Tougher and more ruthless than any man, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh ruled the mean streets of ’20s and ’30s Sydney with iron fists and trusty blades. Larry Writer visits their haunts, the inspiration for the latest Underbelly series.
As long as she lived, Maggie Baker never forgot her initiation to Razorhurst. It was 1933 and the rookie policewoman’s first assignment was to patrol the lanes of Sydney’s Darlinghurst.
“I turned the corner and came face to face with Tilly Devine, who was blocking the footpath,” she recalled. “She said, ‘You’re the new copper, ain’t you? Well, you’re not comin’ down this bloody street …’ She grabbed me and shook me.
“Then a woman wearing a big black hat got off a tram. It was Kate Leigh. She came up and hit Tilly, then sat on her in the road.”
Related: Underbelly: Razor official website
Yet Tilly could handle herself. “Oh, she was a dirty fighter and very strong. I saw her and Kate have a blue in Oxford Street. Tilly had Kate’s hat off and was pummelling her on the ground.”
Today, Kings Cross, Paddington, Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo and Surry Hills are chic suburbs hosting million-dollar homes, cafes, restaurants and galleries, yet anyone venturing there in the 1920s and ’30s took their life in their hands.
For that was when Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh and the razor gangs rampaged through East Sydney — aka Razorhurst — with its unsanitary, ramshackle slums teeming with criminals, alcohol and drug addicts, and those too desperately poor to escape to the city’s burgeoning outer garden suburbs.
Razorhurst has now been recreated as the setting for Underbelly: Razor, screening on the Nine Network in August. Danielle Cormack plays Kate Leigh and Chelsie Preston Crayford is her arch-enemy Tilly Devine.
Crime paid handsomely for brothel madam Tilly and sly grog and cocaine dealer Kate. In their pomp, they were among Sydney’s wealthiest citizens.
It is thought to be unprecedented in criminal history that two women divided and conquered a city’s underworld.
They ruled the traditionally male-dominated domain of organised crime, simply because they were more ruthless and violent, and much smarter than the men.
Each notched up more than 100 convictions and served more than 30 prison terms, but after every incarceration, they cheerfully threw themselves back into the fray.
In the early 1930s, Tilly Devine ran as many as 30 brothels. She sported platinum-blonde sausage roll curls, blood-red lipstick, mascara when few women wore it and full-length furs in summer.
She had numerous homes, but her main residence was a stately brick bungalow with candelabra, a state-of-the-art wireless and grand piano at Maroubra, a beachside suburb.
In pictures: The cast of Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities
From its shuttered veranda, her husband, Big Jim Devine, shot rival gangster Gregory Gaffney dead.
Tilly paid her gang well and provided food and shelter, and took care of doctors’ bills for her sex workers. Yet, if they betrayed her by not handing over half of their earnings or defecting to another madam, she punished them with her ring-bedecked fist or the razor she kept hidden in the luxuriant folds of her silver fox stole.
“I’ll cut her guts out!” she once shrieked at a wayward prostitute. “I’ll cut a hole right through her!”
The TV series Underbelly: Razor is based on Larry Writer’s book, Razor, published by Pan Macmillan, $24.99.
Read more of this story in the August issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Video: Underbelly: Razor the real Kate and Tilly
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