By Lyn Collingwood, Bulletin 4/2023, June 2023

The attic at 1 Westmoreland St Glebe (Photo: Ian Stephenson)

The 14th site nominated in 2021 for a Blue Plaque was 1 Westmoreland St Glebe. Our suburb was once notorious for street gangs and gangsters  like ‘Chow’ Hayes. Many were vicious thugs.  In contrast, Edward Charles Windeyer’s crime was ‘white collar’.  Its perpetrator, eccentric and inventive, may have inherited his clever genes from the legal dynasty into which he was born. 

Windeyer was living in Glebe during the 1950s when it was a down-at-heel suburb with plenty of cheap accommodation.  At least one university student sharing digs close to 1 Westmoreland St noticed the attic light burning late into the night but imagined it was a fellow swot cramming for exams.  It was only when Windeyer was arrested in 1953 that neighbours realised a famous felon had been living in their midst.  The search for the mystery counterfeiter dubbed ‘Mr-One-By-One’ had been going on for more than two years. 

Windeyer showed ingenuity in both the manufacture of the banknotes and their distribution.  He consulted books on engraving in the Mitchell Library and devised a complicated method of avoiding detection. He placed single bets with busy bookmakers at night.  He put forged notes in envelopes which he addressed to himself at various post office boxes and, when he needed money, collected the letters, took out what he wanted and reposted the rest to himself at other post offices.  Police tried to track him down for two years but his arrest happened by chance.  Council workmen, seeing something odd in an air vent in a wall, pulled out an old sock.  Stuffed inside were 185 counterfeit £10 notes.

Mr John Hickey at the hiding place at 1 Westmoreland St where Windeyer hid his forged banknotes (Source: Truth, Sun 6 December 1953)

At his trial, Windeyer pleaded not guilty but was sentenced to seven years, Judge Curlewis finding the fraud ‘extremely clever and cunning’. The defence counsel hoped he might be sent to a prison farm where he could continue his experiments into cosmic rays; even the Crown Prosecutor felt sorry for the accused. 

More about Edward Windeyer.