Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  She didn’t seem greedy for more; it was always Reggie who’d carefully wait for her to mention she liked something – then he’d rush out and get it, to surprise her. So it was sheer torment now to look at her photo and imagine other men approaching her, admiring her charms.

  This correspondence with Frances revealed the truth of Reggie’s obsession with her. But Frances’s own responses were mature and clear thinking, given her age. And it was true, her priorities were not material. This was demonstrated in a letter from Frances to Reggie dated December 1960. In the letter, she took him to task, in no uncertain terms, about his habit of walking in front of her when they strolled down the street. As far as she was concerned, she wrote, this showed a lack of respect. Buying her presents and taking her out was fine. But walking in front of her was not – it was demeaning. She also suggested that he was not being fair in only sending the precious visiting orders for visits to her alone; his parents ought to be able to visit him too.

  There’s the normal day-to-day trivia in the letter: a painful visit to the dentist, the new flock wallpaper the Sheas had had put in upstairs, the Christmas gifts she’d be getting for his family, including cousin Rita’s new baby, Kimmie. She wasn’t sure about getting a present for brother Charlie’s little boy, Gary, whom she thought was quite ‘spoilt’, but she’d probably get him one anyway. The letter also mentioned a Christmas works do – she thought it might be boring. But, she added, it might be fun to see the partners at her firm get tipsy.

  This was the sort of letter any girl might write to a boyfriend in 1960, but the comments about not walking in front of her reveal a spirited young woman with a clear idea of appropriate behaviour between the sexes. And the mention of the visiting order also indicates a strong sense of family obligation. That was how she’d been raised, in the way of East End families then.

  But this letter was unsent, addressed but not posted. Did she have second thoughts after writing it because it was too strongly worded?

  Yet again, Frances’s writings revealed a very different girl to the compliant ‘arm candy’ previously portrayed. How she squared all this with the knowledge that the man she was planning to marry was a criminal, serving a prison sentence, one half of a double act with a reputation for excessive violence, is not easy to imagine.

  You can only assume that with the blithe innocence of youth, she believed Reggie when he promised her so much in the future, so much of the respectable stability her mother had always dreamed of but never found. The house in a leafy suburb. The freedom from worry about money. It would have seemed very attractive.

  Moreover, the promises he gave her in this prison correspondence extended to his own behaviour. Initially, in a letter dated 15 August 1960, he promised he would stop boozing all the time and mend his ways:

  ‘I will definitely cut out the drinking… how right you were about the drinking.’

  Then, in a letter dated 5 October 1960, he repeated these promises. In this letter he claimed he realised what a fool he was to ‘split our nights up’ by going to clubs after taking her out to the pictures and other places – although, he added, when they first started going out he did stop drinking for a while.

  Now, in his cell, he swore to her he could see how futile a lot of his nocturnal ways were. And, again, he realised that much of the advice she’d given him now rang true. Her ‘wise head for her age’ and her understanding, he concluded, reassured him that in the future ‘you and I will be happy’.

  In the light of what eventually happened, you can’t help wishing that he’d been able to follow through with all this. And perhaps he did mean it all at the time. Yet the promises were hollow – once reunited with his twin, the clubbing and the nightly boozing would continue: it was part of their joint DNA.

  What else is revealed by these letters? The same October letter shows a romantic side, another hallmark of the Kray twins’ bizarre personalities: brutal men with a penchant for extreme sentimentality.

  As a plane flew over the prison, it reminded Reggie of their night flight to Jersey and the way Frances had held his hand on the plane. Another memory he cherished was when she would come back off the beach and walk through the hotel ‘with just your swimsuit and jumper on ha ha – and all the old squares would look at you.’

  One of his most pleasant memories, he wrote, was the time round Frances’s house when she sat on his lap and put her arms around his neck. That night, he wrote, he really felt she loved him and he felt very proud. And happy.

  Yet Reggie’s jealousy, his fear of losing her, was never far away. In the same letter he warned her that when she went out dancing with her friends, one of them might try to egg her on to let someone take her home, saying, ‘It won’t do any harm, he’ll never know’ and then she might be paired off with ‘some Teddy Boy’ wanting to satisfy his ego. (A ‘Teddy Boy’ was a fifties youth attired in a long-jacketed ‘Zoot’ suit with a slicked-down greasy hairdo, often with a quiff at the front, wearing crepe-soled shoes and a ‘Slim Jim’ narrow tie. To Reggie, with his social aspirations and obsession with cleanliness and neatness, gangs of Teddy Boys were a lower form of life.)

  Reggie knew Frances had a mind of her own, he said. He knew people couldn’t sway her. But he’d seen these things happen. So perhaps she might understand why he couldn’t help worrying.

  But what did she think of Ronnie, who was now beginning to really enjoy himself in charge of Esmeralda’s Barn, spending huge amounts of money on beautiful clothes from Savile Row and Jermyn Street and dreaming up bizarre stunts like buying a chimpanzee from Harrods, dressing it up and sitting it at the gambling table? There is a hint in this prison correspondence in October 1960 that Frances was already wary, feeling uncomfortable around Ron. She’d obviously made this clear to Reggie.

  ‘If you don’t want to go drinking with Ron, don’t go,’ wrote Reggie. Yes, he knew how Frances felt – but his twin didn’t mean any harm. She’d got it wrong. Ronnie was surely trying to be nice. After all, Frances was ‘getting along nice with him and my family’. This was true, insofar as Frances certainly felt comfortable around cousin Rita, who’d recently had a baby girl.

  Frances had eagerly taken the baby out sometimes. ‘Have you been pushing Rita’s pram lately, I’d have liked to have seen you,’ wrote Reggie – and Frances happily posed for photos with Kimmie on her lap.

  By the beginning of 1961, however, some of Reggie’s worries and concerns about outside gossip reaching Frances were surfacing. In a letter dated 2 January 1961, where a friend had obviously told Frances about a girl Reg had previously been seen around with, he was quick to reassure her.

  ‘I’m not surprised someone tried to mix it for me,’ he wrote. ‘But I never took her out hardly.’ As for getting engaged, he wrote, until he’d met Frances ‘the idea had never occurred to me.’

  Yet the web he was now starting to weave around the Shea family was, by this point, increasing rapidly. In the same letter he wrote ‘glad your dad is on the firm’, a reference to Frankie Senior starting to work for the twins, as promised, as a croupier at the Regency Club in Stoke Newington, not a move that made Elsie dance for joy. The extra cash was needed. But that was it.

  But this was how the Kray twins hooked people in: they needed money, the Krays played benevolent local guv’nors, took them on the payroll or, in some cases, dished out handouts. First had been Frankie Junior, young, cute, impressionable, in awe of the twins, thrilled to be driving Reggie’s luxury cars. Now Frankie Senior was being reeled in – alongside his daughter. Control. Money. All disguised with civility, kindness and good manners. It was astonishingly effective. Unwittingly and unwillingly, so far as Elsie, at least, was concerned, they were all now involved with the Kray twins’ world.

  Given the intensity of Reggie’s obsession with Frances, you might expect these prison letters to carry some hint of sexuality, but the correspondence seems relatively tame.

  In January, Reggie had written that he’d heard 1961 was going to be a ro
mantic year ‘and short skirts are going to be the fashion again’. He reckoned Frances had very nice knees. And when he did get out, he reminded her, ‘I’ll be lively enough… like a tiger out of a cage, ha ha, so save some energy. Can’t have you saying it’s time to go home.’

  Even towards the end of his sentence, the jealousy continued to dominate his thinking.

  ‘Please don’t go dancing’ he wrote in April 1961.

  No harm in dancing, of course, but he couldn’t stand it if she were dancing with anyone while he wasn’t around. Then he implored Frances to stay away from ‘sordid places’ like jazz clubs, saying, ’The atmosphere is not your kind. You belong in a much better atmosphere.’

  By the summer of 1961, Reggie was free. Even before going home to Vallance Road, he went straight round to Ormsby Street to see his girl. She’d lightened her dark brown hair to a reddish colour and had applied for her first passport, in anticipation of the trips abroad he’d promised her so often.

  In July, she received that first passport. Yet the following month, Reggie took her on a motoring trip to Devon and Cornwall. In this, and the trips that were to follow, they were accompanied by Reggie’s friends, which might have initially been reassuring to the Sheas, but probably didn’t leave the couple with much time alone. The truth was, Reggie needed to have his minders around wherever he went.

  Yet Frances must have been delighted taking a trip to what was still a somewhat remote, very pretty part of Britain. She even carefully noted the places they’d visited in a lined notebook. There’s no hint of anything other than brief descriptions of what she saw. But it was obviously memorable enough to commit pen to paper.

  This is the gist of what she wrote in the notebook:

  1961 CORNWALL-DEVON

  They drove from Exeter to Brixham, near Torquay, where they met ‘a German bookie’. At Brixham they stayed with a ‘Mrs Parkington’ at a place ‘in a private road after the Links Hotel, Devon.’ Then they took a ferry to Dartmouth, stopped at an inn for some cider, rested ‘near the coastline’, then drove to Plymouth and stayed at the Continental Hotel. ‘Went to different hotel in the evening’ Frances noted.

  From Plymouth they’d driven to Looe, with its fishing harbour, and Polperro. Then they drove down to Falmouth in Cornwall, from there across to Land’s End and then St Ives, which Frances noted as ‘a very hilly seaside resort, rather commercialised’. They’d stayed at Mrs Davies’s farm, near Polperro ‘and in a guest house at Land’s End’.

  They’d also stayed at another farm ‘near some horse riding stables, run by a Mr Lightfoot’. They’d gone shark fishing at Looe all day long and had also taken speedboats out at Looe. They went horse riding. Then their travels took them up to Bude on the Devon/Cornwall border and then to Clovelly in Devon: ‘a quaint village on the side of a hill, harbour at the bottom.’

  They travelled on to Saunton where they’d stayed at a guest house, and from there to Woolacombe, Devon: ‘Beautiful beaches, golden sands, v. extensive, sea is dangerous, terrific speed of waves.’ They then drove to Ilfracombe where they shopped.

  Horse riding. Shark fishing. Speedboats. Hotels. Nightclubs. All courtesy of an older man, a rich, attractive, immaculate boyfriend, who liked to kiss and cuddle but was ‘respectful’ and didn’t attempt to go further. Okay, there were all these blokes around him. But they were his friends, after all.

  By taking Frances on such trips, Reggie was showing off the good life, splashing around the easy money he’d now become accustomed to. This, he was saying, is how it will be: we’ll go places, see everything, have the best.

  It was all in the starkest contrast to everything Frances had known – or anyone she knew had experienced, come to that, all part of the fantasy life Reggie had mapped out for the future.

  Frances was wise, intelligent and curious about the world. But she was simply far too young to be cynical at this point. Or even fearful. An East End girl from a very tough, bleak post-war background would never have questioned the presence of his friends on those trips back then. Younger men traditionally moved around in small groups, in the street or the pub. Or, in the case of Bethnal Green, in gangs. For now, at least, she was enjoying what Reggie was showing her. Even if he did go a bit over the top at times with his generosity.

  ‘She was not a grabber, not at all,’ recalled Rita Smith. ‘She used to say, “When I go out with Reggie, I don’t like saying I like anything because he goes out and buys it for me.”

  ‘They used to go up the West End quite a lot. If she would see something in a jeweller’s window, he’d come in with it the next day.

  ‘If he could have got her the moon, he would have got that too.’

  Rita confirmed that Frances frequently confided in her that she was still too young for marriage: ‘What it was with her, she didn’t want to get married straight away, because of her age. But the plan was, they’d buy a house near Chingford, Essex and settle down. She liked it round there – and he went along with the things she liked.’

  Reggie, recalled his cousin, always had very definite ideas about how women should look. ‘He liked you dressing well. He taught me what sort of clothes to wear. He didn’t like clothes too short. Or low necks. He liked feminine clothes, pale pink nail varnish, not bright orange.

  ‘In the beginning she just dressed ordinary but when he started taking her out, he’d buy lovely clothes for her. He used to get them from Marlowes in Mare Street, a Hackney dress shop. I always remember one outfit he bought her, a brown cocktail dress with lace at the neck and lace sleeves. He got her a little fox stole to go with it.’

  Frances may not have been greedy but she was, like many young girls, very keen on make-up and beauty routines, as Rita went on: ‘She loved make-up, doing her eyes, always having her hair done. She had very long nails, beautifully shaped. I remember her painting her nails with nail hardener. She got her hair done at Ray’s in Bethnal Green Road. Her hair always looked immaculate. You’d never see her without make-up.

  ‘She used to say, “I like to dress nice – to please him.”’

  Rita Smith told me that it was her belief that had Frances and Reggie been able to develop their relationship in a normal way – crucially, spending time alone together – things might have been different. But the twins’ world didn’t permit such togetherness.

  ‘They didn’t get a lot of privacy, really,’ Rita continued. ‘If they were at Violet’s house, there were always people in and out; if they wanted to talk about something, they’d have to go in the front room. And Ronnie was always around, anyway.’

  Ronnie was there, of course, the night Reggie first took Frances out to show her their new acquisition, Esmeralda’s Barn. At the roulette table, she was encouraged to have a flutter. In the club’s restaurant, they dined on fresh lobster, juicy steaks, and Frances laughed, in delight, when the maître d’ wheeled out the huge dessert trolley, groaning with fresh strawberries, black forest cake and all kinds of exotic gateaux. No, she didn’t want any more, she assured Reggie. Not even the cheeseboard. She’d just have her usual tipple, black coffee.

  Reggie looked at his girl quizzically. He knew Frances was very weight conscious and tried to diet sometimes. But he did worry about her health.

  When he’d first gone into prison, she’d written to tell him that she’d fainted one day at work. He’d told her to go and see a private doctor with the money he’d given her, and she’d written back to say she’d seen the doctor, and everything was okay. Some time later, she’d mentioned in a letter that her nerves were bad, and her hands were a bit shaky.

  He’d written back that it was all that coffee she drank: ‘Coffee is only a stimulant and can’t do you any good,’ he’d told her. But with his obsessive curiosity about everything she did, he’d wondered what else was going on. ‘I hope you’ve not been taking any of them slimming tablets because they can make your nerves bad,’ he’d written.

  Frances had assured him she wasn’t taking any tablets. But now, tonight, he
noticed something he’d not spotted before. When she went to pick up the cup, wasn’t there just the tiniest hint of a shake in her hand? Or was he just imagining it?

  Then Ronnie leaned across the table, interrupting his train of thought.

  ‘C’mon Reg, we’ve gotta go and talk to ’im,’ he boomed. And Reggie, momentarily, brushed his concerns to one side and switched back into business mode. Frances was fine. They were raking it in and the protection business had unlimited potential, now that the new West End casinos were springing up. Any problems, he’d sort them.

  He was well and truly back in control.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GILDED CAGE

  By the autumn of 1961 it was well over a year since Reggie had come out of prison. Yet Frances continually stalled on their wedding plans, still insisting she was too young. Reggie took her on a short trip to Rotterdam in the Netherlands early in November, perhaps in an attempt to convince her, but there was no sign of any wedding bells.

  Rita Smith remembered seeing quite a lot of Frances around that time. She had sensed somehow that Frances’s home life at Ormsby Street wasn’t that happy. Her brother Frankie had left home for good. ‘Her parents were never in and she was left on her own a lot of the time,’ Rita explained. ‘That’s why she liked coming to our house. One day she said to me, “You’re so lucky to have a mum and dad who are here for you. I have to make my own tea when I get in.”

  ‘Sometimes, if Reggie was going out somewhere and she didn’t want to go with him, he’d come next door to me and say, “Is it alright if Frankie comes and sits with you tonight?” Then he’d come back later and pick her up.

  ‘She’d say to me, “Oh, I wish you’d come out with us.” But I had Kimmie, she was only a baby then. Frances loved being with us. I think she felt more comfortable here. I got the impression she didn’t enjoy the clubs, the showbiz parties he took her to. She wanted a quiet, ordinary kind of life.