London's Gangs at War

by Dick Kirby

  Spot appeared in court for the last time on 6 February 1962, when at West London Magistrates’ Court he was fined £12 for stealing meat from his employer. Spot and Rita drifted apart; she died of cancer in 1988 and he followed her to the grave seven years later while living in a residential home.

  It’s time, too, to bid farewell to Billy Hill. He still immersed himself in criminality, some of his contemporaries received the odd wounding and although he and Gypsy lived from time to time in Cannes and Tangier, Hill made his permanent home at 4 Windsor Court, Moscow Road, Bayswater. He ran clubs that featured distinctly dodgy card games, but his relationship with Gypsy fractured after both of them had extra-marital affairs with partners considerably younger than themselves, including a liaison with a black singer for him and one with a native of Tangier for her. Hill died in 1984 – either impoverished or as rich as Croesus, whichever version you prefer – and Gypsy died twenty years later.

  ‘Battles’ Rossi was later questioned about the death of boxer Freddie Mills and was charged with the contract murder of Beatrice ‘Biddy’ Gold in 1975. He was acquitted.

  I saw Bobby Warren in the 1970s when I wanted to speak to him, purely as a witness to a crime in which he had no criminal involvement. He refused to say one word to me.

  Bernard Schack emerged angry and embittered from his twelve months’ imprisonment for falsifying a defence for his friend Jack Spot. Spot, known for his parsimony, had refused to support Schack’s family, and the men never spoke to each other again. According to Spot, after Moisha Goldstein finished his two-year sentence for the same offence, he chummed up with the Kray brothers and ‘taught them everything they knew’. It’s true that the twins did align themselves with Goldstein, although he later died alone, impoverished and frightened.

  Sid Kiki – who may or may not have fingered Spot – went on to become a police informant; his testimony helped convict a threeman blackmail ring who between them collectively possessed nineteen convictions and were sent away for a total of twelve years. Kiki’s betting shop was later burnt to the ground.

  Pasquale Papa – Bert Marsh, as was – died in 1976, tremendously well respected in the Clerkenwell area. A few years ago, I had lunch with an upstanding pillar of Italian society from that area who bemoaned the present day lack of law and order in the district, saying, ‘What we need is someone like Bert Marsh to sort things out!’

  At the time, the name meant little to me and I asked, ‘Isn’t he dead?’

  ‘Dead?’ replied my companion. ‘Of course he’s dead! D’you think we’d be having all the trouble nowadays if Pasquale Papa was still alive?’

  Food for thought.

  As for the rest? Christopher Glinski features again, later on, as to a far greater extent does Frankie Fraser. And although he is left centre stage, Billy Hill will have a small walk-on part in the next bloody chapter – as will the Kray Twins – when three men were convicted of causing grievous bodily harm to a dead man.

  No, honestly.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Pen Club Murder

  Dorset Street in Spitalfields was known in Victorian times as ‘the worst street in London’, and with good reason; just 400ft long and 24ft wide, it was full of common lodging houses which catered for the sleeping arrangements of 1,200 men per night. It had also been the scene of several murders, including that of Mary Jane Kelly, courtesy of Jack the Ripper, in 1888. Perhaps in an attempt to dissociate it from its tarnished past, the City of London Corporation changed its name to Duval Street in 1904; it made little difference.

  Before Duval Street was turned into a lorry park to service Spitalfields Market in the 1960s there was one more murder, and it happened during the early hours of Sunday, 7 February 1960 at the Pen Club.

  To set the scene, we must first introduce William David ‘Billy’ Ambrose, who at the time of the murder was thirty-one years of age. By the time he was eighteen Ambrose had started to box professionally and in the following three and a half years he had won thirty-one of his thirty-four bouts; he was considered, with considerable justification, to be a contender for the middleweight championship of Great Britain. He won on points in an eightround match against Bob Cleaver at the Arena, Mile End in 1952, but this win was his last professional fight, because his licence was suspended.

  The reason for the abrupt termination of such a promising career was as follows: on the evening of 18 November 1952 Ambrose was one of six masked men armed with truncheons who broke into Conway Stewart & Co., Copperfield Road, Stepney, attacked, tied up and gagged Walter Morgan, the security officer, and helped themselves to 2,970 fountain pens valued at £1,500.

  Ambrose and another man stood trial, as did Ambrose’s mother for receiving, after 2,229 of the pens and the impedimenta used for opening the safe were found at her home. Fifty-one-year-old Mrs Sarah Jane Ambrose was later acquitted, but despite the introduction of a defence witness who claimed that although he had participated in the robbery, Ambrose and his accomplice had not, both prisoners were convicted and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.

  Ambrose’s incarceration commenced in Wormwood Scrubs prison, where he was briefly reunited with Reggie and Ronnie Kray – at various times they had all trained at Govier’s gym. The twins had been apprehended after being absent without leave from the army and in the course of their arrest they had assaulted Police Constable Roy Fisher. The magistrate had commended the officer, who also received a modest bursary of 7s 6d, and awarded the twins one month’s imprisonment. Although Ambrose was just five years older than the Krays, they regarded him as ‘an old boxer, who had been somebody, a celebrity’ and they graciously dispensed some tobacco and boxing magazines to him.

  Ambrose’s stay at Wormwood Scrubs was hardly longer than that of the brothers; he escaped from the prison’s hospital wing and was on the run until, recaptured, he spent the rest of his sentence at Dartmoor. There he settled down to serve his sentence and reflected upon the spirited, albeit unsuccessful, attempt by the well-meaning friendly witness to get him and his co-defendant off the hook. When his next bit of criminal chicanery came round, it would be Ambrose who would be the one offering a helping hand to absolve other criminals from blame. On that occasion there would be the assistance of a number of others – including the Kray brothers.

  *

  It has been said that the Pen Club was named after and financed with the spoils from the Conway Stewart robbery, but whilst this is a possibility it does seem rather unlikely, since only 741 fountain pens with a value of £374 were not recovered. The Pen was one of ninety-two such clubs in the Stepney area, none of which were respectable. Its owners were Billy Ambrose and his associate Jeremiah Callaghan (who, it was rumoured, had also participated in the robbery), but they were not the licence holders.

  The wartime Regulation 55C had permitted the police to object to people of bad character managing licensed premises, but this rule was scrapped in 1952. Now any person could fill in a form, devise some rules, list the names of a few proposed members, take it all to the Clerk of the local Justices and, for the princely sum of five shillings, be granted a licence. Drinks could then legally be served for nine hours out of every twenty-four, the hours to be determined by the licensee. It was an utterly shambolic system, although very little has changed with regard to the regulation of licensed premises today.

  So although Ambrose or Callaghan could have been the licence holders, their names would undoubtedly have attracted the attention of the police, with the possibility of uncomfortable enquiries being made in respect of income and expenditure.

  The club had changed hands just three weeks previously, and Ambrose acted as doorman/bouncer. It was managed by a Mrs Fay Sadler whose husband, Alec Sadler, was nowhere to be seen. Blonde, thirty-six-year-old Mrs Sadler also managed a club at 17 Moor Street, Soho and she was better known to the authorities under her maiden name of Fay Richardson because of her conviction, four years previously, for larceny and false pretences, acquired when she had been the par
amour of the late Tommy ‘Scarface’ Smithson.

  How much longer this state of affairs would be allowed to continue was debatable. Despite the fact that Reggie Kray described the club as ‘not being renowned for being a trouble spot, in fact, quite the opposite’, there had already been two police raids the previous week and a third one had been planned for the week following the murder. In fact, two days prior to the murder, the club had been visited by representatives from the Society of Juvenile Probation Officers, to be told by Mrs Sadler, ‘I can see you’re looking for dens of iniquity but you won’t find anything here.’

  The club occupied two floors and on the night of the murder both were crowded. The juke box was playing and Fay Sadler was serving behind the bar when Selwyn Keith Cooney, in the company of his friends Joan Ellen Bending and Johnny Simons, walked in. Cooney – he was also known (certainly to Ambrose) as Jimmy Neill – was a promising middleweight boxer and he managed the New Cabinet Club in Gerrard Street, Soho which was owned by Aggie, the separated wife of Billy Hill; Joan Bending was a barmaid at the club. Simons had a bad criminal record: possessing offensive weapons, assaulting the police, larceny, taking and driving away cars and wilful damage.

  Shortly afterwards, four more people entered the club: they were James Laurence ‘Jimmy’ Nash, a member of a notorious North London crime family of eight brothers, his girlfriend, Doreen ‘Redhead’ Masters, Joseph Henry Pyle and John Alexander Read; the three men were all former boxers.

  Several versions existed of the lead-up to the confrontation, as well as what occurred thereafter, but because of the amount of detail involved it is more than possible that the following scenario was what initially brought Cooney into conflict with the Nashes.

  Several weeks prior to the murder, Cooney had been driving his Vauxhall Victor in Hyde Park when the car collided with a vehicle driven by ‘Blonde Vicky’ James, the girlfriend of Ronnie, one of the Nash brothers. She admitted liability but confessed that she was uninsured, so she suggested that Cooney should get his car repaired and send her the bill. This he did, sending her a rather modest invoice for £2 14s 9d. She, however, refused to pay and then, perhaps by chance, on the night prior to the murder, Cooney went to a drinking club in Notting Hill. There he saw ‘Blonde Vicky’ in company with Ronnie Nash and two other men. The resulting conversation was rather lively, and Ronnie Nash and his two companions attacked Cooney. Outnumbered he might have been, but not outclassed; he fought back and although he collected a black eye he also flattened Nash with a left hook.

  And now, twenty-four hours later, came the dénouement: one version had it that Jimmy Nash walked over to Cooney and struck him with an unidentified object which broke his nose, saying, ‘That will teach you to give little girls a spanking’; whereupon Cooney replied that he had no idea what Nash was talking about.

  Another account was that Simonds heard Nash say, ‘You’re the bastard I’ve been looking for’ and ‘I want you, you had a go at my brother.’ The latter version does have a certain ring of authenticity to it.

  A further version had Cooney shouting, ‘Fuck Ronnie Nash. Fuck all the Nashes. If Ronnie or any of the Nash brothers want it, if they want to mess with me, they can have it any time.’

  It was at this moment that Jimmy Nash walked up to him and said, ‘Hey, my name is Jimmy Nash and you’re talking about my brothers.’

  This elicited the reply from Cooney, ‘I don’t give a fuck what your name is’, and then the battle royal commenced.

  However, since this final version of events was provided by Joey Pyle some considerable time later, it can be viewed with a certain amount of scepticism.

  In any case, Nash continued the attack, knocking out two of Cooney’s teeth, while Pyle and Read joined in the beating-up; then Billy Ambrose’s wife, Betty, shouted, ‘He’s got a gun!’

  There was immediate pandemonium as the crowd tried to disperse; Ambrose pushed his way through the throng and Bending and Simons would both later say that it was Nash who pulled out a gun and shot Ambrose at point-blank range in the stomach.

  Mrs Ambrose screamed, ‘You’ve shot my husband!’

  Cooney shouted, ‘Don’t let him get away!’

  Then a second shot was fired, hitting Cooney in the head. Some of the crowd attacked Nash and his associates; Simons hit Read over the head with a bottle, and the three men and Masters fled from the club, escaping in two cars.

  Cooney had died instantly; Ambrose was grievously wounded and had also been struck on the head, but nevertheless, he, Callaghan and Simons dragged Cooney’s body down the stairs and deposited it some way from the club. Ambrose then drove himself the three miles to his home at Brock Place, Glaucus Street, Poplar, and examined the wound; although he later told a court, ‘I felt a bit of pain but not a terrible lot’, he decided that the best place for him was the London Hospital. He drove to the hospital and when spoken to by the police told them that he had been shot by an unknown assailant outside a club in Paddington the name of which escaped him.

  Meanwhile, Sadler – no stranger to killings, since three of her boyfriends had been murdered – cleared up the bloodstains and mess at the club. When she was later seen leaving the London Hospital, she claimed she had been visiting her friend Billy Ambrose and, giving the police a false name, stated she knew nothing about a shooting.

  But it was not too long before the police began to build a strong case for murder, which at that time still attracted the death penalty. Although there was no trace of Nash, the other three, Masters, Read and Pyle, were arrested.

  When Masters was seen by Detective Inspector James Driscoll at her home address in Parkhill Road, Haverstock Hill, later that morning and asked if she had been at the Pen Club between midnight and 2.00 am, she replied, ‘Pen Club? I don’t know the Pen Club. I wasn’t there. I came home at 1.00 am this morning – what’s it all about?’

  Told that she was alleged to have been at the club when one man was shot and another killed, she replied, ‘I would rather not say anything at the moment.’

  Masters changed her tune after Driscoll found a woman’s pale blue raincoat with spots of blood on it, a bloodstained towel and, inside her crocodile skin handbag, a certificate from Hampstead hospital bearing the name John Read.

  Regarding the towel, Masters said, ‘That’s what I wiped the car seat with. I didn’t want to get them into any trouble and I don’t want to get involved myself.’ She then made a statement in which she admitted taking Read home with her and then on to hospital.

  When Detective Superintendent Millington told Read and Pyle that he had just seen Cooney’s body in the mortuary, Pyle replied, ‘What will happen to us?’, whilst Read claimed, ‘I didn’t do any shooting.’

  Although Simons failed to identify anybody, both men were positively identified by the two women, Sadler and Bending; the latter also identified Masters. When Pyle was unhesitatingly picked out by Sadler, he immediately said, ‘You didn’t see me shoot him’, to which she agreed, ‘I didn’t see you shoot him.’

  Pyle and Read were detained in separate cells at Commercial Street police station. It did not prevent them from conversing with each other, although they did have to shout. The noise attracted the attention of Police Constable Ronald Spiers, who felt compelled to record snatches of the conversation:

  (Read) ‘They all know who done it, you know. Don’t make a statement saying you know the Nashes.’

  (Pyle) ‘I told them I know Ronnie.’

  (Read) ‘I think they know I know them. If we can get out, we might be able to get in touch with Jimmy.’

  (Pyle) ‘I never knew what the row was about. He [referring to Nash] never walked in there and shot straight, did he?’

  (Read) ‘No’.

  (Pyle) ‘They can’t say we were concerned in the matter, can they?’

  (Read) ‘No. We never done any shooting. Three or four tried to get going into Nash. I said, “Turn it up, boys”. It was a ruck and that was that.’

  (Pyle) ‘It’s h
orrible because you don’t know what they’re going to do you for.’

  (Read) ‘No. It’s a fucking worry.’

  (Pyle) ‘I’ll lead a quiet life after this.’

  (Read) ‘You’re telling me.’

  (Pyle) ‘I never knew they could do us for being concerned, did you? We never got into this, with that stabbing on the Common.’

  Pyle then referred to a man named Harris being stabbed to death and another man named Marwood.

  (Read) ‘Yes, all that gun business is fucking silly, isn’t it? I mean, they were only having a ruck to start with.’

  (Pyle) ‘He’ll get life, you know.’

  (Read) ‘Who?’

  (Pyle) ‘Jimmy’.

  (Read) ‘They might top him.’

  Later in the conversation, Pyle said, ‘I won’t go into any more clubs’.

  Read replied, ‘Nor will I, Joe. I was thinking last night they topped the three of us. If they topped me, my wife would be fucking happy.’

  At this, there was general laughter, which suggested that Mrs Read might not find the matter of her husband being hanged by the neck until he was dead as hilarious as all that.

  Charged with the murder of Cooney, Masters made no reply, Read replied, ‘Nothing to say’ and Pyle rather gormlessly said, ‘Is it concerned in murder?’

  In the meantime, the police were searching for Nash. As The Times reported in their 9 February 1960 edition:

  The police are anxious to interview a man who may be armed and who may be able to assist them with their enquiries. A detailed description of this man was sent from Scotland Yard to every police station throughout Britain, yesterday. The alert was centred in London, however, because the wanted man is a Londoner and is in fact well known to many Metropolitan Police officers. His associates and places he habitually visits, including many public houses and drinking clubs are also well known to the police.