Frances: The Tragic Bride (7 page)

BOOK: Frances: The Tragic Bride
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A brutal beating and kicking of a local Hackney boy, involving a bicycle chain, saw the two sixteen-year-olds briefly remanded in custody, though the subsequent Old Bailey trial was eventually dismissed due to lack of evidence. (A lead witness was quietly informed that giving evidence against the twins would result in a razor attack.)

Another teenage court appearance for assaulting a policeman resulted in probation – mostly thanks to the court appearance of the twins’ long-term champion of their respectability, their kindness to their elders, Father Hetherington. He was the long-term vicar of St James’s Church in Bethnal Green Road and knew the twins as polite, helpful, caring youngsters. They never went to church but could impress with their good manners and polite ways.

In December 1951 when the three Kray brothers fought, with star billing, at London’s Albert Hall, the promise of a professional career as sporting champions peaked – and promptly faded.

Everyone knew by then that Ron was too vicious, too undisciplined, to make it big time in the profession. That night, he lost his temper and was disqualified. Reggie, far more calculating, had everything a man required to be a boxing champion. He won. Their brother Charlie lost.

Yet the twins’ growing reputation for excessive violence outside the ring meant their career prospects dwindled right there and then: the boxing authorities rejected them, thanks to the twins’ assault on the policeman referred to above. Reggie was never going to seek out a solo career, anyway. The bonds of twinship were far too tight.

National Service came next: in peacetime Britain from 1947–59, men between seventeen and twenty-one were required to sign up in the armed forces for eighteen months. The twins’ National Service record from 1952–54 proved to be ‘a catalogue of disaster – for the army’, as Reggie Kray once described it.

True to family custom, their National Service history saw them going on the run for several months until they were caught and court marshalled, imprisoned for nine months in a military prison at Shepton Mallet in Somerset in the southwest of England.

In the end, it was a dishonourable discharge. The duo merely used the imprisonment as a career opportunity – to establish contact with other criminals, and to enhance their own reputation.

Within weeks of freedom, the twins, now twenty, had sorted out an operations base, a shabby, run-down billiard hall: the Regal, near Bethnal Green in Eric Street, Mile End. The place was a wreck, already marked down for closure.

They simply moved in, established their presence and within days the word got round: this was where to find the twins. After a few weeks during which the Regal mysteriously became the scene of a series of violent outbreaks and nightly troubles, it all went quiet again. The owner, a sensible man, had accepted an offer from the twins: £5 a week rent and the Regal Billiard Hall went into operation: a well-run refreshment bar and HQ for their varied activities, it became Kray Central.

This, then, was their launch pad, the place where they started to gather around them a group of villains of all ages, an early fulfilment of Ron’s lurid and ever increasing fantasies of forming an all powerful criminal ‘firm’, headed by the twins, men who relished playing the genial hosts, the ringmasters, pushing everyone’s buttons and reaping the benefits of fear. The billiard hall was their first stage, if you like, for the ‘actor crims’. It set them on the road to power.

By 1956, they had established themselves as a distinct force to be reckoned with, running various kinds of protection rackets in their ‘manor’, the areas around Hackney, Mile End and out to Walthamstow, moving beyond protecting illegal bookies and gaming clubs – an income they dubbed ‘pensions’ – extending their remit to ‘protecting’ other places, such as used car lots. Any car dealer daft enough to refuse to pay up would get a night-time visit from the twins’ gang members, armed with sledgehammers and spray-paint cans.

Absolute loyalty was demanded from those who worked for the twins. The rewards were ‘pensions’ for those families of the ‘aways’ (men serving prison sentences) and a helping hand for these people when they came out of jail. Word soon got round the criminal fraternity: the twins, ran the legend, looked after their own. There was some truth in this. But it was a devious ploy. The more you owed them in loyalty, the more they could ask in return. This way, they didn’t even have to dirty their hands by thieving or conning people themselves, because they got others to do it for them. In the end, such requests would extend to murder.

Reggie was by far the more businesslike of the pair. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t just about creating a reputation of fear of their violence: he saw it as a chance to make real money from the gambling clubs, pubs and businesses that paid them for protection.

As a clearing house, the billiard hall was a cover for many things: locked cubicles for thieves’ tools, stolen goods stashed around the back, transport arranged for robberies, percentages taken on other crims’ activities. All highly lucrative. And Reggie was well organised. Ronnie schemed over the battles and gun warfare, weaponry being his major obsession, becoming a powerful criminal leader in the style of Al Capone his sole desire. He even dressed like his hero, wearing a floor-length belted cashmere overcoat and adopting slicked-back hair.

His twin, however, could see bigger and better times ahead with the lifestyle that only money can buy. Ronnie was increasingly violent, just for the fun of it. Initially, he’d been viewed as the dominant force, with Reggie spending much time trying to restrain his twin’s excesses – or clearing up after him. But then, one night, Ronnie went too far. There was a row with a rival gang at a local pub where Ronnie and two others set about a man and nearly killed him in a psychotic attack; as a consequence, Ronnie was given a three-year jail sentence in November 1956.

This was a turning point. For the first time since they were three years old, when a bout of diphtheria separated them in hospital, the twins were apart. (Diphtheria is reputed to have changed Ronnie for good, making him much slower and more awkward than his twin.)

Reggie, troubled by concern for his twin, did everything he could to ensure Ronnie got whatever he needed while he was in prison. But he also started to focus more clearly on his idea of himself as an individual – and what he wanted. It was Reggie Kray’s first taste of adult life as a separate identity: real freedom.

It was a turbulent time. After a year in prison, Ronnie was moved to Camp Hill Prison on the Isle of Wight – and went completely crazy. Paranoid and psychotic, he wound up in a straightjacket and was certified insane. Then, at the beginning of 1958, he was transferred to a mental hospital, Long Grove, in Epsom, Surrey. At one point he insisted his twin was not Reggie at all, but a Russian spy impersonating his brother.

This, sadly, was just one of Ronnie Kray’s many fantasies. Yet there was a tiny kernel of truth in the madness. Because Reggie, no longer in daily contact with his twin, had started to become much more confident, less worried or suspicious of everyone around him. More his own man.

In 1957, the business-minded Reggie had spotted a golden opportunity to make more money by creating something quite different from the billiard hall. His idea was a drinking club in the East End in the Bow Road, Bow, named after the twins, ‘The Double R’. Yet again, a semi-derelict building was transformed. Only this time, the clientele weren’t all East End villains and crims; the majority of the regulars were smart couples, local celebrities, journalists, people in the know, who were all looking for a good night out, without any trouble. That was the point: Reggie could see that in order to attract the ‘right’ people, you had to remove the element of violence and menace.

Reggie, as the slickly dressed genial host, clad in immaculately tailored double-breasted suits, revelled in this smart club life. He positively relished all the celebrity contacts that eventually started to come through the doors. There was Reg, from humble Vallance Road, on first-name terms with gorgeous young women such as Jackie Collins, Barbara Windsor, Diana Dors, even Richard Burton’s first wife, Sybil Burton. The Double R became the hot new place in the East End for a good night out. It positively thrived; Reg’s confidence soared.

Cannily, he started to make even better contacts beyond the local villainy, men with real money to invest in criminal activity. He also started to enjoy life more in areas further away from his manor, going to upscale West End nightclubs or spending time in the countryside at weekends.

Alone, he was a catch, a local lad made good. A twenty-something with cash to splash. He was good looking. Immaculately dressed. Drove expensive cars. He had a playboy image, and women wanted to be around him.

It was a distinct sea change in the life of Reggie Kray. Because up until that point, women or girlfriends didn’t really feature in Reggie’s life.

Certainly, it was a man’s world back then and the twins’ day-to-day life, nurtured by their adoring and adored mother, revolved around a very male, East End bar room environment. Yet Ronnie, always excessively jealous and obsessive when it came to the unbreakable bond with his twin, had always made sure that he steered his twin away from any involvement with women beyond superficial polite exchanges.

Up to this point, while both twins had been sexually active as homosexuals since their teens, Reggie had never openly shown any sign of being interested in other men. Any indication or hint of attraction to a woman had, of course, been immediately stamped on by Ronnie. Women, he would tell Reggie, ‘smell and give you diseases’. Reggie was being a cissy looking at women.

At this time, homosexuality in Britain was still illegal: it was not until 1967 that it was decriminalised. Before that there was no such thing as ‘coming out’; men could be sent to prison for homosexual behaviour. Lives could be ruined by exposure of a same-sex relationship. Certainly, the world of gay people existed, as it always had. Yet it was very covert, underground, and there was a huge social stigma attached to being gay.

In a macho environment like the East End, it really was the love that dared not speak its name.

Ronnie wasn’t exactly shy in his younger years about preferring men as sexual partners. So once the word was out that the laws would be changing, he made no attempt to hide his sexual preference for men, mostly younger men in their late teens or early twenties, ideally straight or heterosexual men whom he’d claim to ‘turn’. Later on, conversely, he claimed to be bisexual, eventually marrying and divorcing two women whilst serving out his thirty-year sentence, though the reasons for these marriages were more to do with his understanding that marriage itself might improve his image – or even the remote chances of release.

As for Reggie, towards the end of his life he admitted to his second wife, Roberta, as she wrote in her book,
Reg Kray: A Man Apart
, that ‘although he had experimented (as many young men do), he had never perceived himself as even bisexual until he was almost fifty.’

One rather startling example of this ‘experiment’ was described in
Villain’s Paradise: A History of Britain’s Underworld
by Donald Thomas: ‘A gruesome story in Michael Connor’s biography of the South London protection racketeer Billy Howard describes the twins in their car picking up a youth at night from the so called “meat rack” of male prostitutes outside the Regent Palace Hotel, near Piccadilly Circus.

‘According to Howard, they broke into a house near Sloane Square and made use of the rent boy simultaneously, choking him to death in the process. They put the body in the boot of the car and, according to Howard, disposed of it in Norfolk. Howard was employed to pay the owner of the house for the damage caused by a “wild party” at a mistaken address and to persuade him not to complain.’

It’s an ugly story and one of many of the twins’ ‘crimes’ that they would never be called to account for. Yet whatever Reggie’s sexual history, when he and his genial married brother Charlie were running The Double R, while Ronnie was inside, Reggie was not only increasingly drawn to the good life. He had also started to see the appeal of a more ‘normal’ existence, involving a woman, and a nice home with marriage and children to complete the picture. Respectability, in other words, versus criminality and violence. So at that point, without his twin goading him and dominating his existence, Reggie was beginning to think outside the box: success and money, he started to reason, should also be bringing him the ‘reward’ of this other, more acceptable, outwardly stable way of life.

Professor Dick Hobbs is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Criminology Centre at the University of Essex. He told me that this thirst for social acceptance was a hallmark of the way the Kray twins ran their lives: ‘They seem to have craved respectability, courting, getting married, one side of the coin being the traditional respectable bit, but at the same time there’s all the schemes, the scams, the pill popping, the hidden bisexuality. Yet they won’t let go of the respectability. It’s a switch from one to the other all the time.’

This trait isn’t that unknown with serious criminals, said Hobbs. ‘I know people now who maintain that respectable side of their life – but alongside it they’re using hard drugs, making money in all kinds of morally repugnant ways, yet the respectability goes side by side with it all. These people are not one dimensional – yet the Krays are the most extreme case of this.’

Hobbs explained that the era where the Krays flourished had a lot to do with it. ‘The sixties are book-ended by two major changes in the law, the end of capital punishment [in 1965] and the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales [in 1967, between two men over 21 years of age]. Those two changes define the Krays. They nearly faced the death penalty, hanging. But the gay thing could never be overt at the time.’

‘“Oh we always knew Ron was gay,” their associates will tell you now. But did they REALLY know? They were nicknamed “Gert and Daisy” (after a well-known female radio double act of the forties, Elsie and Doris Waters) maybe because of their voices, which were lisping and quite high pitched, not those of gruff cockney stereotypes.

BOOK: Frances: The Tragic Bride
10.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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