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The Infamous Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones

Despite his flamboyance and double-barrelled name, Australia’s most infamous medico of the time – and perhaps of all time – Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones, came from humble beginnings. Born in London in 1903, he was the son of a Scottish father and a Welsh mother with the family name of Jones. The family emigrated to Australia when Reginald was nine and settled at Woolgoolga, near Coffs Harbour, where his father managed a timber factory.

An excellent student, young Reg Jones won scholarships to Wesley College at Sydney University where he studied medicine and excelled at cricket, football, tennis, athletics and rifle shooting. He graduated in medicine in 1929 and in 1931 sailed back to England as the ship’s doctor on the Raranga.

In Britain the handsome young doctor was introduced into society where he met and married his first wife Shena, who was the heir to a chain of theatres. And in keeping with his new social status he hyphenated his middle and last names. On his return to Australia he worked as a GP at Canterbury until 1935, when the now Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones set up practice in Sydney’s up-market Macquarie Street as a gynaecologist. From the start his practice was a raging success and he soon became the specialist the ladies of Sydney’s society chose to see for their more personal examinations.

A born businessman and entrepreneur, at night Stuart-Jones ran the Lido nightclub at Bondi and also opened and ran the successful 400 Club in the historic Paris House in Phillip Street, in the city. He owned a string of racehorses, greyhounds and trotters and, at one stage, was the president of the New South Wales National Coursing Association, the controlling body for greyhound racing. He was seen most weekends at the racing venues betting in large amounts of cash.

When his first wife left him in 1936, Stuart-Jones built a five-bedroom, three-bathroom palace in Bellevue Hill with two grand pianos, a billiard room and a pistol range in the basement. He named it Casa Clavel. The parties were legendary, with a full orchestra entertaining his guests who danced and drank until dawn.

In 1944 he met and very quickly married 23-year-old Mary Ryan but within four months they had separated and he sued her for divorce on the grounds of her adulterous relationship with the well-known Sydney criminal Clifford Thompson. Stuart-Jones had found his wife in Thompson’s pyjamas in a room in Leichhardt. Stuart-Jones and his young wife reconciled before the divorce was finalised. But the boyfriend, Thompson, wasn’t too happy about it.

Around midnight on 31 October 1944, Stuart-Jones went to the door of Casa Clavel, where he was escorted to a waiting car under the guise that he should look at a fellow who ‘wasn’t feeling very well’. When he reached the car Dr Stuart-Jones was forced into the back at gunpoint by Clifford Thompson and another criminal, Alexander Jowett, who told him that they were taking him for a ride to Maroubra where he would be executed with a bullet to the heart and thrown off the cliffs into the sea.

With two accomplices sitting in the front seat, the car arrived at Maroubra at about 12.30am and stopped at the top of the cliffs in Marine Parade. The accomplices held Stuart-Jones down while Jowett held a revolver to his chest and pulled the trigger. In a million-to-one chance the bullet missed every vital organ except the doctor’s lung and, as he severely gasped for breath, he begged the men who had just tried to kill him to drive him to the nearby Vassilia private hospital in Randwick and dump him on the footpath.

Incredibly, that’s exactly what the dumbest hit squad in the world did, and Stuart-Jones was rushed immediately to St Vincent’s Hospital where an emergency operation saved his life. The four alleged hit men were quickly rounded up and charged with attempted murder.

Their trial was a disaster for Stuart-Jones. The court heard from the defence that the society doctor was in fact Sydney’s leading abortionist, sly-grog trader, wife-basher, dope-pedlar and nightclub business associate of some of Sydney’s most notor-ious criminals. To a packed gallery that oohed and aahed at each new allegation, the defence told the court of the sordid details of the abductor Thompson’s love for Stuart-Jones’ wife, of Thompson’s wife’s love for the would-be assassin Jowett and other scandalous allegations of love affairs between Sydney’s high-society matrons and underworld figures.

It also came out that Dr Stuart-Jones had been in the sly-grog and cocaine trafficking business with Jowett and a recently deceased gangster named Donald ‘the Duck’ Day, who had been shot dead in Surry Hills. The court heard that Dr Stuart-Jones used his luxury four-master yacht Sirocco to peddle whisky, liquor, prostitutes and narcotics to American soldiers and that his associates in these floating Roman orgies on Sydney Harbour included the cream of Sydney’s underworld hit men and stand-over merchants.

The court heard that Stuart-Jones’ Lido nightclub at Bondi was really a front for a huge sly-grog operation, and his 400 Club was more like a Chicago speak-easy during prohibition with a band, table service and booze served around the clock. The betting that the doctor did at the racetracks in large amounts of cash was allegedly from his ‘cash-only’ abortion clinics all over Sydney.

It was also alleged that Stuart-Jones consorted with the worst gangsters of the times and carried a revolver, which he wasn’t afraid to use to fire into the ceilings of crowded bars or rest-aurants when he was drunk. A well-known Sydney standover man of the day testified for the defence that he was present on one occasion when the doctor beat his new young wife and gave her two black eyes.

But as much as the defence enhanced the tainted reputation of Sydney’s most notorious doctor in living memory, it did little for Jowett and Thompson, who were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment.

But the scandal of the trial was the beginning of the end for the now notorious Dr Stuart-Jones. Soon after the trial his clinic in Macquarie Street was raided and he was charged with performing an abortion and narrowly missed a prison sentence. Unable to explain his income from performing abortions all over Sydney, he had to sell Casa Clavel in order to pay a massive tax bill that had accumulated over the previous seven years.

In 1949 he married for the third time to Adelaide beauty queen Adeline Morick, who was less than half his age. During the 1950s he was involved in doping racehorses and race fixing and was disqualified by the Queensland Turf Club for pulling up one of his horses in a race at Bundamba.

In December 1960 Stuart-Jones received a tax bill for £186,000 for understating his income from his abortion businesses. In June 1961, Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 58 years old but it was said that he had lived three lifetimes.