The Profession of Violence (16 page)

Violet insisted, ‘It wasn't right to allow our Rose to die in a place like that. So we took turns, sitting up with her every night. She was in the big bed in the front room where our mum and dad sleep now. The doctors warned us that her end would come with a haemorrhage and that it wouldn't be nice to see. Her feet swelled up and the rest of her went thin as a rake. Then on Christmas Eve the bleeding started. She went on Christmas Day.'

Two days later, in the psychiatric wing of Winchester Gaol, Ronnie received the letter from Reggie telling him ‘Aunt Rawse' was dead. By evening he was incoherent and had to be placed in the straitjacket again for his own safety.

Reggie had nightmares all that night. So did Violet Kray. She dreamt that two men in white coats were dragging Ronnie across a courtyard to a building without windows. The following morning she received an official telegram from the governor of Winchester Gaol:

‘Your son Ronald Kray certified insane.'

According to the board by the gate the place is simply Long Grove Hospital, a peaceful spot within the Surrey countryside. By the main entrance is a marmalade-pot lodge, lace curtains at the windows. Forsythia flanks the drive; no one is about. Epsom lies a mile and a half away across the fields but all the forsythia in the world will never alter the outline of the old lunatic asylums built to an identical pattern round London at the turn of the century. All have the same red, Aldershot-style wards and office blocks, the same high water-tower that peers like an enormous head across the country. And Long Grove still receives most of its patients from the same part of London as when the London County Council erected it in 1907 to cope with the growing number of the mentally disordered from the slums of Hackney and Bethnal Green. Ronnie was driven here from Winchester Prison on 20 February 1958. He was never to forget the terror of those first few days. He was placed in Napier Ward, a locked ward; trained nurses kept each patient under day and night supervision.

‘I wouldn't move, but sat all day huddled round the radiator. I wasn't quite sure who I was. The radiator seemed the only friend I had because it was warm. I was completely on my own, and funny things used to come and go in my mind. I thought the man opposite me was a dog, and if I got his name right he'd come and jump in my lap. I'd have a friend then, but I never got his name. I didn't recognize anyone, although Reggie and my mother
visited me. Sometimes I thought I'd kill myself to stop someone else doing it first.'

According to his medical report he had ‘put his hand through a glass window' and showed signs of ‘verbigeration and marked thought blocking'. He was ‘unstable and in fear of bodily change'. He believed people were still plotting against him, tampering with his letters and censoring them for sinister purposes. No intelligence test was carried out, and there was nothing on his report about his criminal case history. But the doctor had wide experience of the mentally sick and seems to have had no difficulty summing up the patient's character: ‘A simple man of low intelligence, poorly in touch with the outside world.'

For the Long Grove doctors, this was all he was – a simple man, a fairly simple case of schizophrenic breakdown. He would never be entirely cured, but could be helped over the breakdown and then stabilized on regular doses of the new tranquillizers that were revolutionizing the treatment of the mentally sick. At Long Grove they were performing these miracles every day and the doctors set to work on Ronnie, placing him on Stematol – a drug which damps down neurotic symptoms without doping the patient completely.

Out of the eighteen hundred patients at the time, six were from prisons, and the hospital made a point of insisting to the Home Office that they would be treated exactly like ordinary patients. So Ronnie Kray became a routine case – nothing to make a fuss about. His family agreed, although for slightly different reasons. They knew their Ronnie: he was simply ‘acting up a bit to kid the authorities into giving him a change of scene'. Reggie had seen him ‘acting barmy' once already in the army and knew the lengths he'd go. If the medical officer at Winchester Gaol had been taken in and sent him to this comfortable little hospital near London, that just showed what a good actor Ronnie was. Within a week the treatment had begun to take effect. Ronnie had left his radiator
and there was no longer a dog in the bed opposite. He began to read again, to recognize his family. The doctors were so pleased with his progress that by the end of March they had him moved from Napier Ward to MI Block. The doors were left unlocked there.

Although schizophrenics form by far the largest single group in Britain's mental hospitals the disease remains something of a mystery. Kraepelin described it in the 1890s under the name
dementia praecox
but medical research is still scratching at its origins and true nature. It can take many forms, although the disease usually develops over a long period and is sparked off by a final crisis. There is no known ‘cure' as such, but sufferers can be helped over the ‘florid' state of a schizophrenic breakdown by various modern drugs; after-effects vary enormously.

In Ronnie's case the medical reports show considerable vagueness over the form of his disease. He was in Long Grove to be treated, and here he was responding rather more quickly than most. But had the Long Grove doctors taken the trouble to find out a little of his history of violence and delusion, it is hard to believe that they would have moved him quite so promptly out of Napier Ward. The hospital's policy of treating mentally sick criminals like ordinary patients was a worthy one as far as it went; but it was patently absurd if it led doctors to ignore the fact that a man like Ronnie was a criminal.

For Ronnie was no ordinary schizophrenic whose problems could be tidied up with three capsules of Stematol a day. Crime formed an important part of his disease, and had his doctors had the time to study his history they could not have failed to recognize him for what he really was and treated him accordingly. Among the different types of schizophrenics there is a small group who are potentially dangerous and the most difficult to spot – the paranoid schizophrenics. Most schizophrenics find it hard to face the world and finally collapse through inability to reconcile their delusions with the world outside. The paranoid
schizophrenic is different. Even if he has a breakdown, his obsessions can persist despite it. He has the strange power to direct all his mental faculties to the protection of his distorted world. This means that outwardly he can often appear completely logical and normal; inwardly he is ruled by his obsession as he ‘continues in his vicious circle of ill-advised aggressiveness, self-protection, misinterpretation, spread of delusional ideas and increasing watchfulness'.

There are certain symptoms that usually reveal themselves: lack of feeling for others, difficulty in communicating, erratic behaviour, extreme moodiness. Often delusions of grandeur are combined with extreme feelings of persecution. Sometimes the paranoid schizophrenic suffers what is called ‘double orientation': he follows the normal world, yet simultaneously identifies with Christ, Napoleon or some great figure of the past. Frequently he believes himself to be directed by a fate or personality somewhere beyond him. At the same time the blunting of the emotions can lead to ‘callous and apparently motiveless crimes of violence' if his obsession demands it for its defence. Sometimes such violence would seem the only way he could survive. ‘A trifling affair may arouse wild fury and an incident pregnant with pathos be treated with levity.'

Qualities like these appear in many of history's great religious leaders – also in its most notorious criminals. Jack the Ripper, Al Capone and the Boston Strangler are textbook cases of the violent paranoid schizophrenic. So, as the Long Grove doctors might have discovered, was Ronnie Kray.

But he was recovering so fast that no one did. Stematol was working. Ronnie appeared quite normal, reading, joking, writing letters home. The doctors thought that they had done their job. By the beginning of May, Ronnie appeared so well that he applied to be discharged from hospital and allowed to return to prison.

This request was not as strange as it may seem. Ronnie
was haunted by the fate of his Wandsworth friend, Frank Mitchell, who was considered such a public menace that the authorities had refused him a definite release date. Mitchell saw year follow year in prison, never quite knowing when it would all end. Officially certified insane, Ronnie could end up in the same position.

The hospital considered his request; at the end of May, two doctors examined him. They were both optimistic about his general condition. He showed no marked psychotic symptoms now, answered intelligently and was, they wrote, ‘quiet, co-operative and mentally subnormal'.

But he still showed signs of depression. A swift return to prison could bring a recurrence of his trouble. Reggie was told that for his brother's own good he should stay where he was a while longer. Ronnie was upset at the news. He thought he would never be released. Reggie calmed him down. He wouldn't let that happen. He had a bright idea that ought to work; it always had done in the past.

At Long Grove the main visiting hours are on Sunday afternoon. East Enders take their families seriously; by three o'clock the wards are crammed with cockney relatives and friends. This is the high-spot of the patients' week; the hospital provides tea and biscuits to make everyone feel at home. Not that the Krays and all their friends ever let Ronnie feel neglected. Each Sunday he always had the two visitors he was allowed. But during one visiting-time after Ronnie's application had been rejected an extra lot turned up – two large American car-loads of them. The first car, an electric-blue Lincoln, contained Reggie and an old friend of the family called Georgie Osborne. The second, a black Ford, held several characters from The Double R. One was a safe-blower, two were ex-boxers, and the man at the wheel was known for his skill as a smash-and-grab-raid driver. Both cars parked just outside Ronnie's block. The men in the Ford told the hospital porter that they hadn't
realized visitors were restricted to two at a time; they would wait and see Ronnie later. Reggie slipped on a light-fawn raincoat and he and Osborne walked into Ronnie's ward.

On visiting afternoons there was always a male nurse on duty; on that afternoon there was nothing about Ronnie to give the nurse particular concern. Ronnie was quite smartly dressed in a blue suit and maroon-coloured tie; if he was still upset at the doctor's decision, he was keeping it to himself. His brother in the fawn coat had brought a pile of holiday snaps and they were all enjoying them. The nurse had never seen Ronnie laugh so much.

At 3.30 P.M. tea was brewed up in the scullery along the corridor. Regulations forbade patients to pass beyond the ward doors during visiting hours, so one of the visitors usually fetched it. That Sunday the Kray brother in the fawn coat went. The nurse nodded to him as he passed.

Twenty minutes must have elapsed before the nurse saw anything was wrong. Young Kray was still there, laughing with his visitor, who seemed to have an endless store of snapshots. Why hadn't his brother come back with the tea?

‘Where's your brother?'

‘Which brother?'

‘Your brother Reggie who went out to get the tea.'

‘Reggie didn't go.'

‘ 'Course he did. I saw him myself.'

‘He didn't. I'm Reg Kray. I'll prove it if you don't believe me. Here's my driving licence.'

‘Then that was Ronnie went out for the tea?'

‘Who d'you think it was? Thought you knew him by now.'

The nurse sounded the alarm-bell, but it was too late. The black Ford was on its way to London with Ronnie inside. Reggie had previously arranged with him to wear the same blue suit and tie, and switched the raincoat with him when the nurse wasn't looking. The police arrived
and questioned Reggie and Osborne for over an hour, but there was nothing they could do once Reggie had proved his identity. As he said to one of the police. ‘It's not as if we actually done anything. We've just been sitting here waiting for a cup of tea that never came.'

The track lay to the left of the road, a good half-mile before the farm. There was an ancient wooden gate-post and the track went trailing up between the fields and the nettle-beds towards the woods. Suffolk is a mysterious county, and this was a particularly hidden part of it. Borley Rectory, ‘the most haunted house in England', was four miles distant. Even in high summer this countryside, with its decaying manor houses and lanes that lose themselves between the banks of hawthorn and cow-parsley, seems to be keeping out intruders.

A fortnight before Ronnie's escape Reggie had driven here towing a four-berth caravan. The owner of the farm was an old acquaintance, a London businessman the twins had often worked with in the past. He could hardly have refused them a small favour and at dusk he helped Reggie manoeuvre the caravan up the track and into the woods.

The escape was widely reported in the press; the police were combing London for ‘this violent criminal'. They said, ‘We know what type of person he is and are taking no chances.'

But Ronnie had vanished. Reggie continued working at The Double R as usual. Nearly a week after the escape, Reggie closed up his club and drove back to Vallance Road. By midnight the downstairs lights were out; soon the whole house was in darkness.

Just after one o'clock the back door opened. Reggie slipped out and scrambled over the yard wall. Then along Cheshire Street came the noise of a car starting and driving away; he had a long night's ride ahead. First stop was Walthamstow, where Ronnie was being looked after by
friends; he came out muffled in a black overcoat. They arrived at the farm just before dawn.

When they had eaten, Reggie took a torch and led his brother out to the caravan. He had to show Ronnie all he had done for him and wanted to be back in Bethnal Green before anyone noticed his absence. The caravan was where he had left it. He unlocked the door, turned on the Calor gas lights and the heater and showed Ronnie how lovingly he had prepared the hideaway – the stacked provisions and the radio, the gramophone with all his favourite records, books, beer, a small gas refrigerator.