In the 19th century in a small township in the undulating agricultural region of Queensland’s Darling Downs, there was popular doctor who proved to be an international criminal genius. I told a version of this story live on Darling Downs radio 4AK.
In 1896, the secretary of the Queensland medical board, Charles Horrocks, went to Toowoomba to prosecute Harry Westwood Cooper for working in Pittsworth as an unlicensed doctor. Horrocks got his man but Cooper turned out to be far more than the fake doctor for which he was convicted.
In April of 1896, the good people of Pittsworth were pleased to finally get their very own doctor. The Toowoomba Chronicle enthusiastically reported that Pittsworth was progressing now that it boasted a resident doctor. The Darling Downs Gazette was a little more circumspect, reporting that it is comforting for Pittsworth people to have a medical man residing in town, however questioned whether the absence of duly qualified medical man was a long-felt-want at Pittsworth at all.
In any case, Dr. Cooper went straight to work ingratiating himself to the locals. He took a room at Pittsworth’s Royal Hotel where at a concert in aid of the Pittsworth school fund, he played the hotel’s piano-forte and sang a number of songs to deafening calls for three encores.
But just weeks later, Dr. Cooper was arrested by Pittsworth’s much-admired senior constable James Knox. The constable’s other postings would include Ipswich, Rosewood, Gatton, Clifton, and Warwick, and his son would serve on the Pittsworth council. Constable Knox had Dr. Cooper convicted and fined £10. That’s about a month’s wages at the time but was only half the maximum fine that could have been imposed. The secretary of the Queensland medical board and other authorities in the colony didn’t who they were dealing with.
The year before coming to Pittsworth, Cooper had married a fifteen-year-old girl Helen Scott in Sydney. Weeks after his Pittsworth conviction, Cooper married a seventeen-year-old girl Bertha Young in Brisbane with promises of going to England to claim his so-called Chadwick estates. Once there he defrauded her of all her money which was some £3,000 which is over $3.5 million in today’s money. Harry Cooper was clearly no ordinary Pittsworth doctor.
Cooper was an international criminal genius, with a record that would continue for 60 years across four continents. Police in Europe, America, Africa and Australia had dossiers on him under dozens of different aliases. These included Sir Harry Westwood Cooper, Surgeon-Major Swinton Holme, V.C., D.S.O., Dr. Henry Irving Llewelyn Cooper, Dr. Ernest Moore Chadwick, Surgeon-Commander Percy Parker, and more.
Except for the inevitable periods behind bars, Cooper’s skilled roguery paid him well. At his prime in the 1890’s he robbed victims of more than half a million pounds. That’s an incredible $600 million dollars today in that decade alone. He had a fascination with women that took him from one affair to another. He bigamously married scores of women all over the world, leaving them with broken hearts and empty purses.
Cooper was born in Canterbury, England, in 1870. His real name was Andrew John Gibson which I’ll call him from now on. Gibson arrived in Sydney at 18 years of age aboard the luxurious steamer Ormuz which at one time was said to be the fastest ship in the world. He left England one step ahead of arrest for passing rubber cheques signed with the name of a member of the Royal Family.
Gibson proved himself to be one of the boldest and most original crooks in the English-speaking world. In Canada once he posed as a clergyman to marry and defraud an heiress in his congregation. Hundreds of detectives in the United States, England, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia were eager for his capture.
Gibson’s long global career returned to Australia in 1950 at Sofala near Bathurst in New South Wales, taking up an appointment as medical superintendent at the local hospital. He soon impressed everyone as an efficient and experienced physician. Patients flocked to the hospital from all over the district. Three months later the police arrived and the doctor fled.
Gibson supposedly died in Brisbane two years later aged eighty-one and is buried at the Toowong cemetery, having married yet again and under yet another name, with the headstone cryptically engraved “Her Husband”. There’s speculation that he was in fact the real Jack the Ripper.
But I don’t think so, there’s no violent streak in our man Gibson, so that speculation is probably the result of a conflation of a number of different people.
But one thing is for sure, for the people of the rural Darling Downs, the international criminal genius, the most original crook in the English-speaking world, was simply a Pittsworth medical practitioner by the name of Dr. Harry Cooper who loved to sing.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD ON 4AK.
Photo credits:
Pittsworths Criminal Genius – Harold Peacock with Copilot 2026.
Harry Westwood Cooper – The Sun, Sydney, 6th April 1913, page 11.
Royal Hotel in Yandilla Street, Pittsworth – State Library of Queensland.
Andrew John Gibson, NSW Police, CIB file, Scotland Yard Photos – 20th September 1937.
The first class and second class promenade on the Ormuz – SS Maritime website.
Walter Thomas Porriott, Toowong Cemetery – Grave Tales via Find a Grave website 2021.
