MELBOURNE, 1919
MELBOURNE 1919 (Charlie’s life as a runner)
Book
‘audition run’ in the rain
Football was a thing
Two whiskeys, one gin, half a dozen bottles of beer’
Trams and horses on the streets!!!!
‘there wasn’t a lot to laugh about in the slums, laughing was one of the things that came for free.’ P.108
History
Known as ‘struggle town’
Crime epidemic
Principal of one of the most successful law firms in Melbourne, a patron of the city’s leading private schools, and one-time Ford Motor Company director, he announced that ‘the underworld has reared its head in an unmistakable way, more than ever before in my recollection in the history of this community.’
One year after world war one
Under the supervision of the Central Wool Committee, the British government bought every bale of wool - 7.1 million of them, or about one billion kilograms - produced in Australia between 1916 and 1920. The British paid 160 million pounds for the wool, keeping alive an industry that carried the country.
"(The war) brought a new confidence into Australian national undertakings”
But the end of the war also left Australia with an issue as trying as the conflict itself: taking care of the survivors, the war widows and their children.
The long-term cost of medical care and welfare benefits to returned soldiers and the dependants of those who didn't return was on a scale never before encountered.
And it also included the greatest economic upheaval the world has known - and it hit Australia harder than most.
Australia's heavy dependence on primary exports meant Australia felt the Great Depression affected the country acutely
urban poverty became a feature of city life, and the slum areas of the inner industrial suburbs spread.
Melbourne's mood was also darkened by the terrible sacrifices of World War I, in which 112,000 Victorians enlisted and 16,000 were killed
In 1919, Melbourne's suburban gang rivalries exploded into all-out war and Les Taylor – aka “the Turk” to police, Squizzy to everyone else – was at the centre of the storm.
Richmond
‘The streets of Richmond were like pages in a book. They told a story.’ Pg. 69
‘This story was full of hardships. Hard to mouth and day to day, that’s how it was.’ Pg. 69
Industry boomed here
Tanneries, breweries, the boiling down works, the cork factory, the jam factory, the tip
Smells bad
Fisho’s and rabbito’s
‘these were the same gutters that children played in – a playground full of blood and guts, iof horse manure, of empty tins and rats
Enemies with Fitzroy
Home to ‘every imaginable evil’ p. 185
GANGS
they drifted through the dilapidated Narrows of Fitzroy, the run-down cottages of Little Lonsdale Street, or the boarding houses of St Kilda.
Instead they were simply the same flash larrikins who had terrified the pre-war city
erratic feuding and infrequent gunfights sprang from their limitations as organised criminals rather than from acumen and courage.
Henry Stokes, Taylor, and other criminals beat and shot one another over the proceeds of a jewel robbery in 1919, the infamous ‘Fitzroy vendetta’.
FITZROY VENDETTA
Taylor, the jumped-up Richmond hood, and two men from the rival “Fitzroy push” schemed to rob Kilpatrick and Co, a prominent jeweller in the city's Collins Street.
1918 heist
Man enters shop. Man dithers over £3 silver muffineers for wife. Man finally hands over £5 note. Shop assistant goes for change, returns to find trays of diamond jewellery missing and front door chained shut from the outside. But Taylor's careful planning and instruction, it seems, counted for little when it came time to divide the roughly £1500 spoils
and when two Fitzroy shysters showed up to a Little Lonsdale Street broker to shift their goods, police were waiting.
The Fitzroy gang smelt a rat, of the two-legged, Bourke Street variety, especially when Taylor benefactor and lord of the two-up rings Henry Stokes rolled over for police prosecutors and gave up the Fitzroy mob
With temperatures rising, Taylor sent his first wife and old honey-trap partner, Dolly Gray, to a Fitzroy sly-grog hangout to scout for intelligence.
She woke hours later sick, bruised, almost naked – and minus the jewellery and fur. Thrown out on the street, Dolly made a humiliating trudge back to Taylor's Richmond haunt – and an outraged husband.
So began a series of almost nightly drive-by shootings, beatings and assorted violent acts of retribution that rocked the streets of Melbourne from 1919 and flared for years.
But such feuds don't just die. Not until the main protagonists have. While Taylor led the mayhem for Richmond, among the Fitzroy hardmen was the sociopathic ex-soldier, thief and thug-for-hire John “Snowy” Cutmore. Taylor would soon go “into smoke” (hiding), make a celebrity return to the public eye, narrowly avoid being shot dead in Bourke Street, then focus on the emerging cocaine trade. Cutmore cut out and headed for Sydney and the cocaine war there. In a few years, Taylor and Cutmore would come face-to-face in a rundown Melbourne bedroom to fight out the last chapter in “the Vendetta”. And neither would live to fight again.
MELBOURNE 1919/EARLY 1920’s TERMINOLOGY
‘ya’ ‘anythin’ – Ma
‘indeed I ‘ave, missus’ – Mr Cecil Redmund
‘but I know the fang farrier who works on the ‘orses’ teeth at the track. I’m told ‘h does ‘ouse calls’ – Cecil
‘fang farrier’ – means dentist
‘ya’d best be off to school’ – Ma
‘But I sure as ‘ell aint cold’ – Charlie
‘Yer the last of ‘em. Mr Taylor will be with ya shortly.’ – Dasher
‘D’ya ‘ear that? Charlie ‘ere ‘as the newspaper fillin’ the ‘oles in ‘is boots’ – Squizzy
‘keep outta me way’
‘throng of punters’ – Charlie
‘I’ll do me best Mr Taylor’
‘awight lads’ – Squizzy
‘well to do’ meaning rich
‘cripes , Charlie’, shindig, struth, taking the piss, ‘copper’, ‘wolfed down’ ‘jiff’, ‘sheilas’, ‘lass’, ‘dunno’
‘flamin ‘eck’, ‘hang about’ ‘rolled’
Caper – an illicit or ridiculous activioty
‘as mad as a cut snake’
‘ratbags’