Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  As for Reggie, he veered between his attempts to placate Frances whenever they rowed and a growing conviction that Frances herself was not responsible for all these arguments and critical outbursts. Permanently suspicious of others having any influence or control over Frances, he decided it was her family, namely Elsie, who was turning her against him.

  Not a man to relinquish an idea, the suspicion of Elsie soon developed into something quite sinister. Elsie Shea, he decided, was his enemy. She and she alone was poisoning his beloved Frankie’s mind against him. She’d already wound him up when she insisted on him returning the engagement ring he’d bought Frances, saying she didn’t like it. He’d fumed. But he’d still gone off and changed it. But Elsie didn’t like that, either.

  ‘He bought Frances a little dog, Mitzi,’ recalled Rita Smith. ‘But her mother wouldn’t have it in the house.’

  If Elsie had already made it clear this relationship was not to her taste, Frances’s brother was totally distracted by his own concerns. Frankie Shea was in love. He’d met a beautiful dark-haired girl, Lily, nicknamed ‘Bubbles’. She worked in a club and they’d become an item. By the summer of 1962, Lily was expecting his child. Yet though he welcomed the idea of fatherhood, Frankie couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble, or avoid getting involved with the wrong people, usually in robberies. Sometimes he’d wind up in court and get off but at one stage his involvement in a warehouse break-in led to a six-month prison sentence, because the judge decided to make an example of him. For Elsie, the only good news that year was that she’d be a grandmother. Frances too was thrilled at the idea of a new baby in the family. She loved kids. Little Kimmie, Rita’s girl, was a real favourite.

  Frances went on three trips abroad that year. In April 1962, there’d been an eleven-day cruise, which took in Majorca, Gibraltar, Algeciras and Morocco. Then in August, a friend of Reggie’s drove Frances and Reggie down to the south of France for a holiday.

  According to Reggie, who recalled the holiday in his memoir, Reggie Kray’s East End Stories, the couple had a major row while sitting outside a bistro.

  At one point Frances told him: ‘You’re nothing outside the East End. You’re not known here in France or anywhere else in the world’, a retort meant to wound but a truth, nonetheless, that no one else would have dared to pass on to Reggie. This was hardly the remark of a cowed, intimidated young woman. Frances was nervous as hell within the edgy framework of Vallance Road or any place where Ronnie might appear. Away from this environment, however, she’d deliver home truths in no uncertain terms. She’d always been honest with him, right from the start. It was one of the things he’d always liked about her.

  For Reggie to repeat these words nearly half a century later and commit them to print is remarkable. Though in the book he claimed his response to her remark was to spur him on towards an ambition: to be known ‘in a circle much larger than my own’.

  In September, Frances went on another holiday, to Spain. Rita Smith recalled Reggie sometimes paid for Frances to go on holiday to Spain with friends. ‘He trusted her there. But while she was on holiday with her friends, that’s when she started taking purple hearts.’ These street drugs were hugely popular with young people in the early sixties, and were a combination of amphetamine and barbiturate.

  According to Rita Smith, when Reggie found out Frances had been taking purple hearts he went mad: ‘He found out who was supplying them and he never supplied her again. Or anyone else.’

  It may well have been on the Spanish trip that September that Frances first started experimenting with drugs, though the remarks Reggie made in his letters from prison make it clear that she’d mentioned trying slimming tablets before that. Reggie, of course, knew about drugs because he took them himself: he’d pop tranquillisers such as Librium from time to time. Or take purple hearts. Such drugs were proliferating throughout London by the early sixties, easily acquired in the pubs and clubs of the East and West End by anyone.

  If young people weren’t smoking hashish or ‘grass’ (marijuana) they were popping the pills so easily bought for very little cash; in fact the idea of taking drugs as a recreational high was fast seeping into the culture. Certainly, the Kray twins had ready access to any kind of prescription drug they wanted. Yet when and where Frances first sampled illegal street drugs – and what they were – must remain open to question. Rita’s assertion that Reggie couldn’t stand the idea of Frances taking purple hearts is, yet again, another indication of the control he wanted to exercise over every aspect of her life. Don’t do as I do. Do what I tell you to do.

  Consider all the actions and words Reggie relentlessly deployed to control the woman he believed he loved above all else. In view of this, would it be that surprising if Frances did, by then, feel so hemmed in by the trap she was in that she started believing that drugs or pills were, in some way, a fairly reliable means of switching off from the increasing fear she felt so much of the time?

  People use drugs to change or distort their reality, often because they can’t deal with it. Alcohol can do it. Pills can do it in a different way.

  For Frances, maybe it would simply have been easier at times to just blot out the reality and let the drug take over…

  CHAPTER 6

  PRELUDE TO A MARRIAGE

  Christmas is an odd time of year; sometimes it brings out the best or the worst in people. It’s a time for sharing joy, celebrating with children, loved ones, friends. Yet it can also be a point when suppressed emotions or tensions that have simmered away through the year explode unexpectedly as the year draws to an end. Rows. Recriminations. Ultimatums. Just days before Christmas 1962, Frances and Reggie had the worst fight they’d ever had.

  Reggie was now spending more time than ever with his twin. Frances was distressed and angry about the way ‘The Ronnie Factor’ was affecting any time she did spend with Reggie.

  It wasn’t right, she argued. If they planned a night out as a twosome, time and again plans would be unexpectedly changed to include something involving Ronnie. They were never ever alone. Everything seemed to revolve around Ronnie, the Firm, his friends, their mum. What was the point of them being together?

  Reggie’s tack, as usual, was to tell her she was completely wrong about it all. It was Frances’s mother that was to blame, whispering poison in her ear, putting her against him and his family, who really liked her. Elsie, he insisted, didn’t want them to be happy together, to have a good life. She was being mean, spiteful, putting her daughter off him.

  Frances defended her mum as best she could.

  But the nineteen-year-old, already Reggie’s girlfriend for four years, knew all too well how unhappy her parents were about her seeing Reggie Kray. The frosty atmosphere at home told the story. It just hovered there all the time. Elsie could dish out the silent disapproval treatment sometimes, and somehow that chilly silence was just as bad as any talk about how she disliked Reggie or any of the Kray clan.

  Frances stood her ground with Reg. She meant it. It wasn’t anything to do with her mum and dad, she argued. It was her. She’d had enough of always having minders around them, let alone the endless sitting around waiting for him to finish whatever he was doing. They should break off. She wanted her own life, not this.

  This time it was Reggie’s turn to drive off in tears when they finally said their farewells. In his usual persistent way, he pushed her to agree they could still keep in touch. But okay, perhaps it was time they had a bit of a ‘break’ from each other.

  Early in 1963 there was some good news at Ormsby Street: Frankie Junior’s girlfriend, Lily, had given birth to a baby girl, whom they’d promptly named Frances, after her father’s sister.

  With all the excitement of the new arrival in the Shea family and her own determination to stick to the break-up plans, Frances felt vaguely hopeful that some sort of happier, different future lay ahead for her. She’d seen and done a lot with Reg, but she knew, deep down, she wasn’t really a person who was cut out for that ki
nd of life, sitting around in clubs and bars. She really liked Reg’s cousin Rita, who seemed to understand her, and she adored little Kimmie. But going to Vallance Road scared her, mostly because of Ron. Wouldn’t it be nice, she fantasised, to be with someone who didn’t have this big gang of people around them all the time? Or who had a pleasant brother or sister she could get on with?

  Yet within a couple of months, the penny dropped: if she wanted a new boyfriend, she’d have to find a very brave man indeed. And she was unlikely to meet anyone who could take her out and about the way Reg did.

  ‘At that time, most young men of her age would have at best money that would have bought a new suit every year, rent money, beer money and a week’s holiday in a caravan on the Isle of Wight,’ explained Dick Hobbs. ‘Reg brought Hollywood. Also, what young man would have fancied following Reg? Hardly anyone actually knew the Krays. They were a rumour, a kind of vague dark threat. Sniffing around Reg Kray’s ex would have been a risky venture.’

  Frances liked the same things most girls of her age did. She wasn’t a tomboy; she liked dancing, reading women’s magazines, checking out the latest fashions, getting her hair done. She went out sometimes with her girlfriends, kept up with her shorthand studies – she’d been going to college to learn this – and tried to live her life normally without the permanent spectre of Vallance Road. Yes, he told her, Reggie missed his ‘living doll’ (an endearment he used after the title of the Cliff Richard hit song of 1959). He was in touch frequently. They talked. As was his way, Reggie was intense, consistent in his utter fixation with his beloved Frankie. But he didn’t push too hard. Truth was, he had plenty of other things with which to occupy his time.

  The twins’ empire had spread beyond the West End and out into the provinces. The Barn, however, was no longer a pot of gold. It was now rapidly losing money and Ronnie, helped by their canny friend Leslie Payne, moved the base of operations for the Firm to a big restaurant called the Cambridge Rooms, on the outskirts of London. Then, in another typically flamboyant gesture, he’d gone out and bought a 1,000-guinea racehorse, Solway Cross, for their mother (a guinea was one pound and one shilling). At one gala evening at the Cambridge Rooms, Vi generously donated the horse in a raffle: cue more newspaper photos, more publicity to demonstrate the boys’ generosity. (Solway Cross, alas, never won a single race.)

  In private – and in complete contrast to all this craftily conceived image polishing – Ronnie’s violent impulses continued to scare the life out of everyone on the Firm – and to horrify his twin.

  One night at the Cambridge Rooms, Ronnie went on a vicious knife-slashing spree, slicing open the face of an associate he believed had insulted him. Doctors had to put in seventy stitches to repair the man’s face. The police knew about it. They were ready to spring, to arrest Ronnie. Frustratingly, the injured man remained silent. Reggie’s speedy move to warn everyone who’d been at the Cambridge Rooms that night that they’d be better off staying silent too did the trick: frustratingly, the police didn’t have a case.

  That autumn there was another horrific incident at The Barn when a demented Ronnie branded a man along each cheek. Very soon after this incident, the twins quit Esmeralda’s Barn for good. For Reggie, the ever-present worry that Ronnie was becoming so dangerous that he might wreck their livelihood seemed to be taking on a life of its own. It was so hard to restrain Ron.

  Yet in the midst of all his woes, Reggie eventually convinced Frances to start seeing him again.

  Frances’s passport showed no record of any trip abroad in 1963. Nevertheless, Reggie often told everyone that they’d gone to Milan, Italy, that year, visiting La Scala, the famous opera house to see the opera, Madame Butterfly.

  This romantic trip is mentioned in several books about the Kray twins, including Reggie’s own memories of their time together.

  Yet not only was there no passport stamp for any country visited in Frances’s passport for 1963, there were no entry stamps for Italy at all in her travel document. (This was several years before Britain went into the Common Market, a time when all British passports were clearly stamped by any country the holder entered.)

  Did Reggie simply tell everyone the romantic tale that he’d taken Frances to see the opera in Milan?

  It would be tempting to believe this. But a letter written to Frances by Reggie in December 1963 contains a puzzling clue that there might be some veracity in the Milan story. This letter indicates that the on-off relationship was back on by the end of 1963.

  At that point, Reggie was in eastern Nigeria, in a place called Enugu. He and Ronnie had visited Nigeria twice that year on business trips involving a housing project – the general idea was that they would invest in a development there, though the scheme never went beyond these two trips. However, while they were there they were treated like VIPs and lavishly entertained by their hosts.

  In the letter to Frances, Reggie described Enugu as a ‘desolate place, very lonely’. Then he informed her he’d already bought her a crocodile handbag and the following day he’d be getting her a new bracelet. He’d have phoned her at her brother’s place, he said, but he didn’t know whether she’d be there.

  Why was Reggie calling Frances at her brother’s home? Perhaps the Sheas didn’t have a phone at Ormsby Street at that time. Or was the phone call to her brother’s home indicative of a degree of secrecy on Frances’s part: that is, she didn’t want her parents to know that she was seeing Reggie again?

  The letter made it abundantly clear that as far as Reggie was concerned, nothing had changed, he still wanted them to marry. He’d really missed her and thought how nice it would be once they were married, so she could accompany him to ‘most places’ – though he wasn’t too sure about Nigeria. The letter also mentioned Milan. But there was no indication she’d been there.

  ‘I missed you when I was in Milan too,’ he wrote. ‘Have you missed me? You’ll have to let me know when I see you.’

  The Nigeria letter also indicated that Frances was still harbouring doubts about their relationship, that she had hinted that a different type of girl might be more suitable for him (which was obviously the case).

  Reggie wrote that he’d been thinking about her saying to him ‘such-and-such a girl would suit you better’. But he wouldn’t want her any different, he assured her. Physically and mentally, he told her, she suited him fine: ‘So let’s not have any more of that talk.’

  The letter ended with Reggie saying how he was looking forward to seeing her. He’d be glad, he told her, ‘to see your beautiful brown eyes again’.

  By the beginning of 1964, the police were beginning to take a very serious interest in the day-to-day activities of the Kray twins. Scotland Yard had started to investigate their various frauds and the West End protection rackets. Then, startling information started to filter through to them about Ronnie’s high-level friendships with certain politicians, in particular Lord Robert Boothby, a high-profile Conservative MP, and Tom Driberg, a senior Labour party MP who was openly gay.

  Both men relished living dangerously. ‘Rough trade’ (a tough or violent homosexual partner) was their idea of fun, particularly for Driberg, who blithely ignored the risk of being exposed as a homosexual when in pursuit of sex, often with strangers. The two of them loved the idea of consorting with scary Ronnie, the East End thug and gang boss. In particular, they enjoyed socialising with him because of the coterie of handsome young men Ronnie always had grouped around him.

  Before long, a newspaper reporter with strong links to Scotland Yard was told of the police’s interest in the Krays, and on 16 July 1964, a newspaper story appeared in the Sunday Mirror which mentioned the police investigation (without using the Krays’ names) as well as informing its readers of an existing photo ‘on their files’ of ‘a well-known member of the House of Lords on a sofa with a gangster leading London’s biggest protection racket’. For legal reasons, the article didn’t actually name Boothby and Ronnie, although foreign magazines, less restricted
by British libel laws, did – alongside photos of the Kray twins as young boxers. The genie was about to come out of the bottle. Or so it seemed.

  On 2 August, Lord Boothby wrote a letter to The Times identifying himself as the politician on the sofa – and denying all the allegations of any kind of relationship with Ronnie Kray.

  No, he wasn’t homosexual and yes, he had been photographed with the man in question but he had no idea of the man’s criminal history, even though he had met the man ‘on business matters’ three times in the company of others.

  A few days later, the Sunday Mirror carried an apology to Boothby – and the paper paid Lord Boothby £40,000 in compensation, a huge sum of money for the times.

  Yet the story in the paper had been true. Boothby had blatantly lied. He was bisexual, he’d known Ronnie – and exactly what he represented – for over a year and the consequence of the whole affair was a huge establishment cover-up at the highest level.

  The police, who had already put a case together against the twins at the time of the Sunday Mirror article, promptly stopped investigating them. The press could not write about them freely because of the huge compensatory sum paid to the Sunday Mirror and all its implications of legal action if reporters persisted in exploring the Krays’ crimes. What this all meant was that the twins, through Ronnie’s friendship with these MPs, had won a form of immunity from any attempt to stop them or to write about their activities – and Ronnie’s violence. This was to last for nearly four years. No one, it seemed, could touch them.

  Ronnie arranged for the photographs of him and Boothby on the sofa in the lord’s flat to be passed over to the Daily Express newspaper picture desk.

  By 6 August 1964, the world knew, without any doubt, that the gangster in the scandal was Ronnie Kray, one of the Kray twins, via the Express photo. Fame at last, beyond the East End. Everyone now knew who they were.