in America, declared Sydney ‘the Chicago of the South’ and condemned East Sydney as a ‘region of bohemia, crime and mystery . . . a breeding place of vice’. In September 1928, when the atrocities had escalated further and the newspaper was leading a campaign to have tough new anti-crime laws enacted, Truth unleashed its most purplehued tabloidese:

  Razorhurst, Gunhurst, Bottlehurst, Dopehurst — it used to be Darlinghurst, one of the finest quarters of a rich and beau
tiful city; today it is a plague spot where the spawn of the gutter grow and fatten on official apathy. By day it shelters in its alleys, in its dens, the Underworld people. At night it looses them to prey on prosperity, decency and virtue, and to fight one another for the division of the spoils. The menace increases and nothing is done. Authority sleeps as though the day were not approaching when Underworld Dictators will terrorise the community with threats of certain death at the hands of their bravos.

  Inadequate policing and an out-of-date Crimes Act are the fertilisers of this Field of Evil. Truth demands that Razorhurst be swept off the map, and the Darlinghurst we knew in better days be restored. It demands new laws, and new strength for their enforcement. And it points, for convincing and horrifying evidence, to the crimes already to Razorhurst's discredit . . .

  Recall the human beasts that, lurking cheek by jowl with decent people, live with no aim, purpose or occupation but crime — bottle men [thieves who bludgeoned their victims, usually from behind, with a bottle], dope pedlars, razor slashers, sneak thieves, confidence men, women of ill repute, pickpockets, burglars, spielers, gunmen and every brand of racecourse parasite. What an army of arrogant and uncontrolled vice!