by John Pearson
Soon they were getting known in certain circles. One night a well-known television don turned up at Cedra Court. So did a famous disc-jockey. Driberg was a regular visitor. Then came actors, a world-famous painter, several boxers, the chairman of an engineering firm, an assortment of men from the City, and two young men in dark suits who turned out to be Church of England clergymen.
During his Chelsea days Ronnie had learned enough of homosexual togetherness to know what was expected: entertainments were laid on. Some of the success of these ‘at homes’ must have been due to Ronnie’s boys, some to the novelty of the locale. But by far the greatest draw was Ronnie himself. His appearance, his reputation as a criminal, his adroit mixture of sadism and perversion made him a creature of limitless appeal; he exploited the sexual overtones of violence with the same sly gusto that he brought to his more conventional acts of extortion.
None of the guests seemed put off by the chance of blackmail or by the dangers of flirting with a potential killer. Presumably this added to the excitement. Soon Ronnie was in demand as a guest at certain country houses round London. One he enjoyed was close to Brighton; it was after a weekend here that he first conceived the ambition for a country place of his own. The set-up of wealthy, upper-class country living appealed to him; he was enjoying his success and the surprising range of intimate friends in high places it afforded.
Around this time a different group of men was taking an interest in him: one was a small man called Read who had recently arrived in the East End. He had previously been in Paddington, where the name Kray occasionally cropped up among the criminals he knew. Now that he was a detective inspector at the early age of thirty-six and attached to Commercial Street Police Station, Leonard Read was anxious to meet the twins. He had found them elusive, yet the more he learned of local crime, the more important they appeared to be.
Witnesses were clamming up. Whenever he asked old East End informers about the twins, they changed the subject. A policeman likes to know what he is up against. When someone told Inspector Read that the twins often used The Grave Maurice, a pub by Whitechapel underground station, early in the evening, he decided to go along.
Normally the twins both had a sixth sense about the Law, and would never enter a pub where police were present. But Read was new to the district; and when Ronnie strode into the saloon bar of The Maurice, gazing round to check on unwelcome visitors, he didn’t spare a glance for the man in the grey cap sitting in the corner with a Worthington and the racing edition of the Evening News.
ELEVEN
Twins Victorious
‘PEER AND A GANGSTER: YARD INQUIRY’ shouted the headlines, and the story, splashed across three quarters of the front page of the Sunday Mirror, explained that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson, had ordered a top-level investigation into the alleged homosexual relationship between a peer who was a ‘household name’ and a leading thug in the London underworld, who was involved in West End protection rackets. The investigation was being conducted by Detective Chief Superintendent Frederick Gerrard, who was inquiring into Mayfair parties the thug and the peer had been to, the peer’s weekend visits to Brighton along with a number of ‘prominent public men’, his relationships with certain East End gangsters ‘and a number of clergymen’, and allegations of blackmail.
Within forty-eight hours, warned the Sunday Mirror, Sir Joseph would be meeting the Home Secretary to give him details of what the Sunday Mirror was revealing to its readers. Gerrard would get his marching orders; then the peer, the gangster and the erring clergy had better watch out.
With this front-page salvo in the Sunday Mirror the so-called ‘Case of the Brighton Peer’ began.
This was 12 July 1964. Things soon began to happen. Early next morning a photographer called Bernard Black from Clapton came to the Mirror picture desk claiming to have a reel of photographs of the peer and the gangster, and that day at New Scotland Yard, Sir Joseph Simpson prepared a public statement denying the suggestion that Her Majesty’s Commissioner of Police was starting a private witch-hunt against titled homosexuals. It expressed pained surprise at the suggestion that he personally ordered an investigation into a relationship between ‘a peer and a man with a criminal record’. It denied that he was giving the Home Secretary details from such an investigation. It denied that such an investigation had ever taken place.
Just after tea-time Bernard Black, the photographer, returned to the Mirror offices at Holborn Circus asking for his pictures back and saying that the copyright was not his to sell. The Mirror refused to return them. Next morning Black was in the High Court applying for an injunction forbidding the Daily Mirror or the Sunday Mirror to publish his pictures under any circumstances.
That Tuesday Superintendent Gerrard, the man the Mirror named as head of the officially denied investigation, asked to see the Mirror’s dossier in which the allegations were made. There was no dossier; editor Payne admitted as much, although a phalanx of reporters had been working hard since dawn trying to make good the deficiency.
On Thursday, 16 July, the Mirror led with massive headlines on ‘THE PICTURE WE DARE NOT PRINT’. It described how this picture on its files showed ‘a well-known member of the House of Lords seated on a sofa with a gangster who leads the biggest protection racket London has ever known’. Then an article appeared on 22 July in the West German Stern magazine, entitled ‘Lord Bobby in Trouble’. Unworried by the distant hazards of the English libel law the magazine named Boothby and Ronnie Kray as the subjects of the Mirror story and published a picture of both twins in boxing kit alongside an early photograph of Boothby and Winston Churchill.
Lord Boothby retained Arnold Goodman, Harold Wilson’s personal solicitor, now Lord Goodman, and Gerald Gardiner, QC, who later became the Labour government’s Lord Chancellor.
Normally when an individual considers himself libelled, he seeks redress at law, but Lord Boothby’s new advisers suggested a more direct course. Under their supervision he wrote a 500-word letter to The Times, which finally appeared on 2 August, openly identifying himself as the subject of the Sunday Mirror’s smear campaign and denying in detail all the allegations.
The letter was a model of precision, describing how Lord Boothby returned from France on 16 July to find Parliament, Fleet Street and other ‘informed quarters’ seething with rumours that he had had a homosexual relationship with a leading thug from the London underworld; that he had been to all-male Mayfair parties with him; that he had been photographed with him on a sofa in a compromising position; that there was a homosexual relationship between Lord Boothby, East End gangsters and a number of clergymen in Brighton; that various people knowing about these relationships were being blackmailed; and that Scotland Yard, after watching meetings between Lord Boothby and the thug for several months, had reported on them to the Commissioner of Police.
Lord Boothby went on to describe how he was once photographed ‘with my full consent, in my flat (which is also my office) with a gentleman who came to see me, accompanied by two friends, in order to ask me to take an active part in a business venture which seemed to me of interest and importance.’ He explained how he had turned the proposal down, said that anyone was welcome to publish any photographs taken of him, and added that although he had since learned that the man he was photographed with had been guilty of a criminal offence, he emphatically had no knowledge of this at the time.
He then refuted the Sunday Mirror allegations quite specifically. ‘I am not a homosexual. I have not been to a Mayfair party of any kind for more than twenty years. I have met the man alleged to be “King of the Underworld” only three times, on business matters; and then by appointment in my flat, at his request, and in the company of other people.’ He never had been to a party at Brighton with any gangsters – still less with clergymen. No one had ever tried to blackmail him. The police denied making any report to the Home Secretary in connection with him.
‘In short, the whole affair is a tissue of atroc
ious lies.’
The letter concluded with a challenge to the Mirror newspapers. If either of them possessed documentary or photographic evidence against Lord Boothby, ‘let them print it and take the consequences’.
The letter was signed, ‘Your obedient servant, Boothby.’
This attempt to clear his name by a direct challenge in The Times was unprecedented but was typical of Lord Boothby’s directness. And it produced results. Just five days after the letter appeared, the Daily Mirror was carrying a new headline: ‘LORD BOOTHBY. An unqualified apology.’ All imputations made against Lord Boothby in the original Sunday Mirror article were unreservedly withdrawn. The International Publishing Corporation also paid Lord Boothby forty thousand pounds in compensation plus legal costs.
It was one of the largest settlements of the day – half a million pounds in today’s devalued currency. And what made this so extraordinary was that the Sunday Mirror story had been broadly true, and Boothby had in fact lied repeatedly in his famous letter to The Times.
He was homosexual. He had a close connection with Ronnie Kray which extended back for at least a year before the Sunday Mirror broke its story. And behind the whole affair lay a scandal involving Ronnie Kray and Boothby almost exactly as the Sunday Mirror had suggested.
Had their story been substantiated, Boothby would have been a ruined man, and the Krays’ criminal activities would have been seriously curtailed. Instead an extraordinary establishment cover-up occurred, which earned Lord Boothby a small fortune for his lies, stopped a Yard investigation in its tracks, and gave the Krays virtual immunity for several years – from the attentions of New Scotland Yard, from the British press, and from the politicians at Westminster.
Boothby had actually been introduced to Ronnie Kray early in 1963 by their mutual friend, and fellow homosexual, Tom Driberg (later Lord Driberg of Bradwell-Juxta-Mare and Chairman of the Labour Party). For Boothby, as for Driberg, the chief attraction of Ronnie’s company was the excitement of being introduced to the boys he used to have around him.
In return Lord Boothby offered Ronnie Kray a somewhat different sort of excitement, by showing him the world of privilege and politics, even taking him on one occasion for dinner at the House of Lords, and on another dropping in for drinks at the most prestigious of London clubs – White’s in St James’s.
As a gangster in a Savile Row suit, Ronnie felt very much at home in White’s.
‘Nice place,’ he said when telling me about it. ‘Interesting people. Thought of joining it myself.’
He was always fairly cynical about Lord Boothby, knowing him for what he was, and sometimes calling him ‘the Queen mother’, or ‘that daft old idiot’. But he undoubtedly enjoyed the smart life Boothby could offer him, and realized that in a crisis, a friendly member of the House of Lords might come in useful. Accordingly he made a fuss of him.
On one occasion he arranged a party in Boothby’s honour at one of his favourite West End haunts, the old Society Club in Jermyn Street – at which Boothby was photographed with Ronnie sitting on either side of a teenage boy, along with two members of the Kray Firm, Billie Exley and Charlie Clark. On other occasions, he arranged for sex shows for Boothby and his friends in various locations in the East End of London.
Early in 1964 Scotland Yard’s Criminal Intelligence section, C11, began targeting the Krays’ activities – and as well as details of their frauds and West End protection rackets, they inevitably picked up details of Ronnie Kray’s relationships with men like Boothby. This was a matter of police concern because of the obvious possibility of blackmail.
The Sunday Mirror’s veteran crime reporter, Norman Lucas, had close connections with members of Cll. One of these officers showed him C11’s surveillance reports on the Krays, and told him that a full-scale Scotland Yard offensive against the gang would soon be mounted. This was the basis of the Sunday Mirror story, which Lucas wrote and which was published with the enthusiastic backing of its then proprietor, Cecil King.
Lord Boothby was on holiday in France when the story broke, and always claimed that he had no idea who the ‘unknown peer’ could possibly have been. On his return to London on 16 July he rang Tom Driberg to find out, and it was Driberg who told him – ‘Bob, it’s you.’
Driberg, of course, knew that the Sunday Mirror accusations were true. Boothby, staring ruin in the face, was suicidal. And Driberg, as a highly influential member of the Labour Party, seems to have done his best to save him.
As events were to prove, he was successful. A general election was in the offing which Labour, led by Harold Wilson, hoped to win. After the Profumo scandal the previous year, it was not in Labour’s interests to be seen to be cashing in on an even murkier sexual scandal so soon after, involving as popular a former Tory as Lord Boothby.
So with Boothby now denying all the Sunday Mirror accusations, Driberg was able to convince his leader, Harold Wilson, to support what seemed to be a grossly libelled public figure. It clearly suited the Labour leadership to be strongly sympathetic to Lord Boothby’s case, and to help him clear his name – which he did extremely quickly. On Harold Wilson’s suggestion, Boothby consulted Wilson’s personal ‘Mr Fixit’, Arnold Goodman, and assured him that the Sunday Mirror story was untrue. Believing him, Goodman took on the case, and brought in Labour’s future Lord Chancellor – the celebrated barrister, Gerald Gardiner – as adviser.
With such extremely high-powered backing all the support for the Sunday Mirror’s accusations promptly faded. Scotland Yard denied all knowledge of C11’s investigation, so that when the Sunday Mirror tried to get C11’s evidence to back its story it was unsuccessful. It was equally unsuccessful when it sought evidence from those around the Krays. Hardly surprisingly, a wall of silence suddenly descended, leaving the Sunday Mirror defenceless.
It was then that Arnold Goodman suggested that, rather than engage in a lengthy libel action, Lord Boothby write his famous letter to The Times, which earned him £40,000. Once the original story was retracted, the Sunday Mirror editor, Reg Payne, was fired – and Cecil Harmsworth King apologized personally to Lord Boothby.
But for the Kray twins, this was by no means the end of the story. With their keen eye the twins had spotted some of the possibilities in the incident and did their best to make the most of them. Up to the point where the Mirror settled with Lord Boothby, Ronnie had not been named directly. Just as Lord Boothby had originally been ‘a peer who was a household name’ so Ronnie had remained ‘a leading thug in the London underworld’.
When Ronnie was named it was entirely by his own decision and on his own terms. After the publication of the Boothby letter in The Times, Ronnie appeared to change his mind and personally selected the most flattering of the photographs which were then taken to the picture desk of the Daily Express – the hottest photograph in Fleet Street – the peer and the gangster sitting on the sofa in Lord Boothby’s flat. The Express paid £100 for the right to publish and it appeared on 6 August on the front page beneath banner headlines. Nothing could have made it clearer that the ‘leading thug’ was Ronnie Kray.
Ronnie’s main motive in having the picture published was undoubtedly to try to cash in on the settlement. He was considerably aggrieved when he had to content himself with an apology – and nothing more. But the indirect benefits the Sunday Mirror libel brought him were considerable.
The first was with the press. There had been the beginning of a press campaign on ‘the frightening growth of lawlessness, extortion, blackmail and intimidating in London’ in the Sunday Mirror in the week following the libel, and for the first time the twins were being brought to the attention of the public. Once the libel case came up, all this was over. Had the Sunday Mirror pursued its investigations of the Krays’ criminal affairs it could have been legally dangerous for them, breaking the spirit of their apology to Ronnie, and bearing the appearance of revenge. Not surprisingly, the editors of other papers, having no desire for legal trouble either, kept off the subject of t
he twins as well. For the next three years the Krays were to be immune to press investigation, and on the few occasions when they were mentioned they found themselves referred to as ‘those well-known East End sporting brothers’.
With the police the effects of the libel were more subtle and still more far-reaching. Though Sir Joseph Simpson had made a public denial of a police investigation into a relationship between ‘a peer and a man with a criminal record’, there emphatically had been an investigation of the Krays and their activities – protection, fraud, blackmail, wounding and intimidation. This had been in progress since the start of 1964, when Nipper Read had been promoted Detective Chief Inspector and attached to West End Central Police Station under Chief Superintendent Gerrard.
From all he had learned, Read had few illusions about the twins and knew that they were no ordinary gangsters. The flat at Cedra Court was under observation; their parties and unusual social connections had all been duly noted. With the people they were meeting and their backstairs influence at all levels of society, the twins were moving towards the invulnerability of the big-time organizing criminals of the States. If this continued Read feared they might soon be too powerful to touch. Unsuspected by the twins, the police had a case virtually prepared when the Sunday Mirror sounded the alarm with its first article. Once this had happened, the twins were warned. More important still, thanks to the Commissioner’s denial of the investigation, much of the earlier evidence against the twins became unusable. Largely because of this, much police work against the twins and their organization had to stop.
Despite these difficulties. Superintendent Gerrard and Inspector Read still hoped for a chance to catch the twins, although since the Sunday Mirror libel, potential witnesses were warier than ever of speaking out against them.
