The Worst Woman in Sydney Page 5

  Close to Central Railway Station, the Eveleigh Workshops were in a prime position for railway work. On a regular day, the locomotive and carriage workshops, paint shop, timber shed and store bustled with people going about their working routine. Engineers, painters, labourers, carpenters and many other skilled workers filled the vast grounds. The electrification of machinery in the workshops was complete, heralding a new era of faster production. Eveleigh was a bustling, noisy workshop employing hundreds of Sydneysiders. The workshops dominated Redfern, the surrounding suburb of workers’ cottages and crowded terrace houses. Most workers lived in Redfern or the nearby suburbs of Waterloo, Darlington and Surry Hills. They were all due to be paid as Samuel Freeman and Shiner Ryan waited in a car nearby on the morning of 10 June 1914.

  One of the workshop employees, Norman Twiss, had tipped them off. Over beers at a local pub, Twiss informed Jewey and Shiner that a wagon would arrive around midday, bringing with it two cashboxes filled with money to pay the workers. There would be three men in the wagon: the driver, the paymaster and his junior staffer. Twiss was the junior staffer. When the pay- master, Charles Miller, arrived in the wagon at Eveleigh on 10 June, Freeman ran at him and held a gun to his head. He then ordered Miller and Twiss to hand over the cashboxes. The Surry Hills crooks scrambled from the scene and made off with more than £3000 (the equivalent of $330 000 today).

  The Eveleigh robbery caused an uproar around Sydney. The papers called it the ‘most sensational exploit of the criminal fraternity’. The press followed the events closely and trailed developments from Sydney to Melbourne and down to Hobart. It was a scandal in three states, and the ‘motor bandits’ captured the interest of the public across the country. Shiner and Jewey had managed to pull off, ‘One of the most daring daylight highway robberies ever perpetrated in the history of the State …’.

  Wearing a black handkerchief over his mouth and brandishing a gun, Freeman was an urban bandit not so far removed from the 17th- and 18th-century English highway robbers of historical crime stories. Although the romanticised image is of the highwayman robbing passing coaches in a gentlemanly way, most were opportunistic, poor criminals who used violence to intimidate their victims. In Australia, the bushrangers of the 19th century, including Ned Kelly, were notorious highwaymen. Freeman and Ryan were the modern equivalent of highwaymen, using a car instead of a horse.

  The police needed the public’s help and quickly offered a reward of £400 (about $44 000) and an additional 10 per cent cut of the stolen money. The Inspector- General of Police released details to the press, knowing full well the reward was a substantial amount for the very poor of Surry Hills. Police started talking to locals around Surry Hills until one of their regular informers gave up those involved. Word got around that Samuel Freeman was one of them and he was placed under police surveillance. When he tried to board a Melbourne-bound train at Strathfield Station on 24 June, a fortnight after the heist, he was arrested.

  While the police were busy with Sam Freeman, Ernest Ryan escaped to Melbourne dressed as a woman. It was easy enough to pull off, with his closely cropped dark hair covered by a wig. With his youthful features – he looked much younger than Freeman, who was only a couple of years older – Shiner could pass for a woman at a distance. His height, five foot four (163 centimetres), also didn’t attract attention. In Melbourne, Shiner met up with a friend who promised to look after his cut of the robbery money until the police case died down. Not surprisingly, the friend took off to Tasmania with most of the money, leaving Ryan with only a few hundred pounds stuffed up a chimney. Then Ryan’s girlfriend, Ettie/Edith (Katie) Kelly, gave him up for a reward. Ryan was finally arrested in a house in Albert Park, Melbourne.

  Australia declared war on Germany and entered the First World War in August 1914. The next month, Ernest Ryan, Samuel Freeman and Norman Twiss appeared in Sydney’s Central Criminal Court. The evidence against them was compelling. Norman Twiss was implicated in the robbery when witnesses raised concerns about his demeanour that day. Postmaster Miller thought Twiss was far too cool under pressure and hardly flinched when Freeman pointed the gun at him during the robbery. Freeman also admitted to knowing Twiss, stating they had been friends since childhood.

  At the end of the trial, Norman Twiss was found not guilty and acquitted. Despite witness testimonies linking Twiss to the other men and his boast only days before the robbery that anyone could get at the money at the workshops, police had not established a good enough case for a conviction. Twiss made a dramatic exit from the court, shaking Shiner Ryan’s hand and kissing Samuel Freeman on the cheek. One other man, Arthur Tatham, was found not guilty on charges of assault and robbery, but for having helped Freeman and Ryan plan the heist, he was sentenced to three months in prison as an accessory.

  Shiner Ryan tried to maintain his innocence. He claimed no association with Freeman and said he had fled the city only when the identikit image in the papers looked like him: ‘I wish to be honest. I have a past to contend with, and knew that if I was arrested I should have difficulty proving my innocence.’ It didn’t help his case – he was sentenced to ten years in prison. While in a cell in Darlinghurst Police Station awaiting transport to prison, Shiner tried to take his life. He slashed his ankle and wrist with a small piece of tin and was found bleeding in the early hours of the morning. When he was well enough again, Ryan was hauled off to prison to serve his sentence.

  Samuel Freeman had more to worry about than the Eveleigh robbery. While investigating the Redfern job, police were able to implicate Freeman in another violent robbery. On 6 June, four days before the Redfern heist, postal worker Michael McHale was shot in the face during a robbery at the Paddington Post Office. Freeman faced life imprisonment unless he could supply a good alibi.

  Enter Kate Leigh. As Freeman’s lover, she was interviewed by police and gave evidence in court. Wearing a demure dress with a decorative scarf, Leigh gave Samuel Freeman an alibi for the day of the post office shooting. Kate claimed they were together on the night of 5 June, at a city skating rink, and then spent the next day together at her home in Cascade Street, Paddington. They drank most of the evening and into the early hours of the morning. Freeman, Kate claimed, had slept all day until the evening of 6 June. Outside of this particular case, Leigh’s testimony is interesting in light of the image she later portrayed of herself as a non-drinker. Kate’s sobriety was an important part of her moralistic identity.

  Police knew Kate Leigh well, even before the heist, and were quick to cast doubt on her evidence. A Sydney police report typed up in July, only weeks after the shooting and robbery, described Leigh’s previous residences as ‘frequented by prostitutes, criminals, and others of ill repute’. Intoxicated men were also accosted and robbed in her houses but would not press charges for ‘fear of publicity’. Senior Constable Charlton was scathing in his description of Kate Leigh: ‘She is a very shrewd and dangerous woman who would resort to any device for revenge.’

  Mug shot of Kate Leigh in April 1915, taken just after her conviction for perjury. State Reformatory for Women Photographic Description Book, State Records NSW.

  While the newspapers thought Kate Leigh had to be telling the truth, as few women would stand up in court and admit to sleeping with a boyfriend, the police character references quickly discredited her in court. In a report filed for the Sydney Quarter Sessions, Detectives Turbet and Robertson listed Leigh’s convictions, which included charges for using insulting words, being the ‘holder of a house frequented by prostitutes’ and ‘various offences under the Vagrancy Act’. The report was damning in its portrayal of Leigh. She was a woman who bailed out criminals and gave false alibis. One officer claimed in court that Leigh ‘always appeared to be ready to help criminals who got into trouble’.

  Kate Leigh was charged with perjury in March 1915. At her trial, it took the jury fifteen minutes to come to a decision. Its members were unconvinced by her protests that she had not knowingly given false evidence at the trial
the previous year. She was emotional and angry in court, knowing what a conviction brought. Kate Leigh was sentenced to five years in Long Bay.

  Samuel Freeman was found guilty on both charges. In addition to his ten years for the Redfern heist, he was sentenced to life for the post office shooting. Freeman wouldn’t see the outside world again until he was paroled in February 1940 having served 25 years. Aged 65 by then, he had spent 40 years of his life in prison for violent crimes. When he was released, Freeman talked to the press and told them of his struggle to remain sane in prison and how prison life ‘wrecked the minds of many strong men’. It had certainly worn down the previously youthful, cocky and enterprising Freeman.

  There was no keeping Kate Leigh down, though. She stormed into the State Reformatory for Women and secured a position in the prison kitchen. It was a coveted role for several reasons, not the least of which was that you could pinch food, but it was also less arduous work than the laundry. Kate had worked in the laundry at the industrial school and there was no way she was going back to those conditions.

  The State Reformatory for Women, opened only a few years before Kate Leigh’s dramatic entrance, held around 200 female inmates, among them some of Sydney’s most hardened career criminals. Despite its efforts to convince the public it was a place of order, decorum and disciplined hard work, all in an effort to correct criminal lives, the reformatory made further outcasts of women who were embittered by society. As the Sydney Morning Herald told its readers in May 1912, the moment new inmates donned prison clothing was pivotal as an outward sign of their condemned status.

  If Kate thought her opportunities were severely limited when she came out of the industrial school, they were far worse now she was in prison. She was publicly shamed as an associate of thieves and crooks. Sitting in her cell and contemplating her time inside, Kate knew her life would take a certain course from this point. Any evidence she provided in court after 1914 would be questioned based on her perjury conviction, and police would only be too happy to rake over her history of accosting and robbing men in her houses of ill repute. The Eveleigh Heist secured Kate’s notoriety in underworld life.

  Kate Leigh’s commitment to Samuel Freeman came at a high price. She spent four years in prison, and her daughter, Eileen, was placed in a convent. It left Kate resentful for ‘sticking to a man’. Tim Beahan, Kate’s father, took a turn for the worse while she was in prison, and he died in a Sydney hospital in November 1917. In his obituary, Tim Beahan was mourned as a husband and a father of nine children, including two daughters who were married to soldiers fighting in the war and another widowed daughter whose husband had ‘made the supreme sacrifice in France’. There was no mention of their tenth child, Kate Leigh. Perhaps the Beahans wanted to avoid any public association with a daughter serving time in prison. But although the slight would have hurt Kate, her family remained an important part of her life after her release.

  The authorities were wrong in thinking a reformatory school would curb Kate Beahan’s entry into serious crime. So, too, were the prison wardens. The prisons were popularly known as ‘universities of crime’. Long Bay offered Kate opportunities to expand her underworld connections with other women connected to the gangs of eastern Sydney. Friends and criminal associates visited her in prison and kept her up to date with the latest underworld dealings.

  Everyone was saying the same thing. There was money to be made in the illicit sale of alcohol. Buy up some houses, use a side or back entrance, and business could be done on the ‘sly’. Kate Leigh listened and planned. When she was released from prison in 1919, about the same time Australian servicemen were returning from the First World War, she set up shop in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. This was her opportunity to run her own criminal empire. Never again would she take the fall for a man. It was a very ‘sly’ decision and would make her a fortune.

  KATE LEIGH IS OUTRAGED. They’ve pinned many things on her over the years. Sure, she’ll argue over the sentence or fine, but more often than not Kate will wear it. This time it’s different. There’s no way she’ll let this one stick.

  It all started when she stepped in to help a man who was being bashed by a plain-clothes cop in Surry Hills. Who wouldn’t? You come from the Hills, you look after each other. Especially when the police are involved.

  Kate tore into him good and hard. The man didn’t stick around to thank his rescuer. He bolted, leaving police to arrest Kate for using insulting language. Of course she bloody well used insulting language. He was beating the crap out of a man. It was a wonder he hadn’t cracked his head on the pavement.

  Now she’s in court, facing the charges and the police officer giving evidence against her. If looks could kill. The bastard. He had no right to be tearing into that fella.

  When his time comes, the officer tells the magistrate Kate was being unruly and mouthing off. He knows she’s looking at him, but still he paints a picture of an unruly woman. She’s a menace to society. Ought to be off the streets. Kate’s heard it all before.

  Then it comes. The moment that really fires her up.

  ‘She was blind drunk …’

  Kate is furious. She wants to tear the officer to shreds. How dare he say that about her?

  The magistrate, watching Kate’s angry reaction to the allegation, stops the officer and says, ‘I know that this lady does not know the taste of liquor.’

  Kate Leigh prides herself on her sobriety. She’ll not have some bent copper telling a courtroom she’s a drunk, despite the fact she’s Sydney’s biggest sly-grog seller. You want booze after they close the pubs? You go to one of Kate Leigh’s establishments and ask for ‘Mum’.

  But she’s not a drunk. Doesn’t drink a drop of the stuff. She’ll leave that to the mugs who fund her empire with grog sales.

  3

  SERVING THE COMMUNITY

  Kate Leigh was one of Australia’s greatest sly-groggers. When the pubs were forced to close early after the introduction of liquor restrictions, Leigh saw an opportunity to make a fortune. The sly-grog business – the unlicensed sale of alcohol – was her mainstay, and would earn her the affections of working-class people in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. While Leigh tried to convince the wider public that her ‘private hotels’ were merely serving the needs of the community, her back-door business brought her into direct conflict with a police force intent on stamping out the illicit traffic in booze. Kate’s grog war turned her into a ‘sly-grog queen’ and allowed her to rule eastern Sydney’s underworld of illicit booze for decades.

  Alcohol was introduced to Australia with the arrival of convicts and military men in Sydney Town from 1788. Female convicts were given an extra ration of rum the first night they came ashore, and reports say it led to a mass orgy on the banks of the new settlement. Early governors in New South Wales tried to stem the flow of alcohol, but the early payment in rum to military men only worsened the situation. With few entertainments away from the toil of manual labour, combined with a scarcity of women, drinking became a popular pastime. Alcohol sales dipped during the depression of the 1840s, but were buoyed again by the gold rushes of the 1850s. For most people, alcohol was a form of escape from the hardships of colonial life, even after convict transportation ended in 1840. By the 1860s, drunkenness was portrayed in the Sydney press as a

  vice which above all others is sapping the foundations of our national morality, desecrating hearths and homes, paralysing our industry, and mocking our hopes of progress … It is a clinging curse on rich and poor, young and old, learned and unlearned. It palsies the strong arm, clouds the subtle brain, and deadens the tender conscience. It squanders the fruits of labour, the blessings of health, and the resources of intellect.

  Drunkenness was exaggerated at times by the newspapers, but it was hard to ignore that it was a problem. New South Wales consumed spirits at a much higher rate per capita than the United Kingdom. With intemperance portrayed as the ‘parent of crime’, drunkenness was singled out as a major cause of crime in the
colony. Government, church and temperance authorities argued that the colony’s convict past had left behind not only a criminal stigma but also a legacy of drunkenness. They wanted a sober colony.

  Some of the earliest campaigns against drinking were launched by the temperance movement in Australia. The New South Wales Temperance Society held its first meeting in 1834 and argued that heavy drinking was a serious social problem. Members pressured the state government to regulate the supply of alcohol, and increased their efforts to educate society about the perils of excessive drinking. Reforming the individual drinker was essential to their crusade. Young people were singled out as particularly at risk and in danger of combining their drinking culture with crime. Writing to the Sydney Morning Herald, one anti-drink campaigner linked young people’s drinking to crime and poor parenting:

  Sir – I notice that in the cases that crop up in the police court daily a great many of the offenders are youths. Now, what is the cause of this? I fear that in the majority of cases that demon ‘drink’ is the cause of it all. Mark the number of young fellows lounging about the hotels in Sydney every day in an intoxicated state. The liking for the ‘fatal cup’ has taken too great a hold on them, and in order to procure this drink they adopt any means, with the result that our gaols are crowded with youths whose ages range from 16 to 20 years. Who is to blame for all this? I appeal to the parents of children to protect their offspring from this great evil – this curse that is the cause of so many unhappy homes – this ‘monster’ that is the ruin of hundreds of men and women.

  More than a hundred years later, similar arguments still appear in the media about young people and binge drinking. As alcohol researchers point out, it seems, ‘we are always going back to the drawing board, cataloguing its manifold harms, searching for their causes, and exploring options for eliminating, or at least alleviating, them’.