Frances: The Tragic Bride (13 page)

It wasn’t right, she argued. If they planned a night out as a twosome, time and again plans would be unexpectedly changed to include something involving Ronnie. They were never ever alone. Everything seemed to revolve around Ronnie, the Firm, his friends, their mum. What was the point of them being together?

Reggie’s tack, as usual, was to tell her she was completely wrong about it all. It was Frances’s mother that was to blame, whispering poison in her ear, putting her against him and his family, who really liked her. Elsie, he insisted, didn’t want them to be happy together, to have a good life. She was being mean, spiteful, putting her daughter off him.

Frances defended her mum as best she could.

But the nineteen-year-old, already Reggie’s girlfriend for four years, knew all too well how unhappy her parents were about her seeing Reggie Kray. The frosty atmosphere at home told the story. It just hovered there all the time. Elsie could dish out the silent disapproval treatment sometimes, and somehow that chilly silence was just as bad as any talk about how she disliked Reggie or any of the Kray clan.

Frances stood her ground with Reg. She meant it. It wasn’t anything to do with her mum and dad, she argued. It was her. She’d had enough of always having minders around them, let alone the endless sitting around waiting for him to finish whatever he was doing. They should break off. She wanted her own life, not this.

This time it was Reggie’s turn to drive off in tears when they finally said their farewells. In his usual persistent way, he pushed her to agree they could still keep in touch. But okay, perhaps it was time they had a bit of a ‘break’ from each other.

Early in 1963 there was some good news at Ormsby Street: Frankie Junior’s girlfriend, Lily, had given birth to a baby girl, whom they’d promptly named Frances, after her father’s sister.

With all the excitement of the new arrival in the Shea family and her own determination to stick to the break-up plans, Frances felt vaguely hopeful that some sort of happier, different future lay ahead for her. She’d seen and done a lot with Reg, but she knew, deep down, she wasn’t really a person who was cut out for that kind of life, sitting around in clubs and bars. She really liked Reg’s cousin Rita, who seemed to understand her, and she adored little Kimmie. But going to Vallance Road scared her, mostly because of Ron. Wouldn’t it be nice, she fantasised, to be with someone who didn’t have this big gang of people around them all the time? Or who had a pleasant brother or sister she could get on with?

Yet within a couple of months, the penny dropped: if she wanted a new boyfriend, she’d have to find a very brave man indeed. And she was unlikely to meet anyone who could take her out and about the way Reg did.

‘At that time, most young men of her age would have at best money that would have bought a new suit every year, rent money, beer money and a week’s holiday in a caravan on the Isle of Wight,’ explained Dick Hobbs. ‘Reg brought Hollywood. Also, what young man would have fancied following Reg? Hardly anyone actually knew the Krays. They were a rumour, a kind of vague dark threat. Sniffing around Reg Kray’s ex would have been a risky venture.’

Frances liked the same things most girls of her age did. She wasn’t a tomboy; she liked dancing, reading women’s magazines, checking out the latest fashions, getting her hair done. She went out sometimes with her girlfriends, kept up with her shorthand studies – she’d been going to college to learn this – and tried to live her life normally without the permanent spectre of Vallance Road. Yes, he told her, Reggie missed his ‘living doll’ (an endearment he used after the title of the Cliff Richard hit song of 1959). He was in touch frequently. They talked. As was his way, Reggie was intense, consistent in his utter fixation with his beloved Frankie. But he didn’t push too hard. Truth was, he had plenty of other things with which to occupy his time.

The twins’ empire had spread beyond the West End and out into the provinces. The Barn, however, was no longer a pot of gold. It was now rapidly losing money and Ronnie, helped by their canny friend Leslie Payne, moved the base of operations for the Firm to a big restaurant called the Cambridge Rooms, on the outskirts of London. Then, in another typically flamboyant gesture, he’d gone out and bought a 1,000-guinea racehorse, Solway Cross, for their mother (a guinea was one pound and one shilling). At one gala evening at the Cambridge Rooms, Vi generously donated the horse in a raffle: cue more newspaper photos, more publicity to demonstrate the boys’ generosity. (Solway Cross, alas, never won a single race.)

In private – and in complete contrast to all this craftily conceived image polishing – Ronnie’s violent impulses continued to scare the life out of everyone on the Firm – and to horrify his twin.

One night at the Cambridge Rooms, Ronnie went on a vicious knife-slashing spree, slicing open the face of an associate he believed had insulted him. Doctors had to put in seventy stitches to repair the man’s face. The police knew about it. They were ready to spring, to arrest Ronnie. Frustratingly, the injured man remained silent. Reggie’s speedy move to warn everyone who’d been at the Cambridge Rooms that night that they’d be better off staying silent too did the trick: frustratingly, the police didn’t have a case.

That autumn there was another horrific incident at The Barn when a demented Ronnie branded a man along each cheek. Very soon after this incident, the twins quit Esmeralda’s Barn for good. For Reggie, the ever-present worry that Ronnie was becoming so dangerous that he might wreck their livelihood seemed to be taking on a life of its own. It was so hard to restrain Ron.

Yet in the midst of all his woes, Reggie eventually convinced Frances to start seeing him again.

Frances’s passport showed no record of any trip abroad in 1963. Nevertheless, Reggie often told everyone that they’d gone to Milan, Italy, that year, visiting La Scala, the famous opera house to see the opera,
Madame Butterfly.

This romantic trip is mentioned in several books about the Kray twins, including Reggie’s own memories of their time together.

Yet not only was there no passport stamp for any country visited in Frances’s passport for 1963, there were no entry stamps for Italy at all in her travel document. (This was several years before Britain went into the Common Market, a time when all British passports were clearly stamped by any country the holder entered.)

Did Reggie simply tell everyone the romantic tale that he’d taken Frances to see the opera in Milan?

It would be tempting to believe this. But a letter written to Frances by Reggie in December 1963 contains a puzzling clue that there might be some veracity in the Milan story. This letter indicates that the on-off relationship was back on by the end of 1963.

At that point, Reggie was in eastern Nigeria, in a place called Enugu. He and Ronnie had visited Nigeria twice that year on business trips involving a housing project – the general idea was that they would invest in a development there, though the scheme never went beyond these two trips. However, while they were there they were treated like VIPs and lavishly entertained by their hosts.

In the letter to Frances, Reggie described Enugu as a ‘desolate place, very lonely’. Then he informed her he’d already bought her a crocodile handbag and the following day he’d be getting her a new bracelet. He’d have phoned her at her brother’s place, he said, but he didn’t know whether she’d be there.

Why was Reggie calling Frances at her brother’s home? Perhaps the Sheas didn’t have a phone at Ormsby Street at that time. Or was the phone call to her brother’s home indicative of a degree of secrecy on Frances’s part: that is, she didn’t want her parents to know that she was seeing Reggie again?

The letter made it abundantly clear that as far as Reggie was concerned, nothing had changed, he still wanted them to marry. He’d really missed her and thought how nice it would be once they were married, so she could accompany him to ‘most places’ – though he wasn’t too sure about Nigeria. The letter also mentioned Milan. But there was no indication she’d been there.

‘I missed you when I was in Milan too,’ he wrote. ‘Have you missed me? You’ll have to let me know when I see you.’

The Nigeria letter also indicated that Frances was still harbouring doubts about their relationship, that she had hinted that a different type of girl might be more suitable for him (which was obviously the case).

Reggie wrote that he’d been thinking about her saying to him ‘such-and-such a girl would suit you better’. But he wouldn’t want her any different, he assured her. Physically and mentally, he told her, she suited him fine: ‘So let’s not have any more of that talk.’

The letter ended with Reggie saying how he was looking forward to seeing her. He’d be glad, he told her, ‘to see your beautiful brown eyes again’.

By the beginning of 1964, the police were beginning to take a very serious interest in the day-to-day activities of the Kray twins. Scotland Yard had started to investigate their various frauds and the West End protection rackets. Then, startling information started to filter through to them about Ronnie’s high-level friendships with certain politicians, in particular Lord Robert Boothby, a high-profile Conservative MP, and Tom Driberg, a senior Labour party MP who was openly gay.

Both men relished living dangerously. ‘Rough trade’ (a tough or violent homosexual partner) was their idea of fun, particularly for Driberg, who blithely ignored the risk of being exposed as a homosexual when in pursuit of sex, often with strangers. The two of them loved the idea of consorting with scary Ronnie, the East End thug and gang boss. In particular, they enjoyed socialising with him because of the coterie of handsome young men Ronnie always had grouped around him.

Before long, a newspaper reporter with strong links to Scotland Yard was told of the police’s interest in the Krays, and on 16 July 1964, a newspaper story appeared in the
Sunday Mirror
which mentioned the police investigation (without using the Krays’ names) as well as informing its readers of an existing photo ‘on their files’ of ‘a well-known member of the House of Lords on a sofa with a gangster leading London’s biggest protection racket’. For legal reasons, the article didn’t actually name Boothby and Ronnie, although foreign magazines, less restricted by British libel laws, did – alongside photos of the Kray twins as young boxers. The genie was about to come out of the bottle. Or so it seemed.

On 2 August, Lord Boothby wrote a letter to
The Times
identifying himself as the politician on the sofa – and denying all the allegations of any kind of relationship with Ronnie Kray.

No, he wasn’t homosexual and yes, he had been photographed with the man in question but he had no idea of the man’s criminal history, even though he had met the man ‘on business matters’ three times in the company of others.

A few days later, the
Sunday Mirror
carried an apology to Boothby – and the paper paid Lord Boothby £40,000 in compensation, a huge sum of money for the times.

Yet the story in the paper had been true. Boothby had blatantly lied. He was bisexual, he’d known Ronnie – and exactly what he represented – for over a year and the consequence of the whole affair was a huge establishment cover-up at the highest level.

The police, who had already put a case together against the twins at the time of the
Sunday Mirror
article, promptly stopped investigating them. The press could not write about them freely because of the huge compensatory sum paid to the
Sunday Mirror
and all its implications of legal action if reporters persisted in exploring the Krays’ crimes. What this all meant was that the twins, through Ronnie’s friendship with these MPs, had won a form of immunity from any attempt to stop them or to write about their activities – and Ronnie’s violence. This was to last for nearly four years. No one, it seemed, could touch them.

Ronnie arranged for the photographs of him and Boothby on the sofa in the lord’s flat to be passed over to the
Daily Express
newspaper picture desk.

By 6 August 1964, the world knew, without any doubt, that the gangster in the scandal was Ronnie Kray, one of the Kray twins, via the
Express
photo. Fame at last, beyond the East End. Everyone now knew who they were.

What must it have been like for Frances – and the Sheas – to live with the knowledge that everyone in the world was now aware of the twins’ criminality? Stories and rumours are one thing. National newspaper notoriety or exposure is another.

For their part, Ronnie and Reggie didn’t turn a hair. Exposure, to them, was oxygen. Instead of courting anonymity, a sensible path for any dedicated crim to follow, they would continue to court publicity, and to use the exposure in their incessant thirst for wider recognition.

What is so baffling about it all is that Frances, after all her previous efforts to shake Reggie off and push him away, had now drifted towards him again, in spite of all this. She was now a luminously beautiful player on their stage. Perhaps it was Reg that convinced her somehow that it would all be fine now; there would be no more talk of police and prison, they were in the clear. Or was it simply the threat that the twins now openly represented that stopped her from trying to escape from their world?

But if Reg was so determined to have Frances, what of Ronnie? Tragically, his power over his twin, his ability to draw him closer, away from her company, seemed absolute by then. He was a paranoid schizophrenic whose illness was barely under control – given the huge amounts of alcohol he imbibed along with the powerful drugs he needed for his illness. Knowing that he could do whatever he wanted because he was now ‘untouchable’ was essentially a death knell for an unsuspecting victim.

Now, only the chance to prove himself to the world as a killer, a fearful warrior, would satisfy Ronnie’s bloodlust. As his twin’s murderous impulses started to take over his entire existence, Reggie remained, as ever, in the same dreadful situation: compelled by their blood ties to try to protect his brother from himself, yet still cherishing his fantasy of a life away from Ronnie. Pushed one way, then the other, Reggie still believed that he could make an ‘escape’, via the marriage he’d been talking about for so long.