Gangland Robbers (2 page)

But what exactly constitutes robbery? According to the
Australian Institute of Criminology
:

 

Robbery is the unlawful taking of property from an individual or organisation without consent, and is accompanied by force or threat of force. A robbery may involve the use or implied threat of a weapon (armed robbery) or may not involve a weapon (unarmed robbery).

 

While what occurred on the
Nelson
was certainly a robbery, strictly speaking the Bank of Australia job was not, although, doubtless, had they been interrupted, the men would have used violence to escape; it should probably be called a heist (a major theft not necessarily involving violence) but that word did not come into use until a century later. We have taken a rather broader view of ‘robbery', and included what newspapers and the public over the decades have called robberies but that may not have come within the legal or sociological definition.
Gangland Robbers
, then, is an account of major property crimes in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day.

One of the problems in bringing things up to date is the multiplicity of suppression orders the courts are now imposing and that continue long after cases have finished. Many of these are designed to protect those who have turned dog, even if they weren't believed when they gave evidence at trial. Their names may not be bywords for the general public but these people are, of course, well known to the criminal community. Even if someone has been given another name and moved to another state to serve their sentence, they will be instantly recognisable in the prison showers from, for example, the unicorn tattooed on their right buttock.
Suppression orders probably
reached their zenith in 2012 when while sentencing a man on a charge of conspiracy to murder a judge closed the court to the media and the public and ordered his sentencing remarks, including the penalty imposed, be opened only by order of a judge.

Some will find our choice of robbers arbitrary. Many offenders have turned out to be far more talented escapees than they are robbers and, for the most part, we have not included the stories of men such as Darcy Dugan and Brenden Abbott. (They will appear in our forthcoming
Gangland: The Escapees
.) There may be those who believe that their friends and relations deserve to be in
Gangland Robbers
. If they are kind enough to write to us, we will try to include those they nominate in any future edition.

There are estimates that, during the nineteenth century, there were upwards of 2000 bushrangers, from escaped convicts who robbed to survive, to second-generation bushrangers, such as John Vane, who was born in 1842 and sometimes called the ‘last of the bushrangers'. But what is difficult is deciding exactly who was a bushranger and what exactly was bushranging. Did it have to be more than cattle rustling? Could it be a single bank robbery? Multiple bank robberies? Could it be holding up a homestead? A bail-up of a gold escort? It has been suggested that Jack Bradshaw, self-proclaimed ‘last of the bushrangers', should not count as one because he only held up a couple of banks. Was bushranging really at an end after the capture of Ned Kelly?

What is clear is that the golden era of the bushranger came with the discovery of gold in New South Wales. Before that, it really was a question of survival. In Tasmania, because of supply ships failing to arrive, conditions were so poor that in 1805 the authorities, faced with general starvation, actually released convicts, gave them arms and sent them into the bush to survive through hunting. It should not have been a surprise that some of them took up a different form of hunting. The bush surrounding the settlements was unexplored, but this did not deter the convicts from escaping, with the idea of making their way to Batavia (now Jakarta), or to China.
Some died but others survived
by joining forces with Indigenous people. Others took to bushranging.

Eventually, greed rather than survival became the key word. The bushrangers were no longer always bearded and sweat-stained men
living rough. Indeed, as early as the 1830s, the gang of the Dublinborn ‘Wild Colonial Boy' Jack Donohoe were described as ‘remarkably clean' bushmen, dressed in a raffish style.
‘Bold' Jack himself was said to be fitted
out in ‘black hat, superfine blue cloth coat lined with silk … plaited shirt … laced boots'.

Some thirty years after the 1863 Dunn's Plains robbery, discussing bushranging in general and the robbery in particular, the
Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal
commented:

 

The gradations were from idleness and petty stealing to cattle stealing; from cattle stealing to robbery from the person; then to robbery (under arms) of mails and escorts; followed by the ruin and extermination of honest storekeepers, attacks on the officers of justice, raids on banks, country towns and private establishments. The time had now arrived for a further advance —to the Neapolitan system of ransom.
This made, the question was seriously
discussed in certain quarters whether the next successive movements would be camps, stations, regiments, batteries, and open attack upon the united Government forces.

 

The reverse side of the coin is that by the 1880s, many, such as the Kelly Gang, had become what the Marxist writer Eric Hobsbawm described as ‘social bandits', seen as ‘heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported by peasant society' in the fight on behalf of the oppressed Catholics and small land owners.
This was an attitude they took care to nourish
.

By the 1860s the New South Wales police were under pressure to put a stop to bushranging, and the
Police Regulation Act 1862
provided for a central system controlled from Sydney. It was in June that year that Frank Gardiner devised the robbery of the Eugowra gold escort. At 3 p.m. on 15 June his gang bailed up the coach, which had four police officers as an escort—one sergeant on the box with the driver, and three in the coach itself. Earlier, the gang had bailed up two bullock drivers and had them place their wagons across the track. The police were completely unprepared; one was shot in the groin, another in the arm and the others fled into the bush. Gardiner's men picked up 2700 ounces of gold and £3700 in cash, estimated to be worth $20 million today.

Lieutenant General Sir Francis Pottinger was authorised to lead a recouping expedition.
He and his men met with initial success
,
retrieving 1500 ounces of the gold and taking two prisoners, before they were bailed up and lost both the gold and the men. Eventually, arrests were made and after one of the gang, Daniel Charters, was given bail, he dobbed in his mates. There had been such a spate of robberies that a special commissioner was appointed to sit in Sydney and try bushrangers, including members of the Eugowra Gang, in February 1863. The only one of the gang who was hanged was Henry Manns, who had wanted to plead guilty and was of good character. Two others, John Bow and Alexander Fordyce, convicted by the special commissioner, were reprieved. Gardiner had vanished.

Manns' execution, on 26 March 1863, was not a humanitarian success. Apart from trying to steal his new boots, the hangman failed to secure the rope properly and Manns' face was half torn off. Eventually, four convicts held his body while the executioner readjusted the rope. That night, an Archibald Hamilton, clearly a follower of Cesare Lombroso, the criminologist who believed criminals had different skulls from those of the general population, gave a lecture, ‘Crime, Its Causes, Punishment and Crime', illustrated with replicas of criminals' skulls. Instead of punishment for them, he advocated a course of treatment ‘in strict accordance with their phrenological developments'. Admission was one shilling and reserved seats two shillings.

One outcome of the robbery was the decision that no longer should all members of a gold escort ride in the coach in which the precious metal was being carried. In future, there would be an outrider and officers behind it. Over the years, Cobb & Co coaches were held up a relatively modest thirty-six times, with nine of those occurring between the middle of September 1862 and the end of February the next year. On 10 February the special commissioner sentenced three men to be hanged; five to fifteen years on the roads, the first year in irons (the man's legs would be chained together, although this did not prevent escapes); one man to twelve years; and another to ten. This may have decreased the number of robberies but it certainly did not put an end to them. Several more coaches were attacked before the end of the year.

The first attempted armed bank robbery in Australia is credited to the remnants of Frank Gardiner's gang. On 13 July 1863 Ben Hall, along with Johnny Gilbert and John O'Meally, held up the Commercial Bank at Carcoar, an area popular with ex-convicts. A teller fired a shot into the
ceiling, thwarting the robbery. The manager was shot as he was returning to the bank, and the gang fled without seizing anything.
However, as some compensation
, on their way out of town they robbed a man of £2 and his watch.

But now, with the cities growing, bank branches were springing up in the suburbs, very often as rooms in shops. And these were not the targets of bushrangers but of metropolitan criminals. On 14 June 1864 a team led by Samuel Woods, whose real name was Young and who had served fifteen years on Norfolk Island, raided the George Street, Collingwood, branch of the ES&A Bank. However, the raiders had bitten off more than they could chew.

Around 10.45 a.m. Woods, who appeared to be drunk, entered the bank, and John Dowling, the manager, took him into a side room, at which point Woods produced a gun and ‘threatened to blow his brains out'. Undeterred, Dowling called for the assistance of young ledger clerk
Percy de Jersey Grut
, but before Grut could assist, he had problems of his own. Two men came into the bank and threatened him; one produced a pistol and a bullet scorched Grut's neck. They ran out of the bank, and Grut went to help the manager, picking up a candlestick as he went.

The manager's nephew, Thomas, arrived to help and was shot in the hand. Woods, who had a dagger, stabbed the unfortunate Grut, who now hit him three times with the candlestick, breaking it. There was a knocking on the door, and the manager thought the police had arrived but it was a man from the shop opposite, who had brought a cheese cutter with him. Woods gave up, saying, ‘You can't prove I fired the pistol—it was an accident'.

The gang members, who were thought to have robbed Bergers in Flinders Street a few days previously, were quickly rounded up. As for Dowling, his nephew and Grut, there were testimonials, collections and justifiable praise; in particular, for Grut. The collections realised £120, divided equally between them. On 23 June
Melbourne Punch
published a congratulatory little poem, beginning:

 

When you cracked that

cracksman's nut,

Bravely daring,

On the scroll of fame

You traced your worthy

Name.

 

At the trial, Woods and William Carver, one of the gang members, tried to argue that the bank's money had never been in Dowling's possession, so avoiding the scenario that would convert the robbery into a capital offence. They were unsuccessful, and were executed on 3 August 1864, along with Christopher Hamilton, hanged for a murder. Two other members of Woods' gang, Jeremiah Phillips and James Anderson, each received fifteen years on the roads, the first three to be served in irons. Woods, who was not pleased by what he saw as their cowardice and betrayal in not coming to his rescue, remarked that very soon they would wish they had been hanged.

With the passing of the
New South Wales Felons Apprehension Act 1865
, it became lawful to shoot an outlaw bushranger on sight. That year Ben Hall, who had come to be seen as a ‘social bandit', was shot and killed by police, along with his offsider, John Gilbert. Captain Thunderbolt lasted only another five years before, on 25 May, he was killed by Constable Walker, near Uralla.

Probably Queensland's first major crime for profit, as opposed to survival, occurred on 6 November 1867. Gold commissioner, magistrate and thorough rogue Thomas Griffin, born in Sligo, Ireland, had been a store clerk in Dublin before serving in the Crimean War. On his way to Melbourne in 1857, he had met and charmed the widow Crosby, who had children of his age. He squandered her money, and upon their separation, took half of what was left. He went to Sydney, and became a clerk and then acting sergeant in the constabulary office. He undoubtedly had charm, because he endeared himself to Governor Brown and so was eventually appointed gold commissioner.

Unfortunately, he gambled away £252 worth of gold that Chinese miners had given him, and to retrieve his losses, joined a gold escort party that included several police officers. During the journey, at the Mackenzie River, Griffin attempted to poison four officers, and when that failed to kill constables John Power and Patrick Cahill, he shot them dead and escaped with £4000 of gold.

Caught and convicted, and after an unsuccessful appeal, Griffin continued to deny his guilt to the bitter end, even on the scaffold when, after a breakfast of eggs, toast and tea, he was hanged at Rockhampton on 1 June 1868. No one doubted his guilt, though, and the
Queenslander
thought he had died as he had lived: ‘hard, callous and impenitent'.

The day after his death, a warder, Alfred Grant, wrote to the
Queenslander
that Griffin had tried to bribe him so he could escape. In return, Griffin would tell him where he had buried the stolen money. If escape was impossible, Grant was to bring him either strychnine or a knife, and if he did so, Griffin would make sure his sister in Ireland received £500. Grant had reported this to the principal turnkey, John Lee, and it was agreed he should play along with Griffin. Eventually, Griffin told Grant the whole story of the killings, and after a search, Grant and Lee found the missing money, which was returned to the Australian Joint Stock Bank. For their efforts, the pair were given £200 each and dismissed from their positions.