World War Noir: Sydney's unpatriotic war

By Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern

It seems that not even world war could stop crime in Sydney. In fact, World War Noir confirms that war and crime in the form of sex, drugs, alcohol, racketeering and other illicit activities go hand in hand. A companion book to the later glory days of the Sydney underworld from Sydney Noir, here Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern tell the story of a time when many Australians were not as patriotic as we have been told. With soldiers' pockets full of cash and the freedom of being on leave, criminal possibilities opened up during World War II.Told from the ground or the gutter up, World War Noir is a raw and broad-ranging tale that confounds expectations and reveals a grittier truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781742244457

Michael Duffy

Michael Duffy is Time’s executive editor and Washington bureau chief and directs coverage of presidents, politics, and national affairs for the magazine.

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INTRODUCTION: SYDNEY IN WARTIME

Australians have a certain idea of their country during World War II, an idea we can call the ‘War Memorial view’ because it is embodied in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It includes the belief that during that war Australians – men and women, military and civilians – put aside self-interest and rallied wholeheartedly behind the war effort.

A lot of them did, but a lot didn’t, and this book is mainly about those who did not. The unenthusiastic made up a large part of the Australian population during WWII and while they may not have deserved a War Memorial of their own, they would certainly have filled one.

During the war industrial unrest reached levels not seen since the 1920s. In the latter years of the war scores of thousands of service personnel were arrested for being absent without leave. The enormous amounts of money Australians gambled on horseracing – much of it illegally – soared at a time when the government was calling out for people to subscribe to War Loans. In the light of these and similar instances, the War Memorial view tends to overlook the diversity of reactions by Australians to the war. Not everyone believed their highest duty was to the country; some thought this was owed to their partner or to their family or to the international working class. Or to themselves.

This book is a prequel to our previous history of the city’s underworld, Sydney Noir: The Golden Years, which covered the late 1960s. Between them, the two books form a sort of alternative history of the city, not just the story of the underworld but of its symbiotic relationship with the rest of society. While both books focus on crime, in World War Noir we have broadened the scope to describe more fully the society that the underworld fed off and supported. And of course wartime brought its own opportunities for those on the make.

A lack of patriotic zeal on the part of some during WWII shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, because the preceding years had done little to foster it. Stepping into the shoes of an Australian in September 1939, the first thing that would strike you was that war had come cruelly hard upon the heels of World War I. If you take 2019 as a vantage point and adjust the numbers for the larger population, it would be as if in the late 1990s 400 000 Australian men had died and 900 000 had been wounded in the greatest war in all history. Then there was the Great Depression; it would be as if unemployment had peaked in 2012 at the Depression’s 29 per cent, rather than the GFC’s 6 per cent.

As a result of these twin disasters, authority was at a discount. People were more sceptical, both about the much-vaunted egalitarian, democratic nature of Australian society and about Australia’s place in the global confederation of the British Empire. Whether looking at home or abroad, the questions posed by the Depression and British policy towards Australia were similar. Were the interests of the individual the same as those of the country? Were the interests of Australia the same as those of Britain? Were Australians equals, or subordinates?

In 1938 Sydney had put these reservations to one side to celebrate its Sesquicentenary, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove. Dramatising the umbilical link to the Mother Country, on 26 January there was a re-enactment of the landing in Sydney Cove followed by a parade of motorised floats through the city. The pageant included Aboriginal people; activists held a ‘Day of Mourning and Protest’ to coincide with the commemoration – a campaign now cited as an early example of organised Aboriginal activism. But the pageant did not include convicts, an omission that ignored the criminal tradition that, acknowledged or not, has always lain at the heart of Sydney’s identity.

Generally speaking, the Sesquicentenary was celebrated in a spirit of optimism. It had taken a long time, but the city was recovering from the Depression. And it was changing. In 1939 Australia’s population was a quarter of what it is today. Sydney was the biggest city in Australia with 1.28 million people, ahead of Melbourne, which had just over one million.

It was a very different Sydney to the one we know today. Photos from the time show streets in the suburbs as strangely deserted, with few people, trees or cars. Private vehicles were a rarity – you could always find a parking spot in George Street – and they became even scarcer during the war. The streets of the inner city were carpeted with cigarette butts. The bulk of households didn’t have a phone and often the quickest way to communicate, even between nearby suburbs, was by telegram.

But the city had fine tram and rail networks – the Harbour Bridge had opened in 1932 – and residential construction was booming, with blocks of flats springing up in suburbs like Kings Cross and Kirribilli. Most of these new brick apartments were in the ring beyond the inner suburbs, which were distinguished by their damp terraces and air made foul by adjoining factories and workshops. The inner suburbs – Glebe, Chippendale, Redfern, Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo – were a poverty- and crime-ridden world unto themselves. They were where Sydney Noir lived, and where it died.

World War II would prove to be Sydney’s closest approach to the actual experience of war. The perceived threat to the city would be underlined by the air raids on northern Australia and the Kokoda Campaign. We now know that the Japanese never intended to invade Australia, but in 1942 it was quite reasonable for the military authorities to think they would – and more than half the Sydneysiders polled thought so too. It was a city in fear.

Like its predecessor, WWII upended the city’s emotional life, bringing anxiety and suffering to its inhabitants, particularly to those with loved ones on the front line. But while WWI had set the pattern for the Australian civilian experience of war, the experience of WWII was different in several ways.

One major difference was that overall, casualties were fewer. Bad as it was, in terms of its effect on Australians, WWII was relatively less traumatic than the preceding conflict. But if it cut less deep, it lasted longer – 71 months compared to 51. Another difference was that unlike WWI, only a minority of Australians who donned uniform during WWII actually served on the front line. Most Australian service personnel spent most or all of their war in Australia, and the countryside was dotted with military facilities and camps housing Australian and Allied personnel, civilian internees and prisoners of war.

Public support for the war effort varied considerably over its duration. The popular mood in 1940 was quite different to that in 1942, which again was different to that in 1944. Victories and defeats, the advance and retreat of the Japanese threat, the increasing austerities of an economy on a war footing – all of these affected people’s willingness to contribute to the war effort. The last two years were marked by a distinct war-weariness.

And attitudes to the war were more nuanced than they had been in WWI. By starkly revealing social inequality, the Depression had stoked the long Australian tradition of labour militancy. During WWII unemployment fell to minimal levels and, as the fear of joblessness evaporated, industrial unrest rebounded. More broadly, the experience of mass deprivation during the Depression fostered radicalism on the left both within the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). The CPA would achieve its greatest influence during the mid-1940s.

Another of these nuances arose from the fact that during the 1920s and 1930s Sydney’s population became slightly more diverse, due to the arrival of non-British Europeans. These were mainly Italians but also Germans and Austrians, including Jews, fleeing the rise of Nazism. Although they made up only a very small proportion of the city’s population, these Europeans, often culturally and politically more sophisticated than their Australian hosts, leavened Sydney society. Their presence was controversial.

Australia’s leaders – politicians, military commanders, shapers of public opinion – strove to mobilise and channel public support for the war. They promoted behaviours that aided the war effort and criticised and punished those that detracted from it. These behaviours ran the gamut from waste and selfishness to espionage, but one of the authorities’ major targets was crime. Crime was always anti-social; in wartime it was unpatriotic – of direct assistance to the enemy.

The problem was that much of the crime in Sydney was integral to society: there was a symbiotic relationship between the criminal and the law-abiding. This was the result of various prohibitions, whose impact has been largely overlooked in previous accounts of the city. Prohibitions in Sydney were only partial, unlike the more blatant, and short-lived, American Prohibition on alcohol. In Sydney, for much of the 20th century the number of venues where you could legally gamble and drink was highly restricted. So people sought alternatives. This created badlands of moral and legal ambiguity in which crime and corruption flourished. The underworld was based on prohibition, which was a major influence on society, policing and sometimes politics. And because the war brought a rise in demand for prohibited goods and services, it threw the ambiguities of prohibition into greater relief and complicated the issue further. While the suppliers were criminals, most of the consumers were otherwise law-abiding. Often they were service personnel, who were prepared to risk their lives to defend the country.

Espionage was another form of unpatriotic behaviour. Two tiny spy networks, one Japanese and one Soviet Russian, operated in Sydney during the war and Australians worked for both of them. Those who worked for the Japanese were largely venal opportunists collecting open-source information. But those who worked for the Soviets tended to be highly motivated and embedded in sensitive government positions. They saw themselves as acting from the highest principles, their loyalties to the international working class transcending local patriotism.

The War Memorial view rests on the idea that Australians threw themselves behind the war effort. But the crime, desertion, industrial unrest and profiteering evident during the war show the opposite: there was an endemic lack of enthusiasm for the war effort, particularly in the last years of the war. The patriotic explanation for this lack was usually couched in terms of individual failings like greed and cowardice. Infidelity on the part of women was seen as deeply unpatriotic.

But beyond these supposed moral failings there was a much more subversive force at work: principled arguments against support for the war itself and against the government’s regulation of social and economic life as it mobilised the country for war. This regulation involved measures such as rationing, conscription of civilian labour and public health campaigns to combat sexually transmitted infections.

Political activists and intellectuals were among those who dissented from orthodox patriotism. Novels by Sydney writers dwelt on some of the complexities of the war years, complexities that have since been lost to view. These books depicted the seamy side of Sydney life and one of them, Come in Spinner by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James, actually mounts a sustained critique of the gap between the patriotic principles that inform the War Memorial view of history and the realities of life in wartime Sydney. One of their characters, an airman back on leave from New Guinea, reflects bitterly on the illicit prosperity on show in Sydney: ‘A bloke was a mug to go to the war at all. Get tucked away in some nice safe, soft reserved job … That was the idea. Ride the rackets.’ Two other novelists of wartime Sydney, Jon Cleary and Eric Lambert, both of whom served in the Army in the Middle East and New Guinea, canvass similar viewpoints.

Because of today’s widespread acceptance of the War Memorial view, it would be easy to assume that the same consensus held sway during the war years. It didn’t. These novels that dissented from the orthodox patriotic view were written immediately after the war, and the fact that they were well received (two of them won major prizes) shows that it took some time for the view that Australians united behind the war effort to be accepted as the agreed version of history. Perversely, there’s more unanimity in Australia about WWII now than there was when it was actually taking place.

This is the not-very-uplifting story of a period in Sydney’s history when a lot of its inhabitants were out for a good time – they wanted to get drunk, have sex, make money and stay out of the firing line. And it’s the portrait of the louche, disreputable city that was the setting for this affirmation of life.

IMPORTANT PEOPLE IN OUR STORY

Laurie Aarons, 1917–2005. Communist Party of Australia activist, National Secretary of CPA 1965–76. He was held back from enlisting in the armed services by the CPA.

Anthony Alam, 1896–1983. Nightclub proprietor and Member of the NSW Legislative Council 1925–58 and 1963–73. A business partner of Phil Jeffs, he used his political position to defend illegal alcohol rackets.

Frederick ‘Paddles’ Anderson, 1915–85. Violent criminal and standover man. Briefly one of Dulcie Markham’s partners, by the 1960s he was regarded as the ‘King of the Sydney Underworld’.

Frances Bernie, b. 1922. CPA member 1941–46. A member of KLOD Soviet spy network, she worked in the office of External Affairs Minister Herbert Evatt from 1944 to 1946 and gave evidence to the Petrov Royal Commission in 1954.

Charles Francis Bourke, 1909–64. Violent criminal and standover man. Married to Nellie Cameron in 1940, he was ultimately murdered by Lennie McPherson.

Freda Caesar, 1915–c.1958. ‘The Lady in Grey’, a key figure in a sensational 1940 divorce case, she invoked the blockbuster film/novel Gone with the Wind to explain her life choices.

Nellie Cameron, 1910–53. Violent criminal, prostitute and sly grog vendor. Married to Guido Caletti and then Charles Bourke.

Wally Clayton, 1906–97. Born NZ. CPA activist, Soviet spy and linchpin of the NKGB’s KLOD network from 1943 on. The most successful agent of a foreign intelligence service ever known to have worked in Australia.

Jon Cleary, 1917–2010. Soldier and quintessential Sydney author. He served in 2nd AIF and wrote two novels with the wartime city as their setting: You Can’t See Round Corners (1948) and The Climate of Courage (1954).

John Curtin, 1885–1945. Labor politician, Prime Minister 1941–45. An advocate of austerity.

Dymphna Cusack, 1902–81. Radical, feminist, quintessential Sydney author and CPA sympathiser. With Florence James she wrote Come in Spinner.

Allan Dalziel, 1908–69. Social reformer, political staffer, CPA sympathiser and Soviet agent. In 1940 he became Doc Evatt’s electoral secretary; in 1944 he hired Frances Bernie to work in Evatt’s office.

Donald Day, c.1904–45. Donald ‘The Duck’. Violent criminal, brothel owner and sly grog vendor. An associate of Chow Hayes, Day was shot dead on 29 January 1945.

Dulcie Deamer, 1890–1972. Born NZ. Journalist and author, she was dubbed Sydney’s ‘Queen of Bohemia’ in the 1920s and wrote a wartime column for Truth.

James Devine, 1892–1966. Violent and abusive criminal, soldier. He served in 1st AIF, married Tilly Devine in 1917; they divorced in 1943.

Matilda ‘Tilly’ Devine, 1900–70. Born UK. Violent prostitute, criminal, notorious madam. Rose to fame during the Razor Wars and remained prominent throughout WWII.

Herbert ‘Doc’ Evatt, 1894–1965. Controversial Labor politician, Justice of the High Court 1930–40; MP for Barton 1940–58; Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs 1941–49.

From 1943 onwards his Sydney office was a hub of the KLOD network.

Donald Friend, 1914–89. Artist and diarist. He served in the Army 1942–46, during which he kept a journal recording the follies of military life. Later a self-described ‘pederast’ and now the focus of controversy.

John ‘Chow’ Hayes, 1911–93. Extremely violent criminal, standover man. An associate of Paddles Anderson, Donald Day, etc., in his later years he was humanised through his recollections, recorded by author David Hickie.

Alfred ‘Pickles’ Hughes, 1900–78. Policeman and secret CPA member; member of KLOD network. Serving in the Commonwealth Security Service 1941–45, he protected key CPA assets such as Wally Clayton.

Florence James, 1902–93. Author and journalist. With Dymphna Cusack she wrote Come in Spinner, and in 1988 she wrote the introduction to the novel’s first complete edition.

Phil Jeffs, 1897–1945. ‘Phil the Jew’. Born Latvia. Violent criminal, Razor Wars veteran, sly grog dealer and reputedly fabulously wealthy proprietor of 400 Club in Phillip Street and less salubrious 50:50 Club in Darlinghurst.

Robert Kwan, 1916–? Chinese citizen, acrobat, opium dealer, labour racketeer, gambling house operator.

Eric Lambert, 1918–66. Born UK. Soldier and author, CPA member, served in 2nd AIF. His 1954 novel The Veterans is set partly in wartime Sydney.

Kate Leigh, 1881–1964. ‘The Worst Woman in Sydney’. Sly grog empress. Based in Surry Hills, a great rival of Tilly Devine.

Gavin Long, 1901–68. Journalist, war correspondent, historian, diarist. Editor of the official history of Australia in World War II.

William MacKay, 1885–1948. Commissioner of NSW Police 1935–48, Director General Commonwealth Security Service April–September 1942.

William McKell, 1891–1985. Labor politician. Premier of NSW 1941–47, Governor General of Australia 1947–53. Revered ALP figure who knew his way around Sydney Noir.

Clarence McNulty, 1903–64. Journalist. Editor-in-Chief of Frank Packer’s Consolidated Press 1941–45. Accused of obscene exposure in Wynyard public toilet in 1943, the charge was dismissed in a controversial trial that William MacKay tried to influence.

‘Pretty’ Dulcie Markham, 1914–76. ‘The Kiss of Death’. Prostitute, celebrated beauty, gun moll. A sometime partner of Paddles Anderson, eight other of her partners died violently.

Robert Menzies, 1894–1978. Conservative politician, Prime Minister 1939–41 and 1949–66.

Harold Munro, 1900–79. Criminal lawyer – Tilly Devine’s solicitor of choice. Himself accused of criminal activity, he was finally struck off the rolls for ‘infamous professional conduct’ in 1966.

Ezra Norton, 1897–1967. Proprietor of weekly newspaper Truth and other publications. Bitter enemy of Frank Packer and Packer’s friend Commissioner MacKay.

Feodor Nosov, 1912–? Born Russia. TASS correspondent, NKGB agent. Friend of Allan Dalziel and Wally Clayton’s main Soviet contact, active in Sydney 1943–50.

Frank Packer, 1906–74. Media proprietor, owner of the Daily Telegraph and the Australian Women’s Weekly.

Katharine Susannah Prichard, 1883–1969. Born Fiji. Radical, novelist, CPA activist, Soviet agent. Her Darlinghurst flat was a hub for the KLOD network.

Reginald Stuart Jones, 1902–61. Doctor and criminal, abortionist and serial monogamist. Victim of mysterious 1944 shooting for which two of his criminal associates were convicted.

George Tarlington, 1914–2003. Soldier and author. Served in 2nd AIF, wounded on the Kokoda Track. His two volumes of memoirs cover his life as a street kid in inner-city Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s, then his wartime service.

Clifford ‘Cliffie’ Thompson, 1912–58. Boxer, criminal. In 1945 he was found guilty of the attempted murder of Reginald Stuart Jones.

Edward ‘Eddie’ Ward, 1899–1963. Labor politician, radical, CPA fellow traveller. MP for the Noir bastion of East Sydney 1931–63, Minister for Labour and National Service 1941–43, Minister for Transport and Minister for External Territories 1943–49. Architect of bogus ‘Brisbane Line’ controversy.

1939

PHONEY WAR

1Shooting of Chow Hayes

2Phil Jeffs’ 400 Club

3Phil Jeffs’ 50:50 Club

4Central Police Courts

5Tilly Devine’s brothel/residence

6Commissioner William MacKay’s office: NSW Police HQ

7NSW headquarters of Military Intelligence, Abe Saffron’s workplace: Victoria Barracks

8Japanese Consulate and espionage hub

9Prince’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 south-east 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.

‘As rich as Phil the Jew’: Phil Jeffs, who rose from Razor Gang streetfighter to high-class nightclub proprietor.

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