Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  The People feature was illustrated with a photograph of Kate on her first-storey balcony. She is wearing an apron and waving her hat to an adulatory throng of neighbourhood women and children. Beside her is a man dressed as Santa Claus.

  34

  Wrong Place,

  Wrong Time

  By the 1950s, Dulcie Markham's beauty was gone. On 6 May 1952, when she was about to turn forty, she posed for a police mugshot. Her once-long blonde hair is dirty brown and cut short, parted on the left in masculine fashion. Her formerly clear complexion is blotchy, her expression grim and her once-sparkling eyes, now cold, glare from the frame. Markham's oft-broken nose wanders alarmingly from left to right. Her fabled features have been destroyed by too much dope and bad liquor, too much sex with strangers, too many late nights, too many beatings. Perhaps too many memories. Most of her lovers had died violently: Scotty McCormack, Arthur ‘the Egg’ Taplin, Guido Calletti, Frank Bowen, John Abrahams; and, after them, Donald ‘Duck’ Day, Leslie ‘Scotland Yard’ Walkerden and Gavan Walsh.

  Day was an ex-jockey who had pretensions to being a big man in Sydney's underworld in the 1940s. He was one of the wave of criminals who moved in on the turf of Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, and of Guido Calletti after he was shot dead. Day sold black-market booze to American servicemen during World War II and was a standover gunman. He and Markham were lovers on and off in 1944. Day was a bully and, like most bullies, he received his comeuppance.

  On 29 January 1945, Day assaulted a man who owed him money. As the man lay on the ground, Day loudly told him (kick) that he would be paying him (kick) a call that night to collect his dosh (kick) or else. A few hours later, Day entered the man's flat in Surry Hills. Shots were heard by passers-by and the police were summoned. When they entered the flat, they saw the dead Day spreadeagled on a bed. He had been shot through both cheeks, his nose and chest. The officers arrested the tenant of the flat, the man whom Day had beaten earlier. In court, he said that he was terrified of Day and, knowing he was coming after him, armed himself — he had killed Day before Day could kill him. The court set him free.

  In the war years, Markham, like a heat-seeking missile, zeroed in on the visiting hordes of American servicemen. She relieved them of large amounts of their leave pay in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. She ran a brothel in St Kilda, Melbourne, for a while in the mid ′40s. She was once arrested in that suburb for appearing in the street clad only in bra and knickers and carrying an axe. To police officers she explained patiently that she was a brothel-keeper and had been chasing a customer who dared haggle over the price.

  In Melbourne, Markham met Leslie Walkerden, a criminal with a reputation for violence. When they became lovers, he was providing expensive protection for a Richmond baccarat club. The extreme measures he took on behalf of the club's proprietors made him enemies, and when, at 2.30 a.m. on 12 September 1945, Walkerden left the club, he found one of the tyres of his car flat. While he was occupied changing the wheel, three men emerged from the shadows armed, respectively, with a shotgun, a .45 revolver and a .32 revolver. All three opened fire on Walkerden. The pistoleers missed, but a load of shotgun buckshot blasted Walkerden's side. In hospital he refused to say who'd shot him. ‘Don't waste your time,’ he gasped. ‘I'll fix it my way.’ He never did, for Walkerden died of his wounds almost immediately.

  After Walkerden's death, Markham ping-ponged between Melbourne and Sydney. She remained a prostitute, but, as her beauty faded, she could no longer earn the money she had when she was beautiful, and was reduced to servicing drunks and desperates. In Sydney, Tilly Devine was a benefactor to her old friend, and a job in one of Tilly's bawdyhouses was Pretty Dulcie's whenever she wanted it.

  Back in the underworld of Melbourne in ′51, Markham was drinking with a group of crims at her rented home in Fawkner Street, St Kilda, on 25 September. Among her guests was flame-haired, snappily dressed small-time wideboy Len ‘Redda’ Lewis, in his forties; and her boyfriend at the time, a young journeyman boxer named Gavan Walsh and his brother. Without warning, and for reasons still unknown, two armed men crashed through the front door and sprayed the drinkers with bullets. Redda was unscathed, but Gavan Walsh was hit in the stomach, his brother was shot in the hand and Markham caught a bullet in her hip. The boxer died, and it took Markham and Walsh's brother months to recover.

  Two suspected shooters were arrested, but Markham refused to incriminate them. At the men's trial, a nonplussed judge mused on Markham and her cronies as if pondering the anthropology of a rare species of wildlife. ‘She, in fact practically all the witnesses, moves in somewhat queer circles. As far as one can gather, the men seem to spend the greater part of their day in hotels, and a good part of their night drinking from place to place. The women seem to join them in their drinking, and to change the people with whom they sleep from month to month, without anyone worrying about it or doing anything about it.’

  True to the judge's rumination, Markham quickly got over Gavan Walsh's demise and became the lover of Redda Lewis. Three months after she was shot, still in bed and with her hip encased in plaster, the two were married. Sixty guests crowded into her bedroom at Fawkner Street to hear Lewis and Markham, who wore a white plaster cast on her leg and hip, take their vows. There was a spectacular three-tiered wedding cake and other cakes, savouries and copious liquor in the form of an eighteengallon keg of beer (guarded by best man Les ‘Butcher’ Gordon) and crates of wine and spirits. A reporter asked Markham if she had any qualms about being married where Gavan Walsh had been shot dead. She looked at him as if he were mad. ‘Not a fuckin’ one,’ she said. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that the newlyweds sang ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’. No police were invited, but they came anyway. They took the licence numbers of cars parked outside, then entered the house and noted guests’ names and addresses. When Markham realised they were harassing her friends, she was furious. ‘If you have no warrant, get out!’ barked the bedridden bride.

  Writer Brian Matthews, whose youth, as chronicled in his memoir A Fine and Private Place, was spent in St Kilda, was a neighbour of Markham when she married Lewis:

  Pretty Dulcie did not spend much time or effort on what are sometimes called the niceties. Walking out behind her one day from the ladies toilet of the Middle Park Hotel, one of my innumerable aunts, not knowing for the moment who she was dealing with, noticed that Dulcie's dress was accidentally hooked up at the back, so my aunt helpfully flicked the offending bit down for her, whereupon, before a word of explanation could be offered, Pretty Dulcie turned and intimated her gratitude by saying: ‘You lay a finger on me again, and I'll have the boys break your arms.’ Well, that's roughly what she said — interspersed at appropriate points with copulatory and other references; and recommendations difficult to carry out even if my aunt had the slightest idea what they meant.

  Matthews remembers watching Markham holding court outside the Prince Charles pub on the corner of Fawkner and Grey streets. It was soon after her hip was shattered by the bullet and she sat with her leg propped on a stool as lackeys brought her beer after beer. At one point she caught the spellbound Matthews and his young friend observing her too closely: ‘Our elaborate and studied show of uninterested loitering was so obvious that Dulcie got wind of it and told us to — I quote — “Fuck off!” Unquote.’

  When Markham's hip had recovered, she brought Lewis to Sydney and they set up house in Darlinghurst. The union did not survive. After a series of spats, Lewis returned to Melbourne in April 1952. He was at his mother's home in Prahran on the 23rd when the doorbell rang. It must have been an horrific case of deja vu when the caller turned out to be a gunman. He aimed at the startled Lewis, then coolly pumped three bullets into his stomach. When Lewis fell, the gunman shot him three more times, then ran off. Astonishingly, Lewis did not die. Not so astonishingly, he refused to say who shot him. ‘I'll cop it sweet,’ he told the police.

  While Lewis was recuperating in Melbourne, his wife did not travel sou
th to visit him. It may have been because she was busy on a crime spree, for she was arrested twenty times on a variety of charges in 1952. Or, more likely, she knew the marriage was doomed. Lewis and Markham never lived together again, and were later divorced.

  Once, when Pretty Dulcie was sentenced to a month in Long Bay for stealing, the judge, in kindly fashion, assured her that it was not too late to go straight. ‘Ha!’ she scoffed. ‘There are ways of making money without working for it. The trouble you get into doesn't matter, so long as you get the money.’ It could have been her epitaph.

  35

  Tilly's Grand Shivoo

  Tilly Devine, to the amazement of many, had made it to fifty. She was not about to let the 8 September 1950 milestone pass without a shivoo.

  A photograph exists of the grand event at her old home in Maroubra, which she had reclaimed from her tenants and used as ‘my suburban address’. (The terrace at 191 Palmer Street became her chief brothel, until July 1953 when the Supreme Court declared the premises a disorderly house used for prostitution.) Front and centre in the picture is Tilly, in a white dress, her hair arranged in an improbable and towering pile that resembles a Roman centurion's helmet. Around her neck is a diamond pendant given to her as a birthday present by Eric Parsons. She is standing before a table heaving with food and drink, and is about to carve an enormous roast pig. Her hands, fingers decked with rings, daintily grasp a large carving knife and a fork which she is about to plunge into the beast. She has a prim smile on her face. What she was saying at this moment was, ‘Fair dinkum, I wish to God this ‘ere suckling pig was Bumper Farrell!’

  She is surrounded in the photo by attractive young women and Parsons, who stares boozily at the camera. In open-neck shirt, braces and cardigan, he has not dressed up for the occasion. Parsons had provided the food and drink, which cost £500, and even prepared some dishes himself. On the menu were two pigs, forty chickens and ducklings, four turkeys, two geese, twenty lobsters, two bags of oysters and two crates of prawns. Until he misjudged his alcoholic capacity and was forced to bed early, Eric was loudly proclaiming himself ‘the best bloody cook in Australia!’

  More than 100 guests attended, including Jim Devine's younger brother Sid; Carbine Lottie; a man known as ‘Bandages’; ‘Happy Harry’ Snell; and Radio William, the noted SP bookie. A reporter from Smith's Weekly was invited to chronicle the party. Guests bore tribute in the form of jewellery, orchids, perfume and furs. Before the festivities began, Tilly had spelled out the ground rules: ‘There'll be singin’ and dancin’ all night. There'll be plenty to drink now and plenty to eat later. But don't any of youse put on a blue or make a rort out of my home. If anyone wants to be a galah they had better fly away now while they've got a feather to fly with!’

  After the guests sang ‘Happy Birthday’, one Archibald St Claire, (aka Tools Carpenter) toasted the birthday girl. ‘Gee, it gets my goat when I see the newspapers giving the coppers the big wrap-up. All they do for Tilly is to go her scone hot! How can anyone compare a good girl like Tilly with a mob of droobs and flat feet.’ Praise indeed. Tilly responded with her customary eloquence: ‘Now, you can all get stuck into the suckling pigs and other scran.’ At that, St Clair quipped, ‘Cripes, it's a good thing you've got your teeth in, Til!’

  The Smith's Weekly man later pulled Tilly to one side and, notepad at the ready, asked her to reel off the names of her guests. She admonished him:

  We don't give out names at my parties. I only put them on to please my friends and Eric's relations. I make the parties extra grouse so as to nark old Kate Leigh. Her parties are always drack. The names of the people don't matter. Just put in the paper that there were jockeys and barmaids, horse owners, dog men, tip slingers, trainers, gay girls, my bank manager, my interior decorator and some of my lawyers. Say this: say everybody was at Tilly's suburban menagerie except coppers, top-offs, phizgigs and other mugs.

  As the night wore on, Tilly took the floor to entertain her guests with a musical selection. She sang ‘I'll be Your Sweetheart (If You Will Be Mine)’ and ‘If I Had My Life to Live Over (I'd Do the Same Things Again)’, and her pièce de résistance was when she crooned ‘Why Don't We Do This More Often?’, like a chanteuse in the music halls of her long-ago Camberwell youth.

  The party ended at dawn. Many guests had faded with dancing fatigue or passed out drunk in the house or the grounds, but as the last of those sober enough to do so drove away into the spring morning, Tilly was still going strong on the front lawn, kicking her legs high and screeching her favourite song, ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’.

  Tilly was honoured to accept an invitation for a drink and a chat with Arthur Helliwell, a big-name columnist for People, a high-circulation British Sunday newspaper. Helliwell was an acerbic fellow who wore a ratty homburg hat, a David Niven moustache and held an ever-present cigarette between his third and fourth fingers. When he arrived in Australia he was on the final leg of a 1950 world tour. He had been to the United States and Fiji, and regaled readers back in England with his impressions. Helliwell offered some novel observations of Suva, for instance. ‘My first peek at a South Seas island has been bitterly disappointing,’ he announced. ‘The romance and glamour of the South Seas is a fake.’ Detracting from his enjoyment, he noted, were the sharks, rain and ‘ugly’ Fijian women.

  Sydney, and Tilly, fared no better. The photo accompanying his column about his visit to Sydney, headlined ‘This City Gave Me Such a Shock’ shows Tilly sitting in a pub with Helliwell. She is drawing deeply on a cigarette held in a hand weighed down by a heavy cluster of rings. No fewer than four glasses of alcohol are before them on the bar. Helliwell is grasping one tightly. He wrote:

  The typical Sydney ‘sport’ glosses over a marked inferiority complex with an aggressive and irritating rudeness. He laces his conversation with the army's favourite adjective to the point of monotony, insults strangers as a matter of course and generally goes around looking for trouble.

  Helliwell called Sydney ‘a rough, tough, moneymad good-time city.’ He said it was also, in many ways, beautiful and loved by its inhabitants. ‘But they love much more its Saturday afternoon at the race track, its two-up gambling schools, its rowdy night life and its schooner of beer.’ He could attest to the fact that if one visited such ‘smart nitespots’ as Joe Taylor's Celebrity Club, or Sammy Lee's, where the food, music and floor shows compared with Mayfair's best, ‘you can kiss a tenner goodbye.’ He ventured into Thommo's Two-Up School ‘where not so long ago one character won a small fortune by tossing seventeen heads in a row!’ He was amazed by the ‘cockatoos’ who patrolled outside and signalled the arrival of any stranger in the vicinity with warning whistles.

  And, Helliwell had decided, after at least a couple of days’ intense investigation:

  [Sydney] has an underworld that puts anything I have seen in London, New York, Paris or even Marseilles in the shade. Its sordid, lawless east end [sic], terrorised by a riff-raff of thugs, hoodlums, gunmen and larrikins who would make the spivs of Soho's naughty square mile look like candidates for a charm school, is more dangerous than the jungle after dark.

  One can only imagine what Tilly's ancient and ailing father Edward, reading his People back in London, made of the next paragraph in Helliwell's report:

  Boss of the district and certainly Sydney's most colourful character is the fabulous ‘Diamond’ Tilly Devine, a tough peroxide blonde from Camberwell Green, who owns the most glittering collection of jewellery in Australia. Tilly, self-confessed Queen of the Underworld, was decked out in eleven diamond rings, two glittering bracelets and a magnificent jewelled wrist watch when I met her. ‘Jest a few little trinkets, love,’ she said. ‘Don't feel properly dressed without ‘em.’ Tilly, who thinks nothing of donating £1000 to charity or spending £500 on a children's party, is probably one of Sydney's wealthiest citizens.

  When Tilly was sent a copy of Helliwell's full-page feature, which hit the newsstands on 5 November 1950, she was ropable, and declared that the f
irst thing she would do next time she visited London was to find Arthur Helliwell and ‘punch him fair on the nose’. She was not only angry because her Sydney misdeeds were now well known in her home town, but because the article elicited scores of begging letters from Londoners with sob stories. ‘They're biting me for everything from thousands of pounds to six-roomed houses and washing machines,’ she complained. One man proposed marriage.

  Tilly travelled south for the Melbourne Cup in November 1951. In doing so, she realised she was risking arrest and twelve months in prison for absconding from bail after her 1934 conviction for consorting in Melbourne. She took the chance, and came to regret it.

  She was recognised by police at Flemington, not surprisingly as she was wearing thirteen of her most ostentatious diamond rings and a long fur coat (she also had £296 in cash in her handbag), and arrested. ‘I thought you blokes would have forgotten me after all these years. Why don't you give me a break? Please don't put me in jail,’ she begged the officers. When that tack seemed not to be working, Tilly tried another. ‘I've got cancer,’ she sobbed. ‘I haven't much longer to live and I don't want to die in jail.’ A judge sentenced her to twelve months in Pentridge (or ‘Belsen’, as she called the prison), but because of her age and ‘cancer’, she was released after five weeks.