Tilly Devine's Crew...

Razorhurst was the territory of three main crime bosses; incredibly enough for the time, two of those crime lords were women. Never let it be said however that either Tilly Devine or Kate Leigh were shrinking violets; on the contrary, they were both hard as nails and rough as guts, as the saying goes, and more than a match for any man stupid enough to cross them. Today we look at Sydney’s Queen of Sleaze, empress of the city’s fleshpots, Tilly Devine.

Matilda ‘Tilly’ Devine (1900-1970)

From low beginnings in the slums of London, Matilda ‘Tilly’ Devine rose to the heights of notoriety as one of the queens of Sydney’s underworld. Plain and petite, but with a vicious temper and incredibly poor impulse control, Tilly gave as good as she got on the streets of Razorhurst and laughed all the way to the bank.

After marrying ‘Big Jim’ Devine in London, Tilly took to life as a Sydney brothel owner with gusto. Safe from legal recriminations due to the legal loophole which allowed women but not men to profit from the efforts of sex-workers, she and her husband built a string of bordellos throughout the city and lived large off the proceeds. Having been a prostitute herself in London, Tilly was quick to select girls that showed promise, teaching them various tricks of the trade including the practise of ‘gingering’, or stealing from clients whilst they were engaged in sex.

After attempts by Norman Bruhn to claim her empire, Tilly and Jim encouraged associations with notorious gun- and razor men such as Guido Calletti. When Jim decided that addicting their whores to cocaine was more profitable than paying them in cash for their efforts, Tilly began to encroach on the drug-running operations of Kate Leigh and Phil Jeffs and things grew ugly between them.

Tilly was brought up on many charges throughout her life and went to prison on many occasions. On one occasion she was barred from visiting Victoria after misbehaving there and was summarily gaoled for returning at a later date to see the Melbourne Cup; on another occasion she was released from prison on the promise that she would return to England, a promise she of course refused to keep. Regardless of the consequences, she always resisted arrest and kicked, punched and slashed her way to gaol. Her knock-down, drag-out stoushes with Kate Leigh were legendary and her screaming fistfights with Jim Devine, a tasty morsel for the tabloids. She openly resented being named in the newspapers as the ‘Queen of the Underworld’, but it was felt that she was secretly proud of the title. The only person who seemed to put the Fear of God in her was police sergeant Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell, for whom she was always placid and compliant.

Tilly separated from Jim in the 1940s and re-married. She outlived her second husband after losing most of her ill-gotten gains to back-taxes and she died in 1970 after a stroke, from complications due to cirrhosis of the liver and stomach cancer.

James ‘Big Jim’ Devine (1892-1966)

Jim Devine was a ‘digger’, one of the ANZAC forces who left Australia to fight for Britain and the Commonwealth in the fields of France. He was extremely tall and heavily built, with piercing blue eyes that emanated a deadly menace. After the Armistice, he stayed on in London and settled into the easy life of the ‘bludger’, earning a living from bullying prostitutes out of their earnings. In this way he met Matilda Devine a ‘working girl’ from the Camberwell district in London. They soon married and Jim decided that they could earn a better living in Sydney than in England.

Arriving in Sydney, Jim and Tilly soon realised that if they wanted to operate a brothel, they would have to register everything in Tilly’s name to capitalise on the legal loophole that stipulated no man could earn money from the sexual activities of women. Jim, terminally lazy, saw no problem in letting Tilly run the business, as long as she kept the money rolling in. Soon they had a string of brothels from Darlinghurst to Woolloomooloo and they were living very well indeed.

‘Big Jim’ as he was known was a highly capable standover man and kept a keen watch on the other predators that roamed the streets with their greedy eyes on his empire. It was he who had the idea of addicting Tilly’s whores to cocaine for which they would work in lieu of cash. He carried a razor but preferred to use his fists to respond to threats; on one occasion, while holed-up in his and Tilly’s plush Maroubra home, he used his old army rifle to despatch Raymond ‘Gaffney the Gunman’ Neil, who had tried to kill one of their enforcers. ‘Big Jim’ beat the murder charge by claiming self-defence.

Tilly and Jim split in the early 1940s and Jim went south to Melbourne where he obtained work as a storeman and packer. On New Year’s Eve in 1950, he showed up unexpectedly at a party at Tilly’s house during which he punched her and dislocated her jaw. He died in 1966.

Dulcie ‘the Angel of Death’ Markham (1913-1976)

“There’ll never be another like pretty Dulcie Markham”

-Inspector Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell

Some people are unlucky in love; Dulcie Markham was downright cursed. She was born in 1913 to wealthy north shore parents but split from them to become a prostitute in Kings Cross. She had a Hollywood glamour-type beauty, with large grey eyes and pale blonde hair: in many ways she was much more beautiful than Nellie Cameron but lacked Cameron’s discernment and wit. Tilly Devine cared little about Dulcie’s intelligence and soon had added her to her stable of whores where her various attractions could earn up to £100 a night, a huge sum at the time.

As far as the men in her life were concerned, Dulcie’s sights were aimed lower than Cameron’s: where Nellie wooed and won the first lieutenants of the various crime bosses – people like Guido Calletti and Frank Green – Dulcie dallied with the grunts, a string of unknown thugs, hustlers, pimps and bravos who had a nasty knack of killing each other over her. In time, it became a by-word that going with Dulcie Markham meant that death was near, and she picked up nicknames like ‘The Black Widow’, ‘The Hoodoo Girl’, or the one by which she is best known, ‘The Angel of Death’.

For legal reasons, she floated in and out of Razorhurst, often disappearing to Melbourne to try her luck in that city. Inevitably things would go wrong: her tryst with Melbourne gunman ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, ended with him being gunned down while in bed with her (of course, this was the story promoted by the Sydney tabloids at the time, to beef up her mystique). She was with Guido Calletti when he was shot as he attempted to take out the Brougham Street Gang and attended his funeral, weeping dramatically over his coffin.

In 1955, Dulcie was thrown from a balcony by a man she refused to name but who was thought to have been a client. She never fully recovered from the injuries sustained in that fall and had trouble working from that time on. Probably as a result, she tried to go straight from then on and she largely succeeded. She married an Irish sailor without a criminal record and lived peacefully with him until the early 1960s when a piece of her past caught up with them: an unnamed assailant broke into their home and brutally bashed Dulcie’s husband, who left her shortly afterwards. Then in 1964 she married again, once more to a man without criminal notoriety, and lived happily with him at Coogee Beach until dying of asphyxiation in 1976, from having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.