Frances: The Tragic Bride (15 page)

That morning, Maureen Flanagan jumped into her little Mini and drove round to Vallance Road to do Mrs Kray’s hair.

Maureen really wanted to go to the wedding, see it all for herself. But her husband, no fan of the Krays, flatly refused to accompany her.

‘This was the 1960s and I was married to a man with a ferocious temper,’ says Maureen. ‘I couldn’t get away with sneaking off to the wedding because everyone knew that the wedding was going on and that I knew the Kray family. So I couldn’t go behind his back.’

Inside the Vallance Road house, Maureen found the usual pre-wedding flap. Charlie Kray Senior plodded down the stairs, fiddling with his necktie, muttering that he didn’t like it. Mrs Kray was in her dressing gown, wanting her hair to be done before donning the wedding outfit. A celebratory glass of sherry was handed to Maureen.

‘Mrs Kray said Frances was getting her hair done at home,’ she remembered. ‘She had a school friend called Pat who was going to get her into the wedding dress and do her hair.

‘I sat there with the rollers and portable hood dryer next to me on the table and got busy with Mrs Kray’s hair. Charlie – The Old Man – was still moaning about his tie when Ronnie marched in.

‘“Oh, so this wedding’s going to take place then,” he said, half laughing, but mostly sarcastic.

‘“Don’t start The Old Man off!” snapped Vi.

‘You could see her husband was already getting on her nerves,’ Maureen went on.

‘“She’s told me all about the dress,” confided Vi. “It’s satin, really lovely.”

‘Apparently it was going to be a long dress, very traditional, very beautiful,’ recalled Maureen.

Mrs Kray continued to gossip. The Sheas hadn’t wanted the dress, oh no. But Reggie had insisted. This had all gone back to Violet who told Frances, ‘Wear what you like. Whatever you like, Reggie’ll like.’

Finally, a long spray of hair lacquer and Mrs Kray’s immaculate hairdo was in place. Maureen finished the little glass of sherry, packed up her vanity case and started to leave.

‘As I was on the way out,’ she recalled, ‘Charlie Kray was still reassuring his father that the tie looked nice, Ronnie was muttering, “Weddin’? Wot’s ’e wanna get married for?”

‘“Oh Ronnie, don’t start,” I remember saying to him at the door. “He loves her. And your mum’s happy.” Then I drove off.’

The following week, when Maureen went round to do Violet’s hair, she showed her the wedding pictures.

‘“Ronnie looked fed up all day and all evening, then he left,” Vi confided to her.

‘“What about if they move to the country and get a house?” ventured Maureen.

‘“Oh no, they’ll never be apart. The boys will still be working together,” Mrs Kray assured her.

‘I went through the photos, but to me Frances wasn’t the smiling, lovely bride I saw every time someone came into the salon to show me their own wedding pictures.

‘Reg was smiling in a couple of photos. But not a lot. Charlie and Mrs Kray were smiling. But she was the least smiling bride I’d ever seen. They were peculiar wedding snaps. To me, she just looked… nervous.’

CHAPTER 7

THE WEDDING OF THE YEAR

H
alf a century on, we can look at some of those wedding photos and judge for ourselves. There are the images of Frances as a young bride, retained by the National Portrait Gallery in London, taken by the world’s most famous photographer, David Bailey, an East End boy whose fame was already soaring sky high in the sixties.

The wedding photos – the only time in his entire career that Bailey photographed a wedding – were Bailey’s gift to the couple: he already knew the Krays as fellow East Enders. And it was Bailey’s studio images of the twins, taken before the wedding, which went on to play a huge part in projecting their myth as crime icons of the era. (‘I liked him [Reg…] Didn’t like Ron so much – I avoided him ’cos a slip of the tongue and you’d be fucking dead,’ he told the
Independent
newspaper in February 2014.)

The National Portrait Gallery photos showcase a poignant image of Frances in full close-up. Her big dark eyes are carefully, yet heavily, made up to enhance their pools of liquid beauty, her shy half-smile to the camera innocent yet somehow disarming, the gold-and-diamond pendant around her neck serving to emphasise her purity.

True to form, Bailey captured the essence of Frances at that precise moment: a very pretty, virginal young girl on the threshold of marriage, a truth encapsulated in a split second.

Bailey’s wasn’t the only camera recording the event, of course. The newspaper photographers and reporters crowded the street outside the red brick Bethnal Green church, primed in advance.

The convoy of special guests climbing out of the Rolls-Royces and Daimlers included sporting names of the sixties, British featherweight champion Terry Spinks and his wife, Lennie Peters (the blind singer), renowned stage director Joan Littlewood, glamorous blonde movie star Diana Dors and, according to the newspaper reports, a number of very big men called ‘Big Pat’ and ‘The Dodger’. A hundred telegrams of congratulation had been sent to the couple, the
Daily Express
reported enthusiastically, including one from Ronnie’s good friend, Lord Boothby. (Ronnie’s other chum from Westminster, Tom Driberg MP, also turned up to join the other guests celebrating the wedding.) David Bailey arrived at the church in a blue Rolls-Royce. He was wearing a velvet suit.

The nervous bridegroom shunned the hired Daimler waiting outside his childhood home and made the short journey from Vallance Road to church on foot. The bride left Ormsby Street in a maroon Rolls-Royce, a short veil framing her face and perfectly coiffed upswept beehive hairdo. The dress that Reggie so wanted was a stunning confection of ivory satin and guipure lace. The perfect bride.

Inside the church, the bridegroom’s side was jam-packed with friends and relatives of the Kray family, Violet and Charlie’s wife Dolly both immaculate with sleek hairdos and elegant outfits. On the bride’s side, just a handful of people sat there with Elsie and Frank Senior, glum and straight-faced, Elsie in a dark velvet outfit, her sober attire yet another reason for the hypercritical Reg to despise his mother-in-law: how dare she dress dark on his golden day? If it was a deliberate attempt to make a point, it worked.

And the atmosphere? Heavy as lead. Ron’s unpredictable nature combined with the well-documented events of the past six months did not exactly make for a laid-back setting.

‘It was a curious mixture of celebration and tension,’ recalled Cal McCrystal, who was, at the time, part of the
Sunday Times
prestigious ‘Insight’ team, along with fellow journalist Lewis Chester. They’d been invited to the wedding by the twins because they had interviewed and written about the Krays on a number of occasions, one of the interviews resulting in a legendary piece of
Sunday Times
journalism titled ‘The Charitable Life of the Brothers Kray’.

Because the press were, by then, so heavily restricted in what they could write about the twins’ activities, Chester’s legendary piece had been cleverly worded so that all legal obligations were fulfilled, but the knowing reader could read between the lines, as it were, and understand some of the truth of the Kray twins’ notoriety.

‘It was all innuendo,’ recalled McCrystal. ‘Which the twins missed.’

McCrystal noticed that the tension in the Bethnal Green church that day was quite different from the organisational tension you sometimes sense at weddings.

‘It was the tension of people who were very uneasy,’ he said. ‘There was no feeling of gaiety about it all.’

This became very obvious when the organist launched into the traditional marriage hymn ‘Love divine all loves excelling’.

Not a single wedding guest joined in.

‘No one was singing. It felt like very few of these people had even been inside a church before,’ said McCrystal. ‘Ronnie, the best man, kept looking over his shoulder from the front pew. Reggie seemed content to just sit and wait for the bride: he looked like a well-groomed waiter, as did Ron. Ron kept shrugging his shoulders with impatience. Kept turning round and glaring at everyone. Which was very disconcerting.’

‘Then, because no one was singing along to the hymns, he suddenly yelled out, “SING, FUCK YOU, SING!” Unfortunately that coincided with a break in the organ music. So they all heard it – and tried to obey Ron by making throaty noises.’

Minutes later, Frances entered the church, on the arm of her brother Frank, clutching her posy of blood-red rosebuds. She seemed calm, placid. Frank Junior looked as sleek and groomed as ever, in his well-cut suit and narrow dark tie, if somewhat sombre. In this, at least, Elsie had held sway: Frances’s dad would not be the one to give her away.

‘To me, she was a very demure lovely looking woman, the white veil, the ivory-coloured dress,’ remembered McCrystal.

Then he spotted two familiar faces behind the altar rail: David Bailey with writer Francis Wyndham, holding Bailey’s flashlight aloft: ‘I hadn’t realised they would be there too. In retrospect, of course, having us all there symbolised the twins’ love of being “in society”.’

There were no dramatic moments in the ceremony itself; it continued in the same muted, slightly sombre vein with the Reverend John Foster officiating as the couple exchanged their vows. (The young priest had recently been called as a defence witness for the twins at the Hew McCowan trial.)

There was no triumphant march down the aisle from the happy couple, flashing big grins to both sides in the ‘wow, we’ve done it’ mode of the usual wedding tradition. Husband and wife appeared stilted, self-conscious beyond the church rituals. The best man continued to look exceedingly uncomfortable. More newspaper photos were taken outside the church. There was no joy or sense of celebration. It was a media event, no more, no less.

Then everyone climbed back into the big flash hired cars and headed for the reception at the Glenrae Hotel, Finsbury Park, the same place the twins had been arrested earlier that year.

Here the gloom lifted slightly; there was a palpable sense of relief that the deed had been done, as everyone posed for the obligatory family album photos taken by Bailey. As a party, it was as lavish as any of the twins’ usual big bashes, a social potpourri of high and low life (mostly low), as much food and drink as anyone could humanly consume in one evening, and a live band. Later that afternoon the couple were driven off in their hired Daimler. Athens was the chosen honeymoon destination.

Elsie and Frank Senior farewelled their daughter and returned home with heavy hearts: they’d been powerless to stop what they knew was a farce. What sort of life would their daughter face now?

Rita Smith vividly remembered feeling overwhelmed by the crush of so many wedding guests, all of them strangers.

‘I went to the reception with my mum and dad for a while, then mum wanted to come home,’ she recalled. ‘There were a lot of people there I didn’t even know, to be honest.’

In fact, few knew it but the potential for wedding-day trouble had not been far away that morning.

Yet it came from an odd direction: a girl from Mile End had been coming round to Vallance Road in the previous weeks, claiming that she had given birth to Reggie’s son.

‘She would knock on Reggie’s door with the child, and the little boy was platinum blond – Reggie’s hair, of course, was black,’ remembered Rita. Vi would just say, “Who is she?” and tell her he wasn’t there.

‘On the wedding day, the twins put a couple of minders on the church door, just in case she turned up with the little boy. But she didn’t.’

(This was not the only paternity claim in Reggie Kray’s history. There was another two years later [see Chapter 8]. Even a few years before he died, a woman claiming to be Reggie’s daughter visited him in prison. Her mother, she told him, had had a brief affair with Reggie when she worked at the Double R, yet went on to marry another man, who had raised her as his own. The truth of these stories remains unknown.)

Albert Donoghue was, at the time of the wedding, a member of the Kray Firm and Reggie’s right-hand man. Eventually, in 1969, when Ronnie Kray tried to make him the fall guy for the shooting of Frank Mitchell, this led to Donoghue becoming a Crown witness and testifying against the twins. (Donoghue received a two-year prison sentence for admitting to harbouring Mitchell before he was killed.)

‘I was Reggie’s man,’ recalled Donoghue, now in his late seventies and living in an Essex care home. ‘We didn’t use the word minder or bodyguard then. Where Reggie went, I went. I watched his back, if you like.’

Donoghue missed the wedding itself but as he recalled it, the wedding photos he saw afterwards told him much of the real story. The event, as far as the twins were concerned, was all about their image. The bride was a mere accessory…

‘Later, I looked at the photos and I saw everything Frances must have seen: dozens of good reasons to take a lot of pills. Where most people’s wedding photos are filled with Mum, Dad, Auntie Mary and other young couples, these were dominated by big flat noses wearing buttonholes.

‘The reception was packed wall-to-wall with scar-faced thugs. She could not have missed them. Frances was getting the drift of what was going on, even then. She tried to look happy. She managed a smile. But what’s a smile? You can sit in a dentist’s chair and open your mouth. And it looks like you’re smiling. But you’re in agony.’

Only those wedding day photos of Frances and Reggie give any indication of their feelings on that day in April 1965. As Donoghue said, a forced smile is just that. Reggie, for his part, looked nervous on many of the photos. Though this is hardly unusual: on so many photos of Reggie with Frances during their courtship he seemed to have a similarly tense, buttoned-up expression. Or, in some of the nightclub photos he just looked… very inebriated.

But what about their honeymoon? Black-and-white Athens’ sightseeing photos at the Acropolis showed an unhappy, uncomfortable couple, completely at odds with their surroundings – and with each other.

Her immaculate beehive hairdo, heavy eye make-up, neat attire, his somewhat incongruous shirt and tie and their troubled facial expressions reveal an unhappy, uncomfortable pair of sightseeing honeymooners. Athens too was a bad choice: the ancient city was rundown, still in the throes of civil and economic unrest. Unlike Spain, which was already gearing up to a giant wave of tourism in the early 1960s, it held little attraction then for tourists or East End couples like Reg and Frances.