Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  The comment ‘I’m glad she said it to you’ was, according to Fawcett, all about Ronnie.

  ‘He wouldn’t have wanted Ronnie to hear those words,’ he went on. ‘Ronnie used to make nasty comments all the time like “You seen ’is bird, Mick? Ain’t she got ’orrible legs?” Which wasn’t true at all.’

  Fawcett told me that Reggie later confided in him that he could have straightforward sex with other women. ‘But not Frances,’ Fawcett continued. ‘He had a bit of a Madonna complex about her, nothing to do with love. In his mind she was a bit of an idol, nothing to do with love between a man and a woman. Somehow he felt she shouldn’t indulge in sex. He didn’t say it in so many words. And I’d known him to go with other women, hostesses in the West End clubs. But with Frances… it was different.’

  Fawcett first met the twins in their billiard hall days, before Reggie started courting Frances. ‘I knew there were stories about Reggie being gay. At the billiard hall one day someone said, “You know the twins are gay.” I went “WHAT?” Then it sank in. All these younger men around in the billiard hall, of course, they were gay.

  ‘One fella in Bow told me, “Oh yes, so-and-so is Reggie’s boyfriend.” He didn’t want to be known as a gay person, he really didn’t want to be gay. But I think it overtook him now and again.’

  Before the marriage, Reggie would occasionally ask Micky Fawcett to drive Frances home to Ormsby Street from Vallance Road.

  ‘On one occasion she said to me, “I suppose he’s told you that I mustn’t talk to anyone. It’s ridiculous. All my friends, I’m not supposed to talk to them – because he gets annoyed.”’

  Micky Fawcett told me about one major incident before the wedding which demonstrated Reggie’s fear and paranoia about Frances having anything to do with other men.

  One night, a suspicious Reggie had been spying on Frances, sitting in his car, watching her house. Frances wasn’t home and he was very worried. Sure enough, a car drove to her front door late at night and a man dropped Frances off.

  Reggie carefully took a note of the car registration. Then he got dealer friend to identify the owner. Later he told Micky of his suspicions over a drink in the Grave Maurice pub:

  ‘I’ve got his address,’ said Reggie. ‘And I wanna do him.’

  Micky Fawcett knew what was going on.

  ‘I knew, right away, why Reggie had come to me because he was terrified Ronnie would have found out and driven him mad. The main thing for me was to give him a getout.’

  Fawcett promised to sort it out.

  ‘And Reggie let me get on with it. Perhaps, deep down, he wanted only to know that Frances wasn’t playing around.’

  That same night, Micky was awoken at 5 a.m. by someone knocking on his window. It was Reggie. He couldn’t sleep. He wanted Micky to track the man down immediately. Micky persuaded him it was too early and they drove around for a couple of hours. Reggie was still agitated but eventually Micky convinced him it would be better if he dropped him off at a friend’s house while Micky went round to the man’s address.

  ‘Reggie seemed relieved he didn’t need to go himself. His own way of dealing with things would have been less direct than his brother’s. But just as violent in the end.’

  Micky then went round to the man’s house, driven there by a friend. Later he found out that the suspected boyfriend was a car dealer in his mid-twenties. And married.

  ‘You were seen with Reggie Kray’s bird,’ Micky warned when the man answered his front door.

  ‘He ran back into his house and said, “Tell me through here”, through the letterbox.’ recalled Micky. ‘He was crying, snivelling, all his nose was running. I’d only said a few words but now you couldn’t get any sense out of him. Then I got him to open the door again.

  ‘“It’s nearly on you,” I said. “Behave yourself in future.”

  ‘I went back to Reggie and assured him that the man driving Frances was the father of a girlfriend, an innocent lift home.

  ‘Reggie said to me: “She ain’t pregnant, is she, Mick?”

  ‘“Wot are you on about, Reg? I’ve told you, this is wot ’appened.”

  ‘“Are you sure?” said Reggie.

  ‘“I tell you, this is wot ’appened.”

  ‘And he didn’t query it. He was the most sceptical person you ever met who didn’t believe anything anyone ever said. But he was worried about what Ronnie would think.’

  I asked Micky if he thought there was anything going on between Frances and the married car dealer.

  ‘Definitely. I made up the story I told Reggie, my motive was to quieten Reggie down. And not rock the boat. I knew he would believe what I said. He wouldn’t WANT bad news. Or an inquest from Ronnie. She was definitely having some sort of relationship with this guy. I found out later that his wife heard all the commotion and apparently she was told I’d threatened him because he’d been a bit drunk in one of the Kray clubs – a cover-up story. The man definitely had something to hide.’

  Micky’s story tells us that despite her fears and nervous behaviour, Frances was not overwhelmingly intimidated by Reggie. She did, at least, accept the attentions of other men before the marriage, no matter how briefly, perhaps in the vague hope of finding a new boyfriend who would release her from the situation somehow. Her remark to Micky Fawcett about the honeymoon does not indicate someone who was browbeaten or scared of her husband, worried about a reprisal once they were alone. Did she really understand how humiliating such a comment was when addressed to another man? Or was she just too innocent to perceive its impact?

  My feeling is she did know it was shaming. Yet the rebel in her, the girl that had told Reggie he’d be better suited to someone else, that he was a nobody away from his own environment, wanted the truth to be out there. Somehow.

  Yet the incident with the man giving Frances a lift home took place just before they embarked on the desperately tragic, brief time that was to be their life as a married couple. Here’s an outline of what happened once they came back from Athens in those weeks they ‘lived together’ as man and wife.

  Although it is well documented that Reggie rented a furnished luxury apartment for them ‘up West’ in a big block of flats near London’s Marble Arch, and that the couple later moved to a flat underneath Ronnie’s flat in Cedra Court, Clapton, Frances’s diaries and, much later, her mother Elsie’s account of their married life, show that, in fact, they more or less lived like gypsies.

  At different times after the wedding they stayed briefly at Vallance Road, in a flat in Chingford (presumably belonging to a friend of Reggie’s) and on several occasions, both in London and abroad, Frances was left to stay in hotels alone. As with the honeymoon, the attempt to live as man and wife was a total disaster.

  The Marble Arch flat, while luxuriously furnished, left Frances totally isolated. Most days, Reg would go out, leave her in the flat alone, return home to change his clothes, then go out again and return in the wee small hours, very drunk.

  Frances had no friends nearby, no job to go to, her entire life was now in the hands of her husband. Very soon, it became obvious that this wouldn’t work. Why Reggie decided it would make sense if he and Frances moved into the same block of flats as his twin is baffling: he knew all too well how damaging the undercurrent of animosity between his wife and his twin could be.

  Virtually anywhere in London would have been better than Cedra Court. He had the means to pick and choose. But the truth was, Reggie wasn’t comfortable anywhere away from his twin. He’d wanted Frances; he’d got her. Now there were three of them in the marriage, a terrified young wife, a jealous, possessive madman who detested the sight of her and an equally intense, obsessive husband. It was enough to send even a stronger woman over the edge.

  Yet there was a brief, outward appearance of normality on a social level in this time. Occasionally Frances would accompany Reggie to nightclubs or parties.

  But it was the same old routine: the same circle of criminals, minders and Kray
hangers-on. Plus a sprinkling of celebrities. There is a Daily Express archival photo, taken at El Morocco, days after the couple had returned from honeymoon, which says so much. Reggie, surrounded by well-known celebrities of the day and his proudly beaming mother, are all looking at Frances. She is stony faced, staring ahead bleakly. Reggie merely looks at her sadly, a pained, quizzical expression on his face. Everyone else is smiling. There is the nub of it: Frances had nothing in common with this glamorous bunch – they were not people she could relate to in any way. Nor did she care to make conversation or try to eagerly flatter the celebrities her husband and his twin courted so assiduously. She was no longer the starry-eyed young girl. She was Reggie’s missus, his property. Socially she’d clammed up. Not that surprising when you consider that her husband didn’t want her talking much to anyone, anyway.

  ‘She was in a situation she couldn’t handle,’ recalled Freddie Foreman, the ‘Godfather’ of crime who served ten years in prison for his role in the disposal of the body of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, and who met Frances many times in the clubland setting.

  ‘She was out of her depth. She used to sit there like a pretty little thing. She could not talk or converse with anyone, it was a different world to what she was used to.’

  Foreman too claimed that Reggie was homosexual and thought it unlikely the marriage was consummated.

  ‘He did make the effort to keep her happy. But she was like a trophy to him, someone to have on your arm. I don’t think there was any true love there.’

  Pampered Frances was, beyond reason. He’d buy her anything she wanted. But she was a prisoner. Sure, she could go shopping whenever she fancied, buy what she liked – as long as someone from the Firm accompanied her.

  At the flat in Cedra Court, Reggie made considerable efforts to provide a comfortable home with new furniture and plush carpeting – ‘it was beautiful,’ Rita Smith remembered when she visited with little Kimmie.

  Yet none of this could compensate for the living hell Frances was descending into, the twins’ erratic, booze-soaked, criminal way of life.

  On the nights when they stayed home at Cedra Court, Reggie would down his first gin of the evening, leave Frances to the telly and climb the stairs to Ronnie’s flat where he’d remain until the wee small hours.

  Once in bed, it would be impossible for Frances to sleep without a sleeping pill: the noise from the flat above where Ronnie constantly partied and entertained his friends was unbearable.

  Attempting to question or remonstrate with her drunken husband when he finally returned made everything much worse. The rows between them became hideously abusive. What was he doing up there, why was he leaving her all the time? Frances would cry. The answer was always the same: it was her own bloody fault if she was unhappy, she was to blame for everything – her and that mother who hated him, wanted them to be miserable. On and on he’d go, ranting and raving, swearing and shouting, threatening to hurt her, kill her family, until, finally, the taunts would stop and he’d lie down and pass out.

  In the past, the rows between them would end with her retreating to her room in Ormsby Street. Now there was nowhere to run.

  One night, knowing she hated the sight of blood, Reggie deliberately cut his hand and tormented her by letting the blood drip onto her. It was terrifying emotional abuse for an already nervous and edgy girl.

  Reggie must have known, by then, he couldn’t have that ‘normal’ life he so dreamed of, away from Ronnie, as the successful legitimate businessman living in the ’burbs. He couldn’t make love to his beautiful young wife for reasons he didn’t care to examine, but he still wanted her as his possession, his object of worship, symbol of his success.

  The alcohol too played a big part in the equation. It turned Reggie into a monstrous human being, a mass of emotional frustration that could only be expressed in one way – through sadistic, furious, violent rage.

  Reggie was one of those people who could drink themselves senseless, yet never wake up the next day with a hangover. No matter how drunk he’d been, how badly he’d scared her with words and threats of violence, in the mornings the demon Reg had vanished. Until the next night…

  The late Billy Exley was Ron’s bodyguard, a man who also gave evidence against the twins at their trial in 1969. He knew much about the twins and their crimes; he was also at Ron’s side at Cedra Court during those weeks when Frances lived there with Reggie.

  Exley’s friend, Lenny Hamilton, had no reason to be enamoured of the twins: he’d been branded with a red-hot poker by Ronnie Kray in 1962.

  Not long after Reggie Kray died in October 2000, the following story appeared in the East London Advertiser, 19 October issue:

  REG KRAY HAD SEX WITH PROSTITUTE WHILE IN BED WITH HIS FIRST WIFE

  An East End victim of the Kray twins is about to spill the beans on how he says Reggie Kray mistreated his first wife Frances.

  Lenny Hamilton, savagely branded with a red hot poker by Ronnie Kray in 1962, claimed Billy Exley, who worked for the Krays, told him of a night out on the town which ended in the bizarre three-in-a-bed episode.

  Said Lenny, writing in a new book, I Was Branded by Ronnie Kray, ‘Reggie and Ronnie returned to the flat in the early hours of the morning. He had left poor Billy Exley behind to make sure that Frances didn’t get out of the bedroom and leave the flat.

  ‘Ronnie and his young man retired to Ronnie’s bedroom and Reggie, together with a hostess, retired to his bedroom where Frances was lying in bed, out cold from the sleeping tablets they had made her take before they went up West.

  ‘Frances woke up in the morning, unaware of what had been going on in her own bed, horrified at what she was witnessing.’

  Lenny went on to tell how she tried to get out of the room to find the door locked.

  When she finally did get out Lenny says Billy Exley was forced to watch as Reggie slapped her to calm her down. Eventually Ron came into the room and grabbed Frances as she made a dash for the door.

  Billy told Lenny how the twins had got her back into the bedroom and he could hear Ron telling Reg to stuff pills down her throat to keep her quiet, but Billy was in no position to stop the pair, fearing for his own safety.

  The shocking incident in this newspaper account, later repeated in Getting Away with Murder, a book by Lenny Hamilton and Craig Cabell that recounts stories of several crimes the Krays may have committed but were never convicted for, could have been the trigger that made Frances pack her bags and return to her family at Ormsby Street that summer, but the chronology of events after the wedding is not detailed enough to say for sure.

  Once safely back with her family, Frances recounted some of what had been going on. Her husband, she told her mother, was perverted, didn’t make love to her at all. On one occasion he’d attempted to take her from behind, as if she were a boy. She felt ashamed, soiled, degraded. She told Elsie she didn’t believe any other man would want her now.

  This knowledge of the twins’ violent inner world, so carefully concealed behind their public façade, propelled Frances into a spiral of shame and fear, not just for her own life, but for those closest to her. It is fair to say that she never really recovered from the shock of what she discovered about her husband and his twin in those brief weeks of married life. Is it really any wonder that, by then, she was more or less dependent on taking pills to help her cope with what she was living through?

  CHAPTER 8

  SPIRAL

  Sunshine and blue skies weren’t a panacea for what Frances was going through emotionally. But at least they did briefly remove her from the ugly truth of her marriage. From early June to mid-August 1965 Frances was abroad, first on the Spanish island of Ibiza, then on Spain’s southern mainland in the holiday resort of Torremolinos.

  These dates are recorded in her diary, though there is no detailed account of her time abroad. She wrote that Reggie accompanied her to the airport before the Ibiza trip, which started on 4 June – and noted that she stayed alone there in
hotels for long periods. One can only imagine her terrified state of mind at that time, knowing that at some point she had to return.

  The timeline for the events written down in her diary is not chronological, but much of it seems to relate to the immediate post-honeymoon period, the months before Frances decided she couldn’t stand living with her new husband and went back to the comparative safety of her family home. After the Spanish trip she briefly tried living with him again, but ran back to her family soon after.

  Here is the content of what she wrote in the diary. Exactly when it was written is not clear, though it is most likely to have been penned in 1966, the last full year of Frances’s life.

  If it is somewhat confusing to read, it still gives painful insights into what went on between the couple and Reggie’s tragically abusive behaviour in that brief time when they lived together.

  It also shows that Frances did briefly date other men before the marriage – and highlights much of the tension within the Kray family during Frances’s times at Vallance Road. What is very clear from the diary is that what Frances wanted most of all was a divorce, a legal end to the marriage.

  Where she mentions ‘offence regarding s’ this presumably refers to sex – and the incident she told Elsie about, when Reggie attempted anal sex. The word ‘offence’ was used because she would have seen it in that way, as a shocking act: in those days, anal sex, even between a married couple, was viewed quite differently to the way it is perceived nowadays. (Until the late 1800s in England anal sex or buggery was an offence punishable by hanging.)

  DIARY OF DESPAIR

  Frances wrote that she had been staying in a dark room with hardly any furniture. Reggie’s suits were hanging round the wall. She’d had to take household and kitchen utensils there herself. He had left her there until 4 or 5 a.m. when he would come in drunk from El Morocco. He’d keep a flick knife under his pillow: ‘as if something was going to happen’. She was petrified. He was frequently shouting and swearing at her, leaving her there alone. She couldn’t stand it any more. So she went away. (Presumably this means to Spain, weeks after the honeymoon).