The Worst Woman in Sydney Read online

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  There was a clear double standard aiding the sale of sly grog, and it often frustrated Kate Leigh. During her court case in September 1942, she stared down police officers in the courtroom and told the magistrate that if the police ‘wanted to pinch people for sly grog there were a lot of their own members who could do with a little attention’. According to the reporters, ‘she knew a pub from which police emerged at all hours loaded externally, as well as internally, with beer’. She was unsuccessful in this original appeal against her sentence but had made her point about police corruption.

  Kate Leigh was protective of her business. She had to be. Under police surveillance and facing violence from underworld competitors, she needed to ensure that her sly-grog shops could withstand the pressure she faced in running them. From the 1930s, Kate Leigh employed a local ‘heavy’, Henry John ‘Jack’ Baker, to assist in maintaining her sly-grog business. Over the course of their fifteen-year working relationship, Kate and Baker were well known in the sly-grog trade around Surry Hills. Baker appealed to Leigh because he was good on his feet and was ready to fight anyone to protect his employer and lover.

  Jack Baker was reliable in his work for Kate Leigh because family life didn’t distract him. His marriage had broken up when his children were small, and his wife suffered from alcoholism. While his eldest child, also Jack, always remained bitter towards his father for leaving, it seems that Jack tried to make amends. What his son didn’t know, and Jack shared with another family member later in life, was that he would often have to look after the kids while Celia, his wife, was drinking at the local hotel with her mother.

  According to Baker family members, the relationship between Leigh and Baker was not necessarily an equal one. Jack Baker was there to assist and protect Kate Leigh, and to ensure that her operations continued as much as possible outside of any police scrutiny. When questioned in court in March 1943 while facing a charge of sly-grog selling, Leigh claimed that Baker was the ‘boss’ and argued that any illicit sale of beer was his business. One police officer asked Kate if it was true that she had in the past refused to pay Jack Baker’s sly-grog fine because he had been ‘careless for letting the police catch him’. Kate denied this and was unsuccessful in dodging a prison sentence. She was sent back to Long Bay for six months.

  Jack Baker’s loyalty to Leigh was unfailing. In court he testified: ‘There’s never a better woman lived. I’ve lived with her as man and wife for fifteen years. You always talk about her bad points. What about her good ones? She has a heart of gold.’ Baker wasn’t the only man to testify to this in court, or to the newspapers. Other associates, lovers and locals mentioned Leigh’s ‘heart of gold’. They didn’t deny her notoriety, but her heart was in the right place when it counted.

  Leigh continued to face sly-grog charges in the courts into the 1950s. In January 1951, the newspapers delighted in telling of her regular New Year appearance in court. Vice Squad police had raided one of her shops in December the previous year and found a man there hiding bottles of wine in his clothing. When the offender failed to appear in court, it was Kate who copped the hefty fine. She left court lamenting that it was a case of ‘give a dog a bad name’ and claimed she ran a ‘respectable fruit and vegetable business’.

  Sly-grogging had become such a problem for the authorities that a royal commission was established in 1951 to investigate the illicit trade and its expansion. Sly-groggers diverted alcohol from licensed hotels to illegal venues, sometimes using ‘dummy’ ownership of hotels. All this was aided by ‘police corruption at the highest levels’. Back in 1940, the owner of the Star Hotel, one of many inner-city establishments aiding the sly-grog trade, testified in the Bankruptcy Court that when he bought the business he discovered it ‘supplied Kate Leigh with sly grog on credit’. The owner continued to serve Leigh but was surprised that the after-hours business carried on throughout the night. Yet Kate Leigh was not called to give evidence at the royal commission. Policewoman Lillian Armfield was surprised by the decision: ‘She could have told Mr Justice Maxwell, the Royal Commissioner, more about sly-grog sales than anybody in Australia.’

  Kate Leigh seldom overlooked a criminal opportunity to make a fortune, but she wasn’t just a sly-grog seller meeting the demands of a community wronged by new laws. There were plenty of other people appearing before the courts charged with the illicit sale of alcohol. What made Leigh unique was the scale of her business and her reputation. Sydney crime reporter Bill Jenkings, who knew Kate Leigh for more than 40 years, said it was common knowledge that she ‘ran the biggest sly-grog racket in the country’. She ‘had enough booze on hand to float a battleship’.

  Liquor-licensing restrictions established Kate Leigh’s criminal empire. Just as Prohibition in the United States created bootlegging underworlds, the sly-grog trade was aided by the early closure of pubs. Leigh organised her business and established a hold on the alcohol trade in eastern Sydney. But although her clients affectionately knew her as ‘Mum’, Kate was a ruthless criminal operator. By the late 1920s, her sights were set on the fortune that could be made from Sydney’s sex work and drug trades.

  IT’S A ‘DEN OF INIQUITY’. A place where crime meets vice. You can buy your grog in here and while you wait, check out some of the ladies who can entertain you with their bodies and cocaine stashes. The police hate these places, and the newspapers demonise them in regular court reports. Locals will tolerate the business if no one becomes unruly. When business spills out onto the streets, that’s when the police get called. Half-clad women and blokes off their nut on cocaine never go down well with the neighbourhood.

  Kate Leigh sits in her kitchen in Kippax Street, ‘doin’ the beans’. She’s getting dinner ready and hoping Eileen will join her later. It’s just a regular house from the front, a terrace like all the others around Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. Unless you stop to watch the different people coming in and out of the door to the left of the front windows. That’s where the police keep an eye out.

  She smiles and thinks about the difference a decade makes. Ten years ago she was serving time in prison, Eileen was in a convent, and Kate had no idea what would happen when she was released from Long Bay. She’s made a fortune in sly grog, but now the ante has been firmly upped. If she wants to retain her hold on crime in the city, she needs to make sure she’s in charge of sex and drugs.

  But she still prefers to sell sly grog. Drunks are another thing; drugs bring more violence.

  A newspaper sits open on the kitchen table. The headline stares out at her:

  ‘MEN DRUGGED AND ROBBED’

  What the Police Say Happened

  In Kate Leigh’s House

  CALLED RESORT OF THIEVES

  Bastards. Fischer is the worst. He’s the one who stood up in court and told the world what kind of woman he thought she was.

  He’d turned up at her house and given her a mouthful: ‘I’ve warned you on previous occasions about having thieves and undesirables coming to the houses.’

  Blocking the doorway, she moved closer to the constable. ‘It’s my place and I’ll have who I bloody well like here.’

  ‘You’ll have to get out of this place. We’ve had too many complaints about men being drugged and robbed.’

  She fixed her steely eyes on Fischer and stared hard. She’d been run out of places before by the police, but there was no way it was going to happen again.

  So they’d charged her with keeping a house frequented by thieves, and every other offence they could think of to throw in with it.

  In court, the police prosecutor again accused Kate of drugging men and robbing them.

  ‘I’d be pretty clever if I could,’ was her response. This makes her smile. Of course she’s bloody clever. That’s what infuriates the police the most. They can’t match their wits against hers. Instead, they got away with telling the public she was the worst woman in Sydney.

  ‘You will admit that you are a reputed thief?’

  ‘I am a person of good repu
te. No one can say that I am a woman of ill repute.’

  She wipes her hands dry on a tea towel, pushes the bowl of beans to the side and closes the newspaper. Two prison sentences, each for four months. That’s what she faces. She’s appealed the sentence but it’s pretty safe to say she’ll see the inside of Long Bay again very soon.

  Sly grog is one thing. The police might turn a blind eye to that or give her a heads-up if there’s going to be a raid. Not drugs and sex. They ruin too many lives. Kate knows this. She sees it every day, but there’s money to be had from the business and she’ll not let that harlot Tilly Devine get one up on her.

  4

  SEX AND SNOW

  The year is 1944. It’s the Second World War and the Americans are in town: ‘overpaid, over-sexed and over here’. They are easy prey for Sydney’s prostitutes. Two women appear in court in March of that year, charged with stealing money from an American serviceman. The young naval engineer was lured to a house in Surry Hills and while one of the women entertained him, the other stole all his money. It was common practice for eastern Sydney prostitutes and known as ‘gingering’. Nancy and Valerie didn’t stand a chance in court. They lived a shady life ruled by criminal associations and links to the sex business. Photographed and shamed in the papers, the pair were sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

  Nancy and Valerie learned ‘gingering’ from one of the best in the business. Nancy once confessed to this in court but was quickly rebuked by the woman herself. Kate Leigh would admit to many things in her life but prostitution was not one of them. She proudly told the press she had never sold her body for sex: ‘I been 13 times in gaol and never once for prostitution.’ Regardless of whether she sold her own body for sex, Leigh had dabbled in a bit of ‘gingering’ in her time. It’s likely the assault case against her husband James Leigh was a bungled case of Kate trying to seduce the landlord while James took off with his money. Leigh’s empire was also funded by prostitution. The locals close to Leigh’s houses knew about her gingering joints and prostitution business, but Leigh still tried to maintain a respectable public façade. The stigma of prostitution weighed heavily on her moralistic identity.

  Prostitution has been a part of Sydney life since the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. While there were cases of wife swapping in pre-colonial Indigenous societies, there is no evidence to suggest prostitution existed in Australia before the first Europeans colonised the continent. Prostitution in Australia therefore began with the arrival of the first female convicts. Writing in his diary onboard the First Fleet ship Friendship in 1787, naval lieutenant Ralph Clark described the convict women as ‘damned whores’. Not all of the female convicts had previously worked in prostitution, but as criminal women they were stereotyped as sex workers. It was a lasting image against which many women battled in setting up new lives after serving their time.

  The oldest profession has suffered some very bad press over the years. By the 19th century, prostitution was labelled the ‘great social evil’. Women who entered into prostitution were said to have ‘fallen’ from femininity. Evangelical religious movements argued that the female prostitute needed to be saved to prevent further degradation of society. If we are to believe the campaigners of the time, prostitution was rife throughout the community, and ‘fallen’ women were to be found everywhere. Temptation was their moral poison, and they used it to lure men into their web. Calling a woman ‘fallen’ implied she had no modesty and had slipped from the pedestal of what it meant to be a good woman. Interestingly, not all prostitutes agreed. May Ahern, a well-known prostitute in Fremantle, Western Australia, was proud of her work and convinced other women to enter the business.

  Sydney’s track record was not good with respect to morals. The presence of convicts from the late 18th century stereotyped working-class life as criminal and immoral. This was tempered somewhat by the arrival of larger numbers of free immigrants from the 1820s. Desperate to dissociate themselves from convicts, they pushed respectability in the colony. The ‘convict stain’ weighed heavily on the minds of wealthier immigrants who wanted to develop the colony as a land of opportunity for free people. Prostitution was high on their list of things to stamp out in order to promote this respectability.

  Local politicians and police investigated areas known for prostitution in their efforts to report on and regulate the business. In 1859, JH Palmer toured the inner-city streets of Sydney as part of an inquiry into the condition of the working classes. Walking along a lane from Kent to Sussex Street, he witnessed the poor living conditions of women in the brothels, in what he called ‘scenes of vice’. It is ironic, perhaps, that Palmer Street in Darling-hurst, later one of the most notorious brothel streets, was named after JH Palmer.

  In order to regulate prostitution, there needed to be an understanding of why women sold their bodies for sex. Various insights were offered: seduction, neglect, poor pay, drunkenness, public house entertainments, double standards, female fancy, lack of education, corrupting literature and modern times. The list was endless and everyone seemed to be at fault. Such views created the idea of the prostitute as women entrapped in ‘white slavery’. There were (and are) women, however, whose entry into prostitution was voluntary and gradual.

  Sydney newspapers regularly reported public commentary on the state of prostitution. It was referred to as ‘a wretched, degrading life’, and the fear in the 1860s was that a growing number of young Sydney girls saw only the material benefits of prostitution:

  A very large proportion of the unfortunates who infest the streets of Sydney at night, and who may be seen flaunting about elaborately dressed, and apparently joyous and happy, are very young girls, natives of the colony. In numerous cases those girls are induced to follow this course of life from seeing nothing but the fair side of the picture. They see girls whom they formerly knew in service dashing about at theatres and other places of amusement, expensively dressed, with all the airs and appearance of fashionable ladies …

  Working-class girls were at most risk. They were portrayed as lacking decent family values and developing bad habits. Working-class households were said to set up a ‘fall’ into prostitution. Havelock Ellis, a doctor, intellectual and social reformer, proclaimed in The Criminal in 1890: ‘The prostitute generally lives on the borderland of crime … in those families in which the brothers become criminals, the sisters with considerable regularity join the less outcast class of prostitutes.’ While Ellis spent most of his life in England, he knew something of conditions in Australia before he wrote about prostitutes. He had visited Sydney as a young child and then as a teacher in the 1870s.

  Havelock Ellis’s view of working-class life and prostitution in England were mirrored by sensational stories in Sydney newspapers. In one case in Surry Hills, the elderly parents of one woman lived off her earnings from streetwalking. Sadly, it was reported, she ‘killed herself with a dose of poison’.

  It was around the same time that Ellis’s works became popular in Australia that Kate Leigh came to the attention of the authorities in Dubbo. Wandering the streets and from a poor family, she was said to have ‘no ostensible lawful occupation’. Police were also worried about her friendships with known prostitutes. Leigh returned to the Dubbo area in 1903 and was embroiled in a slander case in which her reputation was questioned. George Allan, a neighbour of the Beahan family, accused Kate of acting inappropriately with men near his yard. He found Kate in an alleyway late one evening and rushed in on her father’s card game nearby, telling him to control his daughter. Tim Beahan threw his daughter out of the house, believing she had been caught ‘doing something she ought not to do’, but he later relented. Kate and her father took George Allan to court for slander.

  What was not printed in the papers but was implied in the deleted sections of the quoted testimony was that Allan was accusing Kate of soliciting. In sworn testimony to the court, Kate argued she had not ‘misconducted herself’ and ‘never lived in a state of prostitution’. Beahan family mem
bers have never believed Kate was prostituting herself. The story handed down in the family is that George Allan accosted Kate and when she rejected him, sought revenge by involving her father and allowing rumours to spread. The case was dismissed but it raised questions in the local newspapers about Kate’s reputation.

  Kate Leigh’s residence in the working-class communities of eastern Sydney also influenced public perceptions of her lifestyle. Around the same time Kate was setting up a life for Eileen and herself, ‘common prostitutes’ on the streets of Darlinghurst and Surry Hills were closely watched by the churches, charitable organisations, the medical profession and police. In 1903, around 2000 prostitutes were said to be working the streets of Sydney. For the Sydney Rescue Work Society, prostitutes were ‘leading a life of shame and degradation’. They were living in ‘sinister houses around Campbell, Palmer, and Riley Streets’, and by the 1930s were still being referred to as ‘half-crazed dope fiends, and the brazen women who thieve and commit all sorts of sexual vices’. These were the same streets around which Kate lived and had established a public identity.

  Kate Leigh downplayed her role in prostitution because she was well aware of the stigma associated with it. The social, medical and legal regulation of street prostitution was heavily influenced by Britain’s example. The Contagious Diseases Acts passed by the British government in 1864, with amendments in 1866 and 1869, were brought in to combat the spread of diseases among the armed forces during and after their involvement in the Crimean War in 1854–56. Prostitution, the great ‘social evil’, was blamed. Yet the Acts were not wholly popular – more than 17 000 petitions about them were sent to the government between 1870 and 1885. Women’s groups were also opposed to the ‘curtailment of the civil rights of working-class women’, who could be arrested and detained as suspected prostitutes. The Contagious Diseases Acts were finally repealed in 1886, but they were successful in shaming prostitutes as a health threat to society.