Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  Outside these houses there was a cold water tap in the tiny backyard with a mangle in a lean-to sheltered area for wringing clothes out on washing days. A tin bath usually hung outside too. Bathing itself was mostly limited to a once-weekly visit to the local baths, price sixpence; the rest of the time families made do with a ‘strip wash’ of water heated up from a kettle or on a range.

  As for the detested Anderson shelter in the backyard, it lived on, mostly because it was handy to store precious coal supplies for the small fires lit each morning to heat up the front room and back bedroom.

  Today, if you talk to former residents of the Ormsby Street area they nostalgically recall families keeping chickens in their gardens – or even pigeons. They talk of the two men who would knock on every door each week to collect the rent on behalf of the landlord, usually between twelve and fourteen shillings a week. They remember with great affection the horse-drawn carts that continued to deliver bottles of milk in the area for many years, and the rag-and-bone man, collecting any unwanted household junk. Or they tell of the chilly outside toilet with its wooden seat, with newspaper neatly cut into squares and hung on a hook as a substitute for proper toilet paper, such as Izal, which was also considered something of a luxury item in the early post-war years (paper was rationed, too). At weekends, the newspaper squares might be replaced with much-prized tissue paper, used to wrap the bread that was purchased from nearby Hoxton Market.

  Most of all, though, they remember the long-lost spirit of those poverty-stricken surrounds, the neighbourly camaraderie, the open front doors, the kids happily playing outside, the bonding, if you like, that had helped them all get through the war years and beyond.

  The Sheas and the Krays didn’t exactly prosper but they managed somehow. Frank Shea Senior, like many men in his somewhat unsteady post-war position, found it convenient to work on the fringes of the law as a street bookie, picking up betting slips and cash from people placing bets on the gee-gees or the dogs, usually in local pubs or out on the street.

  Street betting continued to be an illegal activity across the country for many years after the war, with heavy fines for anyone caught organising it or ‘running a book’ on the street – until the gambling laws eventually changed in 1960 and betting shops began to proliferate across the land. Legal or not, being a street bookie meant ready cash and, given the national passion for ‘having a bet’, something akin to a steady ‘wage’ by Frank’s standards, those of a Hoxton lad.

  Elsie, alas, was never going to feel happy or secure with this lifestyle. The family needed every penny and by the late 1940s, once her two ‘war babies’ were at school she could earn again at the sewing machine. There was a lot of nagging going on in the Shea household about Frank ‘getting a proper job’, though it would be many years before he relented and found a respectable clerical occupation.

  Okay, the bookie money was there, on the kitchen table with its oilcloth, regular as clockwork. Big, crisp white fivers, ten-bob (ten-shilling) notes, carefully counted out. There was enough to make sure the kids were properly clothed and fed, the bills paid. But it wasn’t a respectable way of life, was Elsie’s beef. Oh how she wanted to be decent – and being a street bookie’s wife usually meant you were stuck, just like most of the women she’d grown up with, with a husband who was happy with the ducking and diving – and she was always aware that the law, or unexpected circumstances, could trip you up and send you sprawling.

  Yet like so many women then, Elsie had no option other than to accept her lot in life. Where could a woman with children go, without money or resources? Violet too accepted her lot, put up with Charlie’s absences, his feckless ways and his boozy violence; she had her twins, and they were the sole focus of her life.

  In Elsie’s case, though, this trim, smartly groomed woman with ideas of a better life never stopped resenting her husband’s preference for easy money with no strings attached. She too poured all her love and ambition into her kids, sitting up long into the night, using her skills as a first-rate seamstress to make most of their clothes, driven by pride, and the knowledge that her two were going to be the most smartly turned out, well-shod kids in the street.

  It worked. By the time Frank and Frances were attending primary school – Frank at Laburnum Street Primary (now the Bridge Academy) a five-minute walk away from Ormsby Street and, four years later, Frances at Randal Cremer, a big Victorian building and conveniently just across the street from the Shea home – it was generally acknowledged by everyone in Ormsby Street that the Shea children were always well turned out. In fact, they looked as smart as any ‘posh kids’ you might see in the newspaper advertisements for Start-rite shoes. Elsie could walk tall around the area, clutching the hands of her two, one either side, and be proud of them, these pretty children who had inherited their mum’s big dark eyes and thick, lustrous brown hair.

  This focus on appearance and looking smart wasn’t that unusual for the times, when people tended to wear outfits they’d made themselves – or, if they could afford it, had specially made for them. Men always wore hats. Long before the days of man-made fibres, winter overcoats were made of pure wool – or trimmed with real fur. Shoes were shined and buffed. And, of course, many East Enders were renowned for their love of looking sharp and well dressed when the occasion demanded – and for using their wellhoned entrepreneurial skills in trading with each other to get the best.

  But what is most interesting about Elsie’s determination for her children to look well dressed is that both Frances and Frank ‘learned’ the importance of a smart appearance and looking good. As they grew up, both became quite fixated with their appearance, how they showed themselves to the world. This trait never left either of them.

  Certainly, they inhabited a world where by tradition, ‘street’ people tended to strut their stuff in their finest clothing, irrespective of their humble surrounds. But for these two mothers, the importance they placed on making a good impression, looking utterly respectable, raised their kids way above the lawless crowd around them. Thanks to their mothers, these children grew up with very clear ideas about behaviour and good manners. In the twins’ case, though, their demeanour was totally schizophrenic: before their elders they were impressively polite. Behind the scenes, as it were, it was a very different story.

  Much later, one theme of the oft-repeated stories about Frances and Reggie Kray’s relationship was how Reggie was always buying Frances expensive clothes, gold jewellery, anything she wanted. It was perfectly true. With his talent for control, Reggie liked to have considerable influence over the way Frances looked – for instance, he preferred her with the high, upswept hairdos, so fashionable at the time. Yet Frances already lived as part of a fashion-conscious clan: had Reggie had been less interested in appearances, it’s unlikely she’d have looked anything other than the stylishly dressed, superbly coiffed young woman seen time after time in the photos taken at Reggie’s side.

  As for the Kray family, they too were imbued with the ‘looking good’ gene. Looking superbly immaculate and expensively sharp-suited became a major factor in the twins’ ability to impress and impose, an attitude they struck to fantastic effect. They wore cashmere, vicuna (a very fine, expensive wool) or camel hair overcoats, handmade suits, whiter than white shirts, pressed to perfection by Violet, and slimline ties – at a time when much of the world around them remained shabby and down at heel.

  ‘We’re vicious, elegant bastards,’ Ronnie Kray would boast, many years on, after they’d been locked up for good. This was a truth they revelled in. The smart expensive clothes were part of their armoury – not quite as effective as the collection of weapons they stashed in their bedroom as teenagers, for use when heading off to the Tottenham Royal dance hall for the night: knuckledusters, Bowie knives, coshes, Gurkha knives, cut-throat razors, even a surgeon’s scalpel.

  The Kray twins hadn’t exactly shone in the classroom, though Reggie was the more alert of the two. Elsie’s children were bright. Despite th
e big, mixed classes of forty or more, the ready distractions outside the classroom of the local Saturday kids’ cinema club, and the boys’ endless ‘playing out’ on the bombsites, recreating the furious battles they’d already lived through, collecting shrapnel or swapping cigarette cards, both Shea children did well at primary, especially when it came to reading and writing. Frances had an aptitude for arithmetic, too.

  By the early fifties, changes to the education system were in place. The minimum school-leaving age had been raised from fourteen, as it had been in Elsie and Frank Senior’s day, to fifteen. New types of secondary school were created to follow the Eleven-Plus exam, which streamed kids according to results into grammar school, secondary modern or technical colleges. Frank, to his mum’s delight, passed the exam and was offered a grammar-school place. Frances too already seemed to have an excellent aptitude for the written word, so Elsie’s hopes were high that Frances would also be bright enough to pass the exam to get her to a good school.

  But what was she like in childhood you wonder? Photos of Frances in Randal Cremer days show a cheerful, chubby little girl with a happy grin.

  Paulette Jones grew up in the area. She was in the same class as Frances at Randal Cremer at one stage when they were both aged eight. She vividly recalled, most of all, Frances’s abundant mass of hair.

  ‘She was quite plump with longish dark curly hair,’ Paulette recalled. ‘We always called her Franny or Fran. After Randal Cremer we went off to different grammar schools. I went to Central Foundation at Liverpool Street and Frances went to Dalston County, a girls’ school in Shacklewell Lane, off Stoke Newington Road.

  ‘I can still see her in my mind’s eye in a dark belted raincoat and a hat perched on the back of her head, because of the amount hair she had. The coat and hat would have been part of the uniform for Dalston County. I wanted to go with Franny and some of the others to Dalston County but my mother said Central Foundation was a better school.’

  The discovery that Frances was a grammar-school girl, taking the mile-and-a-half bus journey each day up the Kingsland Road to Dalston County, paints a different picture to the way Frances has usually been portrayed. Iconic and immaculate as her appearance became in adulthood, the general assumption was always that she was not especially intelligent, more of a good-looking clothes horse or ‘arm candy’, as many people suggested when I first started researching Frances’s story. But this low-roofed modern building with tennis courts and gardens was a school where the emphasis was on academic achievement rather than sporting ability.

  As I started to realise when I contacted those who had ‘known’ Frances as an adult, the men who had met her socially, although they wouldn’t admit it to me, would never have had any real conversation with her anyway – because she was on Reggie’s arm. This was one very good reason why the ‘arm candy’ theory had prevailed down the years, with its consequent implication that Frances was a bit dumb.

  This lack of conversation was not simply because of any shyness or reticence on her part, but because in those days, especially in the East End pub and club environment of the late fifties/early sixties, real conversation between the sexes was limited when couples stepped out to socialise. It involved little more than pleasantries.

  Wherever these men sat within their own social pecking order – the well-respected local publican, for instance, or the host or club owner – social talk with other men’s wives or girlfriends tended to be brief. Polite. Respectful. But brief. In this macho environment where a wrong word or look could develop, quickly, into a punch-up or a furious fight, everyone understood the rules: men didn’t even attempt to chat freely to someone else’s bird, whatever the circumstances. ‘Allo Frances. All right, love?’ That was the limit.

  This, I began to realise, had as much to do with the social mores of the times as the well-documented fear of incurring the wrath of Reggie Kray, though sadly this fear would prevail continuously throughout Frances’s life – and even beyond.

  There were other factors that made the grammar-school girl discovery a fascinating insight. I too attended a grammar school in the area in the fifties and well remember it as a strict, disciplined ‘old school’ place of education, with considerable emphasis on preparing girls for A-level passes and university. It had a curriculum that included languages (French or German), Latin, English Literature and Art, with school outings to places like Paris and big evening events at the school, such as Speech Day. At that point, the grammar-school education offered opportunities that had never ever been available to bright working-class youngsters, wherever they lived. These post-war changes were created, specifically, to give ordinary children a chance in life via education.

  If it was all a far cry from what my own family had known in their personal East End working-class background, what would it have meant to Elsie, a girl reaching adulthood in thirties Shoreditch, where ‘travel’ usually meant a train trip to the Kent or Essex seaside – if you were lucky?

  Imagine a young Frances in her navy blue blazer, matching heavy wool skirt, blue-and-white striped shirt, orange tie and summer boater hat among a crowd of other chattering, lively grammar-school girls, boarding the bus going down the Kingsland Road, just as I did (though I travelled in the opposite direction). This image places the context of her early teens somewhat in contrast with the historical, somewhat dismissive, assumptions made about her because of her association with the Krays.

  This girl was never a brainless bimbo or a simpering dummy. Far from it.

  By the time Frances reached her early teens, life in the Shea household was starting to improve, as it was for many millions. After a decade, the scars of war were starting to fade away. Consumerism, heavily influenced by what was happening in the USA, was on its way from across the pond. Nineteen fifty-five saw the launch of fish fingers, TV advertising (Britain’s first ever TV ad was for Gibbs SR toothpaste), a brand new passenger terminal at London’s Heathrow Airport, and an overall increase in people’s wages. There was full employment too. Moreover, the first generation of post-war kids were starting to spend their pocket money, albeit modestly at first, on pop music records.

  The term ‘teenager’ was coined around 1955, at the time of the hit single, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and the Comets, taken from the movie Blackboard Jungle, and the following year, rock ’n’ roll was on its way across the world with the cultural explosion that was Elvis and his first UK hit, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

  Screaming, frenzied young teenage girls erupting into screams every time Elvis wiggled his hips had been seen before in the US, during the short reign of forties idol the young, skinny Frank Sinatra, worshipped by the bobby-soxers (his fans, so named because of their youth). But in Britain, teen power was a relatively – and startlingly – new phenomenon that grew with every month that passed. Frances couldn’t help but soak up the magazines, hear the music, admire the clothes – and, of course, she was starting to be aware of the opposite sex.

  An interesting letter to her from a friend called Sylvia living in Scawfell Street, Shoreditch and dated 31 July 1956, revealed that Frances, two months off her thirteenth birthday, was holidaying at the seaside in Hastings.

  The short letter gave Frances all the local gossip: Sylvia, an older girl, informed Frances that she was going to try for a holiday job at Woolworths in Dalston Junction. The pay was £3 a week, she wrote. Another local friend, Pat, was in hospital, having her tonsils out.

  ‘And how are the boys?’ Sylvia’s letter concluded. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t like them, because you do.’

  This indicates her friends had noticed that twelve-year-old Frances was already extremely attractive to the opposite sex.

  The late Tony Lambrianou, a Bethnal Green boy eventually imprisoned for fifteen years in 1969 for his part in the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, remembered meeting Frances for the first time one day in 1956. He already knew Frankie Shea from primary school.

  ‘One day I came out of work and saw Fr
ankie Shea at the junction of Hackney Road and Weymouth Terrace, which is near where his family came from. His sister Frances came along. She would have been about twelve or thirteen, very quiet and very beautiful with big eyes,’ Lambrianou recalled in his book, Inside The Firm.

  The power of Frances’s dazzling allure to men was already there, right from the start.

  The shift from teen to adult is rarely easy, an emotionally confusing, even fraught time for families. For fifties East End families with teenagers it was an unusually precarious time because while the memory – and evidence – of wartime was still there, all around them, the powerful popular distractions of those mid-fifties years were completely unlike any that previous generations had known.

  Post-war dads had never known what it was to be a teenager, as such, or what it was like to wear clothes specially aimed at youthful fashion tastes, or to be courted by the powerful forces promoting the music, the movies, the new fashions for youngsters. They’d grown up in an era where fathers alone ruled the household, often with an iron rod. Young people back then did what their parents told them to do, and tended not to question their authority, regardless of their circumstances.

  Yet their offspring, now with their own money or spending power, even before they reached their twenties or marriage, didn’t see this authoritarian style of the past in the same way. And they didn’t see why they should listen. Phrases like ‘teenage rebellion’ entered everyday language for the first time.

  There’s no reason to believe that out-and-out rebellion was the order of the day in the Shea household. But there were certainly domestic ups and downs. Elsie had to work at the sewing machine, in the local factory, as long and hard as she could, but her husband, while often out of the house taking bets or in the pub, wasn’t as dedicated to the concept of hard slog as Elsie wished. And Frankie Junior, as attractive as his sister and perfectly capable of passing his exams if he concentrated and took it all seriously, wasn’t very interested in the opportunities Elsie cherished for her kids. Frank had the ability to learn, there was no question of that. But education didn’t suit him and he left school at fifteen.