Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  It is not clear whether this was because Frances had already experienced some sort of breakdown prior to admission, or whether she had talked of attempting suicide in one of her visits to the psychiatrist at the hospital’s outpatients department. But she ended up staying in the hospital’s psychiatric ward from June until September 1966.

  Michael, or ‘Mick’, Taylor is a sixty-nine-year-old divorced pensioner who grew up in London’s East End and still lives there. Known locally as ‘The Sartorialist’ because of the way he always smartly tricks himself out, he is one of the area’s more colourful characters, a living reminder of ‘the old days’ of the district.

  We had coffee together in the now ultra-fashionable Brick Lane where he told me his story of the time he too was a young psychiatric patient at the Hackney Hospital during that World Cup victory summer of 1966.

  He told me, in some detail, how he found himself falling for a lovely young woman who was being treated on the same ward.

  ‘I was 21 at the time and I’d had a nervous breakdown,’ he recalled. ‘I’d suddenly cracked up after a family bereavement. They diagnosed me with a nervous disability. I didn’t remember much about how I got there, but I wound up in the Hackney hospital for sixteen weeks.

  ‘You were in this huge long ward, with about twenty people on it, men at one end, women at the other. One morning, not long after I’d got there, I was lying on my bed and a girl came over, very smartly dressed lady. Immaculate. At first glance, I thought she was one of the doctors – because of the way she dressed and spoke to me. She was so nice.

  ‘She asked me about how I came to be there and said she was the same as me. She told me, “If you do what they tell you, you’ll get better.” She told me she’d already been there for over a week.’

  That was the start of Mick’s friendship with Frances. ‘When she went back to her bed, I went to see the matron, who had an office on our floor. She told me, “That young lady is Reggie Kray’s wife. I thought I’d better tell you.”’

  Hospital friendships tend to develop quite quickly and this was no exception. They were both around the same age, from local working-class backgrounds, in the hospital for similar reasons.

  They were not in a locked or secure ward situation: the psychiatric patients in this ward were free to go outside the hospital if they wished, the only proviso being that they had to return on time for their medication and their meals. (In those days, the Mental Health Act of 1959 permitted considerable discretion on the part of the hospital consultants as to how patients were managed, and changes to the Act, focusing on patients’ rights, were not introduced until 1983.)

  The Matron’s comments didn’t trouble Michael. ‘I wasn’t really frightened by knowing Reggie was her husband.’ he explained. ‘The same day, we went for a long walk outside and she started to talk to me about her life. She told me she was never in love in her life. He never had the time for her, he was always out, drinking, clubbing. She told me she would wake up in the morning when she was with him and find a gun or a hammer lying under the mattress.

  ‘She said she was scared something might happen to her because of the life they were living. It was the uncertainty. And there was no end to it, arguments, violence. Reggie wasn’t violent to her. But she said Ronnie was always threatening her, telling Reg to get rid of her.

  ‘Reggie treated her well. She could have anything she wanted. She never went to work; in a way he had her entire life. But she couldn’t take Ronnie. Him and Reg had to be together all the time, they were a fighting force.’

  During those weeks in the hospital, Taylor said they were both given shock treatment (ECT, electro-convulsive therapy) as well as drug treatments four times a day.

  ‘They’d give us drugs like Valium. The drugs made you docile. You saw a psychiatrist every two weeks. I had to sit in front of a group of people who would interview me, ask me questions.

  ‘I had shock treatment twice. I didn’t like it. You didn’t really know yourself for a couple of hours until the effect wore off. My hair was pretty long then and her hair was long and shiny. A kind of glue was used when they put the electrodes on your head, so that afterwards part of your hair was stuck together. She managed to get it off. She really cared about herself, her appearance.

  ‘One week I remember her having it twice, then once the following week, but I think she had it more than that, over five or six weeks. She said it made her forget about the life she was living. She was so scared.’

  Mick Taylor also recalled that Frances had confided that ‘nothing had ever happened with Reggie, they never consummated the marriage’.

  ‘I felt so sorry for her. She was a good-looking girl, small, cuddly, warm. I can still see her now, wearing a bright red jacket with a tartan skirt with black slingbacks, quite high. The shoes cost a lot of money. All her clothes were immaculate.

  ‘She told me she was going to go in for a divorce; she was going to sort that out. The marriage was over. There was never any love there.’

  She told him, Taylor explained, that she wasn’t scared of Reggie but of Ronnie.

  ‘Why he married her, I don’t rightly know. She said every time they went out as a couple they were never actually together. He had to go here, there, she would be sitting there with people around her. But never her husband. Everywhere she went she’d have minders, people driving her around. At home she was either with a minder or someone else, family.

  ‘She told me she was scared of Mrs Kray. She could never do anything without her knowing. Wherever she went people would point, “There’s Reggie’s wife”.’

  That summer, the pair wandered around the area during the day, enjoying each other’s company away from the hospital ward.

  ‘We’d go for a walk across Hackney Marshes for a couple of hours. We even went to the Spread Eagle pub next door but the guv’nor of the pub, once he found out who she was, told us to stop coming. I wanted to take her to meet my family, but they were also too scared to even meet her.

  ‘Her mum would come to see her every other night for an hour or so. Her mum was very quiet, but she had a fierce look on her face. Her dad, Frank, was a quiet man too. Her brother and his girlfriend came to visit too; sometimes they’d come on their own, without each other. I got on well with them, they seemed like very nice people.

  ‘But I could see her mother didn’t like me, I guess because she saw how friendly we were.’

  On weekends they were sometimes allowed to go back home if they wished. Mick recalled the twins visiting Frances on two occasions.

  ‘The first time they came, they talked to Frances downstairs, away from the ward. The second time, she spotted them walking into the ward from the other end and then she went a bit haywire. I remember her pushing Ronnie out of the way: “Go away!” Then she started crying. But Ronnie was Reggie and Reggie was Ronnie. You couldn’t divide them. Ronnie made sure of that.’

  All the staff at the hospital were aware of the friendship. ‘They did warn me, “Don’t do anything stupid or get involved in any way, Michael. Behave yourself,” they said.

  ‘And I did. I knew I had to do that from the very beginning. I was scared of the Krays. But I was a patient in Hackney Hospital. They certainly didn’t make themselves busy when they came in – they came in like gentlemen. As far as Reg was concerned, I was a mental case. They couldn’t touch me. Or her.’

  As their friendship developed, Frances confided that suicide had been in her thoughts.

  ‘But she said she didn’t have the guts to do it. Reg had taken her to a Harley Street specialist but she said the drugs he was giving her were making her worse.

  ‘When she told them this at the hospital, they didn’t want to know. She told me the drugs the West End doctor gave her made her high, then low, then depressed. She suffered a lot, in a way. The drugs were too powerful, mucking her head up.’

  For all this, Mick Taylor vividly remembered the happiness of their short time together that summer.

  ‘She�
�d buy me the odd gift, a tie, a handkerchief. Someone would always bring her whatever she needed in cash. I’d buy her the odd meal, one day we went to Blooms in Whitechapel. Another time it was Lyon’s Tea Shop, near Aldgate Station.

  ‘She was quiet but she wasn’t a stupid girl. When you talked about things, she knew what she was talking about. Part of her was quite religious, there was a church at the back of the hospital, we used to go and sit there sometimes.

  ‘When you went out, she always walked on the inside as we went down the road. As a cockney, you were taught certain things as a boy, how to behave, chivalry towards women. We respected each other.’

  He told me the relationship gradually developed into displays of physical affection. Yet he was acutely conscious of where the lines were drawn.

  ‘There was a bond between us. She made me happy.

  ‘I do remember the day I first kissed her, on the grass at Hackney Marshes.

  ‘“I’m glad I met you,” I said, then we kissed. She said, “I’m glad I met you too.”

  ‘She needed that affection. It didn’t go further than kissing and cuddling. I suppose it could have happened but I thought if I had done anything it would have been dangerous, she wasn’t divorced.

  ‘She said that if anything happened to him, she would have her freedom. She did have plans in her mind. We even talked about moving out of London, where no one knew us, things like that. But she never got to do anything. It never happened.’

  A little after three months later, both were discharged from the hospital.

  ‘She went home and I went to stay at my brother’s place at the Guinness Trust, behind Moorfields Eye Hospital,’ Mick continued. ‘I missed her. Times like that in your life, you don’t forget. People knew about our friendship, yes. But I kept out of harm’s way afterwards, went to work for the council, doing highway repairs.’

  The news of what happened to Frances, less than a year later, came as a devastating blow when he read about it in the newspaper.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it at first. But when something like that happens, you have a sense that it’s meant to happen. Knowing her, in a way, made me grow up. You start to realise what’s right and what’s wrong – and be honest with yourself. For me, it shook me into getting back on track. I stopped taking the medication and got on with my life.

  ‘She would have made me a good wife. I do know that.’

  The discovery that Frances had received shock treatment on several occasions that summer should be viewed in the context of the times. More commonly used to treat depression then, today it is only used in extreme cases, where all else has failed. Its use declined over the years as new drug treatments were introduced and were shown to be more effective and with fewer side effects.

  ‘ECT has been demonised because it was overused; some people did get chronic memory loss afterwards,’ explained psychiatrist Trevor Turner. ‘Also, they used to give it without modifying drugs, which resulted in shaking, foaming at the mouth, very scary reactions – and people have retained that powerful image of it. And the idea of having electricity shot through your brain feels pretty barbarous. So it has a bad press. It was more its nature, rather than side effects, that generated its demise.

  ‘It sounds like she wasn’t getting better on two or three different types of medications, so a course of ECT had a fifty-fifty chance of helping her. What they’d have been hoping for is to get her sufficiently un-depressed not to need the drugs.

  ‘One side effect would be loss of memory around the time the person had it. But it would come back.’

  Michael Taylor’s account of Frances reveals a person who clearly understood her situation and was cooperative with the doctors who were treating her because she still wanted or hoped to get better.

  The long stay in Hackney Hospital was, in many ways, a refuge from what she was struggling to deal with, and her comment about the shock treatment making her ‘forget’ the life she was living is illuminating. Not only had she admitted to Mick Taylor that she was already contemplating suicide as a way out, but also that it was obvious to her that the treatment for her depression offered various ways of ‘forgetting’. For good.

  Yet the young woman who came out of hospital that autumn just before her twenty-third birthday was, sadly, nothing like the beautiful bride of David Bailey’s photos.

  ‘She did lose a lot of weight after she came out of Hackney Hospital,’ remembered Rita Smith. ‘I saw her in the car and, looking at her, you could tell she wasn’t getting better. She was far away.’

  Maureen Flanagan remembered seeing Frances briefly at Vallance Road that autumn. On the day in question, Reggie was nowhere to be seen. ‘Either she’d just popped in to say hello,’ she recalled. ‘Or maybe Violet had been in touch, asked her round. She didn’t look like the girl I’d met a few years before. She looked drawn, like someone who had just given up. It was all too much for her. She could never be scruffy or untidy, but she had no make-up on, pale, white as a ghost, like a little will-o’-the-wisp: not really there.

  ‘After she’d gone I said to Vi, “She doesn’t look like she’s with us.”

  ‘“I thought that,” said Vi. She looked weak, like she should be in hospital.’

  The sad truth was that despite the efforts of the medical profession to help Frances, really, nothing had changed at all. She was still trapped in the Kray web, shunned by many out of ignorance and fear, still haunted by those weeks when she’d been chillingly exposed to the sordid truth about Reggie’s way of life.

  As for the twins, rumours now persisted that the police were poised to arrest them for Cornell’s murder. At one point the murdered man’s widow, Olive, had been round to Fort Vallance at night and smashed the windows, screaming at the top of her voice that Ronnie had killed her husband, much to Violet’s disgust: as if her boy would do anything like that, she tutted. Such stories were common currency in the pubs and drinking clubs of Bethnal Green and the East End. They soon got back to Ormsby Street.

  The next thing everyone heard was that the twins had flown the coop, to Tangier, Morocco.

  As John Pearson recorded in The Profession of Violence: ‘Ronnie enjoyed the Arab boys, Reggie invited out a hostess from the Latin Quarter Club in London. During her fortnight with him he never once referred to Frances or the East End.’

  But this sunny sojourn was cut short. The twins’ notoriety now trailed behind them everywhere.

  ‘The chief of Moroccan police arrived in person at their hotel to inform them they were undesirable aliens,’ said Pearson. ‘Two seats were booked for them on the next plane back to London,’

  When my research later unearthed a short, handwritten letter addressed to Frances dated 17 October 1966, posted in Tottenham, London, another tragic piece of the jigsaw puzzle surfaced.

  The note, from someone with a Greek-sounding surname, indicated that Frances was buying street drugs. Whatever Frances was hearing or being told about Reggie via the local whispers and the rumours at that time, they would only have served to exacerbate her fears, her terror. The unhappy young woman was now embarking on a perilous road towards self-destruction.

  Sorry I didn’t meet you last Saturday. If you want those pills, I’ll see you this Saturday, 22nd October. I’ll get them this Friday. I will meet you outside the Odeon Cinema at 3pm. Be there.

  PS: If you want to answer back, write to me. Please answer if you are not coming.

  The same day the note was posted, 17 October, Frances was admitted to St Leonard’s Hospital in Nuttall Street, Kingsland Road, as a result of an overdose of barbiturates she had taken at Ormsby Street.

  Frank Senior had found her only just alive, and called the ambulance in time. Fortunately, St Leonard’s was just a few minutes away from the house.

  On 20 October, her consultant at the hospital, Dr N Jones, discharged her from Parkinson Ward and she went back to Ormsby Street. It was obvious the incident had not been a mere ‘cry for help’. She had meant to kill herself. Accordin
g to John Pearson in The Cult of Violence, she said afterwards: ‘I’ve been defiled. I’m useless. What is there left for me to live for? I deserve to die.’

  Whether she’d deliberately tried to obtain the street drugs for a planned suicide attempt and managed to source them elsewhere remains unknown. But as Trevor Turner pointed out: ‘You can’t stop someone buying street drugs. Most psychiatrists are quite streetwise; you have to be aware of the world as it is. So if you are prescribing drugs, even in very small amounts, in the end people can always get more.’

  Reggie, on hearing the news of Frances’s attempted suicide, had rushed round to see her at St Leonard’s. No, he was told firmly by hospital staff, he couldn’t see his wife right now. She was far too frail.

  Off he went into the night, raining verbal blows on Frances’s parents again and again. Like a spoilt child whose favourite toy was being denied him, he was driven back to Vallance Road where he reached for the gin bottle, ranted, cursed and heaped his rage, yet again, on the Sheas, his wife’s innocent family.

  The truth was, tragedy and retribution were now about to engulf everyone.

  But the only retribution ahead would be that of the law.

  CHAPTER 10

  GRIEF

  Ron Kray went into hiding in a flat in north London towards the end of 1966. He had been asked to appear in court as a witness for the prosecution in a police corruption case – a case, ironically, he had engineered – but he refused.

  Barricaded in the flat, curtains tightly drawn, with plenty of booze and medication and his men ferrying in teenage boys at his behest, Ron’s unpredictable illness took over, yet again. Another crisis. Ron seemed even worse than before this time. The last thing Reg wanted was for their mother to even see her son in this state.

  After the ordered slaying of Frank Mitchell just before Christmas 1966, Ron had become increasingly paranoid that his enemies – namely Mitchell’s friends and those of George Cornell – were now out to get him.