by John Pearson
‘Look at Reggie, Mummy’s darling. Sweet little angel, ain’t ’e?’
At other times it was necessary to get him into trouble. This wasn’t difficult either. Reggie was no angel, whatever Ronnie said, and Ronnie knew exactly how to handle things. He knew quite well that in a fight Reggie would always back him up and always rise to a taunt of cowardice.
Gradually the twins worked out a private code of behaviour. Good was what brought them praise and love, chiefly from their mother but also from anyone they happened jointly to admire. Evil was the opposite. And just as their lives had always been ruled by what was absolutely fair, so they began to balance up any excess of praise with an excess of trouble. The pattern is simple to identify, repeating constantly throughout their lives. What was not so easy for the twins was to come to agreement over precisely what was fair between them. There could be no cheating. Each knew the other, watched the other far too well for that. Each motive, every move they made was under mutual scrutiny. There was no escape. Everything one did was known and judged by the other. Often this became too much: one would revolt and they would fight like demons.
One of the family says, ‘No one could ever stop them once they started, and none of us ever understood what the twins fought about. In the end we got used to it and let ’em fight it out. But I never seen ordinary brothers fight like those two did. They would hurl themselves at each other and scream every obscenity they knew. Ten minutes later it was over and forgotten, the twins content and quite inseparable again. I think they had to have these rucks to let off steam. They loved each other really, but sometimes I thought they’d kill themselves.’
Violet had always longed to move from Hoxton back to Bethnal Green. Now on the eve of war one of the houses on the corner of Vallance Road fell vacant. Charles agreed to move. Violet and the twins went home at last and Lee Street reunited.
178 Vallance Road was tiny, the second in a row of four Victorian terraced cottages. There was no bathroom, the lavatory was in the yard and day and night the house shook as the Liverpool Street trains roared past the bedroom windows. For Violet none of this mattered. Her parents were just around the corner; so was her sister, Rose, the wild one with the gipsy looks. Her other sister. May, was next door but one, and her brother, John Lee, kept the caff across the street.
When war came it was in this stretch of Vallance Road, under the shadow of the soot-stained viaducts, that Violet Kray and her family built a protective colony of three generations; it became known as ‘Deserters’ Corner’.
This would remain the centre of the children’s world, the hideout of their cockney clan: those front doors always open, letting them scuttle through the warren of small houses, the hot little kitchens at the back, thick with the smell of stew and washing, where Aunt May or Grandmother Lee would always find them cake and a cup of tea; special treats from wild Aunt Rose who never let a week go by without buying them a toy or a bag of sweets from the housekeeping; and old Grandfather Lee, who was to cycle to Southend and back to celebrate his seventieth birthday, and who still kept his famous left hook in trim, punching a mattress hung up in the yard. He would sit with the twins for hours in his armchair by the fire, talking about the perils of drink and the East End of the past and how he broke Mike Thompson’s nose when he had set on him with a brick one night in an alleyway in Wapping, half a century before. Sometimes he would recite his poems. Sometimes he told them of the great boxers he had known: Jimmy Wilde of Stepney, ‘who had his strength in both hands where I had it only in my left’; Kid Lewis who grew up just around the corner to become champion of the world at three separate weights, ‘a good clean-living man and one of the gamest fighters ever to enter a ring’. And sometimes the old man would talk about the other heroes of the old East End – its criminals: Spud Murphy of Hoxton who killed two men in a spieler in Whitechapel and shouted to the police that he’d bring a machine-gun and finish everyone off before he was caught; Martin and Baker, from Bethnal Green, who took the nine o’clock walk after shooting three policemen at Carlisle. And for the old man, Jack the Ripper’s murders were almost local happenings; the house in Hanbury Street where he had killed Annie Chapman was just round the corner.
As the twins were growing up, their father had a strange place in their lives. The ‘Gold Rush’ had started as the price of gold was rising and he was doing well, touring the country in a beaten-up old Chrysler, and leaving Violet back at Vallance Road. ‘Mr Kray used to be off for weeks at a time, gold buying and wardrobe dealing. So we was never short of money, but everything to do with the twins fell on to me. If they was ill or in trouble I was the one who had to deal with it.’ Most of the control they got came from Violet too. This soon became a source of friction between their parents. When he materialized at the weekends, Charles found the twins lacking in respect. The answer was clearly a good belting, but Violet would not hear of it. Her own life taught her what happened when parents were too strict with their children: she was not losing her twins like that. And so the arguments would start, and the twins would listen, bright-eyed and missing nothing.
Had Charles got his way, their life might have been different. Later he blamed himself for not asserting himself more and moving the whole family out of the East End. ‘I should have bought a house in Gidea Park and been firmer with the lot of them.’ As it was he never stayed long enough in Vallance Road to enforce his authority; he merely taught the twins to hate it. And even in those days they were usually a match for him. They could always dodge to someone’s house and hide. And Monday morning he would be off again in the old Chrysler leaving his family in peace.
The twins were nearly six when war began. Charles was ordered to the Tower of London for military service but he had never been a fighting man. So he changed his name and returned to the wardrobe business on his own. For the next twelve years the twins’ father remained ‘on the trot’ as a deserter. They had their home and their mother to themselves at last. From time to time Charles would appear but never for long, slipping into the house at dusk looking out for the police, and clambering over the yard wall next morning. He never complained about this fugitive life. He made a living and enough to pay for his drink and Violet’s housekeeping. They caught him once, near Croydon, and took him to Woolwich Barracks under escort, but he soon escaped and rented a room in Southwark from an Australian pickpocket called Bob Rolfe. Occasionally the twins were sent there with messages from Violet.
This was how the twins first glimpsed the East End underworld their father knew. Since the eighteenth century the East End had been famous for its boxers and its criminals, both of them bred on poverty. Most East End crime was thieving, violence and gang fights, ghetto crime to which men turn when they have little to lose. In the poorer parts of London crime was regarded as a fairly normal way of life and the police recognized certain ‘criminal areas’: King’s Cross for thieves, Hackney for cat burglars, Stepney for small-time con-men, and Bethnal Green and Whitechapel for their villains.
The ‘villain’ is a fighter who lives on his reputation for not caring what he does or what happens to him. He makes a living any way he can, chiefly from lesser criminals. His weapon is intimidation. His virtues, such as they are, are ‘gameness’ and an unconcern for money once he has it. The East End villain, according to one elderly ex-thief from Bethnal Green, ‘generally died young and never made any money. He lived like an animal and died like one.’ Bill Sykes was his prototype. Despite this, the old villains of the East End did possess a sort of glamour. Their lives were generally ‘nasty, brutish and short’, but they stood out from the grey world around them. Everybody talked about them and Charles knew them all – Jimmy Spinks, Timmy Hayes, old Dodger Mullins: none of them admirable men, but they were recognized for what they were and did what many better men would like to have done. They never worked. They’d scare money out of bookmakers, publicans and successful shopkeepers. ‘Dodger would work his own protection racket round all the small-time bookmakers, calling each Mond
ay morning for his “pension”. Shopkeepers paid him something too; sort of insurance to keep the lesser tappers away.’ Even their brutality was memorable. ‘Jimmy Spinks ordered some fish and chips, and when they cut up rough because he wouldn’t pay, he threw the fish-shop cat in the frier.’ ‘Old Wassle Newman used to throw bricks up in the air and punch ’em as they came down to toughen his hands.’
They were resolutely male. Drunken and idle, they were against home life and treated their women appallingly. ‘Dodger got fed up with one bird he lived with an’ threw her out of the window. The police issued a warrant for his arrest an’ caught him at Epsom Races. To teach him a lesson, one of the coppers, a big fellow, took out a knuckleduster in Epsom Downs Station an’ sploshed Dodger straight on the nose. It made no difference.’
Originally the villains came from the very poorest parts of the East End. There were the Bethnal Greeners proper, who were considered ‘flash’, arrogant men. Then there were Watney Streeters from Whitechapel, and the local gangs from Brady Street and Dossert Street, which has still the highest number of murders of any street in London. ‘In the old days you’d see the worst of the poverty here and the worst ignorance. You’d see the old women sitting in the streets, smoking their pipes. Often the woman’d keep the family alive by making brushes or matches. And this was where the poorest Irish married the poorest of the Jews. Watney Street produced the most uncaring villains of them all.’
Most of the fights were pub fights or full-scale gang fights between the Bethnal Green villains and the men of Watney Street. For the true Bethnal Green criminal, Watney Street was the traditional enemy, even more than the police. This was a part of London where policemen still went warily, and generally in twos.
‘The police just didn’t want to be involved. I’ve seen a villain stab another in front of a policeman in the old days and the copper walk away. As long as straight folk weren’t molested, all the Law really bothered with was where the gear was hid if there’d been a robbery. Otherwise they left us to get on with it.’ The old-time villain was a law unto himself where other criminals were concerned. Then in the mid thirties East London violence was boosted by the rise of fascism: many top East End villains were employed by Mosley; anti-Semitic rioting occurred in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green was briefly known as ‘the fascist manor’.
The one thing East End violence failed to produce was large-scale organized crime. The rackets were petty ones, and up until the war the racketeers kept clear of the East End. ‘Derby’ Sabini, the grey-bowler-hatted ‘king of the racecourses’ was the nearest Britain got to an organizing gangster. But he organized his famous ‘racecourse gang’ at Saffron Hill, and the attempt by Watney Street to oust him one year at Brighton races was so inept that no one tried again.
The German bombs of 1940 seemed to have finished off the villains’ world of the old East End. During the massed raids on the docks, whole districts died. In Bethnal Green alone, ten thousand dwellings were destroyed; the heart of the East End became a wilderness.
When the bombing began, Violet moved into the country with her three children: first to Hampshire, where the twins proved too much for the doctor’s family with whom they were billeted, then to a more resilient family at Hadleigh in Suffolk. The twins enjoyed the country, ran wild, stole apples from the Rothschild estate near Tring and picked up a Suffolk burr over their native cockney: for some time, Aunt Rose became ‘Aunt Rawse’. They also both developed a taste for the country, Suffolk in particular.
But no real cockney buries himself in the countryside for long, and the Krays missed the talk, the cups of tea, the smells of the streets and the constant activities of Vallance Road. So Violet gathered up young Charlie and the twins. She had their fare to Liverpool Street. They wore their best clothes; the rest of their possessions went into a suitcase and two carrier bags. Someone gave them a lift to the station in a van. And back they came to Vallance Road and the bombing.
Violet and the Lees survived, drawing together ever closer as a family. Charles appeared from time to time, but most of his energy was spent dodging the police and keeping on the run. Persistent, neat, respectful as ever to his customers, he was making a good living as he went flitting like some old cockney starling round the suburbs and back to the East End and the City. Because of the blitz, the schools had closed and the twins enjoyed total freedom. Nights were spent in the cockney fug of the air-raid shelters under the Vallance Road viaduct. Grandfather Lee had taken on a new lease of life organizing the neighbours in competitions and sing-songs there every night. He built a stage himself, and his pièce de résistance was a poem he had entitled ‘Hitler, we’ll have none of you’.
During the day the twins played on the rubble. ‘Our mother saw that we never went hungry, though times was very hard. But there’d always be potatoes and stew for dinner. Reg an’ me were both of us lousy and a lot of us kids had scabies. Caught ’em off the bomb dumps where we played. The medical officer came and painted us several times.’ Not that the twins worried. Life was exciting. ‘We started gang wars. We had our own gang early as I can remember. Reg an’ me organized stone raids on the kids in the next street. Outside the house we always seemed to be fighting. Fought all the kids around. In the end we picked up such a name that if anyone was hurt or something broken, we’d be blamed. People called us the “Terrible Twins”.’
The twins often played with their cousin Billy. He was five years older, but for a time they were inseparable. He showed them how to build a box-cart with a sharp front as a battering ram. To test their nerve, he rolled them over the cobbles in a barrel. And when Billy was in a fight, the twins would usually join in, taking on much older boys and learning to take care of themselves. They became vicious early. Fighting was their way of life, as with most boys of Bethnal Green, but the twins’ ability to fight together gave them a great advantage over other boys.
A neighbour says, ‘I can’t remember the twins ever being like little boys. They never seemed to have a proper childhood at all. There was no innocence in them.’
They still observed the rules of their own private world: goodness centred on their mother but was extended to the life and the people she admired. The twins admired them as well. Violet had a strange sense of cockney decency.
Saint James’s Church in the Bethnal Green Road with its High Church ritual and high red spire was an important part of the respectable world the twins aspired to. Father Hetherington, for many years its vicar, remembers them well. ‘They were extremely kind boys and would do anything for me except actually come to church. But they were both exceptionally polite, to old folk in particular, and they took trouble over people. If we were holding a bazaar or a church affair of any sort, they’d always come along and help in some way or other. Few boys of their age did.’
School began again when they were eight. Neither was much of a scholar, although Reggie was certainly the brighter of the two and showed a gift for words. Outside school they were constantly involved in fights but in the classroom they were the reverse of rebels. Their principal teacher was a Mr William Evans, a genial Rugby-playing Welshman from Monmouthshire who taught at Daneford Street School for more than thirty years, certainly too long to be over-sentimental about small boys. ‘Salt of the earth, the twins; never the slightest trouble to anyone who knew how to handle them. Course they were tough and they were fighters, but they weren’t the sort that rolled around the playground or spat in each other’s faces or used knives as some of them do today. If they had to be punished they’d take it like gents. And if there was anything to be done in school, they’d be utterly co-operative. A sporting gala or something of the sort; they’d always be the first to help. Nothing was ever too much trouble.’
But even as young boys they were already entering a different world. It was opposed to the world they respected and was exciting for that very reason. It was brutal and secret, and they first discovered it as they fought and planned their wars across the wastes of Bethnal Green. There was a
lways someone threatening them, someone to be ‘done’. The only rules here were the rules of war, and just as the twins were so much kinder and more considerate than most boys in the respectable world, so they were wickeder here.
Again, this was partly because they were twins. Each one watched the other and neither could relax. ‘Even as a kid, if I was challenged to a fight and I backed down, Ronnie would know. He’d be a sort of conscience, and I’d find it hard to face him afterwards.’
But there was more to their violent world than this. In their imagination they were re-creating their father’s world with their fights and secret wars and passionate vendettas, the old criminal fraternity of the East End, of Dodger Mullins, Jimmy Spinks and Wassle Newman – the world their mother hated. The reality had been bombed out of existence. When it arose the new East End would be a very different place, and the free-drinking, free-spending, dead-end cockney villain would be a figure of the past.
But for the twins the villains’ world was very real. They lived it in their fights. They entered it whenever they crossed London Bridge and listened to Bob Rolfe the pickpocket reminiscing with their father. They soon met Dodger, introduced by Charles as ‘the old guvnor of the East End’.
Toughness at all costs, ‘gameness’, pride in one’s fighting name, contempt for women and the family virtues and, above all, willingness to ‘go the limit’ in a fight – this was the code old Dodger taught the twins, and they learned something else: that this dark villains’ world had no connection with respectable society.
Just as the old-time cockney villains slashed at each other practically unmolested by the Law, so the twins felt much the same about their fights. Here they made their rules to suit themselves and anything was allowed against an enemy. As soon as Ronnie landed in a fight, he knew Reggie would be there, scrapping just as viciously beside him. ‘If Ronnie was in a spot of trouble I’d know and had to be there with him, if only out of self-respect.’
