by Hyams, Jacky
Not one to give up, Elsie persisted: she even found Frank an apprenticeship as a setter with a local print firm, a distinct step on the ladder to what she rightly believed was a decent living. The apprenticeship was definitely a bit of a coup, since career opportunities locally for Hoxton boys leaving school early either meant working in the street markets – pretty much a closed shop because market stalls were run by families – or finding work in a trade like tailoring or French polishing (cabinet making). As a consequence, if a youngster could manage to get into printing it was seen very much as a chance in life. The only other options were boxing, illegal betting – or villainy.
Unfortunately, Frank had inherited his dad’s attraction to gambling, not such a great idea, especially while the laws around illegal gambling remained draconian until the early sixties, although the local constabulary was quite frequently accustomed to getting a ‘drink’ or a good ‘bung’ to look the other way. But teenage boys generally are not usually as savvy or clued up as they should be when it comes to running with the pack, ignoring the hazards – and are especially vulnerable to coming unstuck.
On Friday nights after work at Frank’s print firm, a small group of his workmates would covertly gather in the men’s toilet to play dice, placing bets for modest sums fresh out of their weekly pay packets. Unfortunately, a manager caught the group gambling. Frank was holding the dice. End of job and potential print career.
Viewed today, this seems like an unfair punishment for an innocent after-hours pastime, especially since they weren’t exactly high rollers. But the incident serves to highlight the very different black-and-white world that existed back then.
With hindsight, if this relatively minor incident had never taken place and Frances’s brother had kept his job and remained with the printing firm for some time, events might just have taken a different turn for the Sheas.
Sadly, there are several ‘if onlys’ in this story, not just those involving the actions of the individuals involved but many involving the historical and very important social changes that affected millions of lives in Britain during the fifties and sixties. This was just the first.
The loss of her son’s job fuelled Elsie’s slow-growing fear that somehow, despite the indications that her bright, pretty kids might have had reasonably good prospects in life, it would all go wrong and they’d be stuck, all of them, where they’d started. This was at the bottom of the heap, still far too close to the soot, the dark and the dodgy deal, rather than embarking on a gradual but steady ascent towards a respectable, honest sort of life in the clean, green suburbs.
Perhaps the tensions around Elsie’s fears for their future had a direct impact on Frances’s feelings or moods in her early teens. Elsie’s resentment that her husband wasn’t a steady provider gained momentum over the years, certainly. And the atmosphere in Ormsby Street would have been soured by Elsie’s disappointment when her son lost the job she’d resourcefully obtained for him. There is another important point to consider: teenagers can be prone to dramatic mood swings during puberty, including varying degrees of depression. Frances would have been around twelve years old at the time of the sacking. Given that it was revealed, much later, that Frances had suffered from depression even before her relationship with Reggie started, this could have been the point when Frances’s ‘bad nerves’, as her problems were later described, started to affect her. This factor may have put her in an even more vulnerable place emotionally than may have been commonly understood.
There is one startling piece of evidence that this was in fact Frances’s state of mind in her younger years, though the precise date when this was written down is not known. It takes the form of a section of a well-known Victorian poem, neatly handwritten and copied down by Frances, into the back pages of a lined notebook. Copying out a much-read poem or a section of a book was, back in the pre-electronic era, very popular with youngsters in the fifties and it is likely that Frances copied down this poem before the time when she started seeing Reggie Kray.
The poem is called Maud, written by the Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1855. Maud is a very long poem in three sections. Frances had copied out three fairly short sections from the poem into her notebook. Here are the extracts from Maud that Frances copied. Given the tragedy that unfolded, they make for chilling and prophetic reading:
Courage, poor heart of stone!
I will not ask thee why
Thou canst not understand
That thou art left for ever alone
Courage, poor stupid heart of stone:
Or if I ask thee why,
Care not thou to reply:
She is but dead, and the time is at hand
When thou shalt more than die.
O let the solid ground
not fail beneath my feet…
before my life has found
what some have found so sweet!
Then let come what come may
No matter if I go mad
I shall have had my day
Dead, long dead,
Long dead!
And here beneath it is all as bad
For I thought the dead had peace but it is not so;
To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?
But up and down and to and fro,
Ever about me the dead men go;
And then to hear a dead man chatter
Is enough to drive one mad.
Frances’s first passport described her as a bookkeeper. Yet her studies, though cut short, had exposed Frances to poetry, literature and language itself. Here was an intelligent, articulate young woman, someone who sought comfort or solace in words.
No matter how dark or disturbing the thoughts or ideas behind those words in Maud, the discovery of Frances copying down poetry from Tennyson is a very poignant and revealing indication of her thinking. It also indicates a degree of literacy you might not associate with a young Hoxton girl from that time.
Frances turned sixteen in September 1959. By this time, according to a letter written to Frances and their parents by her brother Frankie in August 1959, Frances was already working in the Strand in a clerical job.
At the time he wrote the letter, Frankie was nineteen. He sent it to his family while completing a stint in a young offenders’ institution called Blantyre House, in Cranbrook, Kent. (Today it is a Category C resettlement prison: an open prison.)
In the letter, he referred to a family visit, for which he thanked them, saying he was looking forward to the following month when he hoped to see them again.
‘In the meantime, you all dress well and look well,’ he wrote. As for Frances, he went on, ‘Well, Franny, you are a proper Italian rebel now, especially now you have a job in the Strand.’
Frank told his dad he was looking younger without his son around: ‘…suppose this is because you’ve got no worries who looks smartest.’ As for his mother, he suggested she cheer up a bit, saying, ‘You take too much to heart. Same as me.’
Why did Frances opt to leave school at fifteen? One can only guess why she didn’t continue her studies or aim for university. However, given the fast-moving social changes of the times, the most likely reason was probably the desire to go out into the world and earn, given the household tensions around her parents’ relationship to money, as well as the huge, ever increasing demand for office staff in London at that time.
With Frances now out working in London’s West End, and despite her disappointment about her son’s behaviour, Elsie must surely have been happy about her daughter’s progress. After all, as a mother, she still had every reason to hope that Frances, rapidly evolving into a well-groomed beauty with a wonderful smile and those bewitchingly penetrating eyes, would be well placed to attract the right man to lead her to the altar and the respectable family life her mother dreamed of.
What Elsie didn’t know, however, was that at that point in the autumn of 1959, there was a man who was already seriously smitten by the charms of her pretty, big-eyed daug
hter. And like Elsie, this man also harboured big dreams.
The trouble was, this man, already in his mid-twenties, wanted it all, anything a man could possibly desire in the whole wide world: money, travel, expensive cars, beautiful clothes, a lovely home, a beautiful wife and children. He wasn’t quite there yet. But partly because of his own growing confidence and partly because his mum had always insisted he was part of something ‘special’, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t take whatever it was he wanted. Everything was ripe for the taking.
And so began Reggie Kray’s obsession with a beautiful, innocent young teenage girl. She wasn’t the first person to capture his possessive eye for beauty and innocence, not by a long chalk. Yet in the wake of this intense, unrelenting obsession lay emotional turmoil, fear – and destruction. There would be no escape for the heart-rending emotional turbulence that lay ahead for the Shea family. Nor would there be any escape for the man that instigated it all: Reggie Kray.
CHAPTER 3
THE MAN ON THE DOORSTEP
But who was Reggie Kray, other than an East Ender in his mid-twenties whose entire life revolved around crime, extortion and violence – and the intense relationship with his twin brother, his other half?
Driven by an unquestionable talent for manipulation – via the ongoing threat of bloodshed and aggression – and a fervently cherished desire to be respected by all as serious underworld players, by now the Kray twins were already local heroes: by the late fifties you’d have been hard pushed to find anyone in the East End of London who hadn’t heard of them – and what they were reputed to have done. The twins made sure of that.
The fifties marked their inexorable rise to notoriety from local bombsite gang warfare to heavy-duty gangster chic. Though along the way the brothers’ own somewhat chaotic relationship with each other had started to shift. Physically, since childhood they had fought each other with astonishing ferocity. Ronnie would goad, taunt; Reggie would react. As a two-headed beast they were capable of extreme violence and brutality. Yet their personalities were at odds: Reggie was more controlled and calculating, less prone to fantasy and irrational, explosive impulse. His twin was delusional, irrational, untroubled by boundaries.
At sixteen, they had turned professional boxers, winning every bout they fought – known around the streets of Bethnal Green as the wildest of street fighters among the local gangs they already ran. In secret.
They would have been just like the thousands of other street-fighting teenage thugs in their taste for violence – except for their penchant for truly vicious attack, sometimes cutting or slashing rather than punching. Ronnie preferred cutlasses, knives over razors – more power in the slashing. Nevertheless they were cunning in their ability to get off the hook.
A brutal beating and kicking of a local Hackney boy, involving a bicycle chain, saw the two sixteen-year-olds briefly remanded in custody, though the subsequent Old Bailey trial was eventually dismissed due to lack of evidence. (A lead witness was quietly informed that giving evidence against the twins would result in a razor attack.)
Another teenage court appearance for assaulting a policeman resulted in probation – mostly thanks to the court appearance of the twins’ long-term champion of their respectability, their kindness to their elders, Father Hetherington. He was the long-term vicar of St James’s Church in Bethnal Green Road and knew the twins as polite, helpful, caring youngsters. They never went to church but could impress with their good manners and polite ways.
In December 1951 when the three Kray brothers fought, with star billing, at London’s Albert Hall, the promise of a professional career as sporting champions peaked – and promptly faded.
Everyone knew by then that Ron was too vicious, too undisciplined, to make it big time in the profession. That night, he lost his temper and was disqualified. Reggie, far more calculating, had everything a man required to be a boxing champion. He won. Their brother Charlie lost.
Yet the twins’ growing reputation for excessive violence outside the ring meant their career prospects dwindled right there and then: the boxing authorities rejected them, thanks to the twins’ assault on the policeman referred to above. Reggie was never going to seek out a solo career, anyway. The bonds of twinship were far too tight.
National Service came next: in peacetime Britain from 1947–59, men between seventeen and twenty-one were required to sign up in the armed forces for eighteen months. The twins’ National Service record from 1952–54 proved to be ‘a catalogue of disaster – for the army’, as Reggie Kray once described it.
True to family custom, their National Service history saw them going on the run for several months until they were caught and court marshalled, imprisoned for nine months in a military prison at Shepton Mallet in Somerset in the southwest of England.
In the end, it was a dishonourable discharge. The duo merely used the imprisonment as a career opportunity – to establish contact with other criminals, and to enhance their own reputation.
Within weeks of freedom, the twins, now twenty, had sorted out an operations base, a shabby, run-down billiard hall: the Regal, near Bethnal Green in Eric Street, Mile End. The place was a wreck, already marked down for closure.
They simply moved in, established their presence and within days the word got round: this was where to find the twins. After a few weeks during which the Regal mysteriously became the scene of a series of violent outbreaks and nightly troubles, it all went quiet again. The owner, a sensible man, had accepted an offer from the twins: £5 a week rent and the Regal Billiard Hall went into operation: a well-run refreshment bar and HQ for their varied activities, it became Kray Central.
This, then, was their launch pad, the place where they started to gather around them a group of villains of all ages, an early fulfilment of Ron’s lurid and ever increasing fantasies of forming an all powerful criminal ‘firm’, headed by the twins, men who relished playing the genial hosts, the ringmasters, pushing everyone’s buttons and reaping the benefits of fear. The billiard hall was their first stage, if you like, for the ‘actor crims’. It set them on the road to power.
By 1956, they had established themselves as a distinct force to be reckoned with, running various kinds of protection rackets in their ‘manor’, the areas around Hackney, Mile End and out to Walthamstow, moving beyond protecting illegal bookies and gaming clubs – an income they dubbed ‘pensions’ – extending their remit to ‘protecting’ other places, such as used car lots. Any car dealer daft enough to refuse to pay up would get a night-time visit from the twins’ gang members, armed with sledgehammers and spray-paint cans.
Absolute loyalty was demanded from those who worked for the twins. The rewards were ‘pensions’ for those families of the ‘aways’ (men serving prison sentences) and a helping hand for these people when they came out of jail. Word soon got round the criminal fraternity: the twins, ran the legend, looked after their own. There was some truth in this. But it was a devious ploy. The more you owed them in loyalty, the more they could ask in return. This way, they didn’t even have to dirty their hands by thieving or conning people themselves, because they got others to do it for them. In the end, such requests would extend to murder.
Reggie was by far the more businesslike of the pair. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t just about creating a reputation of fear of their violence: he saw it as a chance to make real money from the gambling clubs, pubs and businesses that paid them for protection.
As a clearing house, the billiard hall was a cover for many things: locked cubicles for thieves’ tools, stolen goods stashed around the back, transport arranged for robberies, percentages taken on other crims’ activities. All highly lucrative. And Reggie was well organised. Ronnie schemed over the battles and gun warfare, weaponry being his major obsession, becoming a powerful criminal leader in the style of Al Capone his sole desire. He even dressed like his hero, wearing a floor-length belted cashmere overcoat and adopting slicked-back hair.
His twin, however, coul
d see bigger and better times ahead with the lifestyle that only money can buy. Ronnie was increasingly violent, just for the fun of it. Initially, he’d been viewed as the dominant force, with Reggie spending much time trying to restrain his twin’s excesses – or clearing up after him. But then, one night, Ronnie went too far. There was a row with a rival gang at a local pub where Ronnie and two others set about a man and nearly killed him in a psychotic attack; as a consequence, Ronnie was given a three-year jail sentence in November 1956.
This was a turning point. For the first time since they were three years old, when a bout of diphtheria separated them in hospital, the twins were apart. (Diphtheria is reputed to have changed Ronnie for good, making him much slower and more awkward than his twin.)
Reggie, troubled by concern for his twin, did everything he could to ensure Ronnie got whatever he needed while he was in prison. But he also started to focus more clearly on his idea of himself as an individual – and what he wanted. It was Reggie Kray’s first taste of adult life as a separate identity: real freedom.
It was a turbulent time. After a year in prison, Ronnie was moved to Camp Hill Prison on the Isle of Wight – and went completely crazy. Paranoid and psychotic, he wound up in a straightjacket and was certified insane. Then, at the beginning of 1958, he was transferred to a mental hospital, Long Grove, in Epsom, Surrey. At one point he insisted his twin was not Reggie at all, but a Russian spy impersonating his brother.
This, sadly, was just one of Ronnie Kray’s many fantasies. Yet there was a tiny kernel of truth in the madness. Because Reggie, no longer in daily contact with his twin, had started to become much more confident, less worried or suspicious of everyone around him. More his own man.
