by Bobby Teale
You could tell better times were coming. But I could not wait that long. Street trading did not bring in enough for me, so eventually I started shoplifting and stealing bikes. I was a right villain, or thought I was. In fact there were lots of kids just like me.
Of course I got nicked. The case was heard at Chelsea Juvenile Court and I got sent to an approved school called Banstead Hall for nine months. It was horrible.
I went down with the mumps and Mum came to see me. She wore Yardley’s pillar-box-red lipstick, a knitted jumper of the same colour and a flowery skirt. She was as immaculate as always, but I could see that the skirt had been mended several times over. She’d once worn furs and diamonds when Dad was rich but now she didn’t have two pennies to rub together.
I was in bed in a hospital wing at the school. I had a fluorescent rosary in a little box on cotton wool and hidden underneath the cotton wool I had a half-crown coin. I gave it to her.
‘I don’t need it, Mum.’ I told her. ‘If I get found with it I’ll be in trouble.’
Only then would she take it from me.
After six months I went on the run from Banstead Hall. After a few weeks of generally larking around, I needed money. This time I got a proper job – at Bentley’s Oyster Bar on Swallow Street in Piccadilly. I was going to be a West End delivery boy. My bicycle had a big metal basket on the front.
One day a Rolls-Royce stopped in the middle of the road and the driver opened his door suddenly as I was coming up behind on my bike. Everything went flying, including me. The driver wanted to take me to the hospital. I was in terrible pain but I knew I couldn’t go. After all, I was a fugitive from justice, a big-time criminal. The hospital casualty department would be full of policemen all waiting for me. In my head it was playing out like a gangster movie. Actually I was a petty bike-thief and a spectacularly unsuccessful oyster delivery boy.
In any case, my freedom turned out to be short-lived. I was staying at my aunt Mary’s, my mother’s younger sister. She lived opposite Great Ormond Street Hospital, round the corner from our old house. Not much of a hiding place. At the time Mum was living at Leigh-On–Sea, on the way to Southend. My aunt got news that she was ill, so off I went to see her. Good old Mum was in bed and not looking well. I stayed to help out as best I could. There was a lot of lace-curtain rustling in the houses nearby and I think some nosy neighbour must have noticed I was there. Two days later the police came knocking.
This time I was put into a real prison cell back in London – in Wormwood Scrubs – even though I was only fifteen years old and looked no more than twelve. It was terrifying. I couldn’t stop crying. All the other cons would look through the peephole in the door of the cell to check out the crying kid.
Then I was taken to a detention centre, where I would await the juvenile court. The approved school had been so bad that I’d had to run away. This was much, much worse. I went through hell with regular beatings by a real sadist – the sort who got that kind of job just so he could take his sexual kinks out on young boys. I hated it, loathed it. I could understand that what I’d done was going to get me punished – but not like this.
My older brother Alfie came to see me. I told him what this man was doing to me and he was furious. I grabbed Alfie and said, ‘Please don’t do anything! When you leave he will beat the shit out of me.’ Alfie understood and managed to hold his temper. I didn’t get a kicking that time.
Eventually, two men arrived one morning to take me to court for the hearing. I was charged with stealing property worth forty quid. It seemed a long drive. I was handcuffed, sitting in the back of the car. One of them asked me: ‘Why are you holding your stomach?’
‘I’m in pain,’ I replied.
‘Did you see the doctor?’ he asked. I shook my head.
He looked at me closely. ‘How long have you had this pain?’
‘A few days, after every beating.’
There was a folder on the front seat and the driver told the other man to take a look at it. He opened it immediately and read my notes. After a time the man reading the folder turned to me and said: ‘They are going to stick you away in the worst place anyone could be put. I wish we could help. Sorry.’ He was sympathetic but there was nothing he could do.
When I got to the court, in Dorking, Mum was there and when I saw her I just started to cry. I couldn’t stop sobbing – so much that I had to be taken out. On the panel of the court there were two women and two men. I was sat outside the door while they were deliberating and I could hear the two women arguing with the men and saying they were not going to agree with their decision.
I know those two ladies saved my life. Instead of the ‘worst place’ possible I was sent to an approved school called Glamorgan Farm School, at Neath in Wales. It was the furthest I had ever been from home, but from that point on the beatings stopped – or at least they were not on as regular a basis as they had been at the detention centre.
Glamorgan Farm was on top of a hill. As soon as I got there one of the staff made it clear he fancied me and would follow me all over the place. If I were taking a shower and another guard was on the door, this man would come to the door and start talking to him, while openly staring at me. It was obvious what he was doing. I felt furious and desperately humiliated, but there was nothing I could do. He was a plump, short man called Mr Williams, and I hated him.
Boys at this school would sometimes get a chance to actually go off and live on a local farm and be paid for their labour. I volunteered and I must say I enjoyed it, especially the sense of freedom I experienced while driving a tractor up and down the Welsh hills. I was a hard worker and the farmer would let me and another boy have time out to go into the village to buy sweets and look in the shops. Then I was accused of stealing a watch – which I certainly had not. The watch later turned up. The farmer and his family said sorry and wanted me back – but on my side the trust had gone.
I was hurt and sad because I had hoped that this time I had found a job that I could be good at, but it was not meant to be. At this time of my young life, so much of it recently spent in various forms of detention, I desperately wanted control of my own destiny. I wanted to be free. But there was no more running away, even if I could. They’d caught me before and they would surely catch me again.
And so I finished my time in approved schools and was released. It was 1959. I was seventeen years old, with what might seem the experience of someone twice that age. I had been routinely beaten, abused and sexually preyed upon. Meanwhile I had learned how to stand up for myself. I thought I was tough. I thought I knew it all. In fact I was pathetically naïve. I still had so much to learn about the realities of the world.
I got work with a man who fitted out bars and pubs, but this didn’t last long. Soon I gravitated to the West End of London and met an older lady by the name of Ruth, to whom I lost my virginity. I was seventeen and she was twenty-seven. She said she would show me all about sex, and she did.
About this time I also met a man known as ‘Phil’. His full name, as I found out later, was Lieutenant-Commander Cecil Howard Filmer. He was quite a character, a Fleet Air Arm pilot war hero who’d been born in South Africa. He’d been an escapee from German prisoner-of-war camps. Phil had been at that camp in Poland, helping to dig the tunnel for the Great Escape, the story of which was later turned into a film. In the fifties he’d been a merchant ship skipper in the South Seas. Phil had a club called the Music Box which got raided one night for selling drinks to under-age kids, or something like that, and he lost his licence.
Now Phil was setting up a club called the Flamingo in a place called Sandown on the Isle of Wight. He asked if I would like to work as a waiter, along with a friend of mine by the name of John Quinn. We accepted and off we went south for the season. Phil was gay, but he never tried it on with me. He treated us as his sons and I am proud to have known him.
We all moved from Sandown to Shanklin and rented a flat on the esplanade. We started a beach summer rental bus
iness on two sites, hiring out motorboats, canoes and deckchairs. After the tourist season came to an end, that winter John Quinn and I joined the merchant navy. I became a steward on the Queen Elizabeth, the Cunard liner. It was all fine apart from a sexually predatory chief steward who used to chase the younger staff. I managed to ‘escape’ on to a freighter. I got my stuff together and went on board what looked to me like a rust-bucket ship that brought whisky from Scotland to New York.
I thought the ship would be heading straight back to London, but it had three more stops to make first: Philadelphia, Baltimore and Newport News in Virginia. At each stop we unloaded more whisky. On every trip from Scotland the ship had to carry one hundred extra cases of whisky to cover theft, breakages and bribes. I was told this was common practice. I soon learned I had come on board a ship with so many scams going on that I was not welcome, not at all.
I was asked many times by my other shipmates if I was going to sign up to stay on board. Like a fool, I said yes. About mid-Atlantic, coming back to London, I was asked again, did I intend to try to stay on board. Once more, I replied that I did. That night, when we were drinking whisky during a rough sea with the ship rolling all over the place, I started feeling very queasy even though I did not think I had drunk enough to feel that way.
As we were sitting there I made the mistake of saying I felt sick. Two men immediately got up and said they would take me up on deck. I was feeling so weak I went up the stairs with them but as soon as I got to the top of the deck I was overcome by a strong instinct that something was not right. I started to back off, saying, ‘I’m OK, I feel OK,’ even though I still felt terrible. But my instincts were right. At some unspoken signal they started to pull me and punch me with all their might, trying to drag me over the edge of the ship. Terrified, I seized hold of the steel handrail in a death grip, knowing if I let go I would be thrown overboard and that would be the end of me.
After a struggle that felt like it lasted for eternity but was probably only a couple of minutes, the two men eventually gave up. I watched out for them as I made my way unsteadily back to my bunk but they had probably gone back to drink some more. I did my utmost to avoid them for the rest of the voyage, keeping myself to myself. I found out later that one crewman goes missing and is never found again on almost all trips.
In spite of all that had happened, I had, I suppose, fallen in love with the sea. I loved being around small boats. I could never be far from open water. My dream was to live on an island. That part, at least, would come true.
But I got back to London with a sense of intense relief. I was about nineteen years old. I went home to Mum’s house, in Holborn, desperate to see my family again. I knocked on the door but got no response. The lady next door looked out of her window and asked me who I was knocking for. I said I was looking for Mr and Mrs Teale. She told me they had moved, and slammed the window shut. I just stood there on the street, with my bags at my feet. I had never felt so alone.
I suppose I was used to this by now. Here I was, lost again. But I’d grown up a lot in the past two years. And so had the rest of London.
CHAPTER 2
PART OF THE FAMILY
I’D COME BACK to London to find my family – and they were gone. It was devastating. I found another neighbour who said she thought they had moved to somewhere else in Holborn, but she was not sure where. Luckily I had a vague idea where my older sister Eileen lived, so I made my way there, eventually managing to track her down. It was such a relief to see a familiar face. She gave me a big hug and told me my family’s new address.
There I found them: Mum, Dad, Alfie, David, George, Jane and Paul, my younger siblings. They were so pleased to see me that of course we had to have a party to celebrate. Alfie was still full of laughs but harder and more cynical somehow than when I’d seen him last. David had changed too. We weren’t the mischievous kids running from the local coppers any more (and look how far that had got us).
After staying in London for a few days it was back off to Shanklin, to start fixing up the boats and deckchairs for the next season. I loved the winter and the deserted beaches and esplanade almost as much as the summer. There was one special boat that I spent a lot of time restoring. The old salt I bought it from told me it had been one of those that brought the British Army back from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. I renamed her The African Queen.
Did I want to watch the sunset, strolling on the beach through the surf? Or did I want bright lights, big city? I didn’t know myself. But I did know that, even if the Isle of Wight was seemingly stuck forever in some pre-war time warp, London was changing fast. It was happening on the streets. Most of all, it was happening in clubs, the sort of places my brothers were going to.
Apart from nicking bicycles and going to reform school, I didn’t know too much about big-time crime. But I was streetwise enough to have picked up the whispers. Our Dad used to tell stories about the old-time villains, the old West End firms run by men like Jack ‘Spot’ Comer, Billy Hill, Albert Dimes, the Sabini brothers. Their time was passing. In their place I heard there were a couple of new faces round Bethnal Green way, known as ‘the twins’. They were supposed to be as hard as nails and had a reputation for extreme violence that had even managed to reach as far as the leafy squares of Holborn – even if it wasn’t quite terrifying the Isle of Wight yet.
Mum and Dad came down to Shanklin for a day out now and then. I could see Mum could use a nice holiday so I told her that she, Dad, and the children should stay in a guest-house for two weeks and I would pay. Alfie and David came down too, full of stories about wild times in London and their smart and glamorous new friends. These included the infamous twins I was starting to hear so much about.
They were called the Krays. Reggie and Ronnie Kray. Because Ronnie commanded a little army of admirers, he was known as ‘the Colonel’. Alfie was full of them.
‘We’ve met some fellers from over in the East End,’ he would boast. ‘Big villains they are, the governors, you know what I’m saying? The real thing, they are, pretty much running all of London now. And we’re their friends! We go round to their house, we know their mum and dad, the lot. Like family we are, already.’
I couldn’t help but feel jealous. I tried to act uninterested but Alfie kept telling me more. ‘Honest, Bobby,’ he would say. ‘If you go out with Ronnie and Reggie to a club or anything, everyone just gets out of the way and clears the best table for you. It’s brilliant.’
The more I heard about it, the more I wanted to be part of it. I had so many questions. What are they like? How did you meet them? When am I going to?
I naturally looked up to Alfie. He’d been in trouble with the law like me; he’d grown up pretty fast and had been going down to clubs in Soho from his early teens. Mum worried, like she worried about all of us, but it was best she didn’t know too much.
While I’d been putting out deckchairs, Alfie had already had the encounter that was going to change all our lives. It had happened in the summer of 1959. He had been having a drink in Soho, down in Jack Murray’s bar, opposite the Freight Train in Berwick Street. It was about eight o’clock and absolutely dead when who should walk in but ‘Mad’ Teddy Smith.
Teddy was a face round the West End who Alfie knew only slightly. He had a reputation as a bit of a tearaway, especially when drunk, which was often. He was a sensitive soul the rest of the time and liked to think of himself as a writer. There were quite of few of those round Soho in those days.
Teddy suggested going to a club in the East End owned by some friends of his he thought Alfie would like. ‘What’s it called, this club?’ Alfie had asked.
‘It’s the Double R, run by Ronnie and Reggie Kray,’ replied Teddy.
Alfie had just about heard of the Krays. One day an old school-friend pulled up in a big car as Alfie was walking along the street and told him: ‘You’d better be careful. You’ve got the Firm after you for giving Flash Harry a slap. He’s one of theirs.’
The way A
lfie remembered it, Flash Harry used to hang around the West End, a Mod before there were any. He wasn’t a villain but he thought he was, and styled himself that way, bragging about who he was mates with.
‘What’s this Firm?’ Alfie had asked.
‘They’re called the Kray twins and everyone is frightened of them,’ the guy told Alfie. But back then Alfie couldn’t give a monkey’s.
There’d been stories about the Krays, of course – rumours, bits of gossip. They were older than us Teales, and had some sort of club in the Mile End Road. My brothers had no reason to give them a second thought. Anyway, did anybody go to east London for fun? Even East End taxi-drivers didn’t go to the East End. At least it wasn’t south of the river, where it really was the Stone Age.
But the way my brothers heard it, there was always action around the Krays, some kind of general hilarity, or punch-up or knife-fight – from which the twins would never once come out as the losers. So it was said. They’d been in and out of nick, apparently. And there was an older brother, too – Charlie Kray. He was married. The twins still lived with their old mum and dad in Bethnal Green.
Alfie was intrigued by the thought of going to the twins’ club and having a chance to check it out for himself. So he and Teddy jumped in a black cab and went down the East End. They got to the Mile End Road and went into what looked to Alfie like an old tube station. When they got inside though, they could see it was absolutely beautiful, like the Astor Club in Berkeley Square, full of well-dressed men and women. It was so glitzy and glamorous – the decor, the velvet wallpaper, the chandeliers, the gay barmen with their smart bow ties… Everyone who was anyone in the East End was there. Wives sat there all done up to the nines, sipping cocktails with their families, everyone on best behaviour.
As Alfie stood there staring, drinking it all in, Teddy said to him: ‘Come on, I’ll introduce you to Ronnie.’
Alfie nodded. ‘Yeah, I don’t mind. Let’s go over.’ So they walked further into the club and there, at the centre of it all, sitting at the bar, was Ronnie Kray.
