Frances: The Tragic Bride (21 page)

‘It sounds like she wasn’t getting better on two or three different types of medications, so a course of ECT had a fifty-fifty chance of helping her. What they’d have been hoping for is to get her sufficiently un-depressed not to need the drugs.

‘One side effect would be loss of memory around the time the person had it. But it would come back.’

Michael Taylor’s account of Frances reveals a person who clearly understood her situation and was cooperative with the doctors who were treating her because she still wanted or hoped to get better.

The long stay in Hackney Hospital was, in many ways, a refuge from what she was struggling to deal with, and her comment about the shock treatment making her ‘forget’ the life she was living is illuminating. Not only had she admitted to Mick Taylor that she was already contemplating suicide as a way out, but also that it was obvious to her that the treatment for her depression offered various ways of ‘forgetting’. For good.

Yet the young woman who came out of hospital that autumn just before her twenty-third birthday was, sadly, nothing like the beautiful bride of David Bailey’s photos.

‘She did lose a lot of weight after she came out of Hackney Hospital,’ remembered Rita Smith. ‘I saw her in the car and, looking at her, you could tell she wasn’t getting better. She was far away.’

Maureen Flanagan remembered seeing Frances briefly at Vallance Road that autumn. On the day in question, Reggie was nowhere to be seen. ‘Either she’d just popped in to say hello,’ she recalled. ‘Or maybe Violet had been in touch, asked her round. She didn’t look like the girl I’d met a few years before. She looked drawn, like someone who had just given up. It was all too much for her. She could never be scruffy or untidy, but she had no make-up on, pale, white as a ghost, like a little will-o’-the-wisp: not really there.

‘After she’d gone I said to Vi, “She doesn’t look like she’s with us.”

‘“I thought that,” said Vi. She looked weak, like she should be in hospital.’

The sad truth was that despite the efforts of the medical profession to help Frances, really, nothing had changed at all. She was still trapped in the Kray web, shunned by many out of ignorance and fear, still haunted by those weeks when she’d been chillingly exposed to the sordid truth about Reggie’s way of life.

As for the twins, rumours now persisted that the police were poised to arrest them for Cornell’s murder. At one point the murdered man’s widow, Olive, had been round to Fort Vallance at night and smashed the windows, screaming at the top of her voice that Ronnie had killed her husband, much to Violet’s disgust: as if her boy would do anything like that, she tutted. Such stories were common currency in the pubs and drinking clubs of Bethnal Green and the East End. They soon got back to Ormsby Street.

The next thing everyone heard was that the twins had flown the coop, to Tangier, Morocco.

As John Pearson recorded in
The Profession of Violence
: ‘Ronnie enjoyed the Arab boys, Reggie invited out a hostess from the Latin Quarter Club in London. During her fortnight with him he never once referred to Frances or the East End.’

But this sunny sojourn was cut short. The twins’ notoriety now trailed behind them everywhere.

‘The chief of Moroccan police arrived in person at their hotel to inform them they were undesirable aliens,’ said Pearson. ‘Two seats were booked for them on the next plane back to London,’

When my research later unearthed a short, handwritten letter addressed to Frances dated 17 October 1966, posted in Tottenham, London, another tragic piece of the jigsaw puzzle surfaced.

The note, from someone with a Greek-sounding surname, indicated that Frances was buying street drugs. Whatever Frances was hearing or being told about Reggie via the local whispers and the rumours at that time, they would only have served to exacerbate her fears, her terror. The unhappy young woman was now embarking on a perilous road towards self-destruction.

Sorry I didn’t meet you last Saturday. If you want those pills, I’ll see you this Saturday, 22nd October. I’ll get them this Friday. I will meet you outside the Odeon Cinema at 3pm. Be there.

PS: If you want to answer back, write to me. Please answer if you are not coming.

The same day the note was posted, 17 October, Frances was admitted to St Leonard’s Hospital in Nuttall Street, Kingsland Road, as a result of an overdose of barbiturates she had taken at Ormsby Street.

Frank Senior had found her only just alive, and called the ambulance in time. Fortunately, St Leonard’s was just a few minutes away from the house.

On 20 October, her consultant at the hospital, Dr N Jones, discharged her from Parkinson Ward and she went back to Ormsby Street. It was obvious the incident had not been a mere ‘cry for help’. She had meant to kill herself. According to John Pearson in
The Cult of Violence
, she said afterwards: ‘I’ve been defiled. I’m useless. What is there left for me to live for? I deserve to die.’

Whether she’d deliberately tried to obtain the street drugs for a planned suicide attempt and managed to source them elsewhere remains unknown. But as Trevor Turner pointed out: ‘You can’t stop someone buying street drugs. Most psychiatrists are quite streetwise; you have to be aware of the world as it is. So if you are prescribing drugs, even in very small amounts, in the end people can always get more.’

Reggie, on hearing the news of Frances’s attempted suicide, had rushed round to see her at St Leonard’s. No, he was told firmly by hospital staff, he couldn’t see his wife right now. She was far too frail.

Off he went into the night, raining verbal blows on Frances’s parents again and again. Like a spoilt child whose favourite toy was being denied him, he was driven back to Vallance Road where he reached for the gin bottle, ranted, cursed and heaped his rage, yet again, on the Sheas, his wife’s innocent family.

The truth was, tragedy and retribution were now about to engulf everyone.

But the only retribution ahead would be that of the law.

CHAPTER 10

GRIEF

R
on Kray went into hiding in a flat in north London towards the end of 1966. He had been asked to appear in court as a witness for the prosecution in a police corruption case – a case, ironically, he had engineered – but he refused.

Barricaded in the flat, curtains tightly drawn, with plenty of booze and medication and his men ferrying in teenage boys at his behest, Ron’s unpredictable illness took over, yet again. Another crisis. Ron seemed even worse than before this time. The last thing Reg wanted was for their mother to even see her son in this state.

After the ordered slaying of Frank Mitchell just before Christmas 1966, Ron had become increasingly paranoid that his enemies – namely Mitchell’s friends and those of George Cornell – were now out to get him.

He had shockingly vivid nightmares about Cornell’s last seconds of life. But in the dreams it was Ron’s head that took the bullet and caused the subsequent explosion of blood and brain.

Drunk and barely coherent, in his semi-literate scrawl he compiled lists of all his ‘enemies’ who deserved to die, who needed to be taken out. Raving and delirious, at one stage he attempted suicide, slashing his wrists, only to be saved by Reg, who contacted Dr Blasker. His twin, warned Blasker, was a very sick man. He should be in a secure hospital.

Reg couldn’t even contemplate that. By February 1967, the initial press outcry over the disappearance of Frank Mitchell seemed to have calmed down. Even the search for his body seemed to have abated. It was a terrible struggle, but Reggie finally convinced Ronnie to see a new psychiatrist, smuggled him into a car and managed to get him to meet the man in London. It worked. A change of drugs and a move to a different hideaway, this time in Chelsea, seemed to do the trick: the nightmares stopped. Crisis over. For now.

Yet at Ormsby Street, calamity had struck for a second time that winter. On 30 January 1967, Frances had barricaded herself in the front room, turned on the gas fire and taken substantial quantities of barbiturate pills. Again, Frank Senior found her in the nick of time and managed to quickly get her into casualty at St Leonard’s Hospital.

This time she remained there for eight days. The diagnosis of her illness was barbiturate poisoning. Consultant Dr Jones discharged her from the hospital’s Tanner Ward on 7 February 1967. There had been two suicide attempts in four months – the Sheas were virtually at their wits’ end with concern. They felt utterly helpless.

When Frances came home from St Leonard’s she was mostly quiet and fairly unresponsive. No, she was okay, she assured them – when just looking at her, so thin and pale, it was obvious she was anything but okay. What would happen now?

At that point, Frankie Junior stepped in: he was now living close by with Bubbles and their daughter in a brand new flat in a multistorey tower block, Wimbourne Court, on Wimbourne Street on the Wenlock Estate, just a mile away. He could see how bad things were for everyone. Why didn’t Frances come to live in his flat? he suggested. She adored his daughter; surely the move would be good for her?

The young couple would keep a watchful eye on his sister, he promised his parents. At the very least, it would take some of the day-to-day worry off their shoulders. And Elsie wouldn’t have to keep dealing with the neighbours’ whispers and nudges every time Reggie Kray walked down the street or his car appeared near their house.

By this time, Frank Shea was twenty-seven. He’d grown up since those far-off days at the billiard hall when ‘d been so chuffed to be seen driving Reg around in the big flash cars. He was a dad now. He’d had his problems with the law but he was still managing to establish himself as a haulage contractor. His friendship with Reggie had turned very sour over the £1,000 loan that Reggie had never repaid. He knew, because Frances had told him, that the loan had caused fights and rows between Reg and Frances.

Nonetheless, his sister’s welfare was a priority and like their mum and dad he was desperate for her to pick up somehow, to get better. How vividly he remembered the bright, sparky, inquisitive teenager she’d been; he couldn’t stand to think of the way she’d changed in a few years into a passive, near lifeless shadow of herself.

He kind of understood the lows, the depressions. He too got down sometimes; it was a bit of a family trait, though their dad didn’t seem to suffer from it. Yet it was time Mum and Dad had some sort of break from all the worry. They were in their fifties now, getting on. The house at Ormsby Street was down for demolition in a redevelopment programme. They’d be rehoused soon, to a new home built by the council. If only they could all help Franny get better, try to make her see that she still had some sort of future, life could be better for everyone.

If Frances didn’t believe that for one minute, she still went through the motions of living as winter gave way to spring. Her old passport had expired, so she got a new temporary twelve-month one, issued on 20 March 1967. She hadn’t been abroad since those trips immediately after the honeymoon as she’d been too ill. A winter sunshine trip now would give her a lovely boost; it was just what she needed.

On 27 March, Frances’s passport shows she took £50 – ‘foreign exchange for travel expenses’ – abroad with her. (In the sixties, strict currency controls in Britain meant that anyone travelling abroad had to formally declare any cash they were taking with them, up to a limit of £50.)

The holiday with friends, from 27 March to 8 April, a ten-day cruise around the sunny Canary Islands starting at Las Palmas, was her last trip to Spain. Tickets would soon be purchased for another trip, to the island of Ibiza. But there would be two empty seats on the plane.

What went through Frances’s mind in those weeks after that last trip?

She might have been a bit happier away from Ormsby Street with all its associations with the past. But any uplift she felt from the change in environment would have been brief: given what was now a fixation in her mind, that drugs would help her escape for good, she would have already been quietly determined to do what she believed she had to do, once the opportunity arose.

Over the years many people have claimed that it was Reg who fed her drugs, Reg who supplied them; that Reg was the culprit in getting her addicted to pills that could calm her down – or kill her. That theory has some truth in it, but there is more to take into account.

The pills, by then, were not restricted in their availability via the criminal world. Reg may have initially given Frances tranquillisers or barbiturates, yet by the mid-sixties they were fast becoming quite commonly used.

A GP would legally prescribe them for ‘bad nerves’, in modest doses. And the illegal street trade in any drug of choice was positively thriving for those seeking recreational highs induced by medication. Drugs such as purple hearts, black bombers, speed (amphetamine), Mandies (Mandrax, a barbiturate drug with several formulations) or Quaaludes, known as ‘ludes’ (another form of barbiturate, a sedative hypnotic drug), were not difficult to obtain on the streets of London. It was where the mid-sixties cultural explosion of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll had already burst forth.

Certainly, if Frances was regularly using both prescribed and illegal street drugs, dependence would have formed. But as Trevor Turner pointed out, it is impossible to be sure: ‘Some drugs, like Mandrax, had a considerable tendency to produce dependence because of the extra ‘buzz’ they gave; people became addicted to it very quickly,’ he said. ‘But by and large, addiction to any drug is dominated by the individual’s metabolism.’

Without any specific knowledge of the drugs Frances took or exactly when she took them, it’s far too simplistic to say, ‘Reggie got her addicted’.

On the topic of addiction, it was no secret that both twins were totally addicted to alcohol. Pills too were used all the time, though Ron had little choice: without drugs he was a crazed lunatic, a danger to himself and everyone around him.

Reg would openly take handfuls of tranquillisers such as Librium and wash them down with gin or beer. But deliberate intent on his part to ‘get Frances hooked’ as part of any conscious desire to possess cannot be easily directed at Reggie: his crimes were many, but his desire to help her, pull her away from the abyss, seemed outwardly genuine. He was possessive beyond reason. But losing her for good, which now seemed to be a possibility, was still unthinkable as far as he was concerned.