Bea Miles

Beatrice Miles (17 September 19023 December 1973) was an Australian eccentric and bohemian Rebel.

Described as Sydney's "iconic eccentric", she was known for her contentious relationships with the city's taxi drivers and for her ability to quote any passage from Shakespeare for money.

Born in Ashfield, New South Wales, to Maria Louisa Miles (née Binnington), and the third of five surviving children, she grew up in the Sydney suburb of St Ives.

Her father, William John Miles, was a wealthy public accountant and hot-headed businessman, who had a tempestuous relationship with his daughter.

She studied at Abbotsleigh School and enrolled in an arts course, but opted out, citing a lack of Australian subject matter.

Miles also enrolled in medicine, which was unusual for women at that time, but she contracted encephalitis lethargica in her first year.

The disease permanently and profoundly changed her personality, although not her intelligence, and she was unable to finish her studies and became an eccentric and notorious identity in and around Sydney.

In 1923, tired of his daughter's bohemian behaviour and lifestyle, Miles' father had her committed to a hospital for the insane, in Gladesville, New South Wales, where she stayed for two years.

After that Miles lived on the street and was known for her outrageous behaviour.

She was arrested many times and claimed to have been "falsely convicted 195 times, fairly 100 times".

For a while Miles was living in a cave behind one of the Sydney beaches.

She received a small monthly income from her father's estate and she drew on this to pay her debts.

It was said that she always carried a A£5 note pinned to her skirts, so that the police could not arrest her for vagrancy.

Miles' most notorious escapades involved taxi drivers.

She regularly refused to pay fares.

Some drivers refused to pick her up and she would sometimes damage the cab in retaliation, including reputedly ripping a door off its hinges once.

She spent a lot of time reading in the State Library of New South Wales, until being banned in the late 1950s.

Miles was also seen regularly standing on street corners with a sign offering to quote verses from Shakespeare for between sixpence and three shillings.

Miles' writings are in the State Library, some in her own handwriting.

They are: Dictionary by a Bitch, I Go on a Wild Goose Chase, I Leave in a Hurry, For We Are Young and Free, Notes on Sydney Monuments and Advance Australia Fair.

Fiercely patriotic, at twelve years of age Miles wore a "No Conscription" badge to school during the campaign leading up to the conscription plebiscite during World War I.

In another incident Miles was disgusted when she was severely marked down for an essay about Gallipoli, which she described as a 'strategical blunder', rather than 'a wonderful war effort'.

Some time in the 1950s, Miles came to regard the environs of the rectory (then referred to as "the Clergy House") of Christ Church St Laurence as her home.

She had previously been allowed to sleep in one of the porticos of St James' King Street, Sydney, but one of the clergy there had ordered her to leave.

After sleeping in Belmore Park, where she was sometimes subject to arrest, the rector of Christ Church, Father John Hope, who was often called upon to bail her out, offered her a spot on the porch between the rectory dining room and the church vestry.

Clergy entering the vestry to vest for mass would have to step over Miles, who rose late and went to bed early.

From her position on the porch, Miles could hear the hymn singing at evensong (she requested that the nearby church windows remain open) and joined in dining room conversations as it suited her.

A dogmatic atheist, she often gave altar servers and others a lecture on rationalism.

She haunted the Public Library of New South Wales, reading many books each week, until she was banned from the building in the late 1950s.

As ill-health started to catch up with her, Miles spent the last nine years of her life in the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged in Randwick.

In 1955, Miles took a taxi to Perth, Western Australia, and back.

That time, she did pay the fare, which was A£600.

On Christmas Day, 1956, she interrupted a taxi driver's festive dinner to demand he drive her to Broken Hill via Melbourne.

On their return to Sydney she paid the fare of £73 10s.

It is also said she would sit in a Sydney bank smoking cigarettes under a sign reading "Gentlemen will refrain from smoking".

Music-lovers who attended the regular free Sunday-afternoon concerts given in the Sydney Town Hall by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra might recall how, just before the performance began, Miles often appeared and wandered down the centre aisle, calling out "Ruby? Ruby?"

Miles was well-educated, and very widely read.

She was legendary as a fast and voracious reader throughout her life, even in her declining years, and reputedly read an average of two books every day.

Following a spell in Long Bay Gaol, after she had wrenched the door off a taxi when the driver refused her entry, it was agreed she could sleep in the rectory laundry, close to the kitchen, and she remained there until Father Hope's retirement in 1964.

Miles was constantly harassed by police and claimed to have been falsely convicted 195 times, fairly 100 times, though obituaries give lower estimates.