Photos of dapper thugs from the 1920s

Lots of photos of Australian criminals in the 1920s. They look proud of themselves, don't they?

Herbert Ellis circa 1920: The precise circumstances surrounding this picture are unknown, but Ellis is found in numerous police records of the 1910s, 20s and 30s. He is variously listed as a housebreaker, a shop breaker, a safe breaker, a receiver and a suspected person. A considerably less self-assured Ellis appears in the NSW Criminal Register of 29 August 1934 (no. 206). His convictions by then include ‘goods in custody, indecent langauge, stealing, receiving and throwing a missile.

Vintage Mugshots from the 1920s

• [petertrepan]

  receiving and throwing a missile

  A baseball player, eh?

• [mr_subjunctive]

  He is variously listed as a housebreaker, a shop breaker, a safe breaker, a receiver and a suspected person.

  Which is weird, ’cause I also kind of suspect he is/was a person.

• [Zod]

  Uh, back then, weren’t *ALL* the people living in Australia criminals? Australia *WAS* a penal colony after all!

  • [Churba S]

    Yeah, It was – but that was LONG before the 1920s, when we had been an actual independently goverened country for 20 years, and convicts had been a tiny and rapidly dwindling minority for decades before that.

    There is a 40-odd year gap between the last of the criminal transportations and the first large-scale immigrations of non-criminals. The majority of convict transportation had been halted for years in 1850, with the very last convicts arriving in Western Australia in 1860 or so – at the time, an almost impossible distance away from the regular settlers. The majority of transported convicts at the time were also designated exiles, rather than criminals, and were free to roam, just not travel back to England.

    It was in 1855, after the large-scale immigration during the first big gold rush, that New South Wales became a Responsible colony – ie, self-governing and independent from the British crown in almost all affairs – and others quickly followed, along with more gold rushes. During the period, the number of settlers – Irish, british, scottish, welsh, and those from assorted asian nations – made the number of convincts transported across the entire time look like a quiet afternoon tea, with roughly thrice the number making the trip.

    Despite what most Americans think, having convict ancestry is actually somewhat rare, here, most of them didn’t reproduce, either by choice, lack of chances, or simply because they died before they could.

    I’m simply stunned by how many educated Americans think as you do, honestly. I mean, we’re your close allies, we learn a little bit about your history, the least you could do is learn when we were and were not a penal colony. I mean, I can tell you that the transportation of criminals to America went from 1610 to right about 1770, which is longer than it was ever put on us. Ya Convicts!

    • [Zod]

       Because we’re lazy….

      • [Churba S]

         That’s a fair point, I’d suppose. And I know most of y’all don’t mean anything by it, so I’m not really that offended. You just struck me in a…verbose sort of mood, I suppose. Though I guess Ant the mod has seen enough of my comments to know that it’s a state I often find myself in.

    • [thunderhammer]

      It’s not that Americans thing most Australians are descended from criminals, it’s that some Americans think it’s amusing to pretend to think that.  It’s like meeting someone from Kentucky (one of our states) and saying, “you can’t be from Kentucky, you’ve got all your teeth”.  It’s just a condescending joke, mate.

      • [Churba S]

         You say that, and I’ll admit that many do think that way, but frankly, they’re vastly overwhelmed – in my experience – by those that think we’re all descended from convicts.

        To be fair, though, it’s hardly the dumbest question/statement about Australia I’ve heard in my travels, though. I got asked once if we use money here, by a schoolteacher in Virginia.

        As much as I appreciate that it is, on occasion, meant to be a joke, nearly every time I straight up inquire if they’re joking when they put it forward, in my experience, they’re usually not.

        • [teapot]

          When I was snowboarding in Whistler 95% of people thought Australia was Austria. We corrected them once, until we realised there was a pattern forming. Then we just did our best to sow the seeds of permanent confusion.

      • [teapot]

        I’m with Churba on this.. The BB readership is much more worldly than most people on the tubez, but it astounds me how many people think we are all convicts or coppers. My suspicion is that the stereotype of our reputation was exported to Americans from the British who take any opportunity to remind everyone how superior they are, especially over their lowly colonies.

        Had some trouble getting to work this morning, though. The damn kangaroo stopped working so I had to take the emu instead.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          Isn’t Chopper Read your Prime Minister?

        • [teapot]

          @Antinous_Moderator:disqus If he was, QandA would be much more interesting!

          At present our PM is an unmarried atheist who is opposed to gay marriage (?) and the opposition leader is a woman-hating catholic jerk off  who has no fucking clue, no class and he constantly makes massive errors of judgement like saying “shit happens” to a ranking officer when being told about the death of an Australian Serviceman in Afghanistan.

          At least if Read was PM the flat-earther climate change denialists would be too scared to open their mouths to unleash the poo stream.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          Julia Gillard’s only redeeming quality is that she isn’t Tony Abbott. He’s deeply disturbing. Although he looks damn fine in those budgie smugglers that he wears every day.

          Ms. Gillard is an example of what happens when you pick your PM solely on how well she can keep your party in power. Not that it works differently anywhere else. But Kevin Rudd was a lot closer to being an actual human being.

        • [teapot]

          @Antinous_Moderator:disqus Couldn’t agree more re Rudd. I don’t know what the Labor party was smoking the day they axed him.. He was slightly down in popularity at the time because of trying to fix up the funding of our health system and he was, according to some ex-members of his cabinet, incredibly inflexible and demanding but the hilarious thing is that he has consistently beaten Gillard and Abbott in the polls as preferred PM since Gillard’s election.

          Sadly the tea-baggers have provided a template for Abbott to employ in order to rally the simpletons against progressive policies and the one thing he is a master at is trash-talking. His rhetoric is laughable to anyone with a vague understanding of political spin but that doesn’t  stop his empty talking points being repeated endlessly by fools. Since we have mandatory voting in Australia fools who think they are informed do have an effect come election day. I shudder at the potential of Abbott representing Australia on the world stage :

          PS thanks for the reading suggestion. I hadn’t heard of Catalina de Erauso before but I’ll certainly give her autobiography a read if I get the chance.

        • [Churba S]

          Well, Rudd being slightly down in the polls is a wee bit disingenuous, he was only a scant few points higher than Gilliard has been for the last few months, at least, until she took her latest plunge after the latest leadership spill. And his poll numbers had dived very hard to get that low, he went from Golden boy to the shithouse in record time.

          And the reason that he was axed was less public opinion, than his party found him bloody impossible to work with – I belive the words “Perfectionist Micromanager”, “egomaniac”, “Megalomaniac”, “petty, vicious and venomous”, and even maybe Sociopathic have been thrown around by members of his own party, and having met the man and spoken to him more than once in the course of my work, I can’t say I disagree on all points.

          Seriously, that dude gives me the stone-cold chills, and I don’t mean that in a happy way. He’s all happy and nice a fair bit of the time, but you ask him a question he doesn’t like, and he looks at you like he’d gut you and dump your body in a barrel of lye without a second thought if he thought you were truly in his way. No joke, man, I have never, ever, ever met a person, politician or otherwise, who is a more perfect personification of “The Smiler” from Transmetropolitan.

          Kevin Rudd was, indeed, closer than the majority of our current politicians to being a human being, but I must also point out that both Manson and John Wayne Gacey were human beings, too.

          Even just thinking about him gives that feeling like ice water being poured down my spine.

          But personal feelings aside, the public opinion thing was really just the straw that broke the camel’s back. And his current bump in the polls, well, considering public opinion when he was still PM, I liken it to whenever they make a change in the facebook UI – people complain hard, and demand they put it back to the last version of the UI, since they’ve rapidly forgotten that they said the exact same thing about the previous UI, and the UI before that.

          Abbot…Well, I’m of mixed feelings about Abbot. He’s previously indicated that he doesn’t agree with all the party policies, in that subtle way that politicians down here have so they can dodge being questioned about not towing the party line, since that generally is very detrimental to one’s career.
          And he’s often given heaps about his religion, which I feel is a pretty big beat up, considering that not only has he said in the past that it’s foolish and god-awful governance to make policy based on religion, but when his own church criticised him about saying so, he very politely told them to fuck right off – I believe the rough words were “The church gives a priest the power to turn wafer and wine into the body of christ, but it does not at all give them the power to turn bad logic into good logic.”

          I don’t agree with a lot of his policies, and I personally wouldn’t vote for him, but I think he gets the very short and shitty end of the stick, a lot of the time. Which is saying something, since he’s a complete and utter wanker, to say the most complimentary thing I can think of.

          So, I guess the TL:DR version is thus – Rudd was hated when he got the boot, not that much less than Gilliard is now, and is a truly, truly empty and frightening human being, he’s the fucking Smiler, my friend, make no mistake.

          Abbot sucks like a young lady of the trade paid off with a health services union credit card, but still not quite as much as people make out, Gilliard’s virtues are pretty much nil and she’s essentially Tony Abbot with a ginger bob and marginally better dress sense.

          Both Parties are basically carbon-copies, repeating the same talking points with different words, PR and spin in the place of good policy.

          Seriously, it’s bunker-buster-in-a-sewage-plant mess down here.

    • [Wreckrob8]

      At least you did not start off by importing the British class system which may go some way in explaining the Aussie sense of egalitarianism (or so it is perceived from the UK). The colonization of the New World was an aristocratic adventure right from the beginning. There are some saving graces in history, too. I know which I’d choose out of American liberty, Aussie egalitarianism or British subservience.

      • [Churba S]

        I know what I’d chose, too – An Equal blend of American Liberty and our Egalitarianism.  Equality without liberty is meaningless, and liberty without equality is not truly liberty.

  • [Zod]

     Wow! Look what I started!
    Cool!

• [novium]

  I love the hats. Why can’t that be in fashion again?

  • [penguinchris]

    I think douchebags ruined hats for everyone else in the past couple decades. But beyond that, I really can’t see us going back to everyone wearing hats all the time, for a variety of reasons. Social conformity on that scale will (hopefully, anyway) never return (although most people are still conformists for the most part, it takes a slightly different form).

    The real problem with wearing hats like this now is that you look out of place, even costumed. Even if it’s a modern, casual hat – if it’s anything other than a baseball cap, people will think you’re weird. Because of that (quite strange IMO) stigma, few people wear hats, and even fewer do it successfully. 

    There’s a message board called The Fedora Lounge, where hat enthusiasts gather. You’d think that this would be where you’d go if you’re looking for people who know how to wear hats, but – nope. Check out the pictures people post there, and 80%+ look ridiculous in their hats.

    What I’m getting at is that there’s a catch-22 here – in order for hats to not look ridiculous, they have to be ubiquitous, and people have to know how to choose and wear them (which comes from their ubiquity). But they won’t become ubiquitous again until people no longer look silly wearing them – which won’t be until they’re ubiquitous. 

    I do agree that this is unfortunate, because hats are cool, as in these photos! My head is too large for hats (one US hat size larger than most hats are normally produced, or an XXL or even XXXL for non-fitted hats) but I’ve been thinking of getting a straw fedora for summer anyway. I just suspect that people will think I’m a douchebag if I wear it.

    • [novium]

      Part of the thing with hats, I think, is that you’ve got to go whole hog with it. You can’t just wear a fedora while wearing a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. You need a suitably dashing suit to go with it.

      So we just need suits to come back in fashion. (That’ll be easy, right?)

      • [ocker3]

         I think hats are much more common in outdoor activities now. My Father has found a hat style that has a rigid brim in front, but a long soft cloth flap in back to cover the neck better, he wears it while riding a stand-up paddle board, I got one myself

    • [bobarctor]

       The problem is that they just don’t look good in color

• [Paul Renault]

  Nowadays, the thugs are still dapper men.  They wear Brioni and Alexander Amosu, and tell the governments what to do, and they work at banks.

• [Simon Mandel]

  http://www.jenjansenphoto.com/1/post/2012/05/father-son.html

• [Lemoutan]

  Anybody else think W T O’Brien looks like he may have been tricked into jail by the old trail o’ candy ruse?

• [teapot]

  IMO the most interesting photo by far is of ‘Eugenia Falleni, alias Harry Crawford’. This person is a cross dressing woman!

  The blurb: When ‘Harry Leon Crawford’, hotel cleaner of Stanmore was arrested and charged with wife murder he was revealed to be in fact Eugeni Falleni, a woman and mother, who had been passing as a man since 1899. In 1914, as ‘Harry Crawford’, Falleni had married the widow Annie Birkett. Three years later, shortly after she announced to a relative that she had found out ‘something amazing about Harry’, Birkett disappeared

  http://twistedsifter.sifter.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vintage-mugshots-black-and-white-3.jpg

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Are you familiar with Catalina de Erauso? Her putative autobiography, Lieutenant Nun, is well worth a read.

• [Sharon Kitching]

  These are all from a book curated by Peter Doyle – you can buy it from the Historic Houses Trust, which has ownership of the thousands of crime scene negs and mug shots from the Central Sydney police station. 
  http://shop.hht.net.au/Home/Catalogue?productid=7c13e8ad64a0c612

  Most of these criminals were more your average con man, rather than full on criminals. Lost of petty crimes like stealing stockings, or stealing wallets. One that’s always amused me was a middle-aged man who dressed as a woman, and would slide up to women in public and suggest sexual activities. Not a lot’s changed.  

• [humanresource]

  For anyone who loves these pics: do yourself a favour and read the bio of Squizzy Taylor, notorious early-20th century Melbourne gangster, who ended an 8year feud with a rival by killing him, but not before the fella fatally wounded him with return fire.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squizzy_Taylor 

• [Alexandros]

  Ah, the good old days when criminals (and everybody else) still had style…

• [Alexandros]

  Ah, the good old days when criminals (and everybody else) still had style…

• [fisheye]

  The guy on the far left is doing his best Stephen Fry.