Margaret (Peggy) Berman (1923-2002)

Peggy Berman was a strong, intelligent and determined woman. She had a tough start to life, an illegitimate child at a Catholic Children’s Home in Broadmeadows. From there, she was taken in by her Irish grandparents and was sent to the Sisters of Mercy’s St Patrick’s School in Geelong, where she was schooled, but not educated. According to her own account ‘Why Isn’t She Dead?’ she began her working life at age 12. At sixteen, she married, and when World War 2 began in 1939 and her husband enlisted, she took a variety of low-level jobs, first in a rope factory in Geelong, then a cannery, a woollen mill, a meat works and a glass factory. She also took on work as a pea picker and then at the Ford Factory, assembling mines for the war effort. From there, she moved to Sydney, where she worked at the Crown St. Hospital, Surry Hills, with unmarried mothers. Founded in 1893, it was the largest of Sydney’s Maternity Hospitals and famed for its research. 

She returned to Geelong in 1944 to be reunited with her husband, The next year, her son Peter was born and, when he was three years old they moved to Coburg. Here Peggy got a job running a sandwich shop at Melbourne University and met Norval Morris, Senior Lecturer in Criminology. By then her marriage had ended. When she became pregnant, they agreed she should have an abortion, and afterwards, in January 1954, she went to work as receptionist to the doctor, Dr Lewis Phillips, in his practice on third floor of the Bank of New South Wales building on the corner of Bourke and Russell Streets. 

When Phillips retired, he sold the practice to Dr Arnold Finks, who moved it to a terrace house at 1087 Hoddle St., East Melbourne. Abortion was then illegal, a crime that could result in a jail sentence. Peggy soon learned that to protect the doctors performing abortions, the police had to be paid. In return, they would warn of raids and generally keep the doctors informed of any move to close down the clinics.

Peggy Berman became the go-between, conveying envelopes of cash to corrupt police, starting with Detective Sergeant Fred ‘Bluey’ Adam. In 1958, at the request of another abortionist, Dr James Troup and his partner Dr Rodney Brereton, she bought a house at 11 George Street, East Melbourne, which was set up as a gynaecological practice for the three doctors in the front half, and Berman’s own living quarters at the back. The pressure on her increased: not only did she pay police to stay away, but also to ignore complaints about the practice and, over nine years, the demands of the police involved became greater, and their behaviour more threatening. Peggy Berman was caught:

Our patients represented every level of society, she wrote, from factory floor to Government House …There were victims of rape, willing and unwilling partners in incest, as well as women doctors and policewomen – and migrants. (p.39) 

The doctors she acted for were skilled and sympathetic, and if they could not operate, then desperate women resorted to unqualified backyard operators. When, after six years, Adam was replaced as head of homicide by Inspector Jack Matthews, the demands for payment grew to three hundred pounds a month a month to ‘protect’ the doctors and, in addition, Adams still demanded his hundred pounds monthly.

Between 1954 and 1968, Peggy Berman handed over money to corrupt police: regular monthly payments to secure protection for the doctors; payments to ensure immunity from prosecution; payments made by Berman on behalf of doctors other than Fink, Troup.  She also entered into a relationship with Homicide’s Inspector John Ralph(Jack) Ford, which became increasingly abusive. Then, in 1968, she was told that she had terminal cancer, but kept on working. Increasingly distressed by her situation, she could see no way out, and paid regularly to five increasingly greedy and threatening policemen: Frederick John Adam; Gordon Albert Timmins; John Edward Matthews; John Ralph Ford, Martin Robert Jacobson.

There were then about thirty specialists who performed illegal abortions in Melbourne. At 10.30 on August 1 1967, acting on a tip-off the Homicide squad mounted a raid on Mr Charles Davidson’s clinic in Hotham Street, East Melbourne. Davidson was a well-respected and skilful gynaecologist and had been going to perform an abortion that morning. Luckily for him the girl had failed to turn up, so there was nothing for the police to find, but nevertheless, he was charged with five offences. 

Frank Holland, then Head of the Homicide Squad had initiated the raid in an attempt to make revive the clause in the Crimes Act that made abortion a criminal offence. 

Two years later, Davidson was acquitted, Justice Clifford Menhennitt ruling that:

A lawful abortion is one believed by the doctor to be necessary to preserve the woman from serious danger to her life and mental health.

The Menhennitt Ruling was based on the word’ unlawful’ in the Crimes Act: if an abortion was unlawful, he determined, then logic dictated that there were lawful abortions. The ruling offered a level of protection to the doctors performing abortion, but no one was quite sure how the ruling would be applied in the courts.  

Four weeks later, Dr. Bertram Wainer and his wife, Jo Richardson, decided to mount a test case. Wainer decided to claim publically that he had performed an abortion, though in fact, he had not. He had three goals –  to test the law; to bring publicity to the Davidson case and to expose the corruption within the police force. Soon after this, all doctors charged with performing abortions were acquitted.

Truth reporter, Evan Whitton, took up the cause, and on 9 December 1969, affidavits were handed to Attorney General Basil Murray QC alleging that corrupt police were protecting back-yard abortionists as well as doctors and that this went back as far as 1953. 

The Board of Inquiry into Allegations of Corruption in the Police Force in Connection with Illegal Abortion Practices in the State of Victoria opened on 13 January 1970 under Justice Kaye. Over the four months of the Inquiry, there were 50 hours of evidence from 130 witnesses, three million words recorded, plus fifty hours of submissions. Peggy Berman was the first witness. In early 1970, she gave evidence against the police over a period of ten days, an extraordinary feat for a woman suffering from terminal cancer.  

I knew I was telling the truth and more than that … that this HAD to be told because I had discovered that policemen were doing that frightful thing, dealing with the backyarders, and I could not countenance this vile trade (p.140)

It was a dreadful ordeal for Berman, one she fully expected would see her sent to jail, so each day at the hearing, she brought her brush and comb, and toothbrush and toothpaste, in case she did not return home that night. The case involved fourteen law firms and twenty-six barristers, all scrutinising her evidence. At home, she received death threats and on-going harassment from anonymous sources. 

Her ordeal did not end there, for she, Dr Troup and the other doctors who had given evidence, were afterwards to be tried for procuring illegal abortions. However, in the case of Berman and Troup, the charges were reduced to one case, involving an abortion three years earlier. Supported by four witnesses as to her good character, Peggy Berman received a good behaviour bond, while Troup was similarly given a four-year bond.

Following the inquiry, four officers, ‘Bluey’ Adams, Jack Ford, Jack Matthews (5 years’ jail) and Martin Jacobson (3 years jail), plus another ten policemen, were tried for conspiracy and convicted. Ford and Matthews were given five-year jail sentences, while Martin Jacobson was given a three-year term. ‘Bluey’ Adams was acquitted, an act of mercy because he was suffering from cancer and died two months later. Peggy Berman had thirty-four hours of testimony, undoubtedly at the expense of her own health. 

Yet she was not to die then, nor did she die of cancer. Peggy Berman lived to a good age, 79, and died on 8 December 2002 of heart problems. By then she had seen her only child, her son Peter, married and with two children. She can be remembered as a woman who overcame the limitations of her early life and education, battled against the situation in which she found herself and, in the end, spoke out courageously in the face of threats to her own life and the possibility of a prison sentence.

Sources:
Sydney Morning Herald 6 September 2008 ‘Abortion – The Way We Were’ 
Berman, Peggy and Childs, Kevin Why isn’t She Dead? Gold Star Publications, Melbourne 1972
Wikipedia The Menhennit Ruling
The Age December 2002 Obituary Peggy Berman
 Parliament.vic.gov..au/papers/govpub/VPARL 1971-71 The Report of the Board of Inquiry into Allegations of Corruption in the Police Force