Frances: The Tragic Bride (6 page)

The short letter gave Frances all the local gossip: Sylvia, an older girl, informed Frances that she was going to try for a holiday job at Woolworths in Dalston Junction. The pay was £3 a week, she wrote. Another local friend, Pat, was in hospital, having her tonsils out.

‘And how are the boys?’ Sylvia’s letter concluded. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t like them, because you do.’

This indicates her friends had noticed that twelve-year-old Frances was already extremely attractive to the opposite sex.

The late Tony Lambrianou, a Bethnal Green boy eventually imprisoned for fifteen years in 1969 for his part in the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, remembered meeting Frances for the first time one day in 1956. He already knew Frankie Shea from primary school.

‘One day I came out of work and saw Frankie Shea at the junction of Hackney Road and Weymouth Terrace, which is near where his family came from. His sister Frances came along. She would have been about twelve or thirteen, very quiet and very beautiful with big eyes,’ Lambrianou recalled in his book,
Inside The Firm.

The power of Frances’s dazzling allure to men was already there, right from the start.

The shift from teen to adult is rarely easy, an emotionally confusing, even fraught time for families. For fifties East End families with teenagers it was an unusually precarious time because while the memory – and evidence – of wartime was still there, all around them, the powerful popular distractions of those mid-fifties years were completely unlike any that previous generations had known.

Post-war dads had never known what it was to be a teenager, as such, or what it was like to wear clothes specially aimed at youthful fashion tastes, or to be courted by the powerful forces promoting the music, the movies, the new fashions for youngsters. They’d grown up in an era where fathers alone ruled the household, often with an iron rod. Young people back then did what their parents told them to do, and tended not to question their authority, regardless of their circumstances.

Yet their offspring, now with their own money or spending power, even before they reached their twenties or marriage, didn’t see this authoritarian style of the past in the same way. And they didn’t see why they should listen. Phrases like ‘teenage rebellion’ entered everyday language for the first time.

There’s no reason to believe that out-and-out rebellion was the order of the day in the Shea household. But there were certainly domestic ups and downs. Elsie had to work at the sewing machine, in the local factory, as long and hard as she could, but her husband, while often out of the house taking bets or in the pub, wasn’t as dedicated to the concept of hard slog as Elsie wished. And Frankie Junior, as attractive as his sister and perfectly capable of passing his exams if he concentrated and took it all seriously, wasn’t very interested in the opportunities Elsie cherished for her kids. Frank had the ability to learn, there was no question of that. But education didn’t suit him and he left school at fifteen.

Not one to give up, Elsie persisted: she even found Frank an apprenticeship as a setter with a local print firm, a distinct step on the ladder to what she rightly believed was a decent living. The apprenticeship was definitely a bit of a coup, since career opportunities locally for Hoxton boys leaving school early either meant working in the street markets – pretty much a closed shop because market stalls were run by families – or finding work in a trade like tailoring or French polishing (cabinet making). As a consequence, if a youngster could manage to get into printing it was seen very much as a chance in life. The only other options were boxing, illegal betting – or villainy.

Unfortunately, Frank had inherited his dad’s attraction to gambling, not such a great idea, especially while the laws around illegal gambling remained draconian until the early sixties, although the local constabulary was quite frequently accustomed to getting a ‘drink’ or a good ‘bung’ to look the other way. But teenage boys generally are not usually as savvy or clued up as they should be when it comes to running with the pack, ignoring the hazards – and are especially vulnerable to coming unstuck.

On Friday nights after work at Frank’s print firm, a small group of his workmates would covertly gather in the men’s toilet to play dice, placing bets for modest sums fresh out of their weekly pay packets. Unfortunately, a manager caught the group gambling. Frank was holding the dice. End of job and potential print career.

Viewed today, this seems like an unfair punishment for an innocent after-hours pastime, especially since they weren’t exactly high rollers. But the incident serves to highlight the very different black-and-white world that existed back then.

With hindsight, if this relatively minor incident had never taken place and Frances’s brother had kept his job and remained with the printing firm for some time, events might just have taken a different turn for the Sheas.

Sadly, there are several ‘if onlys’ in this story, not just those involving the actions of the individuals involved but many involving the historical and very important social changes that affected millions of lives in Britain during the fifties and sixties. This was just the first.

The loss of her son’s job fuelled Elsie’s slow-growing fear that somehow, despite the indications that her bright, pretty kids might have had reasonably good prospects in life, it would all go wrong and they’d be stuck, all of them, where they’d started. This was at the bottom of the heap, still far too close to the soot, the dark and the dodgy deal, rather than embarking on a gradual but steady ascent towards a respectable, honest sort of life in the clean, green suburbs.

Perhaps the tensions around Elsie’s fears for their future had a direct impact on Frances’s feelings or moods in her early teens. Elsie’s resentment that her husband wasn’t a steady provider gained momentum over the years, certainly. And the atmosphere in Ormsby Street would have been soured by Elsie’s disappointment when her son lost the job she’d resourcefully obtained for him. There is another important point to consider: teenagers can be prone to dramatic mood swings during puberty, including varying degrees of depression. Frances would have been around twelve years old at the time of the sacking. Given that it was revealed, much later, that Frances had suffered from depression even before her relationship with Reggie started, this could have been the point when Frances’s ‘bad nerves’, as her problems were later described, started to affect her. This factor may have put her in an even more vulnerable place emotionally than may have been commonly understood.

There is one startling piece of evidence that this was in fact Frances’s state of mind in her younger years, though the precise date when this was written down is not known. It takes the form of a section of a well-known Victorian poem, neatly handwritten and copied down by Frances, into the back pages of a lined notebook. Copying out a much-read poem or a section of a book was, back in the pre-electronic era, very popular with youngsters in the fifties and it is likely that Frances copied down this poem before the time when she started seeing Reggie Kray.

The poem is called
Maud
, written by the Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1855.
Maud
is a very long poem in three sections. Frances had copied out three fairly short sections from the poem into her notebook. Here are the extracts from
Maud
that Frances copied. Given the tragedy that unfolded, they make for chilling and prophetic reading:

Courage, poor heart of stone!

I will not ask thee why

Thou canst not understand

That thou art left for ever alone

Courage, poor stupid heart of stone:

Or if I ask thee why,

Care not thou to reply:

She is but dead, and the time is at hand

When thou shalt more than die.

O let the solid ground

not fail beneath my feet…

before my life has found

what some have found so sweet!

Then let come what come may

No matter if I go mad

I shall have had my day

Dead, long dead,

Long dead!

And here beneath it is all as bad

For I thought the dead had peace but it is not so;

To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?

But up and down and to and fro,

Ever about me the dead men go;

And then to hear a dead man chatter

Is enough to drive one mad.

Frances’s first passport described her as a bookkeeper. Yet her studies, though cut short, had exposed Frances to poetry, literature and language itself. Here was an intelligent, articulate young woman, someone who sought comfort or solace in words.

No matter how dark or disturbing the thoughts or ideas behind those words in
Maud
, the discovery of Frances copying down poetry from Tennyson is a very poignant and revealing indication of her thinking. It also indicates a degree of literacy you might not associate with a young Hoxton girl from that time.

Frances turned sixteen in September 1959. By this time, according to a letter written to Frances and their parents by her brother Frankie in August 1959, Frances was already working in the Strand in a clerical job.

At the time he wrote the letter, Frankie was nineteen. He sent it to his family while completing a stint in a young offenders’ institution called Blantyre House, in Cranbrook, Kent. (Today it is a Category C resettlement prison: an open prison.)

In the letter, he referred to a family visit, for which he thanked them, saying he was looking forward to the following month when he hoped to see them again.

‘In the meantime, you all dress well and look well,’ he wrote. As for Frances, he went on, ‘Well, Franny, you are a proper Italian rebel now, especially now you have a job in the Strand.’

Frank told his dad he was looking younger without his son around: ‘…suppose this is because you’ve got no worries who looks smartest.’ As for his mother, he suggested she cheer up a bit, saying, ‘You take too much to heart. Same as me.’

Why did Frances opt to leave school at fifteen? One can only guess why she didn’t continue her studies or aim for university. However, given the fast-moving social changes of the times, the most likely reason was probably the desire to go out into the world and earn, given the household tensions around her parents’ relationship to money, as well as the huge, ever increasing demand for office staff in London at that time.

With Frances now out working in London’s West End, and despite her disappointment about her son’s behaviour, Elsie must surely have been happy about her daughter’s progress. After all, as a mother, she still had every reason to hope that Frances, rapidly evolving into a well-groomed beauty with a wonderful smile and those bewitchingly penetrating eyes, would be well placed to attract the right man to lead her to the altar and the respectable family life her mother dreamed of.

What Elsie didn’t know, however, was that at that point in the autumn of 1959, there was a man who was already seriously smitten by the charms of her pretty, big-eyed daughter. And like Elsie, this man also harboured big dreams.

The trouble was, this man, already in his mid-twenties, wanted it all, anything a man could possibly desire in the whole wide world: money, travel, expensive cars, beautiful clothes, a lovely home, a beautiful wife and children. He wasn’t quite there yet. But partly because of his own growing confidence and partly because his mum had always insisted he was part of something ‘special’, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t take whatever it was he wanted. Everything was ripe for the taking.

And so began Reggie Kray’s obsession with a beautiful, innocent young teenage girl. She wasn’t the first person to capture his possessive eye for beauty and innocence, not by a long chalk. Yet in the wake of this intense, unrelenting obsession lay emotional turmoil, fear – and destruction. There would be no escape for the heart-rending emotional turbulence that lay ahead for the Shea family. Nor would there be any escape for the man that instigated it all: Reggie Kray.

CHAPTER 3

THE MAN ON THE DOORSTEP

B
ut who was Reggie Kray, other than an East Ender in his mid-twenties whose entire life revolved around crime, extortion and violence – and the intense relationship with his twin brother, his other half?

Driven by an unquestionable talent for manipulation – via the ongoing threat of bloodshed and aggression – and a fervently cherished desire to be respected by all as serious underworld players, by now the Kray twins were already local heroes: by the late fifties you’d have been hard pushed to find anyone in the East End of London who hadn’t heard of them – and what they were reputed to have done. The twins made sure of that.

The fifties marked their inexorable rise to notoriety from local bombsite gang warfare to heavy-duty gangster chic. Though along the way the brothers’ own somewhat chaotic relationship with each other had started to shift. Physically, since childhood they had fought each other with astonishing ferocity. Ronnie would goad, taunt; Reggie would react. As a two-headed beast they were capable of extreme violence and brutality. Yet their personalities were at odds: Reggie was more controlled and calculating, less prone to fantasy and irrational, explosive impulse. His twin was delusional, irrational, untroubled by boundaries.

At sixteen, they had turned professional boxers, winning every bout they fought – known around the streets of Bethnal Green as the wildest of street fighters among the local gangs they already ran. In secret.

They would have been just like the thousands of other street-fighting teenage thugs in their taste for violence – except for their penchant for truly vicious attack, sometimes cutting or slashing rather than punching. Ronnie preferred cutlasses, knives over razors – more power in the slashing. Nevertheless they were cunning in their ability to get off the hook.