TAKING HIS GRUEL

The months dragged on with no sign of Squizzy redeeming his word to come forward and ‘take his gruel’. He kept out of sight and basked in the gossip and newspaper glory, but could not resist the temptation of facetiously correcting what he considered errors in the news reports. His occasional communiqués, addressed to his admiring public from ‘the dugout’, were read with interest and ready amusement by all sections of the community except the police. Not only could they not catch Squizzy Taylor, his consort had slipped out of their hands as well.

Taylor, claimed the Herald on 24 March 1922, ‘is a humorist in his way, and as a practical joker he has shown lately that he is equal with the best of them. Indeed, he has an admiration for himself in that respect since he was dubbed the Charlie Chaplin of an establishment where he lived for a long time. It has never been regarded as a home of mirth, but the light side of nature was thrown into it when Mr Taylor was in a merry mood. When he changed his abode, his fellow-lodgers were genuinely sorry to lose him because of his humorous qualities. They are doubtless pleased to know that he has retained his ability to amuse.’

In his final note to the editor, he showed he had not lost his sense of humour by contemplating a ‘Back-to-Pentridge’ movement. He had also found profitable entertainment in the ‘In Memoriam’ notices of the newspapers.

Dear Sir,

In reference to the article in Friday’s Herald referring to Miss Pender, I think it is only right that I should deny that the young lady is sharing my hiding place. It is taking me all my time to keep myself in ‘balk’ [sic] without having to look after a second person.

You also state that the elusive Pimpernel has failed to keep his word and come forward; not at all, for I mean to come up very shortly and take what ever punishment there is in store for me and test the Honour System, for I am sure I will set a good example, and I trust that others who are wanted by the police will follow suit and join in the ‘Back-to-Pentridge’ celebration, which they will find under better conditions than of old, what with the re-modelling of Pentridge, a better diet, extra visits, extra letters, and a new Governor, what more could one expect. Trusting that my Friends will let the Argument drop for the time being—

 

Because my letter is ended,

And the poem it is told;

But the place where I’m

Hiding I’ll never unfold.

So good luck to you all,

Is my heartiest wish,

As I fold up my blankets

And put out my dish;

Turn out my pockets,

For the smallest of butts;

William Shakespeare I’m not,

But just one of the Nuts

Respectfully yours,

Mr L. Taylor

A man in hiding was commonly ‘in smoke’, but such a term was apparently too vulgar for Squizzy’s use and he preferred the more expressive ‘baulk’, with its subtle gibe, considering himself unplayable, like a billiard ball in that position.

At last, however, the game of hide and seek with the police lost its use, and one morning in September 1922 Taylor let it be known that he would appear at the detective office. Passengers on the trams clattering along Russell Street near the police station wondered what the unusual activity was about. A man called from the footpath, ‘They’ve got Squizzy’, as a closed car turned into Russell Street from Victoria Street and drew up in front of the police barracks, just after a quarter past eight.

The passenger who stepped from the back seat after the door had been opened was dressed in a smart gaberdine overcoat with a belted back to set off his nuggety form. There was a glimpse of striking light blue socks in tan shoes and a new chocolate brown suit with sharply creased legs. On his head he wore a black boxer hat with an up-to-the minute rolled brim. Accompanied by his aides and with all the assurance of a surrendering German field marshal, Squizzy Taylor dismissed his car in style by turning to the driver and handing him £2. He stepped briskly up the steps to the detective office where Detectives Bruce and Webster were waiting at the entrance.

Cordial greetings were offered and returned. Taylor nodded affably and said, ‘Good morning. Well, here I am.’ He introduced his bondsman, Richard Loughnan, whose assistance was said to have been sought by Taylor’s mother. With imperturbable good humour, Squizzy submitted to the bracelets and was escorted across the road to the watchhouse crowded about by policemen of all ages who came to see the celebrity.

Senior Constable Clarke produced his register to enter up the additional charge of absconding from bail, remarking as he did so: ‘You’ve grown fat, Leslie, what have you been eating?’

‘Lactogen,’ retorted the plump crook to a flattering roar of laughter.

Taylor was then rushed before two justices of the peace who laughed at his impudence and committed him for trial. In spite of strenuous opposition from the police he was allowed his liberty on a bail only £100 more than the one he had estreated.

To the delight of their readers, imaginative journalists turned in stories of the ‘breathless hush’ in the crowded court room as the ‘long-sought mystery man stepped briskly into the dock’ to hear his counsel, Eugene Gorman, assure the Bench that Leslie Taylor would come to court if bail were only a shilling. The reporter wrote that Taylor’s career ‘makes fiction look dull by comparison’ and tried to show how Squizzy had performed a public service by hunting ‘the most notorious gang of criminals that has ever infested Melbourne from one suburb to another’ until his remorseless pursuit drove them to other states.

All Melbourne gaped in amazement at the eulogistic references to Squizzy Taylor: his personal appearance, his taste in dress, his wit, his charm of manner and his cleverness were all held up to the admiration of the public. The city newspapers lost all sense of proportion, investing his surrender with an importance equal to the threat of another world war and splashing his name and photograph over the front page. The conflict in Turkey was relegated to the inside sheets and the eclipse of the sun, seen fitfully behind banks of fleecy white clouds, hardly rated a mention.

Squizzy enjoyed the publicity and revelled in the deferential curiosity of citizens more honest than himself. He also earned a new name, ‘The Turk’, from his underworld hero-worshippers for his spirited resistance to the police from ‘the dugout’ that was his hiding place. Probably, there were other reasons for the sobriquet, for this was the period when Kemal Ataturk was establishing the Turkish Republic by a series of brilliant military operations and astute political moves and the Turks, like the lecherous Taylor, still believed in polygamy.

Asked where he had been during the last months, Taylor replied offhandedly, ‘Knocking about,’ paused and then added, ‘Been living with my wife.’

‘Lorna?’

‘No, Lorna is only a fair-weather friend. Ida is the best. I’m going to stick to her.’

During one of several audiences to the press, every time the name of Ida Pender came up in conversation Taylor would comment enthusiastically, ‘She’s the best jazzer in Australia.’

‘The Turk’ maintained that he gave himself up because he was being blamed for almost every crime committed in Melbourne while he was in smoke, and he wished to put himself right before anything serious took place. His mother was ill, was another explanation offered by Taylor and as ‘no man has a better mother than this mother of mine’ he did not wish to cause her needless distress. The third reason he gave for his return was that the police were irritating people he knew by making raids on their dwellings, although they were never anywhere near him.

Squizzy claimed he had been living in comfort in an East Melbourne flat until June 1922, spending most of his time reading the newspapers and books by Charles Dickens and Marie Corelli, or playing chess. Not that he had to stay indoors; he went to a few race meetings in Bendigo and Ballarat, and often took an afternoon stroll as a schoolboy in ‘applecatchers’ and a college coat and cap. Taylor did not deny a suggestion that he went to meet a friend in Bourke Street disguised as a ‘shee-lah’ (so he pronounced it) in a fur coat and a large floppy hat over a dark wig.

Another sensational incident occurred a few days after Taylor surrendered. One of his underworld enemies pushed through the theatre crowd in Bourke Street and fired three shots after Squizzy as he was about to enter the Bookmakers’ Registered Clerks Association, whose rooms were above Watkins’s butcher shop. ‘The Turk’ had been driven about all day by George Farrow, a hire-car driver from Chelsea, and they drew up at the kerb, on the north side of Bourke Street, about eight o’clock at night. Three shots rang out as Taylor entered the building, but only one struck him, on the back of his right thigh. He did not turn round but staggered through the doorway, waited a few minutes, and then limped out to the car which was still waiting.

A constable on duty ran to the scene. Taylor was pale and frightened. ‘Get into the car. Come to the hospital, I’ve been shot,’ he gasped. ‘The Turk’ appeared very agitated and glanced about as if expecting another attack. Due to go before the dreaded Judge Woinarski the following morning, some rumours said Taylor had met with a fortunate accident, but it simply delayed the hearing.

Acting on information received, Detectives Brennan and Bunker visited a house in Gore Street, Fitzroy, and detained a man in bed. On the table beside him was an automatic pistol and a pile of loose cartridges. At the city watchhouse, Joseph Cotter, a self-possessed, small but solidly built man of 28 years, was charged with shooting Leslie Taylor with intent to do grievous bodily harm, with unlawfully carrying firearms, and with having an unregistered pistol in his possession. Allowed bail providing he kept out of Fitzroy, and remanded to 12 October, Cotter was later acquitted for lack of evidence.

The crowd began to gather outside the Court of General Sessions in Lonsdale Street long before the doors were opened. Squizzy made an impressive entrance about twenty minutes past ten, when a large touring car drew into the kerb and two smartly dressed young men jumped off the running board and opened the door. Taylor was helped out, one man holding his crutches until he was on his feet. The crook, in spite of his handicap, was smartly attired in a hard hat, a light fawn overcoat edged with velvet, a dark blue suit and knitted silk tie adorned with a diamond cluster pin, brown shoes and gloves, and white silk socks.

By the time Judge Woinarski entered the room there were no available seats for the general public. Squizzy was called and hobbled in between two warders. He was charged that on 15 June 1921 he did break into the warehouse of Vernon Scales of King and Little Collins Streets. Not guilty, was his plea.

In a statement from the dock, Taylor told the jury a glib story. He had, he said, been dogged by powerful and unscrupulous enemies led by Lou Stirling, ‘The Count’, whom he had deposed in the underworld in 1916. On the morning of the alleged crime he had been down in Fitzroy and came across his old foe and two other men who threatened his life. Stirling challenged Taylor to a fight and produced a revolver, but the Pimpernel of the back lanes escaped.

Looking for solace in whisky, Squizzy found himself in a befuddled state in King Street, where he fell asleep. It was dark when he woke sick and cold, and hearing noises thought to be made by his rival, he backed into the unlocked door to the warehouse. The door yielded and enabled him to hide inside behind the boxes of goods and so elude Stirling and his men.

‘My life would not have been worth a penny piece if they had found me,’ Taylor told the court. ‘Gentlemen,’ he cried, ‘You don’t understand the underworld which had been the cause of my trouble!’

After eight hours’ deliberation the jury disagreed, and at a second trial a month later, Squizzy was acquitted.

While awaiting the decision of the courts, Squizzy went to the races at Caulfield and was ordered off as an undesirable person. He was told to leave by the special racecourse detective, Detective Napthine, but Taylor demanded to see the committee of the VATC. Napthine took him along to the committee room, where he was told the members were too busy to be interviewed.

‘Very well, Mr Napthine,’ remarked Squizzy, ‘if you say so, I will go.’ With that the little crook turned and walked off, one of the racecourse staff watching his exit through the gates. But his vanity was offended and that night he went around the hotels drinking and bragging about the measures he would take.

‘I’ll show these bloody cows that they’d better leave me alone. I’ll get even with them. Will you fellows come for a ride?’ he asked his boozing companions.

The nightwatchman at the racecourse had completed his rounds and gone to feed the draught horses at the stables in Station Street when the car drew up in the shadows outside the galvanised iron gates on the eastern boundary. Taylor staggered out clutching a tin of petrol which he carried over to the official stand containing the administrative offices. Half-drunk and careless, he saturated the dry woodwork, lit a match and threw it down. The explosion almost blew him off his feet, but he managed to grope his way to the car and fall in the back. One of his companions slid into the driver’s seat while the other hurriedly cranked the motor. They roared away, swerving dangerously into Glen Eira Road.

‘The police are reticent regarding their investigations,’ reported the Argus, ‘but they are following a definite line of enquiry, and are hopeful of developments which will lead to the clearing up of the mystery.’ The nature of the fire and the fact that the buildings were necessary for the conduct of the 1922 Caulfield Cup meeting due to take place that day suggested it was an act of revenge against the Victoria Amateur Turf Club, but the police had no evidence and never did obtain a conviction.

Squizzy Taylor and his paramour, Ida Pender, were familiar figures in the city at that time. The unpretentious tenements of suburban by-ways were not for them; on a sunny Friday afternoon in busy Bourke Street, the gentleman with his lady could be observed enjoying an outing. Their car purrs down Bourke Street and draws up before the Hotel Queensland. They alight with grace; one is a short, dapper, sturdily built man apparently in his early thirties, not at all the accepted picture of the master criminal with beetling eyebrows, repulsive countenance and swaggering walk. He has a rather high intellectual forehead, black hair, very dark deep-set eyes, an aquiline nose, and as he smiles pleasantly at his companion, there is a flash of gold side-teeth.

Leslie Taylor is immaculately dressed in a blue serge of faultless style and cut, and he carries a heavy walking stick. The picture of the suave man-about-town is completed by patent leather shoes, grey silk socks, a super-shaded silk shirt with collar to match, a black knitted silk tie in a large knot, an inevitable bowler hat and fawn-coloured gloves. His tiepin and ring are studded with magnificent diamonds.

As he stops at the entrance to converse for a moment with an acquaintance, one notes that his voice is deep and well-modulated. His companion is a rather tall, slim girl of nineteen with finely chiselled features, very fashionably dressed.

On race days Squizzy could be seen with his Zeiss binoculars slung across his shoulder, talking with the leading racing men in Victoria on the favourite’s chances. If the day was overcast, he wore an expensive overcoat, with a distinctive fur collar, underneath his open motoring coat. On such afternoons, the meticulous Leslie generally discarded his bowler hat for a tweed cap or grey Stetson.

Squizzy and Ida were both enthusiastic ‘first-nighters’, and when the theatre claimed their fancy, the immaculate evening dress of the one and the distinctive gown of the other called forth admiring comment. After the fall of the curtain they generally made two of a select supper party at one of the superior Chinese restaurants at the top of Bourke Street.

The pair lived together in a lavishly furnished house the ‘The Turk’ rented in St Kilda. The rich pile carpets, the sumptuous lounge and the artistic statuary would have pleased the most fastidious. Lorna Taylor had faded out of the picture in December 1922 when she took her two-month-old daughter, Lesley, to live with her parents in McCracken Street, Kensington, and in February of the following year she was awarded £3 a week maintenance from her erring husband. After the birth of his daughter, Squizzy sought peace by holidaying for some weeks with Ida at the City Arms Hotel in Bendigo, where they lived as man and wife.

Returning refreshed to the life of a gentleman crook Taylor was induced by an enterprising film producer to appear as the lead in a racing drama, In Emergency Colours. Squizzy was to play the jockey who brings home the winner after the ride of the season. Several episodes showing him grimly riding over the hurdles were actually filmed before a humourless government banned it.

The Chief Secretary, Major M. Baird, told Eric Harrison’s Photoplay company by letter in October 1922 that it was considered inadvisable in the public interest to produce films, as the Herald reported it, ‘which directly or inferentially glorify the doings of those who adopt an attitude of defiance to the law and those administering the law’.

After an official approach to the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association, the executive of that organisation resolved not to screen films ‘introducing a certain notorious character into them’, but asked the Chief Secretary’s Office to keep the decision confidential. At the same time the file of correspondence was forwarded to the Inspector-General of the police, New South Wales, by Victoria’s Chief Commissioner, Alexander Nicholson, with a request for action. With remarkable speed, new regulations were gazetted by New South Wales’ Chief Secretary Oakes under the Theatres and Public Halls Act. Objectionable motion pictures were prohibited; that is, those showing the operations of criminals which might be considered as having an injurious effect upon youthful minds.

Eric Harrison then sent Richard Loughnan along in a new role as public relations advisor to suggest a private screening of the completed film. Harrison was confident that a viewing of In Emergency Colours would show ‘Nothing at all in it which may be considered inadvisable in the public interest’. A few days later he forwarded the synopsis of his epic of the turf, in which John Booth took the part of Gerald Malvern, an impecunious horse trainer, Ida Pender was his daughter, Dorothy, who had ‘formed an attachment’ with the noble-hearted cross-country jockey Harold Jackson, played by Squizzy, and Fred Patey was cast as the villainous moneylender, Isaac Marks.

Having read the outline plot, the Chief Secretary was confirmed in his opinion that it was still not desirable to grant permission for the showing of the picture.

As insolent as ever, Taylor continued to mastermind crimes for his followers. They raided gambling schools and lifted the winnings, they stuck up a few outer suburban banks and gathered in money from numerous payroll robberies and the proceeds of warehouse thieving. While covering the same wide territory as before, new techniques were added to the criminal repertoire. Costly protection was supplied to leading bookmakers and successful punters, and jury rigging was lifted to new heights by the audacious ‘Turk’. He even sought to intimidate detectives who dared to impede his plans—‘Pull the dogs off the case, or I’ll turn the guns on you,’ was his threat—but he never did have the courage necessary to draw a gun in the presence of the police.

Taylor was also kept busy about the law courts assisting his stooges who had slipped up on some criminal exploit of his devising and been committed for trial. Assisted by the specialist Paddy Boardman, who did little else but rig juries, and a few others, Squizzy barged into all the important cases with generous offers to square jurymen, spirit away star witnesses, or beat them up—all for a price. Witnesses were also ruthlessly intimidated by Taylor or his agents so that positive identifications became vague and evidence was qualified to the extent it became worthless.

At one time, a jury panel was exhibited in a St Kilda two-up school with a promise of five guineas to the person who would persuade any juryman as to the correct verdict to reach. By means of the provisions in the Juries Act requiring a unanimous verdict by the jury, criminals such as Taylor destroyed cases by getting one member to disagree with his fellows.

So active and effective were Boardman and Taylor that the law was altered to keep secret the names, occupations and addresses of those called to jury service.

Just before the conspiracy trial of Taylor and others, George Allsop, a well-dressed young man of 27 years, was arrested outside the Law Courts in Lonsdale Street while mixing with the men summoned to be sworn in as the jury hearing the charges. At the watchhouse he produced his subpoena as a witness, but admitted he was not required to attend that day. Allsop was Squizzy’s constant companion and, according to Detective Lambell, a jury squarer. When asked what he was doing for a living, Allsop claimed he worked for a bookmaker but refused to give his name. Detective Carey interjected, ‘We have been to a good many race meetings in the past two months and have never seen you working there.’

Mr D. C. Levy, for the defence against a charge of insufficient lawful means of support, elicited the information that his client had been a registered bookmaker’s clerk since 1920, but in December 1923 had been refused a VRC licence on the recommendation of Detective Napthine. He received money betting at races and working for Leslie Taylor.

‘I know Taylor well,’ said Allsop, ‘he paid me £2 for interviewing witnesses for him at Eltham and Sandringham.’

Squizzy was an interested spectator throughout the proceedings, and was the first to congratulate Allsop when the case was dismissed.

By 1923 armed bandits and shopbreakers were more numerous, ruthless and vicious than at almost any other period in Melbourne’s history. They were the lucrative years of the really desperate criminals who used a smoothly competent approach against inadequate forces of detectives and plainclothed police, and prospered as never before. Payroll guards and bullet-proof trucks were unheard of; in 1923 a clerk with a valise or suitcase was an adequate means of transporting pay-packets from bank to business.

During May 1923, two clerks from the livestock branch of the Victoria Railways were carefully shadowed as they moved packets of money in an old gladstone bag along a regular route. The result of this research was passed on to the mastermind, and one day towards the middle of the month, the clerks were startled by the appearance of a man in a black mask at the counter. His revolver was aimed at one man’s chest, but instead of firing he tossed a cloud of pepper across the bench, snatched the familiar bag, and ran to the waiting car. The bag held £2,750 in notes.

Squizzy was so elated by this success he was soon seeking opportunities for robberies based upon the same pattern.