Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  She told the court: ‘I told the doctor, “I don’t want them to do it” and she said, “Let them try.” She didn’t feel it was going to make any difference.’

  The paramedics, in liaison with his GP Dr Juliet Rayner, who had the ultimate responsibility, decided to stop treatment. Mr Shea died about 11pm that night.

  Police had attended both in the morning and after his death. Detective Inspector Alan Pitcher told the coroner police initially had concerns that it was ‘a potential assisted suicide’.

  He said that there was no living will, but from numerous notes and poems in Mr Shea’s handwriting he gauged that ‘they were of a man in a desperate place.’

  Mr Shea was able to move about and feed himself, the prescribed bottles were in his bedroom and the decision to stop further treatment had been on medical advice, added the inspector.

  ‘After I had conducted my investigation I was happy there were no criminal offences. It was a very sad situation,’ he said.

  Questioned by the coroner about why she thought police attended, Dr Rayner told the hearing: ‘I was confident neither Debbie nor I had tried to assist Frank’s suicide.’

  Expert medical witness Dr Stephen Metcalfe told the hearing Mr Shea had taken ‘a massive overdose’ some hours before he was found by his wife.

  He said any further treatment would have been fruitless and continued: ‘I believe he had permanent brain damage and would have died anyway. I believe the right decision was made to stop treatment.’

  He admitted that such decisions where consent is given on behalf of someone else were ‘a grey area’ but the patient’s wellbeing should always come first.

  Finally discovering the tragic end Frankie Shea’s life had taken, and the bleak irony of him choosing to take exactly the same path his sister did all those years ago, was yet another shocking point in my research.

  And it was obvious that the brief story in the East London paper revealed long-buried guilt for what happened in his sister’s tragic marriage, guilt and remorse that left him in emotional turmoil for much of his adult life.

  In those years while Frances was still alive, he’d only ever mentioned the secret incident to one person – and that was his mum, Elsie, though it’s not known how much of it Elsie repeated to her husband – or her daughter. But how could the Sheas discuss it openly in conversation? Back then, it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you talked about with everyone, was it? A gay overture? From Reggie Kray? Frankie wouldn’t have been the only one to wish to keep such a thing under wraps back then.

  Of course Frankie had been a tad naïve in those teenage Regal billiard-hall days when he’d been so flattered by the attention the Krays had started to pay him. They’d made such a huge impression on him, six years older, slickly dressed, well-known ‘faces’ in the area, plenty of money, drinks across the bar all night and, of course, they let him drive the expensive cars.

  To a car-crazy Hoxton kid in the fifties this was Dreamland, driving motors you could never afford in a million years.

  He was a mug, really, Frankie told himself. He’d been completely taken in by their flash aura, their charisma. They were quasi-glamorous figures then – and in a raw, dank place like the fifties East End, glamour was an awesome commodity. Only film stars and royals had glamour.

  One night, when they’d all been drinking too much, he’d gone with Reggie back to the house in Vallance Road. He’d passed out. Until he’d woken up abruptly with a start – to find Reggie Kray attempting oral sex on him.

  In sheer blind panic, he’d started shouting and screaming. It was loud enough for Charlie Senior and one of Reggie’s uncles to hear him yelling and, thankfully, step in and pull the inebriated Reggie away in disgust.

  Charlie Senior already knew about the twins’ youthful homosexual escapades and couldn’t disguise his dislike of what they were doing, though Violet remained tolerant of homosexuality throughout her life.

  Ashamed and fearful, the teenage Frankie had quickly dived for his stuff and bolted through the front door, out into the street.

  The incident had quickly sobered him up: for young Frankie it was probably the biggest shock of his life. Where he came from, people never really talked about homosexuality openly, just the odd whisper and nudge. Yes, he’d known that it existed; even at school you’d hear scornful, mocking talk about ‘nancy boys’ and what they did to each other.

  Not long after he’d started going to the billiard hall, one of the blokes he vaguely knew had made comments about Ronnie Kray and poofs to him one night, but he’d shrugged them off, thinking ‘So what?’

  So for Frankie, the discovery that Reggie Kray, someone he’d kind of looked up to, wanted to do those things to him, shocked and terrified him at the same time. This was a man with a reputation for a killer punch. His twin was renowned for his love of the knife. What was going to happen now, when he saw him again?

  Nothing happened.

  The next time he saw Frankie in the billiard hall, Reggie acted as if the whole thing had been a dream. The drinks still came across the bar. Would Frankie drive him somewhere tomorrow?

  Frankie was relieved, for a bit. Reggie had got the message. But was it going to happen again? He could hardly refuse to go anywhere with Reggie, what with driving for him. He needed the cash then, anyway.

  So he playacted, continued to go along with the so-called friendship, being pals with Reggie Kray but managing to steer himself away from the big drinking sessions with them, all the going round to Vallance Road afterwards, not too difficult once Frankie had a girlfriend.

  And then, without warning, Reggie was taking Frances out. Weeks later, he was talking about them getting married. His dad seemed to think it was okay but Frankie didn’t. Yet he didn’t dare talk about what he knew. He couldn’t.

  Much of the guilt that plagued and tormented Frankie Shea for many years of his life stemmed from the fact that even though he’d blurted out something to his mum about Reggie, he’d done nothing at all to warn his sister properly, sit down with her, do the serious big brother talk, to steer her away from Reggie right from the start. Why did he never try to do that? he asked himself time after time. There were opportunities galore, especially at the beginning, when Reggie was in prison and Franny was sitting up in her room, writing to him all the time. It wasn’t as if they weren’t close, he loved his baby sister and she always loved him right back.

  But he’d been so scared at the time, worried about himself. He’d even made a brief attempt to get away from the Kray scene, when he moved to another part of London. It didn’t last. He came back to Hoxton after a few months.

  Maybe Reggie had guessed that this ‘vanishing’ was because of him – they always wanted to know where so-and-so was, what so-and-so was doing – but curiously, nothing had been said, probably because by then, it was widely accepted that Frances was ‘Reggie’s girl’.

  So he’d remained friends with Reggie, all buddy buddy, even when he stopped driving for them, because that was the only way with them, whatever you felt or thought. And you didn’t dare say anything to anyone around them, they’d go straight back to the twins and dob you in.

  It was sickening, how he’d kept quiet, walked Frances down the aisle, knowing all this. He’d hated himself for it, even though long before she’d died, the so-called ‘friendship’ had been well and truly over. That £1,000 debt Reggie never repaid saw to that. But of course, he’d simply used it to scare Frances even more, every time she mentioned it.

  In Frankie Shea’s mind, there was never any doubt about it: Reggie had started courting Frances as an act of pure revenge, a means of getting back at him, Frankie, for that drunken rejection.

  The Krays could be incredibly generous, in the East End way. But they were totally unforgiving when it came to getting their own back if they’d been upset by someone. No one rejected a Kray twin without retribution. Reggie fancied two good-looking teenagers, both called Frankie. If he couldn’t have one, he’d make sure he had the
other…

  Frankie had also struggled with the knowledge that he, not his mum or dad, was the one that could have done something. He could have warned his sister about exactly what she was dealing with long before he accompanied her down the aisle – and towards her early death. Yet he’d stayed silent.

  Should anyone blame Frankie Shea for his inability to step in, to try to ‘rescue’ Frances from her fate? It’s debatable. In that era, telling anyone that Reggie Kray really wanted him, not his sister, was unimaginable; they were such different times.

  Now, of course, someone making a gay overture is hardly a big deal, a person’s sexuality is no longer a matter of shame or concealment. In the fifties, men could go to prison for being gay, but who’d have had the bottle in those days to go to the police and say ‘Reggie Kray tried to give me a blow job?’ And what copper would have taken action, anyway?

  In the end, despite all the pain the Sheas had lived with for all those years, it’s not difficult to understand why Frankie Shea kept quiet about what he knew. And why he didn’t grab the opportunity to attack Reggie Kray in a major blaze of publicity once Reggie was safely beneath the earth.

  Essentially, Frank Shea was ‘old school’: he’d kept the same East End values he’d grown up with. And silence, virtually unknown now in the twenty-first-century world of kiss-and-sell, was a big part of that long vanished world. He’d also had his mum to consider. But even after Elsie had gone, after the story appeared in the paper, he’d known there was no real merit in making a huge noise about it all. It wouldn’t change anything.

  When you consider the stories and deals the Krays were happy to cut with the media over thirty years, in exchange for cash and further notoriety (though to be fair, their reputation as hard men meant more to them than any amount of money), there’s a certain kind of dignity in Frankie Shea’s decision to remain silent about his story, rather than sell it off to the media as a commodity once the Kray twins had died. The past was the past and once he’d quit drinking and moved away from the East End, Frank Shea found great personal contentment in the later years of his life. He’d wanted the world to know the truth about his sister. But perhaps he felt it was a story that could only be told after he’d gone.

  And so I finally reached a concluding point in the story of Frances Shea. She’d eerily predicted Reggie’s destiny if he didn’t let her go and indeed became the ghost that continued to haunt him.

  He had all the time in the world during his thirty-odd years of incarceration to ponder his youth, his mistakes: there were terrible breakdowns and suicide attempts during those years in prison, though he would always present the face of the defiant yet avuncular gangster to the media when required to.

  In January 1990, London Weekend Television, as it was then known, screened a documentary film entitled Still Krays After All These Years as part of their prestigious current affairs series, The London Programme.

  The film focused on the twins’ business activities in prison after two decades and was screened prior to the launch of the biographical movie of their story, The Krays.

  Journalist and documentary filmmaker John Parrish told me his story of working on that documentary – and his memories of both twins on interviewing them. His meetings with them for the documentary underline the very different impressions the twins could create, face to face. He told me:

  Born in the East End and raised there until we moved to Essex when I was six, I’d had close ties to the East End my whole life. Most of my family lived there and as a kid and student most of my Saturday and holiday jobs had been there. I’d worked on a Brick Lane market stall for years. My grandfather was an East End car dealer; my father had a car parts shop in the East End.

  Growing up I’d heard family stories about the Kray twins. When the twins were starting out, they’d attempted to put the squeeze on my grandfather. Apparently, granddad, a big tough man, had sent them away with a flea in their ear.

  In the late eighties, the Krays were becoming popular East End icons. There had always been people who regarded them as latter-day Robin Hoods, but now it seemed there was an all-out effort to rehabilitate their reputation, turn the Kray name into a brand.

  Ronnie’s affairs were mostly handled by his then-wife, Kate, a Rolls-Royce-driving blonde who happened to live in the same pleasant Kent village my grandparents had retired to.

  I interviewed Charlie, the twins’ older brother and other assorted characters, some living in squalor, others in palatial circumstances. I quickly learned that though the twins were safely behind bars, they still commanded respect and induced fear.

  Some of their old friends and foes flatly refused to speak to me. I lost count of the doors slammed in my face when I tried contacting people in their old neighbourhood. Time and time again I heard that though the twins might be locked up “they’ve still got friends on the outside”. This fear was very real.

  The other thing I heard constantly was that the twins only harmed their own, meaning fellow gangsters. When they ruled East London nobody feared crimes like rape and burglary because the twins ‘policed’ the area and would hand out their own violent form of justice if they caught anyone misbehaving on their manor.

  ‘Women and children were safe on the streets then,’ I was repeatedly told.

  This, I knew, was absolute romanticised nonsense. I went through the archives of local papers and found plenty of references to all kinds of horrific crimes. Memorably, one day I found a story on the front page of a local newspaper about a rape, while on the back page there was a story about the twins presenting a cheque to a local boxing gym. So much for women and children being safe.

  As I saw it, the twins were not latter-day Robin Hoods. They were a couple of thugs who preyed upon people. I saw them as parasites and the people who mythologised and revered them as fools. Nothing since has changed my mind. Not even meeting them.

  Through my research, I got word: Reggie wanted to meet me. My documentary wasn’t exactly going to be complimentary, though it seemed Reggie had got it into his head that it would be. Either that or he just couldn’t resist the opportunity to try and charm another member of the media.

  At Lewes Prison, Reggie was led into the visiting room, a big smile on his face. I remember being surprised at how old he looked – he was then around fifty-seven – and that he was a man of about average size, though barrel-chested and bristling with repressed energy.

  He shook my hand with the usual bone-crunching gangster grip, greeted me warmly. ‘I’m really grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to have my side of the story out there,’ he said.

  I didn’t mention that what I was actually doing was exploring how two killers could effectively be involved in a business from behind bars that was rebranding them as Robin Hoods who loved their dear old mum.

  Reggie was earnest, avuncular, smiled and laughed a lot.

  If I hadn’t known he’d stabbed Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie to death, I would have been completely fooled. He chatted openly about how he hoped the sale of paintings and books would bankroll a campaign to get him and Ronnie free.

  There was no sense of menace from Reggie.

  Through my work I’d met a few killers and they usually made me feel uneasy. Reggie didn’t. He could have been an elderly East End relation. Later, he sent me a signed book and a letter, thanking me again for the opportunity to tell his story.

  Then I met Ronnie.

  I’ve never met anyone since who struck me as so evil.

  The meeting was at Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane. I went with Kate, Ronnie’s wife at the time. Beforehand she warned me not to interrupt Ronnie and that he could come across as menacing. No kidding!

  We sat at a very small table in the visiting room and Ronnie came in. I noticed Peter Sutcliffe, the infamous Yorkshire Ripper, behind him. Ronnie was wearing a suit, an incongruous look in that place.

  Ronnie sat across the table from me and hissed, ‘You’re late!’

  T
hose were his first words. No preamble, no greeting. His tongue flicked across his lips and his black eyes bored right into me. All of a sudden that table seemed very small. I could easily see Ronnie leaping over it and tearing at my throat and I had no doubt if I said the wrong thing he might be inclined to do so.

  This man radiated evil.

  As I said, I’d met killers before. I’d even gone undercover and met paedophiles.

  But Ronnie Kray was in a class of his own.

  Looking into his eyes was like looking into the eyes of a lizard. They were dark, expressionless and cold. I’d never met anyone before or since who was so malevolent.

  We chatted about the documentary but Ronnie was hard to make conversation with. Kate kept prompting him to talk but he seemed distracted, disinterested. When he did speak he was softly spoken, almost girlish. Like his twin, he wasn’t a particularly big man or physically intimidating. But he was scary in a way that Sutcliffe, sitting nearby, a serial killer of nightmare proportions, simply wasn’t. Ronnie was bloody frightening. Sutcliffe was not.

  I believed then, and still do, that while Reggie saw extreme violence as just the way business was done in the East End, Ronnie actually enjoyed it.

  Maureen Flanagan, loyal to the family, visited the twins in prison throughout their lives. Violet Kray made her promise to continue to visit them just before she died in hospital in August 1982, age seventy-two.

  ‘Reggie would only talk about Frances if I was on my own, never if there was another visitor there,’ Maureen told me. ‘I’d take flowers to Violet’s grave and he’d ask when I was going and made me promise I’d put roses on Frances’s grave. The card was always the same: “To Frances, you are with me for always, Reg”.

  ‘In all the years I visited, Ronnie never mentioned her. Not once.’

  Carol-Anne Kelly is an attractive blonde sixtysomething Londoner who met Reggie Kray in Parkhurst prison in the eighties. At the time she was visiting her former husband. She told me: ‘I was in the visiting room and Reggie came over and introduced himself. The first thing he said to me was, “You remind me of my late wife Frances, your mannerisms are the same, the way you use your hands to express yourself.”’