Frances: The Tragic Bride (2 page)

BOOK: Frances: The Tragic Bride
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Fortunately, people like my father didn’t need their cash, in his case because he had his own business on his dad’s ticket. The Shea men, father and son, weren’t quite so lucky. Money, in a world of betting, boozing, ducking and diving, where you picked up cash wherever you could, ignoring the law, was, in a sense, the trigger for what was to eventually happen to Frances Shea.

Even before Frances died, her family’s lives were already blighted by guilt and blame. The guilt and the blame were to overshadow everything afterwards, while the publicity the Krays garnered for three decades continued to heap attention on the twins, attention they relished and encouraged all the time.

How it must have hurt the Sheas to have to relive their pain and loss year in, year out, through the newspaper pages read by millions. In discovering their story, it became obvious that Frances’s loved ones suffered a great deal. In silence. It was a haunting too far.

Today, bereaved or stricken families can, if they wish, be a focus of media attention following a bitter injustice to a loved one. It was so different back then. The Sheas, of course, were not the only family to suffer as a result of the Krays’ attentions. Yet how much consideration was given back then to the grief or feelings of the families of the two men whose murders the twins were convicted for, George Cornell and Jack McVitie? Cornell’s wife suffered openly: she smashed windows at the Kray home in bitter frustration. McVitie’s wife was the first witness in court when the Krays were eventually brought to trial for her husband’s murder. She told the court how McVitie had told her he was meeting the twins for a drink but never returned. Then, without warning, she let rip at the twins, broke down in tears calling them ‘murdering bastards’.

It was a sensational outburst at the time. The family of Frank Mitchell, whose killing was ordered by the Krays, surfaced too many years afterwards. But essentially, the families of Kray victims had limited visibility at the time the Krays were convicted. Back then, people remained fearful, in the shadows. This fear of Kray retribution around the East End went on for decades. Even recently, in my research, I heard, more than once: ‘Nah, luv. Best not to talk about it. Don’ wanna dig up all that stuff.’

As for Reggie Kray, did he carry any long-term remorse for Frances’s demise to his own grave? This, I discovered, was not a straightforward question. In prison he remained, as he was when younger, a complex individual with a personal charisma that never quite left him. Both sexes fell for him. Even as he died his wife and his long-term former boyfriend sat on either side of the bed.

Yet even after concluding this book, I struggled to believe that he truly loved Frances.

He certainly believed he loved her. That idealised love became an important part of his image, his myth. But the love between man and woman and obsession – or an overwhelming need for possession – are not the same thing. And Reggie made sure that even in death, Frances was his possession, so determined was he to own her, body and soul.

Photos of him kissing Frances’s headstone at the funeral of his twin in 1995 seemed staged, yet another good photo opportunity. They perpetuated the myth of the caring, bereaved beloved husband. And as for the legendary and persistent Kray myth, that the Krays only harmed ‘their own’– that is, other criminals from their fraternity – Frances’s story clearly refutes this.

Frances Shea was no criminal. She wasn’t a cynical gangster’s moll with one eye on the main chance, drawn in by the easy money, the flash nightclubs and the sparkle of celebrity. She was a beautiful innocent, which was precisely why Reggie was so drawn to her.

Late in life he admitted to his second wife, Roberta, that ‘her memory and how she had died was like a weight that he always carried’. Yet if he regretted the shocking way he treated her family in the aftermath of her death, I could not find any record of this.

One word sums up Frances’s emotional state during much of her relationship with Reggie: fear. Fear was the tool the Kray twins used in creating their myth, propelling them beyond the post-war wreckage of the East End to the upmarket worlds of Mayfair and Knightsbridge, to the USA – and the respect of the Mafia. Fear of their violence, of what they were capable of as a fighting, slashing, murderous duo was the dominant propellant in the explosive mixture of blackmail, manipulation and street cunning they deployed during their days of freedom. That they succeeded in maintaining this fear of their legendary violence throughout their lives gives you some sense of the utter powerlessness that Frances Shea must have experienced: one woman, caught up against all that, via sheer circumstance.

Possessive, violent men remain, to this day, a terrible threat to any woman involved with them. Reggie Kray was both. And when he was blind drunk, as he was frequently, he was emotionally abusive in the extreme. But of course, it wasn’t just Reggie’s behaviour that was creating the complicated and scary situation that Frances found herself in.

Much of her terror came from the fear-inducing persona of Ronnie Kray, even before the marriage. The twins were intense and possessive by nature. (Their older brother Charlie, who died in 2000, was quite different and didn’t have the same criminal, violent traits.) Ronnie’s extreme possessiveness towards his twin, his jealousy of any ‘intruder’ – which matched Reggie’s possessive attitude towards Frances in its power – meant that Frances was also enmeshed in a vicious power struggle as Ronnie fought to steer his twin away from her.

The story of Frances Shea is a tragedy in three acts: an outwardly glorious courtship, conducted in exotic locales, engineered by a boyfriend who showered her with gifts, jewels, lavish attention and introduced her to a lifestyle only the wealthy and privileged were able to experience at that time; a very brief marriage which revealed the true hidden ugliness of that same world and the overwhelming power of her husband’s twinship, both of which left her in the throes of breakdown and drugs to ease the nightmare; and finally, her sad ending and the troubled legacy of her death which continued to haunt her loved ones over the years.

In writing this story, I wanted to bring her a little bit closer into the light. She merits that. Not just because she’s part of the Kray history. But because, as I hoped when I started to look at her story, underneath the smoke and mirrors of the Kray facade, there was a thoughtful, aware young woman, someone who looked as good as a sixties movie star but was, in fact, an ordinary girl who only hoped for the normal things: marriage, security, children, a pleasant home in a leafy suburban street.

Reggie Kray, for his part, fantasised about achieving those things but couldn’t escape his destiny: the bond with his other half, his twin. He had caught Frances in a deadly trap. Yet he was equally trapped, too: by blood ties and violence.

In telling this story, so as to relate Frances Shea’s story in context, it was essential to give an overview of the Kray twins’ background, rise to prominence and crimes for which they were eventually convicted in 1969.

However, Frances Shea remains the focus of this book. The stories of all the multiple gangland feuds, the frauds, the characters who engaged with them in the time before and after they went to prison are not included. These stories have already been told on the pages of the many books written about the Krays.

Finally, it would not have been possible to write this book without a certain amount of external support and enthusiasm for the task in hand. So I would like to give due thanks to John Pearson, whose knowledge and insight into the Kray story remains, as ever, both compelling and invaluable. Anyone new to the Kray genre will find Pearson’s trilogy of Kray books a fascinating and revealing compendium of their history.

Thanks are also due to the helpful staff at the Hackney Archives, Tower Hamlets Archives, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives and Museum, the National Archives at Kew, Brighton’s Jubilee Library, the Edda Tasiemka Archive and my ever supportive friends Danny and Saskia at West End Lane Books, West Hampstead.

This story is historical. Yet the lives of those who unwittingly find themselves trapped by violent, possessive partners remain under threat, all around us, every single day.

So if there is any dedication for this book it should be to all victims of domestic abuse – and in particular to the memory of those whose lives ended in tragedy, cut short by their relationship with an unstable, violent partner.

 

J
ACKY
H
YAMS
East Sussex, July 2014

CHAPTER 1

WAR BABIES

B
lackout. Dim street lamps, the occasional car out on the Kingsland Road crawling along with muffled headlights. Behind the dark main road lie streets of wreckage, the inhabitants clinging to everyday life in the little two-up, two-down Victorian terrace houses that were still standing after the bombing raids, their windows blacked out with material; even the briefest chink of light will bring an ARP warden to bang noisily on the front door, and the threat of fines and penalties for anyone ignoring the strictly enforced blackout regulations. A few windows in these darkened streets are crisscrossed with sticky tape or wire net – a precaution against flying glass as a result of yet another bombing raid.

Tonight it’s quiet. Yet no one around here can ever be too sure when it all might kick off again. If it isn’t the terrifying ‘crump crump’ sound of the bombs raining down from the planes overhead or the booming explosions, it’s the sirens wailing night and day, summoning the people to drop everything, dash to an underground shelter or stumble down the road to home and the damp garden shelter – if home itself hasn’t already been reduced to ash and rubble.

Brutal, relentless, chaotic wartime. Throughout the land, millions of lives turned inside out, personal tragedy of the nigh unthinkable kind being a daily event. Get on with it somehow. Feed the family with whatever you can lay your hands on. Barter. Listen to the radio. Spot the telegram boy on the bike coming down your street, close your eyes and hope with all your heart, as your neighbours do, that he won’t be heading to your front door with bad news about a loved one serving in the forces. In the cinema, study the newsreel with intense concentration, crane your neck to peer at what surely looks like a familiar face: a son, a brother, a husband of just six weeks out there in the enormous jumble of massed troops. Queue for ages to swap a few coupons for a pathetically tiny bit of meat. Or sod the rationing, use the black market to glean a ‘little bit extra’ off a market stall, the extra coming from God knows where; no questions asked, a few precious coins slipped into the pocket of the stallholder’s apron.

A combination of hope and humour kept them all going through these war years, families and neighbours looking out for each other, helping out when needed, sharing the worst, though their stoicism meant that tears were more likely to be shed alone, in snatched privacy. The ciggies helped the shattered nerves – half the women of Britain were confirmed smokers by the mid-1940s. Even with the worry, the waiting, the wanting, everyone knew they had to hang on, believed they’d get through this somehow, with their sanity – and family – intact when it all ended. The only trouble was WHEN would it end?

This was the bewilderingly upside-down world that Frances Shea was born into at her family’s home at 57 Ormsby Street, Hoxton, in London’s East End in September 1943.

At that point in the war, the news came through that Italy had done a volte-face and switched sides. They’d formally surrendered to the Allies, and the Allied troops were embarking on the long, bloody slog of liberation through Italy, while the German enemy began their march on Rome. Was this the beginning of the end? Public bar optimists around the shattered streets peered at the headlines, shrugged, sipped their pale ale and said well, it was good news, wasn’t it? That effing bastard Jerry was now on the run. The Yanks would make sure of that.

But of course, not everyone blithely accepted what they were being told, the official version of events. There was too much secrecy around everything, grumbled the cynics, what with the government poking their nose into every aspect of people’s lives, telling everyone what they could and couldn’t do, saying things like: ‘Where’s your ID card?’ ‘Be like dad, keep mum.’ ‘What’s in that bag you’re carrying, missus?’

When censorship and state control seep into everyday routine for years, it’s easier to remain blinkered, stumble on, not question anything. Yet here in London’s East End, the territory of the renegade, the petty crim and the poorest of the poor teetering on survival’s edge, authority’s sweep was never going to be accepted. War or no war.

In the blacked-out, bombed-out streets around Hoxton, Haggerston, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney, it remained pretty much business as usual: them versus us, look out for yourself and your family, shun authority at any cost, they’re not interested in you, anyway. In this place, in one sense, it had always been war – of a different kind.

Law-abiding citizens these East Enders might not be. But the people’s spirit of survival, born out of centuries of rough, tough living, had never been stronger than it was now, four years into the war. Too many exploded bombs, lives lost overseas, homes in ruins, families wrenched apart, and kids sent off to live with total strangers, where ten shillings (50 pence in today’s terms) per child was paid to families willing to accommodate other people’s children… It had all been going on for far too long.

Yet the default setting here is tenacity: an iron grip on survival amidst utter deprivation. By sheer instinct, they understood resilience, even now, when the only world they’d known was literally crumbling all around them. Tenacity, you see, was part of their cultural heritage, as much as crime and violence had been for a long, long time.

Not every family in the area lived as outlaws, of course. Many people here had usually survived through working in poorly paid, often casual work – the ‘working poor’ – finding jobs whenever they could, struggling to get by on a pittance but staying relatively straight. And, of course, keeping quiet about what they knew about those living outside the law. There was always talk about what so-and-so had been up to, who’d gone inside, who was out, who’d run off and deserted. Yet if authority started stickybeaking (making enquiries), there’d be scant chance of anyone dropping their neighbour in it. Omertà (the traditional Mafia ‘code of silence’), East London style. Stick together. Social glue.

BOOK: Frances: The Tragic Bride
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