SYDNEY, CRIME AND THE PANDEMIC OF 1919

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 engendered a look back at the global pandemic of 1919 known as the Spanish Flu. Nerida Campbell is a curator at Sydney Living Museums. Her most recent exhibition and publication, Underworld: Mugshots from the Roaring Twenties, explores the dark side of the 1920s from wayward flappers to stone-cold gangsters. To reflect on the effects of the Spanish Flu in Sydney and the crime world, The Sydney Institute organised a talk by Nerida Campbell for Youtube broadcast on Tuesday 8 September 2020 – followed by a discussion with Gerard Henderson.

 SYDNEY, CRIME AND THE PANDEMIC OF 1919

 NERIDA CAMPBELL

 It is such an honour to be here today speaking at the Institute. I’m a curator. What I do in my day to day work is collect connections with stories and people and I work mostly in the history of Sydney’s criminal media. I enjoy understanding how our criminal behaviours influence our society, and how law interacts with the policing and society in general.

Today, I thought I’d start by talking about the topic of pandemic policing and crime. The 1919 flu pandemic globally killed at least 50 million people, although some estimates are much, much higher. It had a devastating impact on the world in general, but Sydney in particular. That’s where my interest is ignited.

On 27 January 1919, the New South Wales state was declared infected with the flu pandemic. The actions taken by the government were very similar to those that we understand today. They closed libraries and halls, pubs and race courses, churches, theatres, picture shows. This made major changes to the way that people lived their day to day lives. Wearing masks in public became mandatory and wearing them on public transport was enforced by state police. Public assemblies were restricted, as were the numbers of people who could meet. People infected were required to stay home with, what we would call today, close contacts. State borders were closed as well.

It was very much a period that we can understand today from our current experience. The wearing of masks, in particular, was something that met with resistance during the 1919 pandemic. There’s one fantastic story about Eileen Lee, a Sydney criminal. She was the daughter of Kate Lee who was a sly grogger, making her money from selling illicit alcohol to the public. During the pandemic, you couldn’t buy alcohol after 7 pm legally in New South Wales. Kate’s daughter Eileen was out and about on a tram with her mask down under her chin.

This was reported to the tram conductor who got the police involved. Eileen said that she couldn’t wear her mask because she had so much mucus (this period of history has a lot of reports of mucus in it) that she couldn’t wear a mask. This led the police to query if she was so sick, what was she doing traveling around Sydney on a tram? Eileen was taken to the Water Police court which is the current Justice and Police museum on the edge of Warrane as Sydney Cove is known in the Gadigal language. She was fined one pound for not complying with that particular regulation.

So, even in 1919, the public protested about masks. Some people refused to wear them and some who did wear them gave them quite derogatory names. They might be called toothache bandages, pig snouts or feeding bags.  And not everybody was as compliant or as happy as the police would have liked.

By June 1919, the police were facing a real issue in New South Wales. At a time when most of the police force was male, 300-400 men were down with the flu. We have to remember that, coming out of First World War, the police force was already down by about 300 men. So, out of 2500, you had 300 to 700 under the capacity of the force the commissioner would have liked. On top of being short of staff, the police also had additional areas they had to oversee.

The Water Police were responsible, in part, for overseeing some of the quarantining and there were people who were resistant to being quarantined in Sydney. They also had to deal with large public gatherings and breaking up those gatherings and ensuring people were following the rules. Inoculation was available to members of the police force. There were places set up where attendees could inhale a chemical compound. It was supposed to flush any flu germs out of your system. Such measures were put in place to protect the police force from the flu because of the reliance on them to maintain pandemic regulations. Still, a large number fell victim to it.

The police were also responsible for handing out various certificates of exemption to people who needed to travel interstate or travel outside of the Sydney metropolitan area. That kept them very busy and meant they couldn’t focus on other areas of their normal jobs. In particular, traffic and traffic regulations patrol was dropped from the job description temporarily as there was not sufficient manpower to do those kinds of jobs. It is estimated 12,500 Australians died, more than half of them in New South Wales; over 290,000 Sydneysiders fell ill with the flu. And it had ongoing impacts.

Many of the people who died from the flu were younger people. And pregnant women were hit at a much higher rate than you might expect. That, of course, caused concern in general about the next generation. Australia had suffered through World War 1 losing so many young men. Then the flu hit, taking more young people and many pregnant women. There was panic and concern in society about what would happen next.

What did happen next was the 1920s, the roaring twenties. Out of that period of despair and pain and difficulty came an almost golden period in Sydney’s history. There was rapid societal change, architectural change and technological change coming out of a very dark and desperate era. It also created problems for police. Laws didn’t always keep pace with the criminal mind. Fast times breed new crimes. And some of those new crimes left police in Sydney scratching their heads about what they could do legally with the new kinds of criminals emerging.

We remember the 1920s as a period of jazz and Art Deco glamour, flappers dancing to the Charleston. But, here in Sydney, it was also a period of a dark underbelly of vice, violence and gangs that entered Sydney and ruled the inner city streets.

This era of vice and policing has been captured in a really remarkable collection that I have the privilege to work with. It’s held at the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney and called the New South Wales Police forensic photography archive. It’s a collection of about 130,000 images taken by New South Wales Police in the course of their investigations. It captures our history in a way that nothing else can. These are images that have been taken of our city, of our homes, of our people, when they least expected to be photographed. Such as a moment when the police knock on your door and you haven’t made your bed, you haven’t put your dirty cups in the sink, the place is a mess, you haven’t tidied up because you’re not expecting anyone to come over. These photos capture the way people really lived during that period of the 1920s right through to the 1960s.

There are also unusual pictures of our city giving us a sense of how geography, technology and architecture have changed and grown. Police photographers are the only people who stand in the middle of a road and take a photo of the houses on both sides. This gives us a sense of how people experienced the city. As a historian, I find that remarkably exciting.

This collection also gives us a sense of the criminal world, and how it changed and interacted in Sydney. We have a collection of images known as specials which are part of this police archive. Specials are images taken by the New South Wales police photographers of suspects in custody. These people haven’t had their day in court. Many of them pose in quite an arch manner. Some smile. Often, they’ve got cigarettes in their hands. They’ve got their legal papers in their hands. Some of them are looking right down the camera attempting to intimidate the police who have arrested them. Others are looking almost flirtatiously down the camera. The collection has also been of international interest. As a curator, I’m interested in telling stories to people and hearing their stories and sharing things that spark people’s curiosity. This collection does that in droves.

There are images taken at Central police station from 1919 until 1930. The people are suspects. There’s none of the traditional mug shot imagery. People are looking down at the camera. Often there’s a bentwood chair next to the person who’s having their photograph taken. That’s been put there by the police as a height measure because they don’t want to have a formal height measure behind the subject which would make them look like they were in custody. A chair is a much better measure of a person’s height for the purposes of these pictures. And bentwood chairs were in every police station around the state.

This remarkable collection made me begin to think about what we could do to tell the story of the 1920s and what kinds of paths it might lead me down as a curator. One group that appears quite prominently in the collection are young women dressed in what I would term flappers dresses. The emergence of the flapper is really interesting in Sydney. These young women were consuming films and magazines from overseas and imitating what they saw with the insouciance of the flapper. They would drink, smoke, cut their hair, drive cars, things that were considered to be decidedly unladylike. They rejected the norms of the past generation. It is linked, I believe, to their being young women who have gone through a very dark period of war and then pandemic where they’ve seen the young boys they went to school with going to the battlefields overseas and not coming back. And then the pandemic where people whom they might have said hello to in the street in the morning were, by the evening, dead from the flu.

It was a time of feeling life was precious, life was to be enjoyed. Life was something you just go out and grab for yourself. That attitude comes through quite strongly in some of these young women. One of the stories that came out of the collection arose from the intriguing image of a girl called Edna Lindsay. She was 19 and beautifully dressed. She is pictured wearing the latest fashion, beautiful beads around her neck, hat on her head. You can see just a glimmer of a tear in her eye. She’s just been released from police custody. She’s holding her papers in her hand ready for her court appearance. Now Edna, like so many young women, got involved with a bad boy. In the newspapers of the time, they refer to him as a jazz hall lounger. He was another young man who didn’t have a job, was just living life to the full and taking her money. Edna was working as a typist in the city to fund their lifestyle.

The boy in question had a dream of becoming a professional dancer. But with no training and just a red-hot go, dancing every night at jazz halls, sometimes with Edna. He had convinced her that all they needed to set themselves up for life was a little bit of money. They could then get married, travel to Victoria and take the jazz halls of Melbourne by storm earning money as professional dancers. They had cooked up a scheme to steal a cheque from her employer, which they did and presented it at the bank. It was for £310 pounds, which was a significant amount of money at that time.

The bank manager was suspicious, called in the police and Edna was taken into custody. When she finally had her day in court, it is quite interesting how the magistrate viewed this crime committed by the young woman. He spoke to her father and told her father that he really needed to keep a closer eye on his daughter. He needed to keep her at home more and get her to conform to what was the pre-war tradition of how a young lady should act. Then he turned to Edna and said: “Young lady, there’s more to life than dancing.” Edna disappears after that from all court records. It’s her one appearance.

Young women post 1919 were also beginning to work much more in city offices, as typists, secretaries, shorthand clerks and so on. This involved them in a whole different world from the one that was pre-pandemic or pre-war. They weren’t working in factories, they weren’t working in homes. They were actually out working in businesses in the city. This also caused issues for these young women. There’s a story of a man from 1921, Albert Raymond Clarence Fulton, who was an Englishman working in Sydney, who described himself as an advertising expert. He set up a small office in the city and advertised for typists and clerks. Young women now had these highly valued new skills in shorthand and work as secretaries in these places that had once been male dominated. Unfortunately, Mr Fulton didn’t treat his female staffers very well.

The police were very interested in Fulton because he’d come to Australia via China and he’d spent quite a bit of time in China. China, at the time, was a place the police were concerned about. There was a feeling that men coming out of China, like Fulton, were seducing young flappers in businesses, jazz halls and the like and eventually exporting these young girls to work as sex workers overseas. The police spent a lot of time investigating Fulton to see if he was influencing young women to join, essentially, the sex trade. It was a very real fear even if cases of people who were captured and sent off into the white slave trade are very, very few.

The other group that appear in the collection are returned soldiers. There is image after image of young men wearing badges that indicate that they’ve returned from service. It’s interesting the way the police deal with them and the way that they’re dealt with in the courts. For instance, there’s an image of a young man called Stanley Hay who fought in France and came back as a lower limb amputee. Like many soldiers returning to Sydney in that post-1919 period, he couldn’t settle back into the life that he’d led pre-war. For a while he was kicking around Sydney until he was caught up with the idea of stealing from a place called Diggerville – a workshop set up by the Commonwealth Government to rehabilitate and retrain soldiers who had come back and couldn’t go back to the jobs that they once had pre-war. At Diggerville, men were taught things like leather working skills, how to do the carriage work for the interiors of cars, jewelry making, skills that might be adaptable to those who had suffered injuries and couldn’t return to their former work. Hay was accused of breaking into Diggerville and making off with five leather suitcases, and four kit bags.

When he went to court, the magistrate seemed quite lenient towards Hay. One question was whether, with his disability, he would be able to remove that amount of stuff, so heavy and difficult, so cumbersome to move through the streets. But there was also a sense within the judiciary that these men had had a hard time and that they deserved to have a little bit more rope thrown them, perhaps a more lenient sentence. This attitude had hardened by the mid-1920s but in the early days of their return, some quite surprisingly light sentences for crimes were given to those who had committed them.

During this period, we also see people who are wearing uniforms and badges indicating that they’ve come back from war even if they never actually served. These were imposters using the goodwill of the public towards soldiers in order to collect money for dummy charities, or to take advantage of people’s soft hearts. Others with extensive criminal records perhaps should not have ever been accepted to serve. With their pre-war criminal lives, such men came back and took up exactly where they’d left off. They went straight back into their criminal world and caused all kinds of trouble for the police in New South Wales.

Another group that appear from that period are a surprising number of aged Chinese men. This surprised me in the archive. Why did we have such a large proportion of pensioners going rogue during the 1920s period. The League of Nations was set up in 1920 with a virulent campaign against opium. There was real concern about the dangers of opium. In countries around the world, it was a huge problem. Not so much in Australia and we already had regulations around the importation of smoking opium, that had been effective for some time. But in the mid-1920s, there was a burst of police activity, entering opium dens and arresting men who in their 60s 70s and 80s. It would be the first time such men had ever been arrested. I believe this came as a result of the politicising of policing during this period with pressure from the League of Nations on the government, whereby the government puts pressure on the police and the police arrest these aged men.

Opium in general wasn’t really seen as being such a big issue for policing, because it tended to be focused on the Chinese community. Opium tended to be favoured by elderly members of that community and who tended to sleep off its effects. They weren’t running around the streets of Sydney causing trouble.

Some young women were picked up by police for living with these older Chinese men. Their interrogation was to see whether they were living with the men of their own free will, or whether they were being held through being addicted to opium. The police generally found that most of these young women were healthy, happy, in a loving relationship and there of their own free will. Gladys Low is one such case. She is seen as a beautifully dressed woman, living with a Chinese man. But her neighbours kept reporting her because her sister and other family members would come to visit. People were suspicious that Gladys might have been luring other white women into her home in order for them to become addicted to opium and sent overseas as part of the white slave trade. No evidence of that was found. But Gladys was constantly under scrutiny not just by the police, but by society in general, because of her relationship.

The 1920s was also a period where we began to see cocaine as an issue. Some soldiers experimented with cocaine while they were overseas, particularly in London. The cocaine scene becomes an issue during 1918 with men returning from the overseas war. In 1919, there was an increase in demand for cocaine. Some of it was smuggled into Sydney but a lot was being diverted from what were considered to be appropriate uses at that time – from vets, chemists, doctors. It was being sold on the streets. It was popular with young women, who had been exposed to it through popular culture. It was also popular with street toughs in the inner city. The control of the cocaine market was something that led to gang warring on the streets of Sydney.

Sydney sex workers would sell cocaine as a bit of a side hustle. Many of them stood on street corners dealing in cocaine, and many also became addicted. The police tried to stamp out cocaine. They saw it as being a particularly nasty and evil drug. And Sydney police really followed quite a modern way of dealing with people who had become drug addicted. They often were kindly towards addicts. They would stand up in court and recommend that people be put into treatment facilities although there were none that specialised in cocaine. This was a recognition that it was not so much a crime as an addiction. The offenders should not be punished by being sent to the state reformatory or penitentiary, but should be treated in an infirmary so that they could overcome their drug addiction. What the police saw as the major problem were the dealers and there was a lot of really strong policing to attempt to contain the dealers. The dealers were described by the police as vultures who preyed on the weak and vulnerable.

The other group beginning to emerge from about 1918 onwards, and who caused a lot of problems for the police, were joy riders. Young men and fast cars are always a volatile mix. And the irresistible lure of shiny new cars in Sydney led to a spate of bewildered and bandaged young men appearing in the specials collection, after they had  stolen a car. Many of them had never driven a car before, nor had they seen their parents drive a car. So, you can imagine the kind of carnage on the streets, with these young men taking cars, driving them too fast and wrapping them around telegraph poles or crashing them into people’s houses.

The offenders often argued in court that they had just borrowed the car, they hadn’t intended to steal it, they absolutely intended to return it after they had taken it on a joyride. Initially, the courts were quite lenient towards such joyriders, as they often are towards younger people who make silly mistakes. It was as if it was all a bit like borrowing a horse without the owner’s permission before the war. Now you can put a horse in a paddock and it will recharge its batteries. Not so a car. Owners complained that their property was damaged, petrol used was and this should be treated as theft. As the 1920s went on, more and more of these young people were  charged with theft, as opposed to borrowing an item without the owner’s permission.

Car numbers in Sydney jumped during the 1920s. In 1921, Sydney had 33,000 cars; by 1926, it had 127,000 cars in the city. Again, this took the police force’s focus from traditional kinds of criminal investigations, such as assault or people being drunk and disorderly, to crimes associated with cars. Unfortunately, the law hadn’t kept up with the number of cars on the streets of Sydney, and police had to estimate how fast a person was going. There was no reliable measurement. And in many cases there were no speed limits in various locations. As for driving while drunk, how did a policeman determine that? Or prove that in a court of law when the rules hadn’t been established?

Sydney also was a city with all kinds of problems with parking, an ongoing thing. Police were trying to stop people double parking, parking on corners, parking so businesses couldn’t get in and out with their drays and carts. Which vehicle had right of way and so on. Sydney police trialled putting signs up in the city with parking restrictions, but they were portable. Drivers would park, pick up their sign, put it on a street corner. By the end of a day, there’d been 20 signs stacked at a corner and a street clear of signage so police couldn’t issue any kinds of infringement to illegally parked vehicles.

New gangs emerged in Sydney. Some soldiers who’d come back from the war did not settle back into their normal jobs leaving many to become involved in gangs led by hardened criminals. Two of the gang leaders were women. Tilly Divine mostly looked after the vice trade but was also involved in cocaine dealing. Kate Lee was heavily involved in the supply of illegal or sly grog. She also dealt in cocaine.

Then there was Phil Jeffs, who was involved in illegal gambling, vice, and cocaine. Charlie Pasmore is not so well known now but in his day was well known as the snow king – the person who sold cocaine. He often recruited ex-soldiers to work with him and sell cocaine on the streets. They were his street runners. He had quite a network of them in Sydney. As these criminal entrepreneurs moved into the cocaine racket and attempted to feed the public’s hunger for that particular drug, battles occurred. Many of these toughened gangsters used cutthroat razors as their weapon of choice. It was easier, if pulled over by the police and you had a cutthroat razor on you, to say I’m just going home to shave. If you were found with a pistol or firearm, that was much more difficult to explain. So, groups of criminals fought it out with cutthroat razors. Darlinghurst was renamed Razorhurst because there were so many battles there. And it was all about portioning up the turf amongst these criminal bosses within the city.

This led to public outrage and concern about where Sydney was headed as a society. The post-war years had promised so much change and advancement. Yet, in inner Sydney, gangster activity seemed to have taken over. The police seemed powerless to stop battles on the streets of Sydney. What really did surprise me from work I have done on the 1920s was how dominant women were in the changes that were happening. Kate Lee and Tilly Devine ruled a group of men who did their business for them, collecting rent and standing over people, or moving stolen property and making sure that people paid back monies that were owed. I find that really quite remarkable. In particular, the two women had quite a propensity for violence. Tilly Devine was a small woman who came to Sydney as a war bride. She was married to Big Jim Devine, a big, brash and powerful Australian soldier. Yet, Tilly was often the person who picked up the razor or used her fist to settle disputes, not just with women, but with men.

I’ve always found it remarkable in this period – that we have such a strange dominance of females not seen in other countries around the world. There are female prime figures elsewhere but they’re working in concert with a man. Tilly and Kate really ran their empires by themselves during that period. And the post war period suited them because many of their competitors were in a weaker position as men had been drained from Sydney’s dark side.

Working with these collections has always been a delight for me. From it we can get insight into the way that society has changed, how those changes to policing, changes to laws, that occurred in the 1920s impacted on the way that we see our society today. Everything from our road rules through to the way that police do their job is reflected in the collections I work with as a curator. I’ve always known about the pandemic; I’ve always known about the impact that it has had on policing for my studies as a historian. But today’s Coronavirus, has meant that I understand it to a much deeper level and understand how a society can go into such a depth of difficulty an, have to live in a very different way because of the restrictions placed on it. But it also gives me the hope that, as in the early 1920s, perhaps we as a society can go on and become stronger, question the assumptions of the past and flower.

FOLLOWING NERIDA CAMPBELL’S ADDRESS TO THE SYDNEY INSTITUTE ON TUESDAY 8 SEPTEMBER 2020, GERARD HENDERSON DISCUSSED WITH HER VARIOUS ASPECTS OF HER TALK    

Gerard Henderson: Many thanks Nerida. Let’s go back to early on. You spoke about some harsh policing measures. But they don’t seem to be that harsh. As you know, in recent times in Melbourne, certainly in Victoria, there’ve been quite drastic police actions about what seems to be quite trivial offenses such as a young pregnant woman being handcuffed, and other people being tackled to the ground, and a photographer who was going about his business. Do you have any examples like that from the first pandemic of 1919/1920?

Nerida Campbell: Not really. The police at that time did have people who were, quite resistant. As I mentioned, mostly there was resistance to things like face masks and they had to spend quite a bit of time trying to enforce or dealing with people who weren’t wearing them. Occasionally, there were people who would abscond from quarantine. There is a story of a group of returned soldiers who didn’t want to go into quarantine; they wanted to go and see their families. There was a sort of a chase to get them and bring them back. One of them handed himself in at a police station, but the police had to track the others down. So, there was that kind of resistance occurring at the time.

Gerard Henderson: We’ll come back to the quarantine because that’s interesting. But I think you said if a person was caught without a mask on a tram, that was a one pound fine. Was that right? One pound then would be $2 multiplied many times, and it’s probably a bit below the prevailing fine in Victoria at the moment, which is $1600 dollars, which is a hefty fine. So that was about it, the one pound fine?

Nerida Campbell: For most offenders it was around that. Probably in today’s money it is around $300. But for a woman such as Eileen Lee, reliant on her husband, that was a significant fine for her.

Gerard Henderson: Well $300 today is a significant fine for people who don’t have many means. But it’s not as bad as $1600. So, if she had said, for example, look okay I’ll put it back on before I get to the police station. Would that have been enough?

Nerida Campbell: No, that wouldn’t have been enough. Certainly, in her case. There was also that social policing. People would see a person take their mask off and would report that to the tram conductor. Then there’d be a bit of an investigation. In Eileen Lee’s case, it was also the fact that she had proclaimed herself to be ill, saying she had all this mucus and couldn’t breathe with a mask on. That angered people because they felt, well, what are you doing traveling on a tram? You should be at home in bed.

Gerard Henderson: Okay. You didn’t know her, but you’ve seen her photograph?

Nerida Campbell: Yes, I have.

Gerard Henderson: So why do you think she resisted? What was what was going on there?

Nerida Campbell: I think someone like Eileen Lee resisted every police in her life in every single way. She had quite a long criminal record. She was one of those people, a bit like her mother, who would steal things that she could afford to buy. Her mother Kate Lee, for instance, would steal a cabbage off a street vegetable vendor, even though she was wearing mink and diamond rings. It was all about defying, I suppose.

Gerard Henderson: When was she born?

Nerida Campbell: Eileen Lee was born around 1903. So, at the time that she committed her offense, she was in her late teens.

Gerard Henderson: Do we know where she ended up?

Nerida Campbell: She ended up in and out of jail. She also spent some time in Dubbo where her mother came from. And she travelled around, avoiding the police, because she became quite a magnet for police attention, not just because of her mother, but also her own offending.

Gerard Henderson: You mentioned soldiers coming back after 1918. It took a while for some of them to get back. Obviously, you are talking about the ones that come back in 1919/1920 who went into quarantine. Was that the quarantine station in North Head?

Nerida Campbell: Yes, North Head. Some of them were there, some were quarantined on boats and some of them came in through other ports. The police were most concerned about ensuring that the flu didn’t get out. One of the interesting things about the 1919 pandemic, in Sydney, is that the government knew it was coming. It had hit other countries in 1918. They knew they had a body of soldiers who were coming back from countries where the pandemic had been raging. Obviously, the time it takes to get from other countries to Australia is much longer than today. You don’t just jump on a plane. But it was a real concern for the police to try to stop it from spreading. In New South Wales, it seems that the virus came from Victoria via train when an infected person travelled to Sydney.

Gerard Henderson: Another virus invasion from Victoria surely. It happens every 100 years, does it?

Nerida Campbell: It’s easy to spread blame. But that’s the sort of accepted story that it had come from Melbourne by train.

Gerard Henderson: So it didn’t come through the quarantine station here?

Nerida Campbell: Not that we know of.

Gerard Henderson: So you’re saying the police were firm, but  not particularly harsh for the time?

Nerida Campbell: For the time. They were firm. They had rules and regulations that were changing all the time. And they were understaffed. Many of them had caught the flu themselves. So they were trying to do the best they could. It was very much a focus on public safety and ensuring that people were as safe as possible.

Gerard Henderson: So, when did it all end? When did the regulations ease off?

Nerida Campbell: The regulations began to ease off towards the end of 1919. And the government began to make changes to allow people to do more and more things and to have more and more freedom as the pandemic eased. But always with these events, it eases and then you have another sort of outbreak. Then it eases and then there is another outbreak. The police were always vigilant, but they were exhausted by this time. And maybe that had an impact on how they policed violations of the pandemic regulations. Certainly, large scale resistance was something that they would tackle. But they were under strength.

Gerard Henderson: From what you’re saying, it’s a big jump, are you suggesting that the police in New South Wales which you’ve studied, are less severe than the police in Victoria currently?  I think that’s a fair jump. Now, has this got something to do with an attitude to death? You mentioned a figure of twelve and a half thousand dying from the Spanish flu.

Nerida Campbell: 12,500.

Gerard Henderson: The unofficial figure may be a bit higher. So, somewhere between 12,200 and 15,000. As you know, there was a lot of deaths at the time, around 60,000 dead in the First World War. And many families lost children at an early age at birth, or soon after birth. Did you pick up a different attitude to death then? Was death more accepted than it is today?

Nerida Campbell: I wonder about the role of religion during that period. The comfort that faith can give to some people when somebody dies, that there’s an afterlife, and that we will meet again, which is not something that is as widespread today in our society. I think there was a different attitude. People saw death in their homes. They knew people who had died. Babies died. Families had a more intimate connection with death than perhaps we do today where people are often dying in hospital or hospices away from their home. And I do think that there’s something about the changes in our spiritual life for many people around what death means. Today, many people believe that this is it and there’s nothing else. Back then, a large proportion of the population believed that there was an afterlife and an opportunity to meet loved ones again.

Gerard Henderson: And, as you know, families were bigger, so there were more to go around.

Nerida Campbell: I don’t know about that. If your brother dies suddenly, you’ll still miss him, even if you’ve got another one.

Gerard Henderson: So  coming out of the pandemic was around late 1919 into early 1920. One of our members sent in a question as to whether this actually changed crime? Do you think the pandemic had an impact on crime? Or it didn’t make any difference?

Nerida Campbell: The upheavals of the time, and  not just the pandemic, but also World War 1, did offer different opportunities. There were young people, as I said, who perhaps acted more recklessly, who weren’t necessarily thinking their life was about getting a job, starting a family, settling down, but preferred to go out and drink, dance at jazz halls and enjoy themselves. All that gave more opportunities to the criminals. There were more people out and about, more for experimenting with drugs and other things.

Gerard Henderson: You focus a lot on the flappers. Is that because there were more young women around at that age than there were young men? You’d had men dying, of course, and being severely injured in the First World War. You also make the point that the pandemic hit hard at pregnant women. But the biggest group that died were young men, rather than young women. You’ve got a great thinning out of the young male population due to war and the pandemic. Is that why you focus more on the flappers? Were there fewer things to do? Obviously, there weren’t a lot of men to marry. Does that partly explain it?

Nerida Campbell: Partly, but also they had had years and years of their young life at home in a time when there was a lot of worry, stress and deprivation. It was a dark world where your brother might be at war, not knowing if he was still alive, following the newspapers to see whether he was, where certain battles were happening. With the end of the war, those kinds of stressors were suddenly lifted. Then came the flu and people they knew died from it. Suddenly it is not over there but at home, people around them becoming very sick. Having to stay at home and nurse relatives who stricken with the flu as well, risking their own lives, but also seeing that someone they love is endangered.

Young people had gone through this really difficult period. For young women, what I find amazing is how that they, by and large, came out of that. Part of that was rejecting a lot of what had gone before and embracing a very different lifestyle, one that their grandmothers certainly would have frowned upon. This was young girls smoking and drinking to excess – not something the older generation would have countenanced. And it’s part of that very real rejection, and thinking we did the right thing, we followed the right rules, it came to war, it came to pandemic, all these people I’ve grown up and know are no longer here. With this, next came the thought that they might as well go out and enjoy themselves, burn the candle at both ends. A sense that life is short, it can be brutal, it can be dark. Why shouldn’t I grab that little bit of joy while I can?

Gerard Henderson: In your stream of photographs taken with the chair, they’re mainly men. What was the extent of criminality among women into the 1920s coming off the Great War and the pandemic?

Nerida Campbell: Usually, it was small time theft, shoplifting, that we see. Many of the photographs are taken in the city – young women stealing from employers or stealing from a big department store in Sydney. Some of it was aspirational stuff. Young women might steal fur coats in Sydney in summer, obviously trying to imitate North American women. Others are in a much more entrenched kind of business where they’re stealing to sell and ways of getting rid of things. That’s the key kind of thing that we see with women.

Gerard Henderson: And the men? You don’t have the high profile men in many of these photographs, you don’t have the people up for murder or bank robbery, armed robbery. What court did the men appear before – was it Sydney’s Central Court?

Nerida Campbell: Yes

Gerard Henderson: So, these men were predominantly in for what?

Nerida Campbell: A range of different things. There was the basic drunk and disorderly, as well as some assault. Most of it was crimes against property, people stealing things.

Gerard Henderson: The men didn’t steal fur coats, I guess?

Nerida Campbell: Actually they did.

Gerard Henderson: They did, did they?

Nerida Campbell: But they often do it on a larger scale. They might go to the David Jones warehouse and steal a large number of fur coats, and sell them in the pubs or some such. We also found a spate of chocolate thieves, really interesting in the 1920s. Chocolate was a bit of a delicacy. If you were a man out for a drink at the pub and wanted to take something to butter up the wife, you might sort of take home a lovely heart shaped box of chocolates. People would actually break in and steal chocolates and they’d steal some 50 kilos of chocolates.

Gerard Henderson: Well, they must have had a lot of wives.

Nerida Campbell: These were the people who would then fence it off to the various husbands and possibly some of the general stores. These days we can buy chocolate anywhere, but then chocolate was a very luxurious thing. Buying a box of stolen chocolates was something a working class husband could find accessible in such trade and offer a little present to take home as a surprise for their loved ones.

Gerard Henderson: Well, let’s get back to the women.  What about prostitution – was that a crime for which many women were arrested?

Nerida Campbell: There were often charges around vagrancy, not having a visible means of support. There were quite a few women charged with the crime of vagrancy. And, since some of the sex workers were reliant on alcohol, they’d get into the kinds of crimes that involved being drunk and disorderly – they’d swear at police, spit at police, maybe get into street fights. Many of the prostitutes were on the streets. There were others who were working in more formalised brothels. Tilly Devine had a range of them through East Sydney. Those women were less likely to be arrested because they’re not in the public eye, there weren’t complaints against them from members of the public. The police didn’t see them on the street.

Gerard Henderson: And men also could be picked up for that would they?

Nerida Campbell: For vagrancy?

Gerard Henderson: For vagrancy, for associating with prostitutes or sex workers as they’re now called.

Nerida Campbell: They could be. Vagrancy was also something that could be used by the police against people whom they suspected of criminal behaviour that might have been a bit hard to prove. They could say, well, you don’t have a physical means of income. They would use that sometimes against members of razor gangs. It was a good way of kind of getting them off the streets for a period of time without having to actually prove it.

Gerard Henderson: So, if you got them off the streets for a period of time, what period would that be for a vagrancy charge.

Nerida Campbell: Female sex workers would go in overnight, they’d get a fine, and then they’d be off. It wasn’t something that would lead to them necessarily spending a huge amount of time off the streets. But it was an effective way of breaking people up. Some people could later on be judged to be habitual criminals, and that could cause all kinds of other issues for them, along with things like consulting laws.

Gerard Henderson: With someone who was charged with being a vagrant and convicted of being a vagrant, would that be what we now call homeless, or not necessarily so?

Nerida Campbell: Not necessarily so. It was often about not being able to prove where your money came from. For some people, it was the fact that they were homeless and on the streets. It wasn’t just one thing. There were women clearly living on the streets. There’s a particular image I’m thinking of – a woman who is wearing cast off Army boots with the toes all curled up. She is very dirty, her head has been shaved to deal because of a lice issue she had. She’s living sort of in the Domain area. She had been brought up on a vagrancy charge because she was homeless. On the other hand, for some members of the razor gangs, the vagrancy charge was about not having a nine-to-five job, a visible means of support.

Gerard Henderson: You mentioned the various industries that were closed down due to the pandemic. Rugby League and Australian Rules continued. But as far as I recollect, the state governments didn’t close down large sections of industry. You didn’t have a government coming in and closing down employment as has happened in Victoria where a large part of the construction industry or large parts of retail have been shut down. Is that right?

Nerida Campbell: I can’t really comment on that. Social activities, things were generally considered to be non-essential activities, like theatre going and so on, were certainly a very strong target of the government’s policies.

Gerard Henderson: What seems to happen, from what you’re saying, is that coming into the 1920s we have a pretty quick revival, which was good for people who were doing it well, and it was good for some criminals as well. They were making some money. We seemed to have a pretty good 1920s until we hit the 1930s, or the late 1920s

Nerida Campbell: Late 1920s, yes.

Gerard Henderson: And what happens then?

Nerida Campbell: Well, it all catches up with us. There were many people living lifestyles they couldn’t afford. Obviously, the international economic crisis began to impact on Sydney. That was happening in the late 1920s. And by the 1930s, in terms of crime history, my focus begins to move on to the Communists, the New Guard and other kinds of political agitation that began to occur and some of the crimes that are committed by, by and against them.

Gerard Henderson: That was an interesting time.. Let’s talk about these people standing next to a chair, what influences them? What are they looking at? The women who want the fur coats? What’s the culture there?

Nerida Campbell: They were looking at films, at magazines, reading books and serials in the newspapers. Film had a little bit of an influence. A man who was out in regional New South Wales decided to rob the mail train. He dressed up as a cowboy to do that. Somewhere outside of Bathurst, he jumped on the train. The drivers of that time were burly blokes and he was thrown off the train. When the police caught up with him they asked him why he had dressed as a cowboy? He replied that he was a picture show operator and had been watching a lot of cowboy films. He just thought well, you know, I’m going wild west and might as well dress up for it. So, you do see those kinds of influences. People doing big break and enters, and the rest, could citing the fact that they had watched that on screen. But all that might have been said as a mitigating factor for when they appeared before the court.

Gerard Henderson: Was the cowboy man photographed in a cowboy suit?

Nerida Campbell: No, he wasn’t, unfortunately. He was outside Sydney so we do not have a photo of him. But he actually got a mention in the police Annual Report as one of the unusual crimes that had been investigated for that year.

Gerard Henderson: They had a report about unusual crimes, did they?

Nerida Campbell: They reported on unsolved murders and unusual crimes that had occurred over the period of the year.

Gerard Henderson: Looking back on your portraits of rogues, I guess you call them that, without the pandemic, would there have been any differences in the sort of crimes committed? Would these men and women been up to what you’re talking about? Or would it have been a different society? Or don’t you know?

Nerida Campbell: It’s hard to judge. One indisputable result of the pandemic was that the police were not in a strong a shape to be able to deal with crime. Police didn’t lose that many members during the war, because there was a restriction placed on police joining up. So the war didn’t impact as heavily as the fact that they were not ready or resourced when the pandemic hit. Their attention became focused on other areas leaving the criminals with opportunities to make a bit of money.

Gerard Henderson: So it was a good time for criminals. But the most successful ones probably weren’t photographed because they got away with it.

Nerida Campbell: Well, they didn’t need to be photographed. Everybody knew what Tilly Devine looked like. She was often in the newspapers. She had a blue tongue and was often on the streets swearing and carrying on, drawing attention to herself. She wasn’t a dainty little flower hiding out in the corner.

Gerard Henderson: These days she would have own television show I imagine. But thanks for today. It was great. And you must come back when you move on to the New Guard, which was a kind of right wing movement and the Communist Party. Good luck with what you do.

Nerida Campbell: Thank you very much.