The Profession of Violence (6 page)

In the summer of 1951, the twins fought several bouts as professionals and won them all – Reggie with the precision of the natural boxer, Ronnie by slogging. In September they were at Wembley Town Hall on the same bill, and both were on form. Reggie had his man, Goodsell of Cambridge, down for a count of eight in the second round. He finished him off in the third after a display of fancy footwork and neatly placed hooks to the heart and the head.

Ronnie Kray's fight was with Bernie Long of Romford, and Ronnie steamrollered him. By the start of the third round, Long was badly cut around the eyes and bleeding from the mouth. The referee stopped the fight. People who saw the fights said they confirmed what everybody knew about the twins. Ronnie was game and vicious, but Reggie had a real future.

Within a week the twins were once again in trouble. It was an odd case. In the past they had always avoided a confrontation with the police, and it seemed out of character for Ronnie to insult a young policeman who told him to move on in Bethnal Green Road on a Saturday afternoon. It was even more unlike him to punch him on the jaw before a dozen witnesses outside Pellici's Cafe. Had he wanted to land in trouble, and ensure the twins a public name for violence, he could hardly have done it better. Within an hour he had been picked up and charged with assaulting a policeman.

The incident could not end there. Reggie was with his brother when the trouble started, but it was over too
quickly for him to join in. His immediate reaction was that he had failed him, with Ronnie in the cells, and the policeman already back on duty. ‘If I'd not done something, then I'd never have been able to look Ron in the eye again.' He spent the rest of that afternoon searching for the policeman. When he found him he attacked him just as Ronnie had. He made no attempt to escape, but went off, happy now, to join his brother in the cells. When they came for trial a few days later, the twins would certainly have gone to prison but for the efforts of the respectable world which they had courted. It was Father Hetherington who went into the witness box for them to say that ‘apart from their disgusting behaviour on this occasion', he felt there were still possibilities of the Krays making good.

The magistrate was feeling generous. The policeman was commended for his courage: the twins put on probation. All that had really suffered was Reggie's future as a boxer. Managers dislike boxers with reputations for violence outside the ring, since a serious conviction usually costs a fighter his licence and ends his career.

On 11 December 1951 all three Kray brothers fought at the Albert Hall in a contest headed by Tommy McGovern, lightweight champion of Britain. It was their biggest chance so far. Charlie Kray lost. Ronnie was disqualified. Reggie defeated his man in three perfectly fought rounds.

Now that his attempt to discipline the twins through boxing had failed, Charles had given up hope, and usually kept away from home when he knew the twins were there. Ronnie had been fourteen when he first hit him during an argument with Violet. Now they invariably picked on him when he had had a drink or two. Sometimes they hit him hard. ‘Until a boy's fifteen, I suppose you can do something for him,' he said wearily. ‘After that there's not a lot any father can do.'

They still loved their mother as devotedly as ever. Violet and the twins were now adopting the rationalizations
which would permit their love to continue unimpeded over the years ahead. ‘I used to worry about the twins, of course. I wasn't their mother for nothing. But if they was involved in any trouble I didn't want to know. It only upset me. And as I knew that both of them was good boys at heart, I knew the things people said about them couldn't be true anyhow. I was there one night when Ronnie came back from the police station when they'd beaten him up. An' I was there another time when a copper told Reggie that if there was any more trouble he'd bash his face in. A mother remembers things like that. And if you have to choose between your boys and the police, what choice is that, especially if they're all you've got?'

And at the time Aunt Rose would watch the twins with a knowing smile.

‘When're you goina find yourself a nice girl and keep outa trouble, Ronnie love?' But Ronnie never had been interested in girls.

‘Why would I be needing some stupid girl when I got me mum. Aunt Rose?'

The second of March 1952 was a grey day at the end of another London winter, and the Tower of London gave a grim welcome to the two quiet young men in identical blue suits who arrived among that morning's sparse crop of tourists at the main gate by the Shrewsbury Tower. They showed the Yeoman Warder the official form they had received three weeks earlier, and he directed them past Traitor's Gate to the Waterloo Building opposite the White Tower, the headquarters of the Royal Fusiliers.

Few regiments excel at the welcome of newcomers, and the Waterloo Building – a Victorian block of old-fashioned military ferocity – was enough to make any recruit wonder what he was in for. But the twins seemed unconcerned. They smiled at no one and said nothing. A sergeant put them in line and led them off to the other-ranks' mess for a meal. When they had eaten and were ordered outside to collect their uniforms and equipment, they went along with thirty or so other new recruits. Their squad corporal took over. He showed them their barrack room, allocated beds, and prepared to start the hard sharp lesson that turns mere boys into grown soldiers. He began by showing them how to lay their kit out – small pack above large pack, greatcoat above the bed with brasses gleaming, back and front. He told them the toe-caps of both pairs of boots must be shiny enough to see their faces in by the weekend. And he paused to explain how pride in appearance was the mark of all good soldiers, but that if you were lucky enough to be a Fusilier …

Before the corporal could explain what was so special about the Royal Fusiliers the two recruits in the identical blue suits started walking towards the door.

The corporal stopped. He was not the man to take nonsense from recruits but had never faced a situation quite like this before.

‘And where might you be going?'

The twins paused, faces expressionless except for a faint but identical raising of the eyebrows.

‘I said, where d'you think you're off to, you lovely pair?'

One of the twins spoke then, as quietly as if telling somebody the time.

‘We don't care for it here. We're off home to see our mum.' They continued to walk towards the door.

The corporal felt the two boys were trying to make a fool of him, and grabbed one by the arm.

There was something strange about what happened then. Violence is usually accompanied by some sign of emotion but the faces of the twins remained expressionless. There was a thud. The corporal staggered back against the wall, holding his jaw – and still unspeaking, still unhurrying, the twins, in their dark blue suits, walked down the stairs and out across the square where the ravens perched and the last of the afternoon sightseers was being shown the spot where Queen Anne Boleyn lost her head four hundred years or so before.

Ronald and Reginald Kray of the Royal Fusiliers were back at Vallance Road in time for tea.

The ending of National Service is often seen as a factor in the rise of lawlessness among the young. Perhaps. But for the Kray twins it is undeniable that without the two years they were now to spend in contact with the army, they would never have been able to take over the East End with the speed and ruthlessness they showed when finally released in the spring of 1954.

Next morning, just before daybreak, the police called at
Vallance Road. The twins, who had spent their first night of service to Queen and Country at a dance-hall in Tottenham, were asleep. But they had been expecting the police. They yawned, dressed, made no attempt to resist, and telling their mother not to worry as they'd soon be back, went downstairs and into the police car which carried them to Bethnal Green Police Station where a military escort returned them to the Tower. They were placed in a cell, presented with a fresh uniform apiece, told to get shaved, given a slice of bread and mug of army tea, and informed they would be appearing in the Commanding Officer's orderly room next morning charged with being absent without leave.

From the day the Fusiliers tried teaching them the rudiments of discipline and military training, the twins found something they could never really do without – an enemy.

They also discovered certain skills they needed from the army – lessons in organization and morale, of leadership and weaponry and propaganda which were to prove invaluable when the time came to organize a private army of their own. They learned about themselves as well – how much they could take and just how tough they really were; together with the advantages of being twins. They learned how vulnerable a large organization can be, and taught themselves new ways of making officials ridiculous. They tested out their powers of resistance – and found them more than adequate.

Next morning the twins were lined up among the other petty offenders to face the charge of absence without leave and striking an NCO in the lawful exercise of his duty. By army standards these were serious charges. The corporal gave his evidence and normally this would have led to a court-martial. But there would have been something faintly ridiculous about court-martialling a pair of boys for knocking out an NCO on their first afternoon in the army. There was also a practical difficulty which no one had
thought of until that moment. Which of these identical young tearaways landed the actual blow?

The corporal wasn't sure, but thought it was the one on the far left.

‘Were you the one who attacked the corporal?' the CO asked Private Ronald Kray.

‘No, sir.'

‘Then it must have been you.'

‘Oh no, sir.'

‘Well, one of you did it.'

This was a situation the twins had faced since childhood and they knew exactly how to act.

‘Did what, sir?'

‘Struck this NCO.'

‘But which one of us are you accusing, sir?'

‘Whichever of you made this cowardly assault. Who did?'

The twins shrugged their shoulders – an impertinent gesture and a slightly uncanny one, for they did it together.

The next seven days were spent back in the guardroom. Wisely perhaps, the Commanding Officer had decided to temper justice with discretion and rather than become embroiled in interminable questions of identification, contented himself with reading the twins a lecture on doing their duty and awarded them the most moderate punishment he could in the circumstances.

The twins showed no sign of objecting. The guardroom was icy, the food just eatable and instead of a mattress they slept on the bare boards of a punishment cell. But this was what they wanted, for it proved how right they were to be contracting out of an organization that could treat anyone like this. There was also a certain satisfaction in the very harshness of the regime. Bare boards and bad food were a challenge. The better they resisted, the manlier they felt.

Apart from a visit from their father – still on the wanted list as a deserter, wily old Charlie Kray had the nerve to bluff his way to see them by pretending to be their uncle – the only event of importance was the arrival in the guard-room of a grey-faced, battered-looking thief from Mile End who had been drafted to the Fusiliers straight from a four-year sentence at Portland Borstal. He introduced himself as Dickie Morgan. One of five sons of an Australian sailor father and part-German mother, he had begun his criminal career at eight by stealing from the orthodox Jews of Whitechapel who paid him a halfpenny a time to light the gas for them during the Sabbath. He had been in and out of approved schools and Borstals ever since and had a triangular dent just below the hairline where he had smashed his skull falling into a chalk quarry escaping from Ardale Approved School.

Dickie Morgan was the first of an invaluable set of criminal acquaintances the army would introduce to the twins in the months to come. His twisted smile, his gaol humour, his habitual-criminal's cynicism made a particular impression on them. For like the twins, he lived in a world of his own – in which the chief aim was to grab and spend as much as possible before the next inevitable spell inside. Already life had taught him a philosophy which matched the conclusions the twins were reaching on their own account.

‘Ordinary straight life's just not for the likes of us. That's why we're in a separate world. You see, we get bored with most of the stupid things straight people seem to enjoy, when they could be out drinking or doing a spot of villainy. What's the best thing in life? Getting money. And after that? Spending it.'

A week later, when the twins had been released from the guardroom and went on the run the second time, Richard Morgan went with them. And this time they employed a little more finesse.

* * *

In their first escape they had been acting out of sheer bravado. Now, thanks to Morgan, they had a clearer idea of what they wanted. Dickie Morgan didn't merely talk and dream about the ‘separate world' of the habitual criminal. He lived in it, and the twins were swift to see its possibilities.

The Morgan house in Clinton Road – one of a warren of grey little terraces coiling away from the western end of London Docks – was something the twins had never really known before: a truly extraordinary household. The barrel-chested sailor father had just been sentenced for his part in a raid on the warehouse where he was night-watchman. ‘Chunky' the elder brother, who was in Parkhurst Gaol, had made a name for himself in a riot at Portland Borstal organized by an immensely strong young giant from Hackney called Frank Mitchell. And one of the younger brothers was already serving his apprenticeship in Borstal.

Somehow in the midst of all this, with her straight hair, her full-moon spectacles and her text of ‘Bless this House' on the kitchen wall, stood the eternally worried, uncomplaining figure of Richard Morgan's mother, bringing up the two youngest boys, and cooking eggs and bacon for the unceasing traffic of ‘friends on the run' who made for Clinton Road, snatched a few hours' sleep on the front-room sofa, and dodged off over the garden wall before the police knocked on the door as dawn was breaking.