What does a 1920s criminal mugshot look like? Rebecca Zhou takes a look at 1920s crooks in a collection of photographs of Sydney criminals titled Crooks Like Us by Peter Doyle.

Horace Arthur Parker 6 October 1926 Central Police Station, Sydney. Image: NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice and Police Museum, Historic Houses Trust of NSW

At first glance the men in the photos look like Wall Street bankers and the women look as if they’re dressed for the pictures. In one of the photos, a misty-eyed man in a grey waistcoat and tie is leaning forward, staring intently into the camera with his chin resting on his knuckles. Is he a film star? A businessman? A poet?

Peter Doyle, author of the collection Crooks Like Us explained at a Talkabout lecture at the Sydney Mechanic School of Arts, that he is none of these. The man is Horace Arthur Parker also known as Boris Parker, a rogue accountant arrested for forging cheques. On closer inspection, you can see he is clutching a handkerchief and that his eyes are filled with tears.

Crooks Like Us is a collection of glass negatives featuring mugshots taken of criminals in Inner city Sydney in the 1920s.

The photos are simple and in some ways repetitive. The men wear waistcoats, fedoras or Gatsby caps and the women in coats and pearl necklaces. The photos are taken immediately after arrest, so the criminals are still in their street clothes. Some of their faces still wear a kind of defiance, fresh from a struggle with police; some had barely awoken from drug-induced stupors.

What attracted Doyle to the collection was not only the depravity that underscored the shots but also a kind of humanity that was absent from a lot of modern forensic photography today.

“There’s a kind of kinetic quality…a character manifestation in those photos which I can’t account for.

“Most of these people aren’t lovable rogues, they’re quite devious rogues, but they are themselves and I thank them for that.”

PHOTO GALLERY – Click to enlarge

There was Fredrich Shmelps, who prowled the streets as a rogue jeweller and would swap his customer’s jewellery after he had promised to sell them.

Phillip Ross, a faux doctor who dealt drugs and claimed he got addicted to the taste of cocaine after being severely injured in the First World War.

Barbara Turner Taylor, a piano teacher from the Hunter Valley who conned tens of thousands of pounds from lawyers then punted and drank it all away.

The man with the handkerchief, Boris Parker, turned out to be a scapegoat the police used for the crimes of an English aristocrat, Godfrey Wentworth. According to police records, Parker wept non-stop for 24 hours after his arrest, just before the photo was taken.

The scenes of these crimes took place largely from Pitt Street down to the gully of Haymarket, which, during the roaring twenties, sprawled with the rich, the poor and the hopefuls who came to Sydney from rural towns in search of work.

“It was not a rambunctious street life, nothing like Hogarth’s Gin Lane,” said Doyle, alluding to the cartoon that famously satirised the slums of St Giles, a parish in London.

One would never pick Haymarket as a home for crooks given the covert way in which they operated. Crook card games were set up at the blink of an eye and whisked away when they got wind of police presence.

But still they got caught. And their stories would have been lost in the dusty annals of police records had Doyle not unearthed them.

The same kind of historical realism led him to research and compile his earlier best-selling book City of Shadows, a collection of the earliest Sydney police forensic photographs from 1912-1948.

“In the earliest days of police photography, the photos tended to be random . . . and you get the feeling that the police weren’t sure why they were taking the photos,” says Doyle.

And no one seemed to have realised their significance for decades. The negatives were stashed in boxes and shuffled from warehouse to warehouse across Sydney until in 1989, they were finally released to the Sydney Historical Houses Trust for safekeeping.

Because the photographs lacked calculation, they captured haphazard aspects of life in the twentieth century and so they became more like historical relics than mere photographs of crime scenes.

“When a police photographer sets up, they’re not interested in the human element.

“They’re interested in the corners of buildings, a burnt out building, some kind of evidence…and so the people become more themselves. They slouch. Maybe it’s a little bit of resistance.

“There’s an inordinate number of people just looking hard-boiled in a way that you don’t see normally, and I love that about these photos,” Doyle says.

The subjects of other photos are starker. The photo of a body lying face-down on the muddy bank of a river in Bankstown and another of an overturned chair under a line of washing which hours ago had been the scene of an attempted suicide, are strangely haunting.

Together Crooks Like Us and City of Shadows offer an invaluable glimpse into the netherworld of twentieth century Sydney. Doyle wrapped up the talk with a final bit of advice for our historical education.

“I encourage you to go see Sydney Central Police Station,” he says.

“The room where all the mugshots are taken is still there. There’s a century of piss, vomit [and] human wretchedness in there that no amount of government paint seems to be able to cover up.”

Talkabout is a series of free lectures on literature, art, politics, history and current affairs given at the Sydney Mechanic School of Arts from 12:30-1:30pm every second Tuesday.