Great Australian Rascals, Rogues and Ratbags by Jim Haynes

Author:Jim Haynes [Jim Haynes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

On some occasions, Kate’s sense of humour was ‘deadpan’, while other times it verged on the surreal. On New Year’s Eve 1942 a constable from Darlinghurst knocked on Kate’s door in plain clothes and bought some liquor, which Jack Baker loaded into the waiting car. At the trial Kate kept a straight face when accused of selling sly grog: ‘I’ve never had a sly grog business,’ she protested, ‘but I may have run a private hotel where liquor was sometimes sold.’ She then claimed that Jack Baker was the boss of the establishment. When the judge asked ‘if Jack was her lover’, she exploded, ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that, do you think I’d be sleeping with some big buck nigger?’ The totally Caucasian Jack Baker, who everyone knew had been Kate’s lover for over ten years, looked at the ceiling as the judge sent them both to Long Bay for six months and fined them £100.

On one of the last occasions that Kate’s home was searched by police, in April 1953, she locked the chief of the vice squad, Detective Sergeant Ron Waldron, in her bedroom for some time and told him through the locked door, ‘You might as well search it properly.’ In court she said she’d only done it ‘for a joke’ and they were ‘old friends’.

Kate was declared bankrupt after the tax department finished with her, her debts were calculated to be seven times the value of her assets. She continued to live in the upstairs room of her property at 212 Devonshire Street. Her nephew, William Beahan, ran a store in the downstairs shopfront room.

When Frank Green died in 1956, stabbed to death by his girlfriend while attacking her with a carving knife in a drunken rage, a reporter visited Kate to ask if she would attend the funeral. ‘Hell, no,’ she replied, but added that, if she knew where he was buried, she might ‘dance on the bludger’s grave’.

Kate died in St Vincent’s Hospital aged 82 in 1964, after suffering a stroke. She was buried with full Catholic rights at Botany Cemetery, now known as Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park. Quite a few policemen attended her funeral, as did her once-hated enemy, Tilly Devine. They had formally ‘made up’ in 1947, and there is a photo of them hugging, but they never became friends. Tilly claimed she was at the funeral ‘to have a stickybeak’.

Kate’s grave is unmarked.

In 2015, her old home at 212 Devonshire Street sold for $1.7 million.

In an interview with author Larry Writer, retired Consorting Squad Superintendent, Ray Blissett, then in his 90s, said that Kate was ‘the best informant the police ever had’. Commenting on her funeral, Blissett said:

Jack Aldridge, one of the best detectives Sydney ever knew, read the lesson for Kate when she died. But he didn’t tell the truth. He didn’t tell what she was really like. She was an old bitch, she really was. She’d hit you with an iron bar as soon as look at you.

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