by John Pearson
Their only problem was that this particular Eldorado was already occupied. In the 1950s the whole West End had been neatly tied up by that pair of self-styled ‘Kings of the Underworld’, Mr Jack ‘Spot’ Comer, and Mr Billy Hill. Very little happened here without their knowledge and assent and the primary interest of this double monarchy lay in the prevention of the sort of high Chicago-style villainy the twins had set their hearts on. As they soon found out, this tattered pair of eighteen-year-old army absentees had as much chance of horning in on the rich pastures of West End crime as of joining the Stock Exchange.
This hardly seemed to matter at the time. Confident of their talents and modest enough to know they had a lot to learn, the Kray twins understood that time was on their side and they were prepared to wait. In the meantime they soon found themselves one part of the West End where they were accepted and appreciated and could make their presence undeniably felt.
* * *
In the early fifties a large hotel off Piccadilly Circus was leading one of the strangest double lives of any eating place in London.
During the day the tea-rooms and the downstairs restaurants with their Odeon-style décor and absolute respectability were a great place for children’s teas and maiden-ladies’ outings with the most reliable poached egg in Central London.
But around midnight with the aunts and school children safely in their beds, their places in the Lloyd-Loom chairs would be taken by a very different clientele. And by one o’clock the downstairs tea-room, which stayed open through the night, was transformed into an informal club – part sanctuary, part labour exchange – for half the petty thieves and criminals in London.
‘A regular den of thieves,’ is how one of the regulars remembers it. It was certainly convenient, and cheap – and close to all the places where criminals could work.
It was not the place for the upper echelons of crime. They had more exclusive social territory. But in the old days, after midnight in the big downstairs lounge of the hotel, one saw the social side of West End crime – the small-time fences and ponces, the informers and thieves and pickpockets, the villains and the bouncers who required work or a chat and the society of their own kind. This was where the twins were brought by Dickie Morgan, and they soon began to make their mark on this nocturnal criminal society.
Almost everyone who met them now agrees there was a strange air of innocence about them which marked them out from other villains round about them. Some thought them shy. They were extraordinarily polite to anyone older who took the trouble to talk to them. They never bragged, were never loud-mouthed, never seemed to swear. Among a race of almost universal gamblers they never gambled. Among womanizers and ponces they showed no interest in women. Among hard-drinkers they were never drunk.
Most of the time they would just sit – slightly apart from everybody else – usually silent and impassive, watching and listening to what went on. Several who knew them now remark upon their eyes. ‘There was something about them that bored right through you, especially if you were lying to them. You always felt they knew.’
They also had an air of weirdness and danger, which everybody noticed from the start. Some say they cultivated this quite consciously. Certainly they did so later. Natural actors that they were, they picked up all the tricks of instilling fear with an economy of effort and projecting their presence to maximum effect. But what distinguished them even now from all the other violent characters around them, is that they had an extraordinary presence to project.
It remains something of a mystery. Part of it was due to their behaviour as identical twins. With their telepathy and uncanny similarity their effect was literally double that of a normal individual, and this certainly explains much of their effectiveness. So does their imperviousness to pain and danger. They were so fit and vicious that they had already perfected a technique of synchronized and ruthless combat which rendered them invulnerable as long as they stayed together.
But there was something else. ‘They were,’ says one old villain who came up against them shortly afterwards, ‘a thoroughly evil pair of bastards.’ And from now on in their story, the idea continually recurs that they were uniquely and positively ‘evil’.
Largely because of this the twins were accepted as true villains from the start. Without knowing exactly why, older and more experienced thugs were wary of them. One or two who weren’t were dealt with efficiently and unemotionally, but these were ‘unimportant nobodies’ – ‘liberty-takers’ who hadn’t the good sense to understand the twins for what they were. There was an old wrestler, working as a doorman at a club in Berwick Street, who had the stupidity to refer to the twins as ‘boys’ and whose jaw was nearly broken by a punch that sent all sixteen stone of him down the stairs to the men’s room.
People who befriended them were shrewder. ‘You never knew who you’d be needing next time. You weren’t getting any tougher or any younger and it was common sense to keep on the right side of a pair of up-and-coming youngsters like the twins.’
One of the first freelance villains to befriend the twins during their Piccadilly days was Tommy Smithson from Hackney – gambler, tearaway and non-caring fighting man, he remained one of the twins’ extremely few real-life heroes. Smithson was the supreme non-carer of the London gang-world. A loner, too independent and irresponsible to accept the authority of the Spot-Hill kingship, he went through life with a masochistic desperation never to give in to anyone. A smallish man and an indifferent fighter, he could be rash to the point of lunacy. His lean, dark face cut to ribbons, he would fight and lose and go on fighting. He was free with his money, off-hand with his women, game to the last and unimpressed by anything the ‘straight’ world values.
That summer he was running a snooker hall and illicit gambling club above a restaurant in Archer Street, Soho. When he met the twins he offered them the hospitality of his club, and they spent a few nights sleeping on the snooker tables when the last customers had gone.
A few months later Smithson was slashed and left for dead in Regent’s Park at three in the morning by a gang he had had the rashness to challenge. Somehow he survived, refused to name his assailants, and swathed in bandages, his right arm paralysed, was back in his snooker hall before the week was out. He finally died of gunshot wounds in 1958 after a Maltese fired a shotgun into his stomach from such close range that not even Smithson could survive. Years later, Reg Kray was to describe his death in a short obituary of his own.
‘As he was dying he followed his enemy to the street door where he collapsed and died. This last effort on Smithson’s part was typical. He always fought on until he died. Ron and I went to his funeral, for we admired him.’
Violent and early death would be the fate of many of the villains the twins befriended now. One was Tony Mulla, another East Ender of Greek and German descent, a big good-looking psychopath given to outbursts of wild rage, and fits of weeping and self-pity. When the twins met him in 1952 his state of mind had hardly been improved by having had his flat at the Elephant and Castle broken into at three in the morning by members of the same gang Smithson challenged. Mulla was in bed with his wife. Realizing his visitors meant business and that if he resisted his wife certainly would be hurt, he begged them to leave his face and his wife alone. They agreed and sliced him up the back with cut-throat razors.
Mulla always had a devoted friend – a large, not over-intelligent ex-boxer from Tottenham called Melvin. In the late fifties Mulla and Melvin were to stage a come-back by taking over a number of the new strip clubs in Soho, and suddenly becoming rich. Then at the height of their success, Mulla and Melvin had the sort of sudden, pointless disagreement such criminals are always prone to. Mulla insulted Melvin. Melvin shot Mulla through the head and when he realized what he had done, turned his gun on himself.
Doomed, desperate men like Mulla, Smithson and Melvin made a great impression on the Kray twins and as much as they ever modelled themselves on anyone they probably did on them. But these non-caring v
illains were by no means the only people the twins met now who were to influence their future. There were also smarter, cannier men who were in an altogether different league, men like Bobby Ramsey, with his black coat, pig-skin gloves and Irish profile, who had been associated with one of Billy Hill’s less successful ventures in South Africa and was still in close touch with the man who was to tell an Old Bailey jury – ‘I am the King of the Underworld.’ The Kray twins were to hear from Mr Ramsey later.
Summer turned to autumn and the twins were still seeking the elusive ‘Good Life’ – and still on the run from the Fusiliers.
They weren’t bored any longer. They had friends, and were getting quite a reputation.
For a while they even took a room – in a condemned tenement block in Finsbury Park – rat-infested, uncarpeted, the ceiling down, with a wash-stand and an ancient brass double bed where they would sleep together. When they felt it was time to move they followed their father’s example and, feeling safer in that foreign country that lay ‘across the water’, they crossed the Thames and spent the next few weeks in Peckham. Among the drearier late-Victorian London suburbs, Peckham was hardly Kray country, but it served its purpose. The police weren’t looking for them here and they picked up one more item of practical information now that produced dividends in the years to come. For want of anywhere to go they spent several evenings in a snooker hall and grew quite enthusiastic about the game. Not as players. It was the economics of the game that interested them, and how the hall proprietors protected themselves against trouble. Billiard-table cloths were vulnerable to wilful damage. They would rip quite easily.
The snow came early that year, and it proved their undoing. They had nowhere warm to go except back to Vallance Road. But Sergeant Silvers from Bethnal Green Police Station spotted them at once. He was round with a squad car before breakfast and had a job waking the twins before taking them back to the station.
Another period in the guardroom. Another lecture from an officer on the lines of ‘I hope you’ve learned your lesson’ – which they had, of course, except that it wasn’t the one the army wanted and the twins escaped again in time for Christmas.
They drifted back to Mile End and on Christmas Eve were sitting in the Red Caff at about nine o’clock in the evening. Normally they would have been more careful, but a thick fog had come up from the river and no one was likely to be out on such a night. No one, except the police who were beginning to take an interest in the will-o’-the-wisp lives of the Kray twins, and in from the fog came Police Constable Fisher who had arrested them six months earlier.
It was all quite amiable. The twins asked if he’d like a cup of tea, but he refused politely. Then Ronnie said that seeing it was Christmas and he was an understanding chap couldn’t he forget he’d seen them and let them have Christmas Day at home with their old mother if they gave their word to give themselves up on Boxing Day. Police Constable Fisher was sorry but Christmas was one thing – duty another.
They promised to come quietly, but there was just one thing Reggie would like to tell Police Constable Fisher if he’d come outside. The constable agreed, and as Reggie stood talking to him Ronnie shoved him from behind and sent him sprawling across the pavement. By the time he was back on his feet the twins were away into the fog.
The twins missed their Christmas dinner back at Vallance Road, and were caught a few weeks later. They were tried for assaulting the police.
Constable Fisher was commended by the magistrate and received the princely sum of seven shillings and sixpence, though whether as reward for zeal or compensation for discomfort was never made clear. And the twins received a month apiece in Wormwood Scrubs, along with their picture in the East London Advertiser and the headline. ‘Kray Brothers beat up PC.’ It was fame of a sort, a testimonial to their rising status, and the newspaper cutting and the photograph duly found their way into the cuttings book at Vallance Road, along with their boxing photographs and the reports of earlier misdemeanours. Boxing or crime, it scarcely mattered. They were on their way, their name was getting known. From nobodies they were emerging into somebodies.
As the twins were the first to admit, they had been lucky over their month’s sentence; and after life on the run, it was certainly no hardship. They were together on the same landing and saw each other during the day at exercise and in the prison workshops. Equally important, they were accepted as ex officio members of the small coterie of veteran professional criminals who form the top layer of the unofficial gaol élite – the men the warders are wary of and tend to leave alone, the ones with the extra tobacco and connections with the prison grapevine. The ‘hard nuts who can get things done’.
This was an achievement, for they were barely nineteen and still had no genuine criminal record. What they did have was that presence which had so impressed the villains of the West and which made old lags accept them as ‘their own kind’. And so the month in Wormwood Scrubs, far from being wasted time, was one more step up the criminal social register, widening still further the circle of names and faces on which the future of the twins would finally depend. More than with most careers, professional crime depends on knowing people – what they’re worth, how far they can be relied on, and what they’ve done. The twins possessed a knack for remembering such details.
After their month in Wormwood Scrubs the twins were ready for their criminal life to come. There was not the faintest chance of their ever turning into soldiers, and the sooner the army was rid of them the better. But army regulations made it necessary that before they could be dishonourably discharged, they had to be tried and punished. The twins enjoyed this. They were kept awaiting trial in the guardroom of Howe Barracks, Canterbury, and made the most of their situation as private soldiers under close arrest awaiting a court-martial.
The twins were brought to Canterbury from Wormwood Scrubs. They arrived by train, handcuffed together, and passed the time by frequently asking the guard to let them use the lavatory, so that one twin had to stand in the corridor with his handcuffed arm around the door as the other twin relieved himself. The absurdity of this put them in good spirits and when they reached the guardroom they were greeted by an old friend – fellow Fusilier Richard Morgan, also under close arrest and awaiting court-martial. The three months they spent with him as the army prepared the details of their trial became a sort of three-man saturnalia, a holiday from the restraints of discipline and the worry of staying on the run. They had nothing to lose now and Ron explained how they turned all their ingenuity against authority.
‘We did everything we could think of that would go against the army and they ended up a bit afraid of us. It was funny, but there seemed to be nothing we couldn’t do if we felt like it. I started pretending to be a bit barmy – wouldn’t shave or else shaved only half my face, and we treated most of the NCOs like pigs. Not that we really wanted to. Some of them were nice enough chaps. But if ever people like that think you’re frightened of them they’ve got you where they want you. It was them or us. If we’d given in they’d have kept us in the army for ever.’
It was a performance once again, and a calculated one. The twins were natural actors, with a cockney underdog’s instinct for those points where authority is particularly ridiculous. During the weeks at Canterbury they soon dominated the guardroom by losing all restraint when anyone attempted to control them. The result was a charade in which they acted out their secret inner life, with all its violence and conflict, its cruelty and cunning and antisocial humour. It also showed a touch of real madness, for Ronnie had a knack of appearing mentally unbalanced. Less than three years later the act became reality when Ronnie would be certified insane.
It was not only Ronnie’s madness which had its first rehearsal in this theatre of the absurd which the twins staged in the Canterbury guardroom. Almost everything which happened to them later was acted out in this military farce. At the time they thought it something of a joke. In retrospect it has a distinct touch of the macabre.
&n
bsp; Scene one was a straightforward return to childhood with its wildest tantrums and uncontrolled rebellion – food thrown against walls and dishes smashed. A guard who tried stopping them was knocked against the wall. Shouts, screams, singing, hammering on cell doors. Uniforms were taken off and cut to pieces, bedding thrown around. By the end of the first day the twins had clearly made the point that they were uncontrolled and uncontrollable and safest left alone.
Scene two followed. Authority had to be slapped down as effectively as possible: which happened when the colour sergeant arrived to take charge of the situation. An immaculately turned out, not over-imaginative, regular soldier, he entered the guardroom from parade complete with his medals and scarlet sash, determined to take no more nonsense from three young hooligans. He had spoken perhaps six words to them when the latrine bucket was thrown over him. No one tried reading King’s Rules and Regulations to the twins again.
Orders were given that they were to be more closely guarded than ever, and strictly confined to the caged-off area behind the guardroom. The twins seemed unconcerned but during the morning Private Ronald Kray did ask for a glass of water. Taking no chances the guard handed it through the bars; as he did this Private Reginald Kray produced a pair of military handcuffs he had borrowed several days before and snapped them around the guard’s wrist and the bar of the cage. It took an hour to cut him loose.
