Krayzy Days

by Micky Fawcett

  My dad, Frederick, born in 1907, was a merchant seaman at one time, but by the time war broke out he had been a soldier for seven years. With his experience he was made a sergeant in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and became a regimental drill instructor for the Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU) in Winchester. It meant he was in charge of all the would-be officers. By the end of the war he’d been a soldier for 12 years in all. I didn’t get to know him until he returned. In Custom House it was just my mum and my brother – my sisters didn’t arrive until after Dad got back.

  Aside from the bomb, I always remember that we never had many visitors to our house. My parents didn’t invite people, it was just like that. I grew up to be the same as an adult, not very good at mixing and I like my privacy. When the whole of the media and celebrity world seemed to turn around the Krays, I’d be much happier in the West End or places like Paris and Hamburg where you could go and spend a nice few quid without attracting any attention. It probably helped the twins to realise they could trust me – I wouldn’t be talking to journalists. If anything, they were the worst for fraternising with the media. Even today, I’m still nervous at the prospect of inviting people into my own home. This has its roots in straightforward anti-Irish feeling. Neighbours in Custom House couldn’t even pronounce my mum’s surname and they regarded us with suspicion. I was determined not to pass on that trait when I had my own family and I succeeded. My son gets on with anyone and life for him has been different and easier as a result.

  I only have dim memories of my grandparents, they were already very old when I was born, but I know that Thomas had a reputation for fighting. In that way he lived up to the Irish stereotype, my mother told me that where they lived in Custom House he had a right good fight in the street with local hero and one time world bantam weight champion, Pedlar Palmer. That was something else I inherited, along with a love of drinking that lasted for years. Everyone drank when I was a young man. That went with the territory.

  The neighbours in Custom House weren’t sorry to see us bombed out by the incendiary. Mum got us temporarily housed in rest centres and that gave me another lasting memory – the nit comb. That was the first thing they’d do to me when I went into those places, scrape the horrible metal teeth of the comb through my hair. Fortunately we weren’t homeless for too long. Dad was doing well as a drill instructor in Winchester and he was able to get us billeted in the deanery in the grounds of the cathedral. Mum was given a job helping out the cook. It was a peaceful home, the building itself dating back some 300 years or more, parts of it even older. There was weaponry stored there by the armed forces – I remember jumping up on a table to pose with a rifle once – but mostly the place had been left as it was before the war, down to the furnishings and the silverware. That gave me an early taste of what it was like to enjoy graceful living. And it also made me feel like an outsider again, just as I had in Custom House.

  I found it hard to settle when we got back to the East End. I never really felt comfortable anywhere. Silvertown, the area in which I’d been born, was drab in comparison to cathedral life. There was nothing there at all, apart from a pub and one old cinema. A strange place, Silvertown almost seemed to be in the River Thames itself. Behind its streets you could see moored cargo ships rising up and, if you didn’t know the river was there, it looked like as if they might have been somehow parked on a road behind. It was the industrial heart of the river and for me a return to East London wasn’t a homecoming. I was never going to be a typical East Ender. That’s probably why I got on so well with the other children in Winchester. We chirpy little Londoners were fussed over by adults with names such as Trollope-Bellew. They emphasised the importance of good manners and showed us a different world. But I also saw how war was a class leveller for many of those toffs who went off to fight as officers and never came back.

  In the relatively short time me and my brother spent in Winchester, our accents changed. We ended up speaking quite nicely – though we soon lost that when we came back. I’ve since always spoken like a typical cockney, not gruff, but all the same you’d never have known I was ever in such a refined city.

  We eventually settled a few miles to the north in Stratford where my mum rented a house. I went to a primary school around the corner from which I was expelled for fighting. I wasn’t a bad kid but I was into boxing and that led to trouble. After Mum got a radio I listened to the sport all the time. I was also addicted to comedy like ITMA (It’s That Man Again) and Charlie Chester and drama like Dick Barton: Special Agent, but the boxing would be a lifelong love. Much later I would even end up as a trainer.

  I hadn’t got into fights at school, though I never felt that I was particularly liked. There was no real reason for anyone not to get on with me, it was just that feeling I had of being an outsider. And I think grandfather Thomas’s fighting spirit was already in me. I ended up punching a few boys as if I was practising boxing with them. But when I hit another lad on the nose – and we were all just little kids – the teacher went mad. Usually you’d get the stick on your hand but he made me bend over and gave me four good whacks with the cane. Then we got the letter outlining the other schools I could go to. I think the fact that I was a Catholic and it was a Protestant school had something to do with the severity of the punishment.

  I went to a Catholic school called St Anthony’s at the other side of West Ham Park. Now I was in Forest Gate rather than Stratford and I quite liked it at the new place. I had a good teacher who was Scottish, Mr Connelly. But I was only there for a year before I went a couple of roads south to St Bonaventure’s. This was the only Catholic grammar school in the area and it was known for being good. Kids came from all over the East End to get in there – from Custom House in the south to Tilbury in Essex. St Bonaventure’s was also a technical and modern school and I fitted in more with those kids even though I was a grammar boy. My contemporaries were much posher and their fathers were invariably headmasters themselves. We were taught by Franciscan brothers and many years later I ran into my old form master, Father Andrew. He didn’t remember me but when I told him which class I’d been in he told me about the rest of the class.

  ‘Did you know Michael Cola is now a professor? Clark is a psychiatrist.’

  By then I was 30-something and up to my neck in trouble. But I wasn’t surprised to hear what happened to the rest of them – we even used to call Cola ‘professor’ in class.

  My school used to produce a national boxing champion each year and the sport continued to obsess me. That was the big thing for lads then – it was as popular as football is now. I was a schoolboy boxer myself and I really enjoyed it, though I came to realise I would never make it as a professional fighter. I haven’t really got the physique, I’m not built strongly and I haven’t got the reflexes. Someone once said to me that all I had in boxing was the desire to do it. That ambition was a help when I later went into the training side of the sport. But even with my limited talent I won most of my fights – I scooped the West Ham borough championship and then the Essex county championship.

  I trained at West Ham Boxing Club – they had so many of the British professional champions, boxers like Terry Gill and Terry Spinks, the Olympic gold medallist – and I knew them all. I grew up with them. We were in the same team. But I couldn’t keep up. As lads get older they should become stronger and I just didn’t develop in the right way. Yet even though it was clear I was never going to get to the next level, I did have two very close fights with a boy who was runner-up in the national championships. But styles make fighters. That’s the only rule in boxing and my style was too basic. I was okay if my opponent came straight at me. I knew what to do – put my chin down, keep my shoulders up and march forward, punching left and right. But if the other fella boxed properly – had a decent jab and good footwork – I wouldn’t know what to do. I’m slow. It wasn’t just my build and technique. When I realised that I wasn’t going to make it I stopped training so hard and in my late teens I had a fight in
which I was knocked out. By then I had discovered booze and birds and I was little more than a fan of the sport.

  It was through boxing that I first saw the Kray name in print – Reggie appeared in a book of East London boxing results called The Straight Left. The twins were five years older than me and already well into their careers by the time I started. Reggie lost to a fella called Laurie Gold. Like me the twins were initially disciplined before losing interest. Another boy making his name as a fighter came from the year above me: Roy Shaw from Barking, later a London legend in his own right. He was never part of the Krays’ circle though, he always stood alone. I knew him as Shawry when we became friends years later, though he later got the nickname Pretty Boy. That must have been much later! I don’t know who dreamed that one up. I liked his sense of humour but he was always a bit full on, very intense.

  Schoolwork took a back seat to boxing. That was always my excuse – I didn’t learn anything; I didn’t do anything else. I’d always be saying, ‘I’ve got to go practise boxing,’ and that was it. With such a good record in the sport, the school didn’t push me on the academic side. The teachers made it clear they thought I wasn’t going anywhere and why should they care? They had the likes of Cola the future professor and Clark the psychiatrist. When I told them I couldn’t keep up and wanted to do woodwork they were quick to oblige and I was soon back with the mob from Custom House. I didn’t like those kids any better and I was useless at woodwork. I just didn’t want to do anything. Nothing. I didn’t aim higher than being the milk monitor. It gave me more time to smoke fags. I left at 15 without sitting any exams.

  My parents didn’t know anything about this. They were hard workers. They worked until they dropped. They were too busy to notice anything, certainly not what was going on at school and they had my sisters to think about too – both of them came along more than ten years after me. My brother was still at school and they needed to provide for all of them.

  I had no wish to follow my parents’ example. Dad had come out of the forces after the war and he was a pitch navvy. His job involved clambering down into these enormous metal containers. They had been used for storing pitch and at the bottom was a thick, black residue which he would break up with a pickaxe. On sunny days it would get very hot in those barrels and pitch gave off toxic fumes. It was killing him – even I could see that. He got to the point where he couldn’t physically do it and he became a gatekeeper for big institutions like factories and hospitals. That was very much his kind of thing – he still carried himself like a military man, upright and imposing and he looked the part for doing security. He was also a drinker and the regular hours fitted in with the pub. My mum worked in factories all her life. There wasn’t much alternative. There were factories everywhere and those were the only jobs that you got to hear about.

  Neither of my parents had much choice in their careers but they hadn’t expected to get any. They just didn’t know any better and there was never anyone at their schools asking them what they wanted out of life. My destiny should have been the same and to begin with it was. My first job was at the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery in Silvertown – which still operates near City Airport. Not knowing any different, I didn’t mind the job. The wages were good – four pounds and 16 shillings a week and my parents were happy with that. Theirs had been a truly poverty-stricken background – what was called a no-shoes upbringing. The height of their ambition was that you kept your job.

  Most people in our area had that worker mentality. There wasn’t anything else. So when you spoke about friends and family it was just in terms of how good their work was – which factory they were at, how much they were being paid, how secure it was. Apart from me – I didn’t subscribe to that. I’d seen Mum coming in from work pulling little spikes of steel out of her hands because she was on a lathe all day making pressed hinges. And that wasn’t even anything particularly hard for the times. Most of our friends and family accepted their lot but watching them suffer turned me off work. I didn’t even last at Tate & Lyle for three months. They’d taken on loads of young school leavers and then stood them all off. None of us had done anything wrong and I was even more disillusioned.

  That said, I went back six months later and got a job on the docks, working on the raw sugar landing, unloading sugar from the barges. But like most of my jobs it was short-lived and I heard that the really good money was to be had in lagging pipes with asbestos covering. My parents – for all their belief in working until you couldn’t do it any more – did me a right favour in warning me off. They knew the health risks. All the kids who did that are dead now of asbestosis. Every single one of them. My parents also warned me off Hemingway & Co, a factory on what’s now the site of the Olympic park. They used toxic materials like arsenic.

  Outside of work I didn’t do much. Me and my mates would wander the streets and go to the pictures on a Sunday afternoon. I wasn’t into anything in particular – though we did go to a youth club sometimes and we were all into boxing. As we got older we began to venture further afield, going up to the West End of London, but that was about it for entertainment.

  Queen’s Road Market changed everything. The market was down Queen’s Road off Green Street in Upton Park, not far from where I lived. I met a fella called Jonah on the market who introduced me to the nearest I’ve ever seen to the American model of the Mafia. It was all based around illegal gambling, fruit and vegetables and every kind of crooked business imaginable, which sounds unlikely now. But there were always four or five bookies on the square at the top of the market taking bets and rationing meant that fresh food was at a premium after the war. The market stall game was a good earner and you had to be prepared to throw your weight around if you wanted in. The big stalls were run by families and their lavish displays were like those you regularly get in supermarkets now. We’d never seen bananas as kids and all of a sudden there was all this produce in abundance. The traders themselves all had cars – and their families had everything they wanted – but they were terrible bullies and they were crooked. The whole street market was in on the gambling. They even had a system of whistles to let everyone know when a policeman was coming along.

  Quite a few of them on the market were Jewish and they had moved out from the true East End around Aldgate. I don’t know the history of Upton Park and how the Jews came to be there, but it became the centre of my world when I got a job standing on fruit stalls. I ended up working on one pitch outside The Queen’s pub – mine wasn’t one of the biggest, but I was just happy to be a part of market life. The work was much more enjoyable than the factory jobs and I liked playing up to the image of being a barrow boy.

  My job ended when The Queen’s, owned by a friendly old man called Izzy Miller, changed hands. I never knew what actually happened – either the new owner decided he didn’t want the stall outside his place, or local government, which was always on the case of anyone who’d infringed one rule or other, decided that the stall took up too much of the pavement. Whatever the reason, I was about to be out of work. But not for long. I’d got to know people in the area and made a good impression on them. They could see I had proved myself and there were always people who looked out for you and could introduce you to someone else in the neighbourhood. Another stallholder, Wolfy Lowery, had his eye on me.

  ‘You looking for a job?’

  ‘Yeah, I am now.’ This brief exchange was the beginning. This was my first step into a new world.

  Wolfy was as good as his word. He introduced me to Leon Kaiser and the Sohn brothers, Maurice and Jack, more Jewish guys, who ran a warehouse in Aldgate: Textile & Haberdashery Auctions Ltd. I was an impressionable 17-year-old and I could hardly believe that one of my new bosses had a yellow Rolls Royce. The Sohns also went under the names Mr Maurice and Mr Jackson. Even I could tell they were a bit warm, though I didn’t know their entire operation was crooked. I wouldn’t have cared if I had – it was lively! Exciting. I still remember the address: 2 The Minories, Aldgate. Magical wor
ds. What a bustling, exciting area. The firm auctioned off clothing material and food and sweets on alternate fortnights and I never found out where they got it from. I didn’t ask any questions, I just pulled on my brown coat and boots and unloaded the gear from the lorry.

  ‘Ain’t you heard of Sonny the Yank?’ asked one of the brothers. I hadn’t. ‘He’s Jack Spot’s right-hand man.’

  ‘Who’s Jack Spot?’

  ‘Never heard of Jack Spot?’ The Sohns had a unique way of explaining things and they painted me a vivid picture. ‘Listen, you know when a business employs someone to carry their moneybag chained to his wrist to the bank? They don’t when Sonny’s around. He’ll chop the hand off.’

  It was a typical piece of invention but it made the point. The Sohns knew Sonny and he worked for Jack Spot, one of those London legends every wannabe gangster modelled themselves after. He was a hero too – he fought Oswald Mosely’s fascist blackshirts in the Battle of Cable Street.

  The Sohns had impressed me just as much as they intended – but they also got me thinking. And it was when I got back to Upton Park and I started looking around. The fellas who drank in The Queen’s. The market traders. Everyone working around me. They were all gangsters. It was like a light had suddenly gone on. And another followed soon after when I learned that you didn’t even need to be a criminal to get in trouble with the police. One night I was out for a walk with a couple of mates around Edgware Road and we weren’t doing anything at all. These big plain-clothed coppers just grabbed us and threw us in the back of a car. It was terrifying and no less so when they eventually identified themselves as the Flying Squad from Scotland Yard. We’d committed no crime but that’s how it was – the police didn’t need much provocation to pull you off the street.