Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  There was no comparison between the food served then and what Frank Taylor told me he had eaten. Instead, we all made do with tinned ham, corned beef and scotch eggs, washed down with a glass of lager.

  Over lunch Reg explained that he and his brothers were anxious to have a book about them done as soon as possible. ‘You see, John, we’re thinking of retiring.’ At this point I still naturally believed that Gedding Hall was theirs and took it for granted that they were figures of great wealth and power in the underworld. As I knew of several retired rich businessmen who had written their memoirs as an antidote to boredom I saw no reason why successful criminals shouldn’t do the same.

  ‘But how much can you tell me?’ I remember asking.

  ‘Enough,’ Reg said. ‘Of course we’ve friends we must protect, and we haven’t been angels, but we ain’t done nothing we’re ashamed of.’

  Unlike Reg, Ron wasn’t one for casual conversation. But I remember one thing that he did say just before I left. ‘So much rubbish gets written about our sort of people that what we want you to do is tell the truth about us.’

  I was on the point of asking what if the truth included murder? But then I thought better of it and our meeting ended with this all-important question unresolved. Big Tom and the Mercedes got me back to London airport just in time to get the evening plane to Rome, and throughout the flight I sat there trying to decide whether to write this book or not. Only when I saw the lights of Rome twinkling below me and the thud of the undercarriage being lowered told me we were coming in to land did I realise that my mind had been made up for me already. If I chickened out, I knew the ghost of Ian Fleming was never going to forgive me.

  So early next morning I rang through to Charlie Kray and suggested coming over the following weekend to discuss things further. I also asked him if he knew of somewhere I could stay in Bethnal Green where I could soak up something of the flavour of the old East End. Six days later I flew in from Rome on a wet Sunday evening and took a taxi from the airport all the way to Bethnal Green

  Since I still believed that the Twins were the lords of Gedding Hall I imagined them, if not exactly basking in illicit splendour, at least inhabiting something like the Limehouse hideaway of my boyhood hero, the dreaded Fu Manchu, with its hidden entrance from the Thames and its misty views across the river. So I was disappointed when my taxi took a turning off Whitechapel High Street and dropped me slap outside the Blackwall Buildings.

  The locals used to call this mouldering ruin with its minuscule apartments ‘Barracks for the poor’ and it had been declared ‘unfit for human habitation’. But the Twins used one of the empty ground-floor flats as a punishment cell, and legend had it that anyone who needed to be taught a lesson was confined here for an hour or two with Ron’s fierce Alsatian, Rex. Within The Firm the flat was known as ‘the Dungeon’.

  Little Tom was waiting in the pouring rain to let me in. Charlie Kray had taken me at my word with a vengeance. First the Ritz, now this.

  I looked around me at the unmade bed and wondered who’d been using it before. Apart from a non-functioning TV, a sagging old armchair and a cracked sink with a dripping tap, there was no other furniture .

  ‘Sorry about the décor,’ Little Tom said cheerfully before he left. ‘Reg said to tell you he’d be here to pick you up at eight. He and Ron want you to meet some friends of theirs. So make yourself at home.’ After I’d unpacked some books and a few possessions I sat there on the sagging chair, staring through the filthy window at the rain and waited for Reg.

  When he did arrive I was in for yet another disappointment. No Rolls. No armour-plated Cadillac. Instead, a battered old Austin with a silent driver at the wheel. Luckily the journey to our destination didn’t take us long. ‘This is a favourite pub of ours,’ said Reg. ‘It’s called the Old Horns and we thought you’d like to meet some friends of ours.’ He pushed open the swing doors – and I found myself in Krayland.

  This was to be the first of many evenings that I would spend with the Twins in a succession of East End pubs getting to know their friends and fellow criminals, but the Old Horns soon became my favourite too. Time could have stood still here since the days of Dickens. The Twins were at their best when they were surrounded by those they knew and trusted and the bar was crammed with assorted felons of all ages, shapes, and sizes. At the centre of them all was mad Ron, leaning on the bar and actually smiling as he listened to a tiny hunch-backed lady hammering away at an old piano and singing very loudy:

  ‘I’ll give you bluebirds in the spring …’

  ‘It’s me favourite song,’ said Ron, leaning towards me. ‘She always sings it specially for me.’

  Then Reg introduced me to Teddy Berry, the landlord of the Old Horns, whose father had taught the Twins to box. Teddy limped because he had only one leg. Later I learned that Ron had shot the other leg off some years before, ‘during a little misunderstanding’ in a car park on the Kingston bypass.’ Ron made it up to Teddy by giving him the pub. It was Ron’s way of saying sorry.’

  That night there were a lot of old East Enders the Twins had asked along to meet me and who had more or less retired from their lives of crime. Later I realised they had been carefully rehearsed for the occasion and had been told exactly what to say. There was tiny Sammy Lederman, former henchman of Jack Spot, and good-looking Moysha Blueboy, who had worked with the racecourse gangs of Derby Sabini long before the war.

  Sammy was full of praise for the Twins. ‘Take my word for it. After we’re all dead and gone, someone will put a statue up to the Twins in Bethnal Green for all the good they’ve done.’ Moysha nodded. ‘Never a widow in Whitechapel went without her Christmas dinner, if the Twins had anything to do with it,’ he said. ‘And one thing you must mention in your book – whatever else they were, the Twins were gentlemen.’

  Apart from the old-timers, the sheer range of shady characters on show that night bore witness to the Twins’ influence and power.

  There were several pickpockets, or ‘dips’ as they were known, who belonged to the notorious Hoxton whiz mob that worked the crowds at football matches. There were several burglars from King’s Cross, along with a lot of hefty minders and enforcers from the clubs. There was a lesbian called Linda who was smoking a cigar. ‘She’s a nurse in an operating theatre in an ’ospital. She’s a friend of ours, and ’elps me if I need a woman dealt with,’ Ron told me. But she seemed a gentle soul, and while I was talking to her I felt something tugging at my trouser leg.

  This was ‘Little Legs’ the dwarf, who worked in a circus and who the Twins had hired for the evening. Ron must have also told him what to say as well because he shouted up at me in a piping treble, ‘If you don’t write a good book about my friends Ron and Reg, I’ll kill you.’ Ron enjoyed that, and for the first time I heard him laugh.

  The roll-call of infamy continued. There was old Harry from Stockwell who had made a living making counterfeit half-crowns, and Charlie with a squint who, according to Reg, was the most successful safe-blower in London. There was also Collins the getaway driver who, following a smash-and-grab raid on Mappin and Webb, drove a stolen Bentley the length of Bond Street in reverse with a police car in pursuit – and got away.

  As we were leaving I could hear the quavering voice of another of the Twins’ old guests. It was one of the forgotten stars from the vanishing East End music halls – Cavan O’Connor, ‘Ireland’s own Vagabond of Song’, singing the refrain that years before had made him famous.

  ‘I’m only a wandering vagabond,

  But goodnight, pretty ladies, goodnight.’

  As I climbed aboard Geoff’s battered Austin with the Twins, the words lingered on the evening air. They could have been Ron’s own farewell to the East End that he would soon be leaving – except that Ron couldn’t sing, and wasn’t very keen on pretty ladies.

  But the evening wasn’t over and the Twins had something different to show me – the Astor Club off Berkeley Square. Although the Astor was one of the smar
test nightclubs in Mayfair, during the 1960s in the early hours of the morning it became the unofficial showplace for the richest sector of the underworld. After the Old Horns, I was seeing something of the status that the Twins enjoyed in a wider world of crime than Bethnal Green.

  I discovered later that, as the club’s official ‘minders’, the Twins were drawing a ‘pension’ of £200 a week from the Astor. By now I’m sure that rumours of the McVitie killing must have got around the underworld, enhancing their authority even further.

  I got some hint of the Twins’ importance from the way that Sulky, the Astor’s famous mâitre d’, treated them like royalty. ‘Your usual table, gentlemen’, he said.

  It was said that Sulky, when he wasn’t schmoozing important guests, had a key role in the world of crime as a go-between for both the underworld and the police. As for them themselves, I was left in little doubt of their importance from the two bottles of well-iced Dom Perignon that instantly arrived at our table ‘with the compliments of the manager’.

  Soon after we arrived Geoff Allen turned up with the Twins’ good-looking cousin Ronnie Hart, an old cat burglar called Charlie Clarke and Dickie Morgan. They were followed by a steady stream of heavy men in suits who arrived throughout the evening to pay homage to the Twins. One of the few I remembered was their old ally – and soon to be co-defendant – the immaculate Freddy Foreman, looking more than ever like ‘the managing director of British crime’.

  I can’t imagine what we found to talk about that evening but the conversation never seemed to falter. Reg appeared far more relaxed than at Gedding Hall and it was on this occasion that he became the first person I had ever seen demolish a bottle of Gordons in one sitting. But nor will I forget how, in the early hours of the morning, when bedtime in the dreaded dungeon beckoned and I bade the company goodnight, it was Reg who staggered after me and, blind drunk though he was, insisted on finding me a taxi and then paying the driver to take me back to Bethnal Green.

  It didn’t take me long to realise that, along with Frank Taylor, I had been adroitly conned by the Twins over their ownership of Gedding Hall – which, of course, belonged to Geoff Allen. The fact that they had taken so much time and trouble to convince us made me understand how desperate they were to have their story told so that their lives would never be forgotten. It was only later that I discovered that fame and immortality were what really mattered to them now, but I do remember, how what time, I couldn’t understand why they seemed to be much more concerned about my book and the film than about any threat from the police. I’d have been more puzzled still had I known that they had murdered Jack McVitie just a few weeks earlier.

  This had to be because the mantle of invulnerability that the Goodman cover-up had thrown around them had protected them for more than three long years already and they were taking it for granted that they were still ‘untouchable’. They must have also felt completely safe in Bethnal Green with their old familiar world around them.

  In fact, at this very moment, Nipper Read together with a force of twenty-five detectives was working round the clock at Tintagel House, building up the case against them. At the same time, Admiral Hanly and the US Secret Service were also stepping up the pressure on Cooper to entrap them. In spite of this, to me at any rate the Twins seemed sublimely unconcerned about the dangers they were facing. Reg would occasionally ask me whether I’d heard any news from journalist friends about how the police inquiries against them were progressing. Apart from this the Twins appeared completely unaware of the hazards they were facing.

  Much of their conversation with me seemed to be about the past. As well as discovering that Gedding Hall did not belong to them I also discovered that their home, which all their friends refered to as ‘Fort Vallance’, was actually a tiny terraced house in Vallance Road. I remember Reg taking me to see it on the morning after our visit to the Astor Club and making me realise how much it meant to him and Ron, from the sheer nostalgia with which he talked about their childhood there – how in the old days, none of the locals used to lock their doors, and how they had watched the old steam trains going back and forth across the bridge at the end of the road, to Liverpool Street station. Their uncle ran a cafe opposite, and Evans the Welsh dairyman kept his cow next door.

  In Vallance Road they had always been surrounded by their family. It was their grandfather Lee who lived next door who gave Reg and Ron their earliest boxing lessons. The indomitable Auntie Rose lived one house away, and Auntie May lived next door to her.

  Above all I remember how proudly Reg introduced me to his mother and how she obviously adored him. She showed no embarrassment when Reg showed me the coal shed in the backyard where his father used to hide when on the run from the police, nor did she seem at all concerned when recounting how, when Ron started shaving as a teenager, he copied his Mafia hero Al Capone, and like a true Italian gangster had the local Italian barber come each morning to the house to shave him. But when her sister May turned up for a cup of tea they were both at pains to emphasise how respectable their family had always been,

  I was lucky to have seen all this. For, as I soon discovered, this cosy-seeming run-down little world of theirs was coming to an end. The whole of Vallance Road was due for demolition and already the Kray family were among the last survivors in the street. Old Cannonball and Grandma Lee would soon be moving into sheltered accommodation and the Twins’ parents had been allocated a council flat on the ninth floor of a tower block a mile away in Bunhill Row.

  More than ever now, relations between the Twins themselves were at the mercy of Ron’s moods, which in turn depended on whether or not he’d taken his Stematol. His mood swings were becoming more pronounced and were starting to dominate their lives. When Ron was on a high he felt invulnerable and his thoughts would once more turn to murder. He was still talking to Cooper about Murder International and had started making lists of whom to kill.

  Unlike Ron, Reg was in fact a terrible worrier and was also on tranquillisers, though these were not so strong as Ron’s. At times, usually in the morning, when he was recovering from a hangover, Reg would talk to me about ‘getting right away from all this fucking nonsense’. I remember discussing with him whether he could join the French Foreign Legion, or disappear to fight with the Americans in Vietnam. But these conversations always ended up with Reg saying, ‘But then, of course, I never could leave Ron.’

  And despite the fact that Reg was relatively sane, Ron could always make him join him in his madness. When Ron was driven by his demons he would dominate his weaker twin by resorting to the same tactics he had employed since childhood to survive. It was when this happened that the most sinister and dangerous aspect of their relationship appeared and, however briefly, the pair of them would become united. At such moments these two separate but discordant beings merged, becoming one person in the process, with the same genetic make-up and the same all-powerful mentality. And when this happened, this duplicated human being would become a homicidal madman. This had happened when they’d murdered Jack the Hat, but the killing of McVitie did more than bring the Twins inseparably together. By forcing Reg ‘to do his one’ and become a murderer, Ron had completed the process which had begun when he’d helped to wreck his marriage. When Frances died, Reg’s hopes of ever having a ‘normal’ life away from Ron died too. Since the killing of Jack McVitie, less than ever were they ordinary twins. However much Reg might talk about ‘getting right away from all this fucking nonsense’ they were irrevocably locked together as twin murderers.

  *

  Reg had another way of trying to escape his fate and alleviate the guilt that he felt for Frances. Still in his early thirties, he was attractive to women as well as men, and a short time after Frances’s death he met Carol Thompson, an attractive twenty-three-year-old receptionist, who fell in love with him. She told me once that what attracted her was that ‘he seemed to be so desperately unhappy’ and the hope of changing him became a challenge.

  It turned out to
be a predictably stormy affair. She told me that she soon felt that he was merely using her to get over Frances, and that they were hardly ever alone together. In spite of this he persuaded her to live with him but his drinking steadily increased and the rows got worse. At times he was violent but, as with Frances, he never hit her.

  During this period the Twins could still surprise me. I remember an evening with them at the Carpenters’ Arms, the other pub they ‘owned’, just round the corner from Vallance Road, when who should suddenly appear but the now seriously famous photographer David Bailey. I’d met him at the Sunday Times several years before at the start of his career when he was still one of the three young freelance photographers, who along with fellow East Enders Donovan and Duffy, earned a living from what cockney printers on the paper still called ‘the smudge game’ of press photography. Since then he’d become a huge success. Like Ron and Reg he was an East Ender, and they longed for fame like his. That very year Bailey had personally achieved their own greatest wish. The famous Italian director Antonioni had made a film called Blow-up, based on his life.

  So it it was something of a tribute to the Twins’ own status as celebrities that even at this late moment in their criminal career he was there because he had asked him to come to take pictures ‘for our book’ as he had now begun to call it. The Twins were particularly anxious to include pictures of themselves along with Read and Gerrard.

  Here I should explain that Read and Gerrard were not the two detectives who at that very moment were working round the clock on the Twins’ downfall but two pet pythons. Occasionally Ron still visited the Harrods pet department and had recently ordered two young snakes, one for himself and one for Reg. It was Ron’s idea of a joke to name them after the two detectives, Superintendents Nipper Read and Gerrard.