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| ISBN-13: | 9781742244457 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
1939
PHONEY WAR
1 Shooting of Chow Hayes 2 Phil Jeffs' 400 Club 3 Phil Jeffs' 50:50 Club 4 Central Police Courts 5 Tilly Devine's brothel/residence 6 Commissioner William MacKay's office: NSW Police HQ 7 NSW headquarters of Military Intelligence, Abe Saffron's workplace: Victoria Barracks 8 Japanese Consulate and espionage hub 9 Prince's and Romanos 10 Killing of Guido Caletti
Chow Hayes: hospitals make you soft
On the evening of 3 February 1939 a gunshot was heard in Talfourd Lane Glebe, but when the police went to investigate they only found two drunks. They took the pair back to the police station, where it turned out that one of the men had been shot in the abdomen. The police conveyed him to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital but he refused treatment and discharged himself.
This was John 'Chow' Hayes, 27 years old and already with more than 70 convictions on his criminal record. In his recollections, which were recorded in the 1980s, Hayes told how he had been shot in Talfourd Lane by another Glebe criminal who had objected to his chatting up a local teenage girl.
Hayes would not have known the word 'machismo', but he was certainly familiar with the concept. When asked why he had walked out of hospital, he said: 'Lying in hospitals is dangerous. It makes you soft.' Two days later his wife's pleas (she had a five-week-old baby) got the better of his judgment and he went back to Royal Prince Alfred. The doctors examined Hayes, found not one bullet wound but two, and insisted they had to treat him or he would die. Hayes was sceptical: 'A couple of rums would do me more good,' he told the Daily Telegraph, then as now a keen chronicler of the underworld.
At that point the Telegraph lost interest in Hayes' braggadocio, but he evidently recovered fast. Three weeks later he was acquitted of carrying an unlicensed pistol; he had been arrested while waiting to ambush the hood who had shot him. Two weeks after that he was charged with participating in an armed hold-up but he was acquitted on that charge, too. It was the start of a normal year in the life of Chow Hayes, gangster.
Phil Jeffs: the 400 Club
Phil Jeffs, proprietor of the 400 Club, was also a gangster, but in a very different class to Chow Hayes.
For such a notorious venue, the 400 Club was quite good at staying out of the newspapers. A rare appearance in 1939 was a reference in an alimony hearing on 28 February. Maud Bennett was applying for maintenance. Her estranged husband Lionel Bennett agreed to pay, but said that because she earned more than he did the sum should be reduced. As an example of Maud's earning capacity, he said that when she worked as a hostess at the 400 Club she made £4 per week plus tips.
In this book, amounts of money are expressed in the old imperial measure of pounds, shillings and pence: for example £1 1s 1d. As a point of comparison, in 1939 the national basic male wage stood at £4 1s per week. The basic wage was roughly similar to today's national minimum wage, which in 2018 was set at $719.20. But in 1939 the gender pay gap was even greater than it is today; if Maud Bennett really was earning more than her husband then she was a striking exception to the rule. But then, she was in a very profitable industry.
The 400, where Maud Bennett made such good money, was a nightclub. At 173–75 Phillip Street, its location was a good one, drawing a clientele from the upper reaches of the legal and medical professions that clustered at this end of town. The sort of place to which successful men might take women to whom they were not married, it was also just down the road from NSW Police Headquarters and Parliament House.
Phil Jeffs, generally called 'Phil the Jew', had been born in Latvia in 1896. Jeffs was an East Sydney gangster and a veteran of the Razor Gangs. In the late 1920s he had emerged as the proprietor of the 50:50, a nightclub on the southeast corner of Forbes and William streets in Darlinghurst. Then he moved upmarket and we first hear of the 400 Club in 1934. Unlike the 50:50, which was essentially a place for prostitutes to meet customers, the 400 was more 'respectable': you had to be a member to gain access. It staged 'scanty dances' ('scanties' was a term for women's underwear), and Jeffs presided wearing tails. By the late 1930s he was doing so well from his clubs that the phrase 'as rich as Phil the Jew' entered into Sydney slang.
Anthony Alam MLC
In 1936, there were three partners in the lease on the 400 Club premises. Besides Jeffs there was Anthony Alam, a wealthy businessman of Lebanese ancestry who was a Labor member of the legislative chamber (MLC), the upper house of the New South Wales parliament.
Alam also had his own nightclub, Grahams, in the basement of 9 Hunter Street. Grahams had an orchestra and provided meals, it could accommodate 200 patrons and it was scandalously public. There was a big sign outside the front door and it advertised in the Sun newspaper. Yet for some reason that the public could only guess at – and many did – it had almost never been raided, even though it was only 500 metres from police headquarters.
In 1936 the Sydney weekly Truth, whose readers were very interested in criminal matters, ran an investigative series exposing Grahams and, as a result, it was closed down in October of that year. But this surprising development didn't stop Alam continuing to use his political position to protect his interest in the 400 Club. The closure of Grahams had focused attention on other nightclubs, and in the first five months of 1937 the 400 Club was raided six times by police, frequently led by one Inspector WK Keefe. In August 1937 Alam, under parliamentary privilege, made an impassioned attack on Keefe, describing him as 'incompetent, not fit to manage a fowl yard, a flat-footed civil servant, and a fanatic'. Like some of his successors, Alam was keen to use his political position to promote his dodgy business dealings – and his colleagues let him get away with an awful lot.
Dr Reginald Stuart Jones: tired and emotional
Alam was not the only member of the establishment moonlighting as a crook. In 1936 the third partner in the 400 Club was Dr Reginald Stuart Jones, one of the most interesting criminals of this period, a flamboyant sporting identity and Macquarie Street doctor. He was also an abortionist with professional and social links to some of the leading Noir figures of the day. In those days, and for decades to come, abortion was a large business in Sydney. At its top end, involving doctors and nurses, it was well organised and usually protected by police.
Stuart Jones weaves into our story in March 1939, when he was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol. He denied the charge with all the tell-tale bluster of the alcoholic, insisting to police that he hadn't had a drink since New Year's Eve. At the court hearing he prevailed on some of his medical colleagues to testify that they had examined him after his arrest and, while he might have been a bit tired and emotional, he was certainly not drunk.
Stuart Jones had come to Australia at the age of nine, and his father ran a timber company on the north coast. Reginald Jones, as he was then known (the 'Stuart' came later), studied medicine at Sydney University and excelled at a number of sports. He graduated in 1929 and went to England, where he married a cinema- chain heiress. He returned to Sydney, set up as a gynaecologist in Macquarie Street, and divorced his wife.
In 1934 Stuart Jones bought into the lease on 173–75 Phillip Street, home of the 400 Club, thus becoming partners with Phil Jeffs and Anthony Alam. He later told a court he'd sold his interest in the lease almost immediately. But others say the doctor was Jeffs' partner in the club until September 1937, when Jeffs beat him up, kicked him down the front stairs of the club and told him never to return. Jeffs (and presumably Alam) took full ownership of the 400 and there was no compensation. Despite this humiliation, Stuart Jones continued his high life of crime.
In October 1939 he was back in public view when he was fined for swearing in the street at Rushcutters Bay after being beaten and robbed in the early hours of the morning. As it was a first offence, no conviction was recorded.
Tilly Devine, queen of the other half
On 13 April 1939 Tilly Devine 'screamed loudly' as she was taken away to the cells of the Central Police Court in Liverpool Street, where she had just been sentenced to six months gaol for habitually consorting with women of ill fame.
If this report from the Sun newspaper were to be our only mention of Devine, the impression that it left on the reader's mind would nevertheless be quite complete. Happily, like the Royal Family – whom she worshipped – Devine was always in the public eye, popping up a couple of times a year to remind Sydney that it had a Queen of the Underworld, although she disputed that title with sly grogger Kate Leigh. Devine was ubiquitous.
Matilda 'Tilly' Mary Twiss was born in London in 1900. There, as a 16year-old prostitute, she married James Devine, a 24-year-old Australian soldier. In 1919 the couple had a son. In 1920 Devine left the child in the care of her parents and followed her husband to Sydney, where she established herself as a brothel madam. Over the next two decades she amassed a criminal record more than six single-spaced typewritten pages long – the chronicle of her rise to the top during the era of the Razor Gangs and the Cocaine Wars.
Like the rest of the underworld, Devine's fortunes had suffered as a result of the introduction of anti-consorting legislation in 1929. This stopped criminals from associating with each other, and made it easier for the police to lock them up. But she was still in business, and the forthcoming war years would be good ones for her.
East Sydney, her realm, lay at the heart of an arc stretching from Woolloomooloo Bay south to Redfern, a fissure of poverty and crime between the city and the more respectable Eastern Suburbs. By 1939 Devine was operating out of adjoining houses, numbers 191 and 193, in Palmer Street Darlinghurst: one was the brothel, the other was her residence. The nearby Tradesman's Arms (now The East Village), the pub that served as Noir headquarters in East Sydney, was like an extension of the family home and the setting for many a Devine domestic drama.
There was another characteristic feature of Devine's April 1939 court appearance. This was her lawyer, Harold Munro, the celebrity criminal solicitor described as the 'legal father confessor to the "other half" [that is, the criminal half] of Sydney's citizenry'. Munro successfully lodged an appeal against Devine's sentence for consorting, but one month later she was back in the same court charged with theft and indecent language. The theft charge was dropped because the witness against her failed to appear in court – as did many witnesses against Devine. The indecent language charge stuck.
William MacKay, 'Nemesis'
In Sydney during WWII, crime and threats to national security were frequently two sides of the same coin; often the officials dealing with both were the same people. This comes through in the record of a conference held on 19 April 1939 at NSW Police Headquarters, on the corner of Phillip and Hunter streets. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the threat to Sydney from sabotage by potential enemy agents – what infrastructure was at risk, what was the best way to protect it and who would do the protecting.
Among those attending were Police Commissioner William MacKay and several of his subordinates, who had all made their careers chasing the likes of Chow Hayes, Phil Jeffs and Tilly Devine around Sydney's inner suburbs. On the other side of the table were officers from Australia's tiny peacetime Army.
The list of potential sabotage targets included the Shell Oil terminal at Gore Cove, Mort's Dockyard at Balmain (where a youthful Lennie McPherson would soon be employed) the Amal-gamated Wireless of Australia factory at Ashfield – the country's largest electronics manufacturer – and the beautifully named Purr Pull Petrol Company at Blackwattle Bay. Altogether, the list ran to four hundred separate installations. Along with the Bunnerong Power Station at Matraville, which was the city's main source of electricity, the single most vital piece of infrastructure was the railway bridge over the Hawkesbury River. Sabotage of the bridge would add an inland detour of 650 kilometres to the rail journey between Sydney and Newcastle and points further north.
As often happened in the meetings he attended, the voice of the Police Commissioner was frequently heard. William John MacKay, the archetypal forceful Scot (he dressed the NSW police band in the MacKay tartan), was born in Glasgow in 1885 and migrated to Australia at the age of 24. He joined the police force almost the moment he landed in Sydney.
Right from the beginning of his career MacKay was a very political, and very controversial, policeman. He had been introduced to security intelligence – monitoring dissidents, keeping watch on subversives – during WWI. As a result of his skill at shorthand, MacKay had been given the job of recording speeches given by radical speakers in the Domain, such as those from the anarchist International Workers of the World organisation.
By dint of tireless ambition and a talent for breaking down doors MacKay had, by 1928, risen to the position of Detective Inspector in charge of the Criminal Investigation Branch. He frequently attracted publicity, good and bad. He garnered much credit for his part in suppressing the Razor Gangs in the 1920s. He played a prominent role in the Rothbury Riot of December 1929, when a striking miner was shot dead by police in the Hunter Valley coalfields. He demonstrated political acumen by taking a strong line against the far-right militias that sprang up in Sydney in the early 1930s, deflecting Labor suggestions of right-wing bias. And he had the all-important gift of promoting himself. In the 1940s the equivalent of a catchy Twitter handle was a striking one-word personal telegram address: MacKay's was 'Nemesis'. His instincts were purely authoritarian.
Security intelligence: the Nazi people
During the conference at the NSW Police Headquarters, a major from Military Intelligence commented that 'we had a confidential report last night that the Nazi people are very interested in the wireless station at Canberra'. He was referring to the intelligence network operating out of the German Consulate at 4 Bridge Street in the city and their interest in HMAS Harman, the RAN's new transmitting station just outside Canberra.
Australians now take it for granted that civilians, under civilian control, carry out the domestic security intelligence function of government. But during WWII a great deal of security intelligence work was done by Army officers of Military Intelligence (MI), which was based in Army Headquarters in Melbourne. As the reference to Nazi spies shows, MI was involved in counterespionage. But its remit was much wider than that. Until September 1942 it was MI that determined who should be detained as threats to national security.
In Sydney, MI worked out of Victoria Barracks in Paddington and also had an office in the strategically important, radical hotbed of Newcastle. MI was staffed by Army officers and used both army personnel and civilian agents for surveillance and as informants.
MI had the help of the agency known as Military Police Intelligence (MPI), a hybrid military–police unit, unique to New South Wales, which was established in 1938 to keep watch on 'subversive activities'. Based in NSW Police Headquarters, it was jointly staffed by military officers from MI who identified 'subversives', and by policemen who followed them around. Also present at the sabotage conference was Anthony Alam's bête noir, Inspector WJ Keefe, who had been promoted from raiding nightclubs to heading the police contingent in MPI.
During the war Australia's various intelligence agencies competed vigorously among themselves. Besides MI and MPI, the Royal Australian Navy had its own Naval Intelligence Division. There was also a national civilian intelligence organisation, the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB – unhelpfully the same initials as NSW's police Criminal Investigation Branch), which reported to the Federal Attorney-General. Formed in 1919, the CIB was focused on the threats of industrial militancy and communism. In New South Wales, the CIB office was on the top floors of the Commonwealth Bank Building at the corner of Martin Place and Pitt Street, where Sydney-based federal ministers and other parliamentarians also had their offices.
Defending Sydney: the espionage threat
There were two perceived threats to national security in wartime Sydney. One was that posed by the imaginary Fifth Column, which we discuss later in this chapter. The other was the small but very real threat of espionage carried out by foreign powers using their own nationals and the Australian citizens or residents they recruited.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "World War Noir"
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Copyright © 2019 Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern.
Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Sydney in wartime 1
Important people in our story 9
1939 Phoney War 15
1940 Waiting gaily here 61
1941 A lot of gazelles 103
1942 In the Mood' 143
1943 As bad as can be conceived 191
1944 Normal, banal, familiar 237
1945 You'll shoot out the other side of Christmas 273
Epilogue: 'Don't Fence Me In' 304
Notes on sources 313
List of illustrations 317
Bibliography 318
Index 322