Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  Not that there could have been any question over their role as the country’s top criminal celebrities by the time their trial ended. For more than a year the sometimes shocking exploits of the Twins had been making headlines in the press, and the trial had ended by making them utterly notorious. This meant that when the Twins arrived in prison they were treated with considerable respect, not only by the other prisoners but by the prison staff as well.

  Throughout the months to come the Twins were fortunate to have Violet always there to help them. In many ways this was to be their mother’s finest hour. Far from despairing at the shame the Twins had brought upon the family, she saw her boys as victims rather than as murderers. As always she was proud of them and did everything she could to help them. She was a great organiser and when she wasn’t on the telephone persuading somebody to visit them she’d be searching for something that they’d asked for, then sending old Charlie trotting off to Durham or the Isle of Wight to deliver it. It was thanks entirely to Violet that the Twins lacked for few of life’s necessities like boxer shorts, Brylcreme for their hair and cigarettes.

  But since prison regulations banned them from seeing anyone with a criminal record from outside prison there were problems finding friends to visit them, which curbed the Twins’ social life considerably. But thanks again to non-criminal acquaintances, and even the occasional celebrity, would go and see them, which added to the Twins’ reputation.

  During these early days in prison the Twins faced one big disappointment: Frank Taylor had been having problems finding backers for his film about them and had finally opted out. But even this didn’t worry them for long, thanks to a sudden upsurge of interest in the Krays in the British film industry.

  Until now, all the Twins’ old favourite gangster movies had been modelled on the American mafia, but already the first British gangster films were in production inspired directly by the Twins. The first of them, which was screened in 1971, was actually entitled Villain and starred Richard Burton as Vic Dakin, a sadistic gang leader clearly based on Ron. The same year saw another very British gangster movie, although not so obviously modelled on either of the Twins: the exuberant Get Carter, starring Michael Caine.

  Then in 1972 came the most unusual British film of all to be touched with the mystique of the Twins. This was the cult film Performance, made by several of those members of the celebrated Chelsea ‘Popocracy’ who had been so gripped by the legend of the Krays in the days of Esmeralda’s Barn. It had even been scripted by Ron’s one-time devotee and flatmate David Litvinoff and directed by rich young Donald Cammell, the former painter who had also been besotted with the Twins. James Fox, the promising young actor who had visited them in Brixton Prison, played the part of an escaping criminal who took refuge in the house of an androgynous, drug-crazed pop-star played by none other than Mick Jagger. With its mesmerising vision of the floating world of homosexuality and drugs and violent crime, this film has long been seen by many as a classic British movie of the sixties. The British Film Institute historian Colin McCabe goes further actually claiming, rightly or wrongly, that ‘it was through Performance that the image of the Krays became imposed upon the national consciousness as the dominant image of the violent criminal.’

  Any publicity was encouraging for the Twins, but they and the family were still in need of money. Geoff Allen had helped them out as usual, but most of their other ‘bankers’ who had been ‘minding’ quite large sums of money for them at the time of their arrest had mysteriously disappeared. The Twins were not entirely surprised at this, but were still anxious to keep their house in Suffolk, largely for Violet’s sake, and ‘so as we ‘ave something to look forward to when we come out,’ as Ron said with a hollow laugh.

  Since I lived by writing books I also needed money, and the revelations of their trial meant that I could now write the uncensored biography that would have been impossible had they still been free. We came to an agreement: I would pay their share of the royalties on the book to Violet and in return would be free to write about them as I pleased. This suited me and meant that over the next few months I could talk to almost everyone I needed, including the Twins themselves, members of the ‘Firm’, their victims and the police.

  By the end of 1971 my book was all but finished. Jonathan Cape, who published my biography of Ian Fleming, liked it and the Observer newspaper was offering me £20,000 for the serial rights on publication. Then came trouble, and like so much that the Twins became involved in, it all related back to Robert Boothby.

  I had interviewed Boothby earlier that year, and it was then that he told me that it had been Harold Wilson who had personally persuaded Arnold Goodman to represent him when the scandal burst in 1964. He seemed remarkably untroubled by it all, and when I mentioned Ron telling me about having dinner with him at the House of Lords he cheerfully admitted that as well. ‘Well, bless my soul, I think you’re right. So I did’ he said.

  Soon afterwards I saw two personal letters he had sent to Ron which made it all too clear that, as I thought, there had been more to their relationship than those ‘three occasions at my flat to discuss business matters,’ which Boothby had mentioned in his famous letter to The Times. But it was not until Ron himself told Violet to give me a small brown suitcase containing ‘a few things that might come in useful for the book’ that I realised the friendship between Ron and Boothby was even closer than I thought. Inside the little suitcase was a personally inscribed copy of Boothby’s memoirs along with photographs of him with Ron at the flat in Eaton Square and also at a dinner party at the Society restaurant. There were also a number of typewritten notes from Boothby to Ron on crested paper, sent between the autumn of 1963 and May 1964.

  Although I didn’t understand it at the time, this was in fact a cache of evidence that Ron had been entrusting to Violet in case he needed it in future. It was not in any way salacious. There was no mention in it of Litvinoff and the rent boys or the rough-trade parties at the flat in Ashburn Gardens. Ron, like Reg, would never talk about any of this for fear of rumours of it getting back to Violet. This had always been the Twins’ one great fear about the scandal, and I didn’t learn the full truth about it all until much later. But the real reason why Ron had so carefully retained the contents of the suitcase was itself quite interesting. The truth was that, unlike Reg, Ron had always secretly admired the English upper classes. He didn‘t particularly like them but, as he told me once, he was convinced that ‘when things go wrong, the upper classes always save their own’, which was why he’d been so anxious to get in with Boothby. It was also the reason why he had kept the letters and the photographs of himself with Boothby, not necessarily for blackmail but to prove his friendship with one of the most important politicians in the land. One never knew when friendships such as this might come in useful.

  When Violet gave me the suitcase I still had no idea of the way that Arnold Goodman had covered-up the scandal. Still less did I envisage the political explosion that would have certainly followed had the truth about it been revealed. All that I could see from the letters and the otherwise completely harmless photographs of Boothby and Ron Kray together was that there had been a genuine, if unlikely, friendship between them, and that Boothby had been less than honest on the subject. Since this was clearly of importance to my story I decided to include the gist of it in my book, mentioning Boothby’s visits to Esmeralda’s Barn, his meals with Ron at the House of Lords and the Society restaurant, and how he met Vi Kray at Vallance Road. And that was all.

  Even so, I had what should have been a warning of trouble when I went away on holiday and returned to discover that my study had been turned over and several things were missing, including the letters from Boothby to Ron and a copy of the manuscript of my book. (Fortunately I had already deposited duplicates of the letters and the manuscript in my bank, before I went away.) Then Deborah Rogers, my agent, informed me that her office in Warren Street had also been broken into and her files on my book were also missing.<
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  We’ll never know who did it, although we had our suspicions at the time. Cape had read my book and were pleased with it, the artwork for the jacket was complete and the Observer was deciding when to run my three part serialisation. Then suddenly my world collapsed around me.

  It began with one of those ‘I think that you should know’ telephone calls from Lord Goodman in person. ‘I think that you should know that I’ve read parts of the manuscript of your book that contain highly libellous allegations against Lord Boothby,’ he informed me, but when I asked him to explain what libellous allegations he was refering to, he refused to say and then rang off.

  Shortly afterwards I received a call from Deborah telling me that Lord Goodman had also been in touch with my publishers. As a result, Cape were rejecting my book immediately on the grounds of libel.

  Then next day came the final blow when the Observer followed suit. (I hadn’t realised that among his other influential appointments, Lord Goodman was also the Chairman of the Observer Trust.) So in one day I had lost my publisher, my publisher’s advance and the promise of being serialised in a leading Sunday newspaper.

  My instincts were to fight it out on the grounds that I stood by every word I’d written. But every lawyer I consulted advised firmly against taking on the establishment. ‘Up against these people you will never win,’ they told me. As it was, they had broken me financially and I was left with no choice but to sell my house.

  About six months later, the publisher George Weidenfeld came to my rescue by taking my book over and publishing it late in 1972 under the title The Profession of Violence; but all references to the Boothby case had had to be removed. From the start the book was a success. Sales were good, and the reviews were excellent. The Twins hated it of course. Violet positively loathed it and told a reporter from the Daily Telegraph that I’d ‘betrayed her boys and told a lot of lies about them’. She never spoke to me again, which was a pity as I liked her; but I’ve discovered that this often happens to biographers, and one gets used to it.

  Then the unexpected happened. While telling the story of the Twins I had intended it to be a dire warning over the danger of organised crime in Britain. But the Twins rapidly discovered that far from damaging their reputation, my book was giving it the boost it needed. And not only did it bring in fame to them in prison, it was soon producing an extraordinary range of dedicated fans outside. So much for warning Middle England of the perils of people like the Krays. My book had made them more popular than ever, particularly among the new punk generation, and Time Out magazine was hailing it as ‘a cult book among the young’, many whom were actually regarding the Twins as heroes.

  Nor was this all. It’s always hard to find how fashions start, but it’s often claimed that The Profession of Violence started a whole new genre of so-called true crime books. It certainly became the one reliable source of information on the Twins and the whole Kray family, and started off a cottage industry of people writing books about them. At the last count there were more than thirty of such books, and the Krays now have a special section of their own in the ‘True Crime’ section in most bookshops. More important to the Twins, the book had suddenly inspired both Adam Faith and Bill Curbishley, the influential manager of the pop group The Who, to start thinking about making a major film about them.

  But although the Twins’ status as criminal celebrities was flourishing and adding to the fame they’d always wanted, it did little to offset the stifling regime of maximum security, which after their first few years in prison was beginning to destroy them.

  Not that they did anything to help themselves on the one occasion when, thanks again to Violet, they had a genuine chance to improve their quality of life. Violet had been in touch with Tom Driberg and had begged him, as an old friend of the Twins, to use his influence to get them reunited. It was thanks to him that they were finally permitted to share a cell in maximum security in Parkhurst.

  This lasted for several months, until a half-witted fellow prisoner began to irritate them unbearably and finally they lost their temper. The killer streak within them suddenly ignited and they set about him with a broken bottle. If a posse of warders hadn’t dragged them off they would probably have killed him. As it was, their victim needed more than a hundred stitches to save what remained of his face, and the Twins were once again separated. From now on they would have to cope with the deadening routine of maximum security without each other.

  Their reputation as celebrities did little to alleviate their troubles, and by the late seventies both of them were showing signs of going off their heads and becoming institutionalised. The curse of Melford Stevenson was upon them, and it looked as if their dreams of finding fame and immortality through crime were over.

  It was Ron who buckled first. By 1979 he was back on massive doses of stematol and was in a very bad way, having lost five stone in weight.

  It was around this time that I received a letter from Ron saying that he’d decided to follow the advice of the prison doctors to get himself re-certified insane and go to Broadmoor as the lawyers at his trial suggested.

  In his letter Ron said that he knew his life would be much better in Broadmoor than in maximum security: he wouldn’t need to wear a prison uniform and seemed to think that he would be able to more or less please himself over anything he did. He was obviously excited by the thought that in Broadmoor he could have all the sex he wanted. Only one thing worried him: the thought that once in Broadmoor he was in for life.

  In fact something a great deal more important than Ron Kray’s sex life was going to depend upon his move to Broadmoor. As time would show, his transfer to this famous ‘hospital for the criminally insane’ would bring a total transformation in the lives of both the Twins and help to magnify their legend as Britain’s best-remembered criminal celebrities.

  *

  In the bad old days, as Britain’s major institution for the criminal insane, Broadmoor was run on the lines of an ordinary prison. But after the war, when the Ministry of Health took over, it started to resemble a normal hospital, and thanks to a whole new range of drugs to restrain the mentally deranged, its inmates could be treated more as patients than as prisoners. Security remained all-important, but otherwise the ‘patients’ had much the same rights as non-criminal patients would enjoy in any other hospital. There were no restrictions on visitors, they could even speak to journalists if they wished, they could wear more or less what they liked and, within reason, they could buy anything from the world outside that they could afford. On the day Ron Kray entered Broadmoor, following ten years in maximum security, he must have felt as if he’d entered Heaven.

  With so many specialists in mental illness on the staff of Broadmoor there was no problem getting his medication reassessed, and his health rapidly improved. When I visited him there a few months later he was looking more like an opulent psychiatrist himself than the ghostly presence I remembered from the year before. Violet had brought him in several of his old Savile Row suits and still did his laundry for him every week, just as she’d done all those years before in Vallance Road. Thanks to her, his white shirts were as immaculate as ever and his solid gold Rolex watch shone brightly on his wrist. As we sat down in the big reception hall at Broadmoor and drank an alcohol-free lager I asked how things were going.

  ‘Well, John, they could be worse’ he said, smiling at a young male nurse he fancied.

  For Ron one of the most important things about being at Broadmoor was the right to see virtually any visitors he wanted, even those who had a criminal record. This meant that, apart from his mother, one of his earliest visitors was his brother Charlie, who by this point had been released, having served eight of the ten years awarded him by Melford Stevenson. Nor was there any problem when Freddy Foreman, also recently released from prison, arrived to see him and before long most of the leading members of the London underworld were traipsing out to Broadmoor to offer their respects to Ron.

  Reg, meanwhile, was still endur
ing the maximum security regime at Parkhurst, and growing increasingly despondent. Things grew worse when in early 1982 he was suddenly transferred to Long Lartin, a modern top security prison near Birmingham. From the moment he arrived he hated it, and a few weeks later he tried to slash his wrists. When Violet heard of this she rushed to Birmingham to see him, and was so shocked by what she saw that the moment she was back in London she went directly to the Home Office in Whitehall and demanded to see the Home Secretary.

  Unsurprisingly the Home Secretary was unavailable but Violet did meet an under-secretary with whom she pleaded for a ‘more humane treatment for my boy, Reggie. He is now a broken man, and I don’t want him to lose his reason.’ The under-secretary promised he would try to help but, apart from moving Reg back to Parkhurst, nothing happened.

  For more than a year now Violet had been suffering from cancer; she and Charlie had hidden the truth from the Twins, but it was getting worse and she got weaker. All she could think about was how the Twins would cope without her. She need not have worried so much because when she died, quite suddenly in August 1972, her funeral became the most valuable legacy she could have left them.

  Of course they were both shattered by her death and instantly applied for permission to attend the funeral. Although the Home Secretary was concerned that the funeral ‘could become some sort of circus’, he couldn’t possibly have refused; and the funeral of Violet Kray at Chingford parish church became something far more important to the legend of the Twins than a mere circus.

  This was their first public appearance after thirteen years of total exclusion from the outside world. Attempting to make them look ridiculous, the prison authorities had ordered them to be handcuffed to the two tallest warders in the prison service. But from the moment that the Twins appeared it was not them, but the pair of gangling warders, who looked ridiculous. If Violet’s funeral proved anything it was that here in the East End ‘her boys’ were still celebrities. Prayer book in hand and swathed in black, the East End’s very own film star Diana Dors led the mourners; and as Ron and Reg and brother Charlie entered the church together people started clapping. The reporter Paul Callan, writing on the front page of the following day’s Express, described ‘men with hands as large as babies’ heads grabbing at the passing brothers and hugging them with a wild East End passion.’