by Hyams, Jacky
After Frances’s body had been moved to the mortuary where, as her husband and next of kin, he was required to identify it, Reggie didn’t waste a minute.
There were plenty of histrionics, with Reggie weeping and pleading with his darling Frankie to come back to him over and over again, an incredibly theatrical display of grief he would repeat, day after day, even after her body was moved to a silk-lined coffin in the funeral parlour at Hayes & English in Hoxton Street, N1. Despite all this, the practical, devious Reg went into action.
He drove round to Ormsby Street and Wimbourne House and demanded every single item belonging to Frances. Her engagement ring. All her jewellery. All the letters between them. Photos. Her bank book. Her collection of little dolls from their trips abroad. A silver dressing table set he’d bought her. Her clothes, underwear. Even her make-up. Everything.
Here we see the same Reg the organiser, the businesslike twin who always did a first-class mopping up job after one of the Kray’s calamitous crimes, the same Reg who’d successfully engineered the silence of the entire East End after the disastrous Cornell slaying. Cunning Reg, the planner who thought ahead, knew the law, understood perfectly he was entitled to everything as Frances’s legal next of kin. The same Reg who’d strung Frances along on the annulment of their marriage – until it was too late.
There was no pity or concern for the family of the girl he claimed to love, at a time when they desperately needed the smallest crumb of comfort they could salvage from their wrecked lives. His savage ransacking of Elsie and Frank Shea’s daughter’s life, right down to the last hair grip, was yet another example of Kray terrorism, rule by fear.
But it was also an act of sheer calculation, lest anything in her belongings might betray his image and incriminate Reggie as the monster controller he surely was at that moment. The Sheas needed something to hang on to, no matter how small, in the early days of their grief, something to briefly assuage the sorrow that would never really leave them for the rest of their lives.
What Reggie Kray gave them as a grieving son-in-law was as violent and crushing as if he’d taken a brick and smashed it right in their faces. Though as we will see, despite his raid on her possessions, he didn’t quite manage to get his hands on everything.
Until Frances died, it was relatively simple to understand, even to find a modicum of sympathy, for the conflict in Reggie Kray’s emotions: his desire for Frances and a different, normal life versus the overwhelming need to remain with his crazy twin brother – who hated Frances’s very existence and scared her witless.
Yet at this juncture, when all Reggie’s fantasies for their future were finally destroyed, you have to question the motivation of a man who, in the midst of such tragedy, so chillingly sets out to put his own interests before anything else.
This also strips bare the Kray myth, persistent to this very day, that the twins were ultimately a force for good.
The ransacking of Frances’s bedroom, the plundering of the remnants of her short life, were never the actions of a caring, generous or thoughtful man. Respect is a word that crops up again and again in the Kray lexicon. It’s almost a mantra within the world they inhabited – even today the word has profound connotations in the criminal world. Where was the respect for Frances and her family in this?
Six days after Frances’s death, an inquest was held at St Pancras Coroner’s Court on 13 June. Here is the report of the inquest from the local paper, the Hackney Gazette, dated Friday 16 June 1967:
MRS KRAY TOOK DRUGS OVERDOSE
At a time when she had been planning a holiday with her husband, Mrs Frances Elsie Shea (otherwise Kray), wife of Mr Reginald Kray, a company director, took an overdose of drugs at her brother’s home, 34 Wimbourne Court, Wimbourne Street, Shoreditch, it was disclosed at Tuesday’s St Pancras inquest.
Recording a verdict that she had died from barbiturate poisoning and had ‘killed herself’ the Coroner, Mr Ian Milne, said she had suffered a personality disorder.
‘Her marriage was on the rocks, although there seems to have been rising hopes of a reconciliation’ said Mr Milne.
‘Barbiturates can be bought almost as easily as sweets on the London streets and she has clearly taken an enormous overdose. I am satisfied it was self-administered.’
Her brother, Mr Frank Shea, a haulage contractor, said she had lived at Ormsby Street, Shoreditch, but for the past three months had been living with him. He said she had reverted to her maiden name by deed poll, but she had been ‘hoping her marriage would come right.’ She used to practise typing and shorthand to get her old skill back. He was not worried about her in any way.
Mr Shea said she did have tablets prescribed by her doctor. He agreed with the Coroner that he had at one time searched her handbag to see if she had got hold of more from somewhere else. He also agreed that his wife had some sleeping tablets and that she had ‘missed some’.
Mr Shea said that her husband had been to see her and she and Mr Kray had been discussing plans for a holiday. Everything was quite all right, and there was absolutely nothing to indicate she might harm herself.
On the Wednesday morning (June 7) he took her a cup of tea and he thought she was just waking up. It was about 10 a.m. His wife was still in the flat. He went out and returned about 2 o’clock and noticed the tea was still there. He called a doctor who certified she was dead.
Dr Julius Silverstone, consultant psychiatrist at Hackney Hospital, said he had known Mrs Kray as a patient since January this year (1967) but she had first attended a psychiatrist in 1965 for a while as an outpatient. She was seen in 1966 by his predecessor and it was thought advisable to bring her into the hospital as an inpatient. She stayed in the hospital and had a ‘variety of treatments’.
‘I think she was [sic] largely a personality problem,’ said Dr Silverstone.
He said that in October last year (’66) she was taken to St Leonard’s Hospital, as a result of an overdose of tablets, and again in January this year. It was diagnosed as barbiturate poisoning but she was found in a gas-filled room.
Replying to the Coroner, he said it was ‘very difficult to say’ whether or not they were genuine suicide attempts. She was certainly a very distressed young woman. He last saw her on June 5 and she was talking about plans for a holiday. He gave her some tablets, which she asked for, for the plane flight.
P.C. Geoffrey Tomlin said he found Mrs Kray wearing pyjamas. The cup of tea was still there, he added.
Dr N Patel, pathologist, stated that there were no signs of violence or injury and no evidence of alcohol.
Other newspapers reported the story. The Times reported that ‘Mr Reginald Kray was in court at the inquest but did not give evidence.’
His twin, of course, remained in hiding.
According to Rita Smith, Reggie was shocked to learn at the inquest that Frances’s suicide attempts went back much further than he’d known: ‘He found out she had suffered from depression and attempted to kill herself when she was about 13. He didn’t know before that.’
Unfortunately, archival records of the inquest are not available. In a sense, this hidden history of depression – there was no reference to it in any other aspect of my research – makes it clear that Frances was already far too vulnerable a young girl to be able to handle the violent world she’d unwittingly stepped into – and remained trapped in.
As with the wedding, the Sheas’ wishes were cast aside when it came to Frances’s funeral. Her brother attempted to start making the arrangements at English’s Funeral Parlour but Reggie intervened.
No, she couldn’t have a quiet, small family funeral: as his wife she’d have a big, lavish funeral befitting her celebrity status. No, she could not be buried under her own name, the name she’d changed legally. She was a Kray. He’d be organising the headstone and it would say she was a Kray. And she was to be buried in the satin and lace wedding gown which he’d purchased. He was her husband and he’d bury her the way he wanted. As he told John Pearson afte
rwards: ‘I’d given her the East End’s wedding of the year. Now I was giving her the East End’s funeral of the year.’
The lavish, extravagant East End Cockney funeral is, of course, as much an expression of self-assertion as a tradition in that part of London. It goes back a long way, to the nineteenth century, where working-class funerals meant horse-drawn hearses, coffins with brass knobs and mourners dressed in black silk. In due course, an over-the-top display of flowers became de rigueur too.
Frances’s funeral was as ostentatious as Reggie wished. At the time, the story went round that the funeral cost ran to £2,000. (Today’s equivalent of that sum is around £30,000.) There were enormous floral displays from their underworld contacts and members of the Kray firm, complete with condolence cards, dwarfing the more modest wreaths from Frances’s family. Reggie ordered huge floral wreaths, one in a heart shape with red roses and white carnations going through the middle, the biggest one being a six-foot tall wreath spelling out her name. Ron, still hiding from the law, sent a huge bunch of carnations.
Albert Donoghue recalled his distasteful task at the cemetery before the mourners arrived: ‘I had to go and check all the bouquets, see who had sent flowers and then tell Reggie who’d been missing. He’d remember that. It was sick.’
For the Sheas, while the funeral turned out to be everything they didn’t want – an extravagant gangster funeral – there had been one small victory in the midst of their grief.
After the funeral, Elsie told people that she had secretly visited the undertakers and convinced them to let her put a little slip and a pair of tights onto Frances underneath the wedding dress. She also claimed that she had managed to remove the wedding ring from Frances’s finger and replace it with a little ring Frances had kept since childhood.
Reg’s old friend Father Hetherington conducted the funeral service at St James the Great, the same church where the marriage had taken place.
After the service, the mourners, mostly culled from the Kray’s world, where celebrity met underworld, were transported in ten huge black limousines for the journey to Chingford Mount Cemetery where Reg had purchased a large burial plot, his intention to be buried there with Frances, along with all the other members of the Kray family.
At the cemetery, police even mingled with the mourners, in the vain hope that Ronnie might appear, much to Reggie’s disgust. At the grave, as he watched his wife’s coffin lowered into the earth, Reggie wept. Everyone else watched in silence. It was a classic Hollywood performance, a ritual demonstrated to show the world how Reggie Kray had loved and lost his wife.
As Albert Donoghue commented: ‘He was a good actor. If Frances was mentioned afterwards, he’d start to cry. It was either remorse or acting.’
Yet within a few months, as the Shea family struggled with their loss, the grief-stricken husband would be finding comfort in the arms of a twenty-three-year-old woman. And a man answering to the name of McVitie would be meeting a grisly end…
CHAPTER 11
AFTERWARDS
Gin. Bottle after bottle of Gordon’s, poured continuously down Reggie’s throat. Medicine, if you like, gulped down in a fruitless attempt to help him handle what had happened. There were also handfuls of Valium taken with the gin in a pointless attempt to calm himself down. A tidal wave of intoxication, night after night, anything to alleviate the pain – and crush the truth, which he couldn’t acknowledge, of his own responsibility for Frances’s downfall.
He’d always been the rational twin. Yet now there seemed no reason at all in his behaviour: consequently there were two madmen giving orders to the men in the Firm, drawing up hate lists, behaving unpredictably. Very soon Reggie looked haggard and drawn. Haunted.
Just a week after Frances’s funeral, now virtually consumed by paranoia, Reggie Kray decided it was time to get out there and wreak revenge on the Shea family. He’d start, he thundered, with Frankie Shea. The row over the unpaid debt of £1,000 that Frankie had lent Reggie still rankled. He’d sort him out once and for all.
He despatched one of the men around him, Tony Lambrianou, to drive him to a pub in Hoxton where he knew Frankie drank regularly.
‘He had a gun on him and I realised he was thinking about shooting Frankie Shea,’ recalled Lambrianou, in his book, Inside the Firm (Lambrianou died in 2004).
Tony Lambrianou said he found himself in a difficult position, having known Frankie since childhood. ‘I understood his [Reggie’s] feelings, especially since other people were putting a lot of poison in, sticking up Frances’s name while knowing it was a sore point. At the same time I saw the other side of it all and I could never have harmed Frankie Shea; could never have seen him shot.’
Inside the pub, Frankie was drinking with his mates, unaware of how close he was to Reggie’s paranoid rage – and the gun.
Tony Lambrianou parked the car opposite the pub and started talking to Reggie, hoping he could get him to see reason. ‘In my heart of hearts, I was almost certain that Reggie could not have hurt Frankie,’ he wrote. ‘If he’d come face to face with him, he’d have been more likely to break down, because every time he saw him, he saw Frances; or maybe he might even have given him a few quid rather than do anything to him. But when Reggie was in a funny mood, you could never be completely sure.
‘I said to him, “Look Reggie, you don’t mean it. Come on. You don’t mean it.” And as we talked, I knew that the moment of danger had passed. Reggie calmed down; he was rational again.’
On another occasion not long after Frances’s death, Tony Lambrianou wrote that he ran into Frankie Shea in a West End club. ‘He said, “Am I all right? I know you and Chris are very strong with the twins now.”
‘I said, “Frank, we go back a long way and I’d never do anything to harm you. I’d be insulted if you thought I would.”’
Kray minder and enforcer Ronnie Hart saw the state Reggie was in at very close range. He’d been living alongside it right from the time Frances died. Hart was the twins’ cousin, a blonde, good-looking, former merchant navy sailor. He’d relished being part of the Firm, had opted to get involved with it for kicks, for the sheer thrill of living dangerously.
Ronnie Hart, in fact, played a key role in the twins’ downfall. Yet in those weeks immediately after Frances’s death, he went everywhere with Reggie as his driver. He’d been with Reggie when he’d gone to the mortuary to identify her body and after the funeral he would drive Reggie each week out to the suburbs to the cemetery at Chingford Mount.
‘The minds of the twins were, of course, completely warped and inhuman,’ said Hart in 1969. ‘In his peculiar way he was devoted to Frances and he was convinced – probably because of his ego – that she really loved him and that after she left him, she only stayed away at the instigation of her parents.
‘On every trip to the cemetery, Reggie would sob. He spent £20 on fresh flowers for the grave every Saturday. He became so upset he was incapable of changing the flowers he’d bring. I had to do the job. All he could do was kneel in front of the grave and cry. He bought a windmill that stood about three feet high, a working model made in a plastic material which looked like stone.
‘He said, “This will do until I get the headstone made.” The headstone was to be made in Italy from Italian marble.’
The expensive, specially made headstone bearing the name Frances Elsie Kray was to be a permanent reminder for the Sheas of Reggie’s complete rejection of their wishes, a visible affront to Frances’s memory and, even more painfully, a denial of what had been her own wish to be buried as Frances Shea.
On the anniversary of Frances’s twenty-fourth birthday, 23 September, 1967, Hart drove Reggie to the graveside. This time, they were accompanied by Violet and her sister May. Elsie and Frank Senior were already there.
‘Mr and Mrs Shea put two black vases down, one on either side of the grave, and on each was a label. One read: “To my beloved sister: from Frank, for your birthday” and the other read: “To our darling daughter, rememberi
ng you on your birthday”,’ recalled Hart.
‘While the parents were putting flowers on the grave, we all stood back by our car.
‘Mrs Shea broke down and cried. She came across to Reggie and spat at him.
‘She said, “You killed my daughter, you bastard, and if you spend a thousand pounds a week on flowers it won’t do any good because we will never forgive you and neither will she.”
‘Then they walked away.’
At the time, Reggie said nothing.
‘The following Saturday I took him to the cemetery, he pulled the flowers out of the pots Frances’s parents had left and savagely screwed them up in his hands. “I don’t want their stinking flowers on my wife’s grave,” he said.
‘“I would love to have choked her last week when she said that to me but I daren’t because of Frances.”
‘He then moved the two pots into bushes where they could not be seen,’ concluded Hart.
‘When she died it was like the world had come to an end,’ remembered Rita Smith. ‘We didn’t know what to do. He looked absolutely terrible. One of his mates said, “He’s worrying me, Reet. He’s drinking himself silly. He doesn’t care if he lives or dies.”’
Throughout the East End, the story of Frances and how she died was an endless topic of speculation. Some believed it wasn’t suicide at all. Ronnie had murdered her, they claimed, forced the pills down her throat, though there was no foundation in this whatsoever, since Ron remained in hiding at that time.
Others claimed they’d both ‘done her in’ themselves, hatched a plot between them to kill her because she was threatening to go to the police. Most people, however, knew that Elsie and Frank believed Reggie and Reggie alone carried much of the responsibility for Frances’s self destruction. All these stories, of course, eventually found their way back to Reggie. Which made him even more deranged.
‘After she died, we all thought it would send Reggie over the edge,’ recalled Maureen Flanagan. ‘Their brother Charlie always said that people kept telling him in pubs that Reggie had scared this young, beautiful girl out of her life with his lifestyle.’
