The Gentleman Burglar
When I was growing up in my old home town of Box Hill, in those days just after World War II, I had a close friend, Dick, who became my accomplice in a short period of illegal escapades.
We decided, having read some stories of “The Saint” which had just come out at that time, that we should become as mysterious as he was in righting wrongs and in bringing injustice to an end.
We decided that we would do most of our visits at 3 a.m. We would leave a calling card like The Saint. At this time I had read a mystery book entitled “Raffles, The Gentleman Burglar”. I had the idea of dressing up in our best clothes, wearing white gloves purloined from our mothers’ collection, and learning to break in to buildings where we might correct injustice.
We carefully prepared a number of pieces of plain white cardboard with a black silhouette of a gentleman in top hat and white gloves. This was to be left to show all who would follow, who had been responsible for our adventures.
We started these adventures when we were ten years of age in the school class of tyrannical Mr. Thomas O’Reilly in 1948. Mr. O’Reilly was a very old teacher brought out of retirement to replace some of the men teachers who had been called up for the war and in the few years after the war he still continued to teach. He was crotchety and grumpy. Every time boys made a false move in class we were punished severely with his cane. He also had a strap which was rumoured to have tacks in the end of it and pieces of lead inserted along its length. But it was his cane we most frequently felt. He would line several of us boys up against the blackboard forcing us to lean over and push the blackboard as if it were falling down, and then moving quickly along the line he would deliver several cuts to our bent backsides.
We despised Mr. Thomas O’Reilly and determined to limit his activities.
Our first adventures did not seem to have much purpose because we decided we would climb the roof of the school at 3 a.m. and leave our calling card at the highest point. The three storey school building built on the side of the hill had a noble turret at the top. On top of the turret was a spire. At 3 a.m. I went up the side way beside Dick’s house to his bedroom. True to his word a piece of string hung out the window. I pulled the string a couple of time. The other end was tied to Dick’s big toe. He woke instantly, let himself out the back door and came with me. We had ropes and white gloves and were dressed in our good clothes, although we were both too young to wear long trousers at that time.
We had made a ladder in two parts which we lashed together and it was high enough to take us onto the roof of the school tuck shop. Once on the roof of the tuck shop we climbed up onto the roof of some classrooms and then onto another roof, eventually getting to the top of the school. We had worked out how we were to get up the turret and quickly tied the rope in a large loop around the turret. With Dick on one side inside the rope and myself on the other counter balancing him we slowly edged our way up the side of the turret and over the edge to where we could grasp the spire on the top of the copper sheeting. There we tied a pair of old men’s pyjama pants which had belonged to my late father and left our “Raffles” card. Carefully we eased ourselves down the turret, down the school roof, and eventually back to ground level. We dismantled our ladder and returned home as silently as we had come.
The fluttering of a pair of men’s pyjamas from the topmost point of the school turret had staff and pupils alike standing in the quadrangle staring up at them. They speculated how they got up there and who would get them down. The assembly was duly berated by the headmaster about some foolish men who had come in the night, possibly past pupils at risk to life and limb to desecrate the school.
Dick and I looked at each other and shared a moment of secret joy. Not one other person had been told of our escapade. The eventual arrival of the fire brigade, and the removal of the flying pyjama pants caused so much interruption it was as good as a holiday. Our careers as gentlemen burglars had begun with great success.
In class Mr. Thomas O’Reilly seemed to be getting worse. He swished his cane with great authority as he moved up and down the rows between the desks. Frequently when people were nodding off or drowsy he would slam the cane down on a desktop and we would all jump with fear. We decided it was time to report him to the Principal.
When the muffled alarm clock went off at five to 3 a.m. that morning I quickly dressed, drew on the white gloves and went to meet my friend Dick. I woke Dick by pulling the string tied to his toe. Tonight was a very important night. In the book of “Raffles, The Gentleman Burglar” we had read how he broke into a building. This was the first and the last time we actually ever broke into a building or caused any damage.
We needed a glass cutter. I had purchased one for five shillings at the Royal Melbourne Show. At the sideshow there was a man with a glass cutter and large panes of glass. He simply ran the glass cutter over the front of the glass, tapped it twice, and, lo, all kinds of beautiful cut glass shapes came into being at the tap of the miracle glass cutter. I parted with my five shillings and found that it did not work quite as easily as that. I had broken several old louvres before I ever got it to cut properly. But this night the miracle glass cutter was on an important outing for “Raffles, The Gentleman Burglar”.
We quietly slid through the pine trees that surrounded Box Hill South State School (No. 4138). Walking up to the multi paned glass door at the front of the school, I held the glass cutter in my right hand and with one firm swift movement placed my thumb at the centre of the circle and inscribed an arc to the edge of the pane. Then using the trick that Raffles had taught we smeared jam on the pane raspberry jam and cut a piece of brown paper to fit exactly the size. Sticking the brown paper to the jam on the glass we then gave the semi circle of cut glass a sharp tap. There was a crack, a slight pop and we peeled the brown paper off and the semi circle of glass came out with ease. Putting a white gloved hand through the opening we released the catch inside the door and let ourselves into the school.
The corridors were pitch black but we knew the way to the Principal’s office. By some stroke of good fortune the Principal’s door was not locked in those days of trustworthy souls so we did not have to repeat Raffle’s method of gaining entry. We simply left on his desk blotter one of our Raffles cards together with a neatly penned black message
“Mr. O’Reilly must treat his students more kindly, or else!
-The Gentleman Burglar.”
We locked the doors behind us and the gentlemen burglars crept back to their beds.
The next morning the school bell did not ring as usual. We were allowed to play for some considerable time and students speculated why the teachers were having the meeting in the staff room. At the end of that time nothing was said. However, we were absolutely convinced that Mr. O’Reilly’s behaviour had changed remarkably.
A week or two later the “Sun News Pictorial” was full of pictures of huge footprints which had been found near Mt. Everest of “The Abominable Snowman”, a huge white Yeti Mystery surrounded from whence the Yeti had come. Only his footprints were there, plain to be seen on the front page of our daily paper.
Raffles, the gentleman burglar, decided it was time the Yeti visited our school. That night another 3 a.m. venture. We both let ourselves out of our homes without our parents’ knowledge, met together complete with white gloves and large buckets of thick stiff whitewash. Whitewash was plentiful in those days. We always used to whitewash the interior of our chook houses to keep the lice at bay and in the back of many a garage would be found a 5 pound bag of whitewash.
We had mixed a bucket of thick white paste. After school we had cut out from a large sheet of cardboard, a stencil of a white Yeti foot, drawn in consultation with the photograph on the front page of the “Sun News Pictorial”.
Quickly, Dick and I placed the cardboard cutout on the path from the school gate. Then quickly we painted the large white footprints as they marched down the asphalt path around the corner to the quadrangle six feet apart, across the quadrangle, up the wall as far as we could reach where one disappeared into the window of the ladies staff toilet. We left another Raffles card and disappeared into the night as silently as we had come. We carefully washed the bucket and removed all trace of the whitewash. We took off our white gloves and hung up our good clothes.
The next morning the school quadrangle was in consternation. Children ran in all directions, calling to each other explaining the meaning of the Yeti footprints. The staff gathered round as the poor caretaker sought to hose down the whitewash and scrub it with a stockyard broom. The significance of the footprints visiting the ladies staff toilet was discussed at a special staff meeting called at recess time.
Neither Dick nor I said a word.
The morning after the Yeti’s footsteps were discovered across the quadrangle, Mr. O’Reilly paid more attention to us boys than usual. Every time I looked up from my work book or writing, he seemed to be looking at me. Just before morning playtime he dismissed the girls and asked the boys to put away their books and come out to the front and to stand in line across the front of the classroom. He then asked us to hold our hands out. We all thought we were going to get the cane on both hands. He simply walked along carefully inspecting the palms of each hand. Then he told us to turn them over because he wanted to inspect our nails. Walking along the row of boys one by one he looked at our nails, around the quick and underneath. Dick’s nails and mine were no different from those of the other boys except in one regard they looked remarkably well scrubbed and clean. At the end of the inspection Mr. Thomas O’Reilly dismissed us all rather savagely and not another word was said.
You do not think that two gentlemen burglars would be caught out as easy as that do you?
I don’t know why it was but suddenly Raffles, the Gentleman Burglar, went out of fashion and we no longer continued our game. There is a certain prosperous businessman around Sydney and a certain church leader who would be quite embarrassed if it were known that in their boyhood their great ambitions lay in the direction of being gentlemen burglars.
But at that time that thought often filled my head as I went home up Devon Street, opposite the cow paddock, to No.55 Birdwood Street, Box Hill, a great city which was only a village where the adults were kind and where the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
