by John Pearson
In the mid thirties, silver was fetching two shillings and sixpence per ounce; eighteen-carat gold seven pounds an ounce. ‘I always sold to Abe Sokolok in Black Lion Yard, off Whitechapel Road, every Sunday morning, him being Yiddish. Most weeks I’d be making twenty or thirty pounds from the gold alone.’
This was wealth in the East End, where family income averaged seventeen shillings a week; and Charles had a life he thoroughly enjoyed. ‘I’ve been a free man. That’s how I like it. I don’t believe in working for a Guv’nor. That’s a mug’s game.’ But at twenty-four the time had come to marry. With his looks, and his money, he had the pick of the local girls and chose a seventeen-year-old blonde with blue eyes called Violet Lee. They met in a dance-hall in Mare Street, Hackney. After the marriage they moved in with his parents over a shop in Stene Street, Hoxton. She was soon pregnant and the doctors told her to expect twins. Instead she gave birth to a single son, Charles David. She had been eighteen then. Now at twenty-one she was once again expecting.
Charles Kray was not a family man. But when the midwife told him Violet would soon be giving birth, he decided to postpone his trip to Bristol. That Monday morning he went to King’s Cross to explain things to Sonny Kenny before seeing him off. The old Irishman laughed at the idea of Charles of all people sacrificing a good trip for his family; as the train steamed off, he leaned from the carriage window and shouted, ‘My love to Violet. Hope she has those twins this time. Then you’ll have something to worry about, me boy.’ That night, 17 October 1934, at 64 Stene Street, Hoxton, Violet Kray surprised the midwife by giving birth to two male children within an hour of one another. The first she called Reginald, the second Ronald.
Charles remembered Kenny’s warning and did find the twins’ arrival a financial problem. But his wife was thrilled with her two babies and that was what mattered. For Violet the arrival of the twins was the greatest event in her life. The last few years had been a struggle.
She had been one of three good-looking sisters living on the corner of Vallance Road in Bethnal Green; she was headstrong and had eloped romantically with Charles. ‘I was just young and silly and my head was full of all the nonsense of young girls of seventeen.’ When she found out more about her new life there was no point complaining. Her husband would not change. He had to have his beer and gambling and male company. Some men were like that.
So she made the best of things. She was a good wife. According to her sister May, ‘She always kept herself nice, Violet did. Never let herself go, like most women once they’re married. She was a quiet one.’ With the quietness went great strength of purpose; with twins she finally had something to be purposeful about. ‘I never seen no babies like the twins,’ she said proudly. ‘They was so lovely when they was born, the two of them, so small and dark, just like two little black-haired dolls.’
Their brother, nearly four, was a placid, easy child, with his mother’s personality and looks. The twins were different: they were demanding and brought out all their mother’s deep protectiveness. They did something more: for the first time they gave Violet’s life a touch of the glamour she had dreamt of when she eloped. Nobody else had twins; they were something special, and when she pushed them out in the big double pram they conferred on her the final accolade of cockney motherhood. It was a pretty sight; blonde young mother, gleaming pram and these two beautifully dressed little dolls, making their way past the pubs and stalls of the Bethnal Green Road. People would stop and look, neighbours inquired about them; her two sisters begged for a chance to take them out on their own.
‘In those days everybody loved the twins and wanted a go with them,’ says Violet.
Hoxton, where the twins were born, lies just outside the City up the Hackney Road. A depressing hinterland of dead grey streets and tenements, it was famous in its day for pubs and pickpockets. One of their father’s favourite Hoxton pubs was The Eagle; for years children have been singing about it in the old nursery rhyme:
Up and down the City Road
In and out The Eagle
That’s the way the money goes
Pop goes the weasel.
Hoxton’s tailors often ‘popped’ or pawned their ‘weasels’ or flat-irons at the countless pawnbrokers along City Road to pay for beer when the money ran out, and The Eagle was one of the places where the Hoxton ‘Whizz Mob’ came to drink. This was the biggest gang of pickpockets in London; from Hoxton they would work the race-tracks and the Cup Final crowds, operating as a team and often picking up hundreds of pounds at a time. But Hoxton was a lifeless place; even its pickpockets were despised by the rest of the criminal East End.
As the East End had grown from the ancient villages along the river, so much of the village atmosphere remained. Each quarter kept its name and its identity, and Bethnal Green, where Violet Kray had lived, looked down its nose at Hoxton, barely half a mile away. Certainly Bethnal Green was livelier. It ran eastwards from the old boundaries of the City at Bishopsgate, with Whitechapel and Whitechapel High Street to the south and Hackney and the Bethnal Green Road to the north. Unlike most parts of the East End, the green of Bethnal Green remained a narrow patch of grass fringed with eighteenth-century houses and although Bethnal Green had some of the worst poverty and vilest slums in the country its people kept a certain local pride.
The main employment for the men was casual labour in the London markets or the docks and in the thirties after the Depression, Bethnal Green saw brutal poverty again. In 1932 a government report estimated 60 per cent of the children of Bethnal Green suffered from malnutrition and 85 per cent of the housing was unsatisfactory. But this part of the East End was used to poverty. This was where the ‘Rookeries’ of Dickens’s time had been. In Bethnal Green before the war, the most lavish events were still the funerals, day-long wakes with black, plumed horses pulling the hearse and more spent burying a man than he could earn in a year alive.
Death was a commonplace affair in Bethnal Green; most men survived by toughness or drunkenness or both, and the family was the one firm unit of defence. This was the basis of the famous East End matriarchy, with the woman of the family keeping life going against all the odds. Without the woman and the family no one in Bethnal Green had much of a chance. Violet had learned this from experience.
‘Before I ran away to marry Mr Kray we was devoted as a family. Us three sisters, Rosie, May and me, and my brother who kept a caff across the road. My dad worked in the market, but everybody used to know us. They called our bit of Vallance Road “Lee Street”. Though times was hard I’d say that we was well looked after. My mum would see to that. We always lived close as a family and helped each other every way we could.
‘The only trouble was my dad was terrible strict. Us girls had to be indoors by nine of a night. I used to like life. Always have, and I was the one who never could get home on time. That must be why I married at seventeen. That’s what I put it down to, me bein’ young and silly and him being so strict, I thought I’d do anything to get away. Then when I married Mr Kray, my dad disowned me. No proper wedding and he wouldn’t even come to the register office in the Kingsland Road.’
Violet’s father, John ‘Cannonball’ Lee, stuck by what he said, and Violet remained outlawed from her family during the earliest years of marriage. But gradually she was accepted back. ‘My mum had kept an eye on me to see I was all right. Often be poppin’ round with half a pound of cheese or a bit of meat for us.’ The birth of Charles David brought something of a reconciliation with her family. Her father started speaking to her again. But it was the twins who really brought the wayward daughter home to the family in Vallance Road. And she returned in style, double pram and all. ‘My dad adored the twins, thought they was wonderful. Everyone who saw ’em seemed to love ’em.’ And everybody spoiled them. ‘Somehow with the twins you couldn’t help it.’ ‘I always dressed the twins the same. They was such pretty babies. I made ’em both white angora woolly hats and coats and they was real lovely, the two of them. Just like two littl
e bunny rabbits.’
Some of the old East Enders like Charles Kray lived on their wits. Others, like Violet’s father, old John Lee ‘the Southpaw Cannonball’, lived by sheer force of personality. Boxer, juggler, street performer, impromptu poet, market man, he was a famous local character. His mother’s family was Irish and his father’s Jewish. His father had been a butcher.
‘He weren’t a bad man, except that he took to alcohol, and it ruined him as it’s ruined many a good man. It made him epileptic. I can remember as a boy him having five and six attacks a day. And all the time he’d still be drinking.
‘ “Helen,” he’d shout to my mother, soon as he was over an attack, “bring me my rum and coffee.”
‘There was one night when he come over all peculiar and tried to kill us in our beds. Mother called the police and he was taken to the epileptics’ colony at Epsom. He was there seventeen years. I saw him twice myself. He died there.’
John Lee became a passionate teetotaller; he was also a great fighter in his time. ‘I had a good left hand. That’s how I got the name, “the Southpaw Cannonball”. I was just nine stone, so I fought as featherweight, but when I boxed professional, I’d take on any weight at five pounds a fight.’
He saved his money, started a haulage business and ran twenty-two horses before going bankrupt. Then he became a showman, working the streets of the East End.
‘First thing, I made a bit of money from was licking the white-hot poker. I’d seen a big black fellow doing it before a crowd on Mile End Waste, so I took a chance with it myself. You’re safe enough, long as you see the poker’s white-hot. If it’s just red you lose your tongue.’
Another turn that earned him money was walking the streets with his young son on a five-gallon bottle balanced on his head; but it was his barrel trick that brought Cannonball real fame. It took him four years to perfect. He used to walk down a line of twenty-four lemonade bottles which were balanced nose down on the floor. Then he would climb a pair of steps with a bottle on each rung. From the top of the steps he would jump into the mouth of a barrel, all this without upsetting a single bottle. He toured the music-halls offering fifty pounds to anyone who could do the same and never had to pay. His last appearance on the stage was at the Portsmouth Empire, when he was nearly fifty; afterwards he worked as a market porter. But however eccentric Cannonball’s working life appeared, life in the home was always strict; he ruled his family with Victorian severity.
‘True, we lived hard, but I could always find a bit of greengrocery from the market. Kippers was two a penny in them days, pennyworth of faggots, ha’porth of pease pudden. All things that put the vitamins inside you and help you to uphold yourself.’
He had a famous temper in the home, and his daughters went in fear of him. At table none would eat until he finished carving. No one contradicted him, and not a drop of liquor was allowed inside the house. By the time Violet had made her peace with him, Cannonball had mellowed, but he still lived within the old-style world of Bethnal Green with all its rectitude, self-reliance and loyalties. This was the family to which Violet brought the twins. It soon became their real home. Their father was invariably away and Violet provided most of what discipline they got. Charles was regular with the housekeeping, but he seemed less and less involved in his family. The little black-haired dolls in the angora coats were emerging from babyhood, loved and adored by everyone around them. Their mother was still the only one who could be sure of telling them apart; they were inseparable and seemed to need no one but themselves, certainly no other children nor their brother. They were late talking, but showed signs of being telepathic. As they got older they shared dreams and thoughts quite naturally. If one decided he was hungry or wanted to go to the lavatory, so would the other. If one got hurt, the other one would cry although he might be in another room. They had a private language, liked the same food, laughed at the same things and lived in a self-contained world of their own. They never argued. Neither seemed dominant. Their mother still dressed them the same, but she was beginning to wonder if it was right to treat them so alike.
The twins were unusually healthy babies. At three neither had caught anything much worse than a cold. But when Violet Kray found Reggie feverish and sick one day she took it for granted that Ronnie was going to be ill as well. By evening both the twins had temperatures and the following day the doctor diagnosed measles. At first Violet refused to worry. The twins were sturdy, but they got worse and by next evening Ronnie had difficulty breathing.
‘He was in a dreadful state, poor little thing, gasping away for breath, and none of us able to help him. None of us knew what it was until I saw his nose-holes moving in and out. I knew it was the diphtheria then and called the doctor again.’
Diphtheria it was: both twins were infected, but Ronnie worse than Reggie and the doctor decided to isolate them in separate hospitals; Ronnie in the isolation ward of the General Hospital, Homerton, and Reggie in St Anne’s Hospital, Tottenham. There they stayed for the next few days; isolated, and extremely ill.
It was the first time they had been parted more than half an hour; the first time they had been without their mother. She was permitted to peep in at them through a small window at the end of the ward. After a fortnight, Reggie was recovering and within a month was ready for home; his brother remained critically ill. And although Ronnie finally began to mend he was apathetic. Three months after the twins were taken ill, Reggie had recovered and was back playing happily with other children in Vallance Road. Ronnie remained in the Homerton isolation ward.
Violet decided to assert herself. ‘I understood my Ronnie better than all them doctors. They couldn’t see what was really troubling him. He was just fretting for his Reggie an’ for me. So I told the hospital I was taking him home. They warned it could be dangerous, but it wasn’t no good leaving him there. When he was home I nursed him night an’ day, had him in my room with me of nights. He picked up in no time.’
‘His mother saved his life,’ said Charles. ‘No question of it. If it hadn’t been for Violet an’ what she did then, he’d ’ave been a goner.’
The twins were three now, but the balance between them was disturbed. Violet tried to treat them as before and be scrupulously fair. She still dressed them identically and gave them identical presents on their birthday. If one had an ice-cream, she would make sure the other had one too. They even started sharing the same name now: when anyone wanted them he would not call ‘Ronnie’ or ‘Reggie’ but always ‘Twins’. It was as if they were a single person.
But Violet knew that there were differences between them now: she could not forget that Ronnie had needed her most, that he had fretted for her in hospital and that she had nursed him back to health. She saw things other people missed. Physically the twins remained the same, but Reggie was brighter. He talked more than Ronnie, was easier to handle and got on better with people and with other children. Ronnie seemed slower, shyer, more dependent on his mother than before. His moods were always changing. Children of this age can be permanently impaired by a severe attack of measles and diphtheria. Suddenly Ronnie began to sulk and to have difficulty talking. As he grew he seemed slightly bigger and clumsier than Reggie. Despite this he always needed to outdo him.
At first this competition took the form of vying for their mother’s attention. Violet saw nothing wrong with this. ‘It was as if he had to make up for all the love he’d missed in the hospital.’ But soon Ronnie would do anything to get his mother’s affection; scream, sulk and think up ways of putting Reggie in the wrong. Then once she noticed him Ronnie would smother Violet with love. As he grew, this never stopped, and soon both twins became affected.
‘When Ronnie was just a toddler he would be watching all the time to see Reggie never did better than he did. And Reggie was soon watching him as well. They watched each other like young hawks.’
There is a photograph of them taken the summer war broke out, on Southend Pier: a wistful picture of two solemn bright-eyed lit
tle boys staring into the camera. All Violet’s doting care is obvious in the neat suits and the carefully brushed-back hair but there is something else, something about their eyes, a look they never lost. It is as if one face is watching itself mistrustfully in a mirror. A former pimp who grew up with them says, ‘Even when they was very young the twins never seemed like other children. Didn’t laugh nor lark around for the fun of it. They seemed to have something more serious on their minds.’
Violet knew this too. She knew her twins were ‘different’ from other children. In some ways she was proud of this. They always had been special; they were twins. That made them extra precious; they needed more love than ordinary small boys.
‘They seemed to gather trouble; fighting with other boys already, breaking things, getting in mischief for the hell of it. They had a devilish streak in them.’ But Violet knew she must be patient.
‘Twins always stand out. Bein’ twins they’re naturally conspicuous. Other kids pick on ’em.’ And there always seemed to be older children ready to lead the twins into trouble. So it was their fault, not the twins’. For Violet knew how vulnerable they were behind their toughness – Ronnie particularly. And she could never bring herself to be hard on them. Ronnie always longed to be the favoured twin. But this was difficult with Violet determined to be fair to both, and it was clear that with his greater quickness and his charm Reggie had the advantage. So gradually Ronnie learned to manipulate things so that if he couldn’t always win the love he wanted he could make sure Reggie never had it either.
One of their cousins says, ‘When we was kids together, I have seen Ronnie sit down and count out the peas on their two plates, then throw a scene because Reggie had a couple more.’
Whenever Reggie was in favour, Ronnie could usually redress things. Sometimes he did it with a sneer.
