The Cheerfully Violent Rivalry of Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine; or, It's All Fun and Games Until Someone gets their Face Sliced Off with a Razor
Hey you know what’s cool? Crime. Don’t let nerds tell you otherwise. It's so cool.
This particular tale of super-cool crime comes from Sydney, which isn’t really a place I’d associate much with major crime, but Australia is just a prison built on genocide, which eventually evolved into a country, so I guess it makes sense.
So back at the tail-end of the 19th century, a furious woman called Kate Leigh (née Beahan) was born in Australia and had a shitty, abusive upbringing which, unsurprisingly, led to a bunch of shitty, abusive relationships as she got older. Funny how that happens.
It was through these shitty, abusive relationships, however, that our girl Kate discovered her true love: lots of crime. Sydney, you see, had passed prohibition laws, making it illegal to sell alcohol after 6pm. And, as we know from literally every single other time anyone has tried prohibition, that shit always works out really well.
They didn’t have to worry about climate change in the 1930s so they protested booze laws instead.
Kate opened some cheeky wee bars across Sydney. And, when the city made cocaine illegal, she bought up all the coke she could find and started marking it up and selling that too. She made a shitton of money very fast.
(This was known as the "sly grog trade" which is an objectively dumb name).
In the meantime, a prostitute in London by the name of Matilda Twiss was persuaded to marry an Australian soldier and move to the other side of the world with him because his family was super rich and had their own kangaroo farm.
Oh, honey.
Obvs when she got to Australia, she found out that this was a complete lie (are kangaroo farms even a thing? Who knows). Changing her name to Tilly Devine, because it sounded way cooler, she quickly returned to sex work. She became known for stabbing johns who didn’t pay and setting dirty police officers on fire if they stepped out of line.
I can only imagine she was an outstanding fuck, because there is no other reason people would keep going back to That One Prostitute Who Might Brutally Murder You.
Around this time, Sydney passed another Very Sensible Law, banning any man from running a brothel.
We’ve all seen Lord of the Rings. We all know the loophole.
There we go: the one time Tolkien acknowledged the existence of women.
So yeah, our girl Tilly became a madam, running a string of brothels across the city. And she was really good at it, becoming absolutely loaded very quickly. She provided services for a variety of men, from sailors to millionaires, but didn’t offer any rent boys because she believed gay sex “wasn’t right”. But stabbing people to death was perfectly fine, I guess. Jesus, Tilly, sort your shit out.
And that was how Sydney’s underworld became home to two badass lady criminals.
I mean… woo feminism? I guess?
Much like New York around the same time, Sydney was riddled with larger-than-life gangsters, with great names like "Monkey" Webb and Phil “the Jew” Jeffs. But even among that lot, Tilly and Kate stood out.
Here was the thing, though. They fucking hated one another.
(You know what, I really hate this idea that two women with any level of success need to be constantly pitted against each other. As though there’s only one seat at the table and we need to compete for it, instead of joining forces and eating all the men to make space for more women. We’re better than that, guys. Just a note).
Their rivalry started when Tilly started opening her own speakeasies, getting all up on Kate’s turf. And then Kate opened some brothels. And then all-out bloody war started.
Tilly (and by Tilly, I mean people paid by Tilly) began smashing up Kate’s liquor stores. And Kate (and by Kate, I mean people paid by Kate) violently attacked Tilly’s sex workers.
And then there were the Razor Gang Wars.
These uncreatively-named battles came after Sydney passed yet another law, banning firearms. This was one of their more sensible laws, I’ll admit, but it did lead to all the local gangs taking to slashing each other up with razors, which is utterly horrific.
Slap-bang in the middle of these Razor Gang Wars were our girls Tilly and Kate, whose gangs had been ordered to attack each other on sight. And it was brutal.
Don’t think that Kate and Tilly were afraid of getting their own hands dirty, either. There are reports of them full-on wailing on each other in public, often having to be split up by the police. Plus both were suspected of (but not charged with) shooting a good number of people in the face. Hilariously, the Wikipedia article for Tilly mentions her house, and contains the words “a number of homicides were committed at this residence” like the world’s grimmest estate agent posting.
They also married and shagged a bunch of men because why the fuck not.
Be honest, both of these women 100% look like someone who would slice your face off with a razor.
And then things took a baffling swerve in an entirely different direction, catalysed by Sydney passing another idiot law.
As mentioned before, the city was crawling with cartoon gangsters, which wasn’t great for the police. But most of these gangsters, our girls included, were very good at covering their asses so that they were very difficult to pin down. So instead of faffing around with ballaches like “probable cause” and “evidence” and “actual police work”, the city decided to pass a law allowing police officers to arrest and charge people for “poor character”.
Which was just… you can see how that was going to cause issues, yeah? Like, glaring racial and class issues aside, that was always going to be a terrible idea. Right?
And so the razor battles evolved into PR fights. Desperate to stay out of jail, while simultaneously taking the chance to fuck with their rival, Tilly and Kate mercilessly tore into each other in the press.
Kate was significantly better at this than Tilly. While Tilly was a furious, stabby whirlwind, Kate managed to create this image of a charming, maternal, charitable public figure who, yes, ran a crime empire and killed a bunch of people with razors, but also gave a bunch of money to charity and waved at crowds from balconies and such. Tilly, in the meantime, publicly accused of her of getting high off her own supply and “ruining” young girls, which is a bit rich coming from the head of the biggest brothel chain in Sydney.
N’aww look at the little razor-murderer.
Either way, this was probably a nicer way of going about things than all the previous razor-based violence. Jesus, Australia.
And Tilly and Kate would’ve gone on slagging each other off in the papers and slicing people’s faces off with razors probably forever, if they didn’t both have the one crippling weakness that most gangsters and all rich people seem to share.
They didn’t pay their goddamn taxes.
(Ugh. Guys. Pay your fucking taxes. Welfare systems are in place for a reason. We can’t all claw our way out of poverty by slicing the faces off strangers).
Around the 1930s, Sydney police were really sniffing around Kate and Tilly’s finances, leading Tilly to return swiftly to England, and Kate to go swiftly to jail.
(Don’t worry about Kate too much, she had a fab cushy time in prison and became BFFs with the warden’s wife, because she was such a charmer).
A few years later, once they were both back from prison and England, they returned to all their crime. But things were different. Being gangsters, they found that most of their friends were either dead or in jail (don’t you just hate it when that happens?) and both women were feeling pretty lonely.
So they decided to become friends.
You know how we all have those friends who we tried to kill with a razor for decades?
Unfortunately, all their tax fiddling had caught up to them and they were made to pay back so much money that they both ended up in crippling debt (plus Sydney’s lawmakers had finally worked out they could nip the illegal-booze trade in the bud by legalising the sale of alcohol again, which put a bit of a downer on their businesses). When they died, they died in poverty.
Kate beat Tilly by a few years, and had over 700 mourners at her funeral (because, again, bizarrely, everyone really fucking loved her). Tilly, on the other hand, was mourned by barely anyone (not even Kate, who was already dead). Her eulogy was inexplicably done by Sydney police commissioner Norman Allan, who was quoted as saying “she may be a villain, but who am I to judge her?”
You’re the police commissioner, Norman. It’s literally your job to… you know what? Never mind. There are better hills to die on.