The Worst Woman in Sydney Read online

  While apprehensions for drunkenness decreased early in the 1880s, an Intoxicating Drink Inquiry Commission was established in 1886 to investigate the connection between drunkenness and crime. Police in Sydney argued that at least three-quarters of crime in the city was due to drunkenness. The governor of Darlinghurst Gaol claimed that more than 90 per cent of inmates were there because of drink. But while the connection between drinking and crime was re-established by the inquiry, it also found that the rate of alcohol consumption had decreased since the 1870s.

  Australian authorities were also worried about alcoholism. International debates raised the question of whether drunkenness was ‘a moral vice, a bad habit, or a mental disease’. In Britain, the United States and Australia, excessive drinking featured in medical discussions about habits and disease:

  The craving for alcohol, which is a symptom of disease, is intensified by a short period of compulsory abstention; and in some cases the sudden cutting off of the drink supply amounts to positive cruelty. The world, including the medical profession, has been slow to arrive at anything like a general agreement that inebriety is a disease not a misdemeanour.

  Drinking was also linked to mental illness and called ‘dipsomania’. Doctors and psychiatrists argued it was a disease creating an ‘irresistible, uncontrollable, morbid impulse to drink stimulants’ – and was explained as a ‘degenerative nervous disease often rooted in family history’. By emphasising an imbalance within a person’s mental state, authorities at the time hoped to tackle excessive drinking by associating it with the stigma of insanity. Some drinkers, however, were genuinely worried about their drinking and used dipsomania as a defence in court. In January 1899, Robert Thorpe declared in a Sydney court he was ‘a dipsomaniac of the worst type’ who ‘lost control of himself’ when drinking. He was sent to gaol for two months.

  From the turn of the 20th century, habitual drunks – whether mentally unstable or not – came under the new Inebriates Bill, introduced in 1897 and enacted in 1900. From 1912, the Inebriates Act gave police the authority to arrest people who were drunk in public and force them to undergo medical treatment. Police and magistrates were keen to break the prison cycle for habitual drunks and instead have them placed in institutions where they could receive treatment for their ‘disease’. Offenders sometimes spent up to twelve months in an institution once a magistrate labelled them a habitual drunk. The Inebriates Act officially defined alcohol abuse as a serious medical and social problem.

  Alcohol restrictions followed. The New South Wales Parliament introduced a Licensing Amendment Bill in 1905. The supply of alcohol to pubs was limited, and Sunday drinking was outlawed. Earlier pub closing times were next on the list of regulations. Campaigns in support of this turned it into a patriotic argument. At a public meeting in Sydney in May 1915, Archdeacon Boyce used the First World War as a case for closing pubs earlier. He argued Australians should be supporting their nation and soldiers in whatever way they could rather than drinking to excess and letting their families down.

  When the Holman government’s Liquor Act of 1916 ordered all pubs in New South Wales to close at 6 pm, temperance campaigners rejoiced and called it ‘the patriotic hour’. Early pub closing was successful across four Australian states. Western Australians agreed with drinking restrictions but preferred a closing time of 9 pm. The anti-drink campaign lasted longer in New South Wales than other states. In fact, it was the only state to hold a referendum on prohibition.

  Newspapers voiced the concerns of working-class drinkers. Some editorials argued that workers had every right to drink on a Sunday after a long week, despite what Christian organisations might think. As one newspaper argued, ‘[I]f the laws do not command men’s respect, they would not observe them.’ For many working-class men the pub was an alternative to church. It was a place to socialise beyond work and enjoy a sense of mateship. Inner-city locals were also upset by early closing hours because they didn’t give them much time to get from the factory to the pub before the last call.

  Early closing times created the ‘six o’clock swill’. Drinkers raced to the pub after work and hurried to have their fill of beer before closing. The ‘swill’ led to packed pubs and binge drinking. The demand for drinks was so great in the last hour before closing that bartenders fitted long tubes to bar taps and walked around the pub filling glasses as they went.

  While sober anti-drink campaigners celebrated the restrictions, drinkers stared into their empty glasses at 6 pm and lamented their loss of rights. Working-class men and women felt most hard done by. They were the ones who frequented the pubs and kept business ticking over. In the referendum on pub hours, held on 10 June 1916, more than 60 per cent of people voted for a six o’clock closing over nine o’clock. In the working-class inner-city suburbs of eastern Sydney, however, a majority voted for the later closing time. Defeated in their efforts to keep the pubs open, they turned to the black market in booze.

  One major side effect of the Liquor Act was an increase in the popularity of sly-grog shops. As one historian explains, ‘to the drinker, sly-grogging was a way of life’. Usually run out of a back room in terrace houses or small shop premises, sly-grog shops accommodated locals who demanded beer or spirits outside early closing hours.

  Sly-grog shops had been a part of the Australian drinking scene for a long time. Colonial newspapers wrote about them in the 1820s, and they featured on the goldfields during the rushes of the 1850s. They also popped up across the rural landscape on pastoral properties. Station hands and shearers would often drink poor-quality liquor in rundown shanties. Sly-grog sellers featured in popular literature. Henry Lawson’s 1907 short story ‘The Blindness of One-Eyed Bogan’ mentions a ‘hard-looking woman’ who was ‘just the sort’ to keep a sly-grog shop.

  The liquor laws meant that unlicensed drinking was forced underground and sly-groggers made a fortune. The liquor trade had in fact argued against the early closing of pubs by using sly-grog selling as an example of the criminal business it would create. Sly-grogging remained an important source of criminal income through the first decades of the 20th century because it had a ‘quasi- legitimate status and won widespread public tolerance’.

  By the 1920s, groggeries were centralised within the inner-city neighbourhoods of eastern Sydney, and business was booming. While private houses were preferred or shops used as a front for the business, one notable pub and hotel stands out as a popular sly-grog seller. There was a hole in the wall of the Shakespeare Hotel on Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, where sly grog used to be passed through. And the woman who owned a terrace house nearby was none other than Kate Leigh.

  Eastern Sydney was Kate Leigh’s heartland and she used it to full effect. She took advantage of the demand for sly grog when she was released in 1919, buying a house at 104 Riley Street, Surry Hills, with her daughter, Eileen, and setting up a sly-grog shop. Leigh soon controlled prime real estate for the illicit drink trade. Her houses all came with back rooms that doubled as groggeries.

  The urban layout of eastern Sydney also supported Leigh’s business. Badly lit alleyways ran along the back of her houses, allowing many customers to come and go undetected. Leigh’s Devonshire Street property also had a second door to the left of the front entrance. It was through this door that Leigh was able to sneak drinkers into the back room. If the police raided, she would answer the front door and claim not to know any of the people escaping from the other door.

  One of these customers ended up being the second Mr Kate Leigh. Edward Joseph ‘Teddy’ Barry married Kate in September 1922. A small-time crook from Fremantle, Western Australia, Barry was a labourer but was better known around inner Sydney as a sly-grogger and petty thief. Teddy was looking to make a quick fortune from his marriage to Kate, but underestimated her independence and willingness to run her empire on her own terms.

  Sly-grogging had a longer life than Kate’s marriage to Teddy. A newspaper notice shows that Teddy Barry was back in Fremantle in March 1928, accompani
ed by his new wife, Edith Hynes. Charged with being an idle and disorderly person and frequenting a brothel in Leake Street, Fremantle, Barry was ordered to leave the state or pay a fine. He returned to Sydney, where he died in 1948. Kate Leigh donned her finest furs for the funeral and described Teddy as her ‘beloved husband’ in a newspaper notice. Perhaps the passing years had made Kate sentimental, for there was little in the Barry marriage that was beloved by the time Teddy ran off to Fremantle.

  Kate Leigh was running her own sly-grog show by the late 1920s. Access to space was a crucial factor in her success. Few working-class homes had the room to store and sell alcohol. Leigh was able to provide drinking space to groups of customers in her properties in Darling- hurst and Surry Hills. Her houses at 104 Riley Street, 2 Lansdowne Street and 212 Devonshire Street played a central role in the sly-grog trade. As she later told reporters, her house in Devonshire Street had ten rooms and was the most popular of all her groggeries.

  The décor of Leigh’s houses and sly-grog rooms increased her market and profits. She fitted out her groggeries with good furniture and radios. She wanted her customers to feel comfortable and relaxed. They were more likely to keep buying booze if they were lounging about and listening to music. They might also forget just how much they were paying for the grog. Kate’s booze was expensive but it was of premium quality. Most of the other groggeries specialised in watered-down beer and spirits. Kate wasn’t above doing this herself, but she usually knew not to target the more sober clients when offering diluted grog. She prided herself on making locals feel welcome in what they referred to as ‘Kate’s hotels’. Her house on Lansdowne Street was popularly known as the ‘Lansdowne Hotel’.

  Late-night drinkers were always on the lookout for ‘Mum’. Wandering along the backstreets of Surry Hills, they would knock on back doors and ask if Mum was in. Most knew the right houses to go to. ‘Mum’ was the password for Kate Leigh’s groggeries and the familiar term illustrates the local support she enjoyed. When Roy Glover appeared in court, embroiled in a sly-grog charge against Kate, he told the magistrate, ‘It wasn’t Mum who did it, but one of the coots out the backyard.’ Other locals provided Leigh with alibis in their evidence to the courts and licensing courts. Frederick Montrose claimed in October 1942 that he had brought beer to Leigh’s house and had not seen her handle or sell any of it. Kate’s neighbour told the court in another case that Leigh had been in her house while the grog had been sold. Even the taxidriver who took police to Leigh’s house to buy beer refused to state that Leigh had sold any beer to the officers.

  Stories handed down by locals also tell of Leigh evading police raids by signalling locals to her back door while police banged at the front entrance. Quickly palming off free bottles of booze, she made the locals happy and most of the time managed to face the police free of any contraband. This local rapport is what sustained her for so many years.

  The local community supported Kate Leigh but she still faced criminal charges on a regular basis for her sale of illicit booze. In their duty to serve the wider community, NSW Police officers had to uphold state legislation regulating the sale of liquor. Anyone who policed the streets knew the impact drunkenness had on crime and within families. Sly-grogging, though supported by some newspaper editors, was heavily criticised by the wider public for adding to Sydney’s drunkenness problems. In one 200 yard (183 metre) stretch of Surry Hills, police officers alleged there were at least nine ‘Hills Hotels’ (slygrog shops), which frequently became overcrowded and led to street fights.

  By the late 1920s, a special vice unit of the NSW Police was created to deal with sly-grogging. Police raids were a regular occurrence in inner Sydney. In one incident, a house was raided in Woolloomooloo and the occupants arrested. It wasn’t without its ‘take down’ action, though. During the raid, men and women armed themselves with revolvers, and ‘fisticuffs played a prominent part’, according to the papers. Police were bitten on the fingers and arms, and officers were held down by two or three men at a time. Officers would move up from the ’Loo and continue their raids into Darlinghurst and Surry Hills.

  Police usually infiltrated the sly-grog businesses by posing as customers and then sent others in to conduct the raids, which often turned up more than expected. In November 1920, officers raided a house and found large quantities of wine and champagne stored along with sly grog. The perpetrators had recently robbed a wine shop.

  Police operations also involved a certain amount of corruption. According to former local Mary Baker:

  the police were usually cap in hand with the sly grog owner. And they were either paid not to raid them, or if they were going to raid them, they would ring up the owner of the sly grog shops and say, we’re going to raid you tonight, you’d better not have any liquor in the premises. So the liquor used to be all hidden or something. But sometimes the coppers used to run a double cross and they’d turn up after they’d warned … they’d still turn up and raid.

  Kate often got her revenge on the police. One police story, told to former journalist George Blaikie in the 1970s, shows both the toughness and humour of Leigh. Two plain-clothes policemen had been given the task of catching Kate in the act of selling grog at her house. Each evening they sat down on the steps of an electrical substation across the street from Kate’s: ‘One night, before the men arrived to take up their watch, Kate smeared the steps with thick, black grease. The young men sat down in the darkness, and never did get their trousers clean of what was on them when they arose.’

  Kate Leigh was public enemy number one in police efforts to break the sly-grog trade. Undercover officers often targeted her businesses and highlighted the seedy side of life associated with them. Police informed the newspapers of their raids, and the press penned stories about underworld life in Sydney and the ‘drinking dives’ that were big revenue earners for the likes of Kate Leigh.

  Kate had been under close surveillance for years by the time she faced the closure of her groggeries in the 1940s. Though she often evaded arrest by hiding her loot or paying off officers and local authorities, when she was arrested, the public was treated to an interesting tale. In July 1942, Leigh was arrested for selling liquor without a licence at her 23 Pearl Street property in Surry Hills. After watching Leigh sell beer to a group of men outside the house, undercover police approached her and purchased two bottles of beer. When they returned a short while later to make the arrest, Leigh claimed she was a ‘victim of mistaken identity’ and had only just turned up at her house after ‘nursing a sick old lady’ in Lansdowne Street. Leigh was later successful in appealing the charges, but less successful the following March when she was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for slygrog selling. Again, she had been caught out selling beer to police officers. Even though she didn’t serve her full gaol term, she didn’t stay clean for long after her release. In May 1943 she was charged with possession of more than 1000 bottles of beer, 84 bottles of whisky and a bottle of wine, all hidden under the floorboards in her Surry Hills home.

  Targeted policing of sly-grogging continued through the war years. With the dramatic increase in crime during and after the Second World War, sly-grogging continued to concern the authorities. General explanations given for the increase in crime included moral looseness (an argument characteristic of wartime discussions in general), disruption of family life and demobilisation after the war. Despite the fact that early pub closing hours had created the black-market demand for sly grog after the First World War, the inability of police to strike out the illicit trade continued to concern some citizens into the 1940s. One Coogee resident wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald arguing that he was astounded by the recent statement that the sly-grog traffic had been ‘almost entirely eliminated’. He continued:

  Such a statement could only come from stark ignorance or be inspired by political propaganda. I can vouch of my own knowledge that sly grog trading in Surry Hills, for instance, has never been so intensive as today. I challenge Mr. McKell or an
y reputable person he nominates to make periodic and unannounced visits and all the evidence required will be available. For the sake of our country, our people, and more particularly the young people growing up among the sordid surroundings, let us get down to facts and clean up this cancer in our midst.

  Kate Leigh was well aware that some Sydneysiders didn’t accept her business in sly grog. In court in October 1942, she claimed she had given up sly grog for war work, as the Herald reported:

  FROM SLY-GROG TO WAR WORK

  Kathleen Barry, 50 (also known as Kate Leigh) appeared to the Quarter Sessions Appeals Court yesterday against the fine of £100 and six months’ imprisonment, imposed on her by Mr. Wells, S.M., at the Licensing Court, for having sold beer without a licence. The appeal was allowed and the conviction set aside by Judge Markell. Barry said she had given up selling sly grog, and was doing war work. She had been a life-long abstainer, she said. Judge Markell said that because of the bad light there was a doubt about the identity of the woman who had sold beer outside a house in Surry Hills. On leaving the court Barry shouted ‘Hooray!’

  Despite Leigh’s win in this case, the authorities were hardly convinced that she had reformed her ways. Police knew she carried on one of the largest sly-grog businesses in inner Sydney. Regular raids often turned up plenty of booze, and the police were well aware Leigh was not focusing on war work and charity as she claimed.

  This appearance in court in October 1942 had been to appeal charges laid against her the previous month. The original conviction, in September 1942, had come only months after Leigh had claimed to be turning over a new leaf, and the original sentence had been handed down by a frustrated magistrate who knew about her groggery at Lansdowne Street – and her ability to force other business associates to take the fall for her.