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Heroic People Who Deserve to be Way More Famous

Khalid Elhassan March 31, 2021 36 min

A black GI and captured Germans in WWII. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Downtown Sydney in 1920. New South Wales State Records

12. Taking on Sydney’s Razor Gangs

Two female crime bosses, who hated each other, ran Sydney’s biggest gangs. One was Kate Leigh, AKA the Sly-Grog (unlicensed bar) Queen. The other was Tilly Devine, AKA the Queen of Woolloomooloo. The crime queens fought each other with all available tools. Their goons slashed each other in the streets. Each one snitched on her rival to the police. They even conducted public relations campaigns in the press by bribing journalists to portray them in the best light possible, while vilifying their foe. The heroic Lillian Armfield took on and wrecked both.

Kate Leigh, ‘The Sly Grog Queen’. Justice and Police Museum

Tilly Devine, the Queen of Woolloomooloo, used to be a London prostitute before she emigrated to Australia. There, she continued her career as a sex worker, and added to her repertoire a series of violent assaults – often with razors – that earned her a reputation as “The Worst Woman in Sydney“. She racked up 79 convictions in just five years, none of which carried serious penalties. That eventually changed, when she got two years in the State Reformatory for bloody assault.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.