Herbert Ellis sits with his arms folded waiting for his photograph to be taken. He’s perched on a chair, back against a wall, legs apart, wearing a three-piece suit, a white shirt with stud collar, a knitted tie and a slick Fedora. Ellis could be a guest at a dinner party, the groom’s best man at a wedding, an actor on a film set, or a model showing off the latest cut for a fashion spread. He looks cool, almost smiling at some private joke, seemingly at ease with what’s going on all around him.
But looks can be deceptive. Ellis has just been yanked off the street by two cops. They arrested him in connection with a burglary. Ellis is a “suspected person.” He has a reputation as a housebreaker, a shop breaker, a safe breaker, and receiver of stolen goods. Herbert Ellis is a criminal. He’s having his mugshot taken at the Central Police Station, Sydney sometime around 1920. As soon as the cops pulled in a suspect they took their prints and flashed their photo against a wall. Most of the time, the arrestees did not pose according to the positions of the latest standardized mugshot. Instead they sat or stood, wore what they liked, kept their coats and hats on and even smiled at the camera. As Peter Doyle curator of the Justice and Police Museum, Sydney, Australia notes these men and women “recently plucked from the street, often still animated by the dramas surrounding their apprehension.”
Ellis had a string of petty convictions to his name including “goods in custody, indecent language, stealing, receiving and throwing a missile.” His MO was noted as:
...seldom engages in crime in company, but possessing a most villainous character, he influences associates to commit robberies, and he arranges for the disposal of the proceeds.
He was nicknamed “Curly” down to his thinning hair and “Deafy” as by the time this picture was taken he was stone deaf.
Most of the criminals photographed by the New South Wales Police Department between 1910 and 1930 were taken in the cells of the Central Police Station, Sydney. The mugshots documented the various men and women arrested on charges as diverse as theft, larceny, violence, or procuring an abortion. The photos look unlike most other standard mugshots and could easily be portraits of family, friends or actors on a set.
B. Smith, Gertrude Thompson and Vera McDonald, Central Police Station, Sydney, 25 January 1928.
Special Photograph no. 1608. This photograph was apparently taken in the aftermath of a raid led by CIB Chief Bill Mackay - later to be Commissioner of Police - on a house at 74 Riley Street, ‘lower Darlinghurst’. Numerous charges were heard against the 15 men and women arrested. Lessee Joe Bezzina was charged with ‘being the keeper of a house frequented by reputed thieves’, and some of the others were charged with assault, and with ‘being found in a house frequented by reputed thieves’.
The prosecution cast the raid in heroic terms - the Chief of the CIB, desperately outnumbered, had struggled hand to hand in ‘a sweltering melee in one of the most notorious thieves’ kitchens in Sydney’. The defence, on the other hand, described ‘a quiet party, a few drinks, some singing ... violently interrupted by a squad of hostile, brawling police’ (Truth, 29 January 1928).
Hampton Hirscham, Cornellius Joseph Keevil, William Thomas O’Brien and James O’Brien, 20 July 1921, Central Police Station, Sydney.
Special Photograph no. 446. The quartet pictured were arrested over a robbery at the home of bookmaker Reginald Catton, of Todman avenue, Kensington, on 21 April 1921. The Crown did not proceed against Thomas O’Brien but the other three were convicted, and received sentences of fifteen months each.
Ellen Kreigher, 13 July 1923, Central Police Station, Sydney.
Special Photograph no. 965. Ellen (“Nellie”) Kreigher was one of four people arrested and charged over the murder of Gertrude Mabel Heaydon. In October the previous year Gertrude Heaydon had been taken to the Coogee flat of a woman known as “Nurse Taylor” to procure an illegal abortion. She died there in the flat. Police later claimed she was murdered by Nurse Taylor, at the behest of Heaydon’s husband, Alfred. A team of low-lifes was eventually assembled by Taylor’s husband Frank to remove the putrefying remains in a horse and cart, and their somewhat farcical progress across Sydney was later recounted by numerous witnesses.
Police became involved the following year after Gertrude Heaydon’s relatives in England became suspicious. The case became known in the press as the “Coogee Trunk Mystery” (referring to the trunk in which the corpse was allegedly removed from the flat). Alfred Heaydon, Frank Taylor, a man named Edward Riley (a trade union official and one time Labor senate candidate) and Ellen Kreigher, who had shared the flat with Nurse Taylor, were all eventually arrested and charged with murder, accessory to murder, concealment and with having illegally disposed of the body. (Nurse Taylor herself had died in the interim). With press interest running high - one paper offered a 1000 pounds reward for information - an intensive search was made for Mrs Heaydon’s remains. In early August human bones were found under the flagstones of a garage in Westmoreland Lane, Glebe.
The case promptly became known as the “Glebe Bones Mystery”. After a long inquest the coroner concluded that Gertrude Heaydon had been feloniously and maliciously murdered by the late Nurse Taylor, and that the eleven bones found in the Glebe garage were in fact Gertrude Heaydon’s remains. Alfred Heaydon, Taylor, Riley and Kreigher were committed for trial, but a month later the police prosecutor announced that the Crown would bring no evidence against the four, and the charges were dropped.
B. Moody, Newtown Court, around 1919. Details unknown.
Special photograph no. 77. No entry for a ‘B Moody’ is found in the NSW Police Gazette for this period.
‘Mrs Osbourne.’ Location and details unknown, around 1919.
Special Photograph no. 20.
Aiden Feutrill, 4 May 1920, location unknown.
Prisoner identification photograph no. 17167. Sixteen-year-old Aiden Feutrill is seen in this 1920 prison mug shot, taken while he was serving a sentence for breaking and entering. He appears again in one of a series of group shots taken at Central 25 January 1928, in the aftermath of a raid led by CIB Chief Bill Mackay. Feutrill, who by then had a string of aliases (including Arthur Feutrill, Francis Brown, Reg Dawson, Angus McCrinnon), was charged with assault, and with ‘being found in a house frequented by reputed thieves’.
Margaret Lee Teale, criminal record number 757LB, 8 April 1929. State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW
Margaret Teale moved to the small Riverina town of Beckom where she married John Selby. Unfortunately, her first husband, Ernest Teale of Windsor, was still alive. She was charged with bigamy and sentenced to six months gaol. Aged 25.
Frank Murray alias Harry Williams, 4 February 1929, Central Police Station, Sydney.
Special photograph no. 199A. Harry Williams was sentenced to 12 months hard labour on March 1929 for breaking, entering and stealing. Murray/Williams’ entry in the NSW Criminal Register, April 30 1930 describes him as a housebreaker and thief, whose MO includes ‘[breaking] leadlighted door or windows or [forcing] the fanlights of dwelling houses during the absence of tenants’. He ‘disposes of stolen property to patrons of hotel bars or to persons in the street ... professing] to be a second-hand dealer’.
Although he ‘consorts with prostitutes’ and ‘frequents hotels and wine bars in the vicinity of the Haymarket’, he is described as being of ‘quiet disposition’.
Valerie Lowe, 15 February 1922, Central Police Station, Sydney.
Special Photograph no 744. Valerie Lowe and Joseph Messenger were arrested in 1921 for breaking into an army warehouse and stealing boots and overcoats to the value of 29 pounds 3 shillings.
The following year, when this photograph were taken, they were charged with breaking and entering a dwelling. Those charges were eventually dropped but they were arrested again later that year for stealing a saddle and bridle from Rosebery Racecourse.
In 1923 Lowe was convicted of breaking into a house at Enfield and stealing money and jewellery to the value of 40 pounds.
William Moon, 7 August 1922, probably Central Police Station, Sydney.
Special Photograph no. 1109.
Elsie Bowman, 31 October 1928, Long Bay Women’s Reformatory.
Prisoner identification photograph no. 743 LB. Elsie Bowman was a pickpocket, prostitute and thief and was a close associate of John Brendon Parker, thief and notorious escapee. Bowman’s MO as recorded in the NSW Criminal Register, 22 July 1938, includes such details as:
2. Sat down alongside a man on a seat in University Park, Sydney, at night, and stole a sum of money from his fob pocket. When the man discovered his loss and accused Bowman she handed the money to Alfred Thomas McGovern ... by whom she was accompanied.
3. After having several drinks with a man whom she had picked up in a city street, stole 12 pounds from his pockets whilst pretending to feel his privates in the approved fashion of the lower type of prostitute.
4. Snatched at a gold watch chain on a man’s vest, but only succeeded in stealing a gold-mounted sovereign, which she later sold to a gold buyer.
5. An associate of criminals and prostitutes generally ...
6. Frequents Newtown, Enmore and Darlington.
John Walter Ford and Oswald Clive Nash, June 1921, possibly North Sydney Police Station, Sydney.
Special Photograph no. 407. A week after the photograph was taken the pair, both aged 16, appeared in North Sydney Police Court on break, enter and steal charges, for which they were put on bonds to be of good behaviour for twelve months.
Nellie Cassidy, criminal record number 446LB, 10 February 1919. State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW
Convicted of stealing. The jury could not decide whether Nellie Cassidy was guilty of ‘stealing a lady’s costume’, or if she had merely acted as a fence, and so a special verdict ‘that she was guilty of one or the other’ was entered. Aged 23.
Ronald Frederick Schmidt, 13 June 1921. Location and details unknown.
Special photograph no. 410.
Vera Crichton, 21 February 1924, probably Central Police Station, Sydney.
Special Photograph no. 1094. Vera Crichton, 23, and Nancy Cowman, 19, are listed in the NSW Police Gazette 24 March 1924 as charged, along with three others, with “conspiring together to procure a miscarriage” on a third woman. Crichton was “bound over to
appear for sentence if called upon within three years”.
Harry Chapman, 30 June 1924. Location unknown.
Stealing a motor cycle and side car (value 175 pounds) and a till containing money, value 17s. 6d, in league with Harold (‘Tarlow’) Tarlington (15) and Alfred Fitch (17).
Tarlington went on to become a well-known criminal and was eventually shot dead in St Peters by Myles Henry ‘Face’ McKeon, who was himself later shot dead in Chippendale. Fitch also went on to become an active member of the Sydney underworld.
Chapman was sentenced to two years hard labour for the motor cycle theft.
Muriel Goldsmith, criminal record number 231LB, 29 October 1915. State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW
Convicted of stealing. Muriel Goldsmith looks like a country schoolteacher but was actually a prolific thief with a string of aliases. She was found guilty of stealing money and jewellery from the Criterion Hotel in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales. Aged 25.
Gilbert Burleigh and Joseph Delaney, 27 August 1920, possibly Central Police Station, Sydney.
Special Photograph no. 169. Gilbert Burleigh on the left is identified as a ‘hotel barber’, and Delaney’s picture is labelled ‘false pretences & conspiracy’.
A companion photograph makes it clear that in fact Delaney was the hotel barber - meaning one who books into a hotel, boarding house or residential and robs (or ‘snips’) fellow patrons, usually in the dead of night. In this instance Delaney was charged with stealing a cigarette case, a hairbrush, a clock and a quantity of clothing from a dwelling-house. A month later he was further charged ‘being about to abscond from bail’.
He is described as ‘a fireman and a returned soldier’. Gilbert Burleigh doesn’t appear at all in the police Gazette in 1920, but is listed in the Photo Supplement of 1928, eight years later as being wanted on warrant.
Lillian May Southwell Boland, criminal record number 553LB, 28 September 1922. State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW
Convicted of conspiracy to procure an abortion. Lillian Boland worked as a secretary for an illegal abortionist who operated out of a dentist’s surgery on Oxford Street, Paddington. Boland protested her innocence and ignorance of the ‘doctor’s’ work; however, the court decided she must have had detailed knowledge of the business and handed her a suspended sentence of 12 months hard labour.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Mug Shots of Female Criminals from Early 20th century Australia
Stunning Australian Mug Shots taken in the 1920s
Via Sydney Justice & Police Museum