Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  Safely home in Sydney, Tilly, her health miraculously restored, regaled reporters with the details of her ordeal. When she was gaoled, the warders had ‘stripped me down to the way I was born because they thought I might be carrying a gun or drug running. I objected to that because I've never carried a gun and I've never had anything to do with drugs. My only failure is that I like a drop to drink occasionally.’ She said she was glad to be home, and thankful for the hundreds of Christmas cards, letters, telegrams and personal messages she had received from strangers wishing her well. ‘My neighbours, who are on the square, came and shook hands with me when I got home. All this kindness has made me vow never to get into trouble again. As a matter of fact I haven't been in trouble since I married Eric Parsons, but no one gives me credit for that.’

  She returned to Melbourne for the Cup in 1952, and this time she was left in peace.

  PART 4

  The End of

  an Era

  36

  Empire in Decline

  ‘The bloom has gone off the grog,’ mourned Kate Leigh. It was 1954 and she was explaining to tax investigators why she was no longer wealthy. In her seventies, she had seen her sly-grog empire snatched from her by other dealers. Another formidable rival was the licensed club, just gaining purchase in society. Why would a drinker bother slinking up a dark lane, giving a password through a chink in a door, often imbibing gut-rotting booze in unseemly surroundings and risking arrest, when they could drink at their local rSL or sporting club until all hours for just a few shillings a year subscription? And with the blessing of the authorities.

  But sly-grogging was all Kate really knew, so even though by the early 1950s she owned only a few outlets, she kept at it. Her main dispensary was a flat above her fruit-and-vegetable shop at 212 Devonshire Street. Police still raided her premises, sometimes in bursts when they needed to improve their raid quota, but usually the busts were spasmodic and gentle. She still proffered the officers information but now that she was yesterday's woman and out of the major criminal loop, the few snippets she could divulge were of little practical use to police. Yet, they humoured her. They liked her as an honourable old adversary.

  ‘in the early 1950s,’ says ray Blissett, ‘I saw a lighter side of Kate. We had a Perth detective called Bill neilson join us in the Consorting Squad. I thought since Bill and Kate were going to have quite a bit to do with each other, it would be a good idea to take Bill up to her house in Devonshire Street and introduce them. I knocked on the door and she opened it herself. “What do you want?” she said with a scowl. I said, “Kate, I'd like you to meet Bill neilson, our new copper.” Kate's face broke into a wide smile and she yelled, “Bill, you old bastard! What are you doing here?” I said, “So you know him?” “Blissett,” she said, “i know all the shits!” They'd hooked up somehow in Perth when she went across to marry Shiner ryan.’

  The old outlaw could still spark a ruckus, however. In July 1952, after one raid, she had been charged with selling wine without a licence at the Devonshire Street shop. She beat her well-worn path to Central Criminal Court where she met her lawyer, the tall and patrician W.r. Dovey, QC (who was the father of future prime minister Gough Whitlam's wife Margaret). Outside the court, before proceedings began, Leigh and Dovey were taking in the winter sunshine when a photographer for the Daily Mirror snapped their picture. Leigh normally relished publicity, but, for some reason, was not in the mood for it that day. With a roar, she charged the photographer. She punched him and tried to prise his camera away, all the while abusing him, said an onlooker, ‘with a stream of filthy words’. The newsman was saved only by the intervention of Dovey, who held the combatants apart and tutted: ‘now, calm down Kate. That's enough of that.’

  Just one month later, in August 1952, the vice Squad again raided 212 Devonshire Street. On bursting in, officers led by Detective Sergeant ron Walden encountered a man with a suspicious bulge under his thick woollen jumper. When they asked him what he was concealing, he sheepishly produced two bottles of illicit wine. The fellow, who gave his name as Sloggett, confessed, ‘I bought the booze from Kate.’

  For perhaps the hundredth time in her life, Kate Leigh was charged with selling liquor without a licence. She attended court with Dovey. The Crown's key witness, Sloggett, failed to appear, no doubt after Kate had convinced him it was in his interests not to. Just when she was waiting for the formality of the charges against her being dismissed, Walden surprised her. He produced a signed statement from Sloggett, dated the night of his arrest, naming Kate as the liquor vendor. Judge Stewart decided the note was permissible evidence and fined Kate £200. Outsmarted, she leapt to her feet, and shouted that she had been framed and Sloggett had made his statement under duress — ‘The coppers kicked Sloggett in the guts and I will produce him at the Appeals Court.’ Dovey calmed Kate — ‘Kate, behave yourself!’ — and attempted to reason with Stewart. ‘This is a case of “give a dog a bad name”,’ he complained, insisting over the uproar that his client ran a legitimate fruit-and-vegetable shop. But the conviction, and the fine, stood.

  Through her nearly forty years as a sly-grogger, Kate had prided herself on the high quality of the liquor she sold. She would pass through her shops, complimenting customers on their good sense in coming to ‘Mum's’. So roy Fowler-Glover was shocked, and then angered, when he opened one of two bottles of wine he had bought from Kate on 22 november 1953, and discovered it contained water. Throwing caution to the wind, the Marrickville electrician (who conceded later that ‘I might have had a noggin or two that day’) hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him to Devonshire Street, where he would confront Kate. As the taxi idled at the kerb, Fowler-Glover knocked on the door of no. 212 and, when asked by the cockatoo, gave the password, ‘Mum’.

  When Mum materialised, the diminutive Fowler-Glover angrily accused her of gypping him, and demanded his money back. Kate laughed in Fowler-Glover's face. At that, he stormed outside into the street and shouted that unless he was reimbursed immediately he would hurl the two bottles of water through the front window of the shop. Kate disappeared into a back room. Fowler-Glover presumed she was going to retrieve his money. He was mistaken; she returned with her gun. Kate levelled the rifle at his head — ‘Get out of here, or I will blow your brains out, you bastard!’ Fowler-Glover's bravado evaporated. He leapt into the cab and ordered the driver, ian Wheatley, to get them out of there quick-smart. Wheatley, Fowler-Glover said in court, followed his advice ‘with the speed of a greyhound and the grace of a dove’.

  That evening, acting on a complaint from Fowler-Glover, Darlinghurst detectives called on Kate. She was indignant. ‘Wouldn't you have taken a gun to him, too? The mug was going to throw a bottle through my window.’ A Detective Baldwin confiscated Kate's rifle, which was unloaded. She was charged with assaulting Fowler-Glover, selling liquor without a licence and carrying a firearm on Sunday. The judge found the sly-grog and firearm charges proved but did not register a conviction, and he dismissed the assault charge.

  37

  Crown Witness and the

  End of Nellie Cameron

  Like Moll Flanders's triumphant homecoming as a woman of means after she had been exiled to the colonies in disgrace, Tilly Devine's visit to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth ii in 1953 was planned as a jab in the eye to all who had snubbed and derided her. ‘She returned home to show everyone in Australia and London that she'd made it to the top,’ says George Parsons. ‘She was effectively saying, “i left here poor and now I've come back with money.” ‘

  Tilly, says Parsons, had no particular love for individual members of the royal family. He remembers her asking, ‘How does being born on one side of the blanket make you any better than someone born on the other?’ But, like most Britons, and Australians too in those days, she had an inherent respect for the institution of the monarchy. So she was keen to attend the coronation and the new queen's procession through the streets, and few of the thousands of Australians who also
made the journey could have planned their odyssey with such joie de vivre. She'd been dreaming of the big day, 2 June, she breathlessly confided to friends, and unless she was ‘six feet underground’, she'd be there in a prime vantage point. ‘My family are Londoners,’ she exulted with a wink, ‘and they'll grab us ringside seats!’

  She filled a number of trunks with her finest clothes, including eight evening gowns, fur coats, cocktail dresses, sportswear, underwear, shoes and hats. She chose a dozen of her glitziest diamond rings, and took the diamond brooch Eric Parsons had given her on her fiftieth birthday, her diamond bracelets, a diamond watch, and pearl and diamond earrings. Her husband, too, would be a sartorial paragon. ‘Eric looks a real lady-killer in his new monkey suit,’ said Tilly. ‘We've got the best clothes money can buy.’

  Tilly hosted a series of bon-voyage parties, the swishest of which was a gala farewell dinner at the Grand Central Hotel on the evening of 4 January, the day before she and Eric sailed away first class on the Himalaya. ‘I extend an open invitation to everybody who has a kind thought for an old sinner like me,’ she announced to reporters in the days before the affair. ‘I don't particularly want wallopers or screws, but if they turn up I'll do the decent thing by them.’

  Tabloid pressmen mobbed the departing couple as they climbed the gangway of the Himalaya. ‘Tilly, I love your hair!’ cried one. Devine had wound her locks into a plait for the send-off.

  ‘Thanks, love. One nob made a crack about my hair being a wig. I told the old tart what she could do. Just because a woman takes care of her coiffure, that's the kind of thing she gets.’

  ‘How are you paying for the trip, Til?’ ‘We backed Dalray in the Melbourne Cup!’ ‘Tilly, are you glad to be travelling first class?’ ‘I'd rather travel tourist. Swells give me a pain in the neck. But a bit of swank is all right for a while, particularly as I'm so sick with bronchitis.’

  As reporters yelled questions and well-wishers flung streamers at them, Devine and Parsons hugged each other and called down at the dock, ‘Hoo-roo! We'll be back when the money runs out!’

  As the liner made its majestic progress out of Circular Quay, tugs tooted and sprayed water high into the air. Once outside Sydney Heads, the excited travellers repaired to their luxury cabin. Three weeks later, after battling dyspepsia, seasickness and many a hangover, Tilly arrived in England in a vintage season for Empire. The touring Australian cricket team, with Keith Miller, neil Harvey and the young richie Benaud, was contesting a marvellous Ashes series with England, and new Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing had just conquered Everest in the name of the new monarch. Tilly herself did her bit to uphold the reputation of the colonies when she disembarked at Tilbury, wearing, it appeared, most of the contents of her clothes trunks. She declared to pressmen who had received prior warning of her arrival: ‘I am not a member of the underworld, and it is eighteen years since I have been in any trouble. I mix only with nice people.’

  Midday 2 June 1953, and 40 000 people lined the streets of London. Tilly Devine and Eric Parsons and about nine of their friends were grouped in their allocated seats in the Mall, not 500 metres from where, nearly forty years ago, Tilly had sold herself on the Strand. They had been in position since early that morning. ‘Aunty Tilly and Uncle Eric sent postcards back from London, and photos,’ says George Parsons. ‘They showed them sitting on chairs right on the kerb in a flag-bedecked street. They were in the front row of a crowd about twelve deep. I remember my old man saying to Mum, “Oh, Til must have paid a lot of money for those seats!” ‘

  Tilly, wearing a hairdo created for her by a Paris hairdresser two days earlier, was ebullient and probably tipsy, for Eric had been passing a bottle around to ward off the effects of unseasonal rain and sleet. A band nearby drew smiles from the shivering masses when it struck up ‘it Ain't Gonna rain no More’ and ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. Then, half an hour past noon, as the chimes of Big Ben rang across Parliament Square, cannons in Hyde Park and the Tower of London boomed to signify that the young Elizabeth had just been crowned queen at Westminster Abbey. At the sound of the big guns, the crowd, including Tilly and her party, and the soldiers and police who controlled it, broke into ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘rule Britannia’. A squadron of rAF jets screamed across the leaden sky.

  Tilly's and her friends’ seats in the Mall were at the end of the processional route. Before passing them, the long line of carriages rumbled from Westminster Abbey up Whitehall to Pall Mall, Piccadilly, Hyde Park Corner, East Carriage Drive, Marble Arch, Oxford and regent streets, Piccadilly Circus, Haymarket, Trafalgar Square and Admiral's Arch before entering the Mall.

  Suddenly, to thunderous cheers, the carriages were upon Tilly and Eric. Eight grey horses drew the golden state coach of Queen Elizabeth ii (‘her smile gay and brilliant,’ the Times of London said the next day) and the Duke of Edinburgh, with Earl Mountbatten of Burma their personal aide-de-camp. In Elizabeth's wake were Sir Winston Churchill, who flashed his trademark ‘v for victory’ sign, and Lady Churchill. Australia's prime minister, Robert Menzies, and his wife Patty were in the seventh carriage. There was the Queen Mother, whom Tilly had, in all likelihood, last seen at Circular Quay back in 1927 when she was Duchess of York; and Princess Margaret; the Sultans of Lahej, Selangor, Brunei, Jahore, Perak and Zanzibar; and the Queen of Tonga. Tilly cheered, whooped and waved as the dignitaries’ horse-drawn coaches rattled and clopped along the grand red, white and blue–festooned thoroughfare — ‘We want the Queen! We want the Queen!’ The Times called the parade ‘long and lovely pageantry’ and lauded ‘the glitter of the gold, the glow of the scarlet, the trappings and embellishments of martial pride and gallantry’.

  After the procession passed by and on through the gates of Buckingham Palace, there was no sense of anticlimax as the throng, many people carrying the umbrellas and newspapers with which they'd warded off the rain, and the cardboard periscopes they'd used to see above o thers’ heads, crushed into the West End for a huge street party. The river Thames, Big Ben, the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square were all illuminated by thousands of burning electric globes. Fireworks lit up the stern faces of statues in Parliament Square and the white stone of historic buildings. No one now knows for sure how Tilly and Eric spent that night, but it's a safe bet that they joined the revellers.

  If the finest moment of Sir Winston Churchill, whom Tilly had so roundly cheered that day, was facing down Hitler in World War ii, then 2 June 1953, Coronation Day, was probably Tilly Devine's. It was also her last real hurrah, for her life would never be such fun again. There was a portent of future tribulations when Eric developed a condition in his eye that necessitated its removal in a London hospital.

  In the 1950s, Tilly Devine was a woman under siege. On her return from England, troubles piled at her door. She learned that she was being targeted by the Taxation Department, which was probing her returns over the past ten years. Tilly was worried about what the department's sleuths would turn up, and she had every right to be concerned, for each year she had routinely understated her income by tens of thousands of pounds.

  Possibly to take her mind off the snooping tax investigators, Tilly planned a party at Torrington road in honour of her old friend Stella Croke when the latter was released from Long Bay Gaol after serving fourteen years of her life sentence for murdering chef Ernest Hoffman. But the night ended in uproar when a fight broke out, guns were drawn and someone shot Croke in the upper thigh. She survived that flesh wound but died within the year when a cut on her finger turned septic and poisoned her.

  Another setback followed. Tilly, who had always prided herself on her pugilistic prowess, had her eye blackened by another woman at the Tradesman's Arms. Tilly was drinking with Esther O'Hara, an Aboriginal acquaintance who lived in nearby Thompson Street. The women's friendly banter became heated and ugly as their glasses piled higher on the bar. Tilly called O'Hara a ‘half-breed’ and a ‘black bitch’; O'Hara retorted
that Tilly was a ‘Pommy bastard’. They shaped up to each other, but O'Hara was quicker and struck Tilly a glancing blow that knocked her down. In times past, Tilly would have leapt straight up and torn her attacker apart, but this time, her spirit crushed and her body weakening, she slowly pulled herself to her feet and slunk from the pub.

  Then, in november 1957, Eric Parsons, her rock for more than a decade, died of cancer. As she had had with Jim, Tilly and Eric had regular domestic dust-ups, but without the violence. ‘Eric was a promiscuous man,’ says George Parsons, ‘and even when he was married to Tilly I don't think he was faithful to her all the time, and I think she suspected . . . But as he got older he calmed down. Even though he was only fifty-two when he died, when we saw him in the hospital he was a very old and broken man. They were happy together and he left her some money.’

  Nellie Cameron retained her good looks for as long as she lived despite the abuses of her lifestyle. In her forties, Cameron, unlike Dulcie Markham, was able to attract wolf-whistles and admiring glances in spite of being a veteran prostitute, alcoholic and drug user who had been shot, stabbed and beaten regularly for nearly thirty years. In Rugged Angel, Lillian Armfield compared the beauty of Cameron and Markham:

  Dulcie was prettier than Nellie, but Dulcie's features didn't have the rare and curious indestructibility of Nellie's. Right to the finish, Nellie retained her attractive appearance and the assured poise that set her apart from all the other women of the Australian underworld. Even after being badly wounded or bashed up, she maintained her air of rather disdainful nonchalance, and she continued to queen it over men.