Meet Victor Hugo, Winston Churchill (the Plain Turkey), Professor toshima et al
The 19th century was a time for criminals to adopt aliases that reflected their disruptive outlaw ways – The Wild Scotchman (James McPherson) and Henry Hunter, The Wild Frenchman, rode the backroads in the 1860s, nicking horses and emptying the mails. The Snob seems an unlikely name for a bushranger, but Edward Hartigan’s nickname derived from his earlier trade as a bootmaker.
Sixty years later, and criminality had taken on a different look and truly bizarre aliases. After the war to end all wars, and before the Great Depression, criminals were less interested in dashing escapades with “wild” nicknames. These men preferred conning their fellow citizens, whilst using preposterous or aristocratic sounding aliases. Which were rendered even more preposterous when accompanying photographs showed a collection of hard-living spivs.
Young Winston
Meet Reginald Fulljames, or Winston Churchill Fairlie, or Winston Churchill Watts alias The Plan Turkey. He was born in 1900 in New South Wales and came to rural Queensland in 1916.
Mr Churchill was frequently without lawful means of support, and his attempts to rectify that situation kept courts in remote places like Isisford, Chinchilla and Springsure occupied for the better part of the decade.
Little has been written about The Plain Turkey or Winston, so I imagine that he took his passion for funny names and unfortunate jumpers elsewhere.
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo came from New Zealand, and had a long criminal history there and in New South Wales before fetching up in Queensland in 1929 and breaking and entering at Brisbane. Police weren’t fooled by his literary pretensions, and charged him under his proper name, Terence O’Connor.
Professor Toshima
Englishman William Arthur Hill, aged 50, was thought to look Japanese apparently, and was thus able to set himself up in Brisbane as a Japanese Professor named Toshima. He claimed to be a medical practitioner and later a film producer, when he was in fact a carpenter with a sideline in wrestling.
As Mr Cardinal, he ran a training centre for would-be film stars (preferably of the young, female, attractive and gullible variety). The various newspapers in Queensland at the time unkindly pointed out the lack of impending major motion picture productions in the Brisbane area at the time. Mr Hill was jailed for two years.
The Truth article goes on to detail the financial frauds committed on the aspiring actors, and the earlier fraud committed under the alias Professor Toshima. The author of the article, assuming that Mr Hill was Japanese, used this criminality as a breathtaking, openly racist supporting argument for the White Australia Policy.
Romey Juliet Reynolds
Really, you’d disown your parents, wouldn’t you? Romey Juliet? Mr Reynolds employed variants of his name (usually Romeo) or the alias R.J. Butters when he arrived from New South Wales in 1929. He was keen to establish a life free of the ten previous convictions in other States, but was unable to resist a spot of imposition.
In his prison description, much attention is paid to the size of his nose and his Jewish heritage (“Jewish features” – whatever that means).
MR MERTON, FRASER, DOUGLAS, SANDERSON, scott or KING
Reading the articles, I think that this man’s name was really Victor Douglas Fraser. His occupation was given as business manager, and, although rather rumpled before the prison camera, he looks respectable. The unhappy appearance (and crumpled suit) can be explained by the sentencing below.
Mr Fraser’s identifying particulars include a quite patriotic-sounding series of tattoos, a Rising Sun, Australian Coat of Arms, a wreath and 1914-1919 encircled. They are suggestive of a military career in World War 1. Fraser’s criminal record indicates that he was in prison in South Australia until 1916. There was a person with this name who enlisted in the Australian Armed Forces in 1918 at Brisbane. The height and physical appearance are similar, but the enlisted gent was born in Melbourne in 1882, rather than New Zealand in 1886, and had previous military service on his record.
And of course, the man whose aliases and activities merited a blog post of their own, Thomas Penny, charged here as Gordon Tempest Vane Simpson. All of the others are rank amateurs.
- Australian National Archives
- Queensland State Archives Item ID ITM 610793, 654069
- The Toowoomba Chronicle
- The Truth
- The Bundaberg Mail
Moreton Bay and More 