by Bobby Teale
Ronnie was a little bit older than Alfie. He was heavily built with a fleshy, quite sensual face, and he was dressed in a navy mohair suit. He was sitting half turned so he could see the people coming in and survey the whole place as if from a throne. Reggie wasn’t there. At the time he was away in prison, on a charge of demanding money with menaces from a north London shop-owner. Alfie later found out that in fact it was Reggie who had first opened the Double R Club when Ronnie himself had been away doing time for wounding with intent. The name of course was a tribute to his twin, to the two of them.
Ted said, ‘Hello Ron! Here’s a friend of mine, Alfie Teale.’
Alfie stepped forward and shook Ronnie’s hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Ron,’ he said. ‘This is a lovely place you’ve got here.’ Alfie felt pretty pleased with himself. He had no reason to feel in awe of Ronnie Kray.
‘Thank you very much. Would you like a drink?’ Ron said.
Alfie asked for a gin and tonic.
Ron asked Alfie where he lived. He replied that he came from Holborn.
‘Oooh, Holborn. It’s nice round there isn’t it?’ he said. The voice was high coming out of such a big body, but not overly effeminate. My brothers and I would be getting very used to the sound of that voice over the next few years. Alfie told him our mother had recently opened a club called the 66 in Upper Street and he said: ‘Got a club, eh? I’d love to go there and meet her… Get him another drink. He’s smart, very smart, you must come here again.’
Alfie was flattered. He was smart, despite having left school at fourteen and getting a job as a butcher’s boy. Like me, he’d grown up fast and had found quicker ways to make money than cycling round Holborn delivering pork chops. By now he had a bit of experience as a petty thief, mainly in jewellery shops. He used to drive two Buicks at the time. He thought he was Elvis Presley. I used to catch him posing in the mirror, combing his hair and wiggling his hips whenever he came to stay with me.
As Alfie had revealed, Mum and Dad had indeed recently opened a nightclub. Their first one was called the Theberton Club near the Angel in Islington. I suppose it was a natural thing for Dad to do – he was always a showman, and Mum loved a bit of glamour. It was her stage and she was the star in the spotlight.
Everyone used to drink there. Small-time crooks, big-time crooks, market stallholders, coppers, the lot. It got very crowded so they soon moved round the corner to a bigger place called the 66 Club. It was above a clothes shop on Upper Street, a bit beyond Islington Green towards the Angel with the old Collins Music Hall just over the way. It was what you might describe as a little speakeasy. I was only there a couple of times but David and Alfie caught all the action.
Ronnie Kray obviously saw the possibilities in this new friendship with the son of these north London nightclub owners. By the end of that night in the Double R, Ronnie told Alfie directly how pleased he was that Teddy Smith had brought him there, what a shame it was that Reggie was away, and that it was good to see new people coming in. Alfie basked in the attention. He was twenty-one years old. Ron was five years older, a man of the world, a businessman, a face among faces.
Three days later Alfie got a phone call. It was Ronnie. Alfie had been expecting it. ‘I thought I’d phone you up because I’d like you to come over to my house in Vallance Road and meet my mum and dad,’ Ron said. ‘You’ll like my mum and dad.’
Alfie said: ‘OK, Ron. What time?’
‘Come over early,’ Ron replied. ‘I’ve got a bit of running about to do later.’
Alfie agreed to be there at nine o’clock. He was intrigued to know more about Ronnie Kray and his family. So the next morning he drove over to Vallance Road, parked his car round the corner, and knocked on the door. Ronnie’s mum, Violet, answered the door and greeted Alfie warmly.
‘Oh, you must be Alfie! Ron is over at the bath-house right now but he’ll be back in ten minutes. Come in and wait in the kitchen and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.’
Alfie went into the kitchen and saw about ten or fifteen white shirts all immaculately ironed, hanging up on an old-fashioned indoor drying frame on a pulley. He sat amongst them awkwardly, drinking his tea, until eventually Ronnie came in.
‘Hello, Mum,’ he said, handing her the towels and soap he’d been using over at the bath-house. Then he turned to my brother. ‘Hello Alfie! You met Mum then?’
Alfie said he had and what a lovely lady she was. Ron then turned to her and said: ‘Make me a nice bit of breakfast, Mum. You’ll have some, Alfie, won’t you?’
Ron sat down with Alfie and started telling him about the caravans the family had got down at a place called Steeple Bay in Essex, where they often used to go at weekends. In the meantime Violet Kray rustled up two plates of smoked haddock and poached eggs with bread and butter. Alfie ate it up with relish, enjoying the company of his new friend. It already felt like he was part of the family.
Alfie started telling Ron more about our parents’ new club, the 66. It was nothing like as luxurious as the Double R, of course, but it was a nice, clean family club. Alfie proudly told Ronnie how well it was doing.
‘Oh, that’s good,’ said Ronnie. ‘I must come up there and meet your mum and dad. Do you mind? We’ll take a couple of friends up and have a nice drink with them. That will be nice, won’t it?’
Alfie wasn’t dumb. He knew what Ron had on his mind, and realised that he was thinking of the 66 for little private meets. But he couldn’t see the harm in it. In fact, Ronnie quickly made the club his second home. My parents didn’t mind either. Dad used to sit down with Ronnie and tell him stories about all the old gangsters he had known.
Ronnie was intrigued, saying: ‘I knew a few of them.’ And Ronnie did. When he was still a teenager he used to work for Jack Spot and Billy Hill. It was his apprenticeship. Jack Spot taught him the golden rule: ‘Only nick from thieves; that way you’ll never get nicked.’
So that’s what the twins did – they moved in on anyone who was vulnerable. They called it a ‘pension’, a slice of every bit of dodgy business, every tickle, every bit of profit from a deal. Their main interest was clubs.
Clubs were everything in London at the time, the way the laws on prostitution and gambling had changed in the late fifties. Grafters [prostitutes] couldn’t pull their punters on the streets any more without being arrested, they’d do it indoors, and at the same time you could now gamble in ‘licensed premises’. You could make big money. To run one you just had to find some premises, get a drinks licence and square the local coppers. Then there was the little matter of ‘protection’ – keeping out troublemakers. But who was it making all the trouble?
If you had an interest in a club and had a criminal record you didn’t want anyone knowing about, you were easy meat. Anyone who had their own reason not to involve the police could be got at. And that was a lot of people.
Putting out the deckchairs in the Shanklin sunshine, it all seemed a world away from my quiet life. But every time Alfie came out to visit me he would regale me with stories of going out with his new friend. Soon Ronnie was phoning him up all the time. He would tell him: ‘Come on, we’re going to the Pigalle, or Churchills, the Astor, the Celebrity, the Society, Danny La Rue’s…’ Alfie’s favourite place, which he used to go to four or five times a week, was called Talk of the Town. It had a stage that came up out of the floor and swirled round. Alfie swore that the women in there were the most beautiful he’d ever seen.
Going out to a club with Ronnie was like being with royalty, Alfie said. If a place was full, an empty table, freshly laid, would magically appear. Service was instant. When that first happened to Alfie, he thought he was a big boy, one of the chaps, one of the villains. ‘We’ll pay for it later,’ Ron would say at the end. But no money would ever change hands. And it went on from there. First it was protection, a club owner having to pay the Firm to make sure there was no trouble. Then the Firm would become ‘staff’. Then all of a sudden the place would be theirs.
Well, we, th
e Teale family, were in the club business, even if I didn’t have much to do with it at the time. That’s how Mum and Dad made their living. And now we were on the Krays’ takeover list.
CHAPTER 3
DOWN THE 66 AND UP THE WEST END
SO THAT’S HOW my brother Alfie met the big bad Ronnie Kray. While I was scraping barnacles off the bottoms of pleasure boats, he was now one of ‘the chaps’, posing around the West End clubs with his new friends. Meanwhile, my younger brother, David, had also had his first big meet with Ronnie. It was at our mum’s club, the 66, where he was looking after the door. It was David’s job to let the right people in and keep the undesirables out.
One night there was some loud banging on the door at the bottom of the stairs. Our mum called out to David: ‘We’re closed.’
David opened the door to the street and said to the two men standing there, ‘No, you can’t come in,’ and shut the door in their faces. But they banged and banged until eventually David was forced to open the door on its thick metal chain. Peering through the gap, one of them said to him: ‘D’you know who I’ve got here with me? It’s the Colonel.’
‘I don’t care who it is,’ David replied. ‘My mum said you can’t come in so that’s it. We’re finished, we’re closed.’ And he shut the door again.
Just at that moment Alfie came downstairs to ask what was going on, and hearing the Colonel’s name, he said very quietly to David, ‘Oh God! You’d better open the door – it’s Ronnie Kray.’
Poor David had to let them in and went and sat in the kitchen at the back, feeling very embarrassed. He didn’t even know who Ronnie Kray was. Alfie quickly filled him in. The man who’d done the talking was Dickie Morgan, a friend of Ronnie’s since his misdemeanour-filled National Service days. David had never heard of him either.
David was still the kid brother, really. Alfie was the grown-up. I had gone off to seek my fortune at sea and had now disappeared off to some island. David was barely seventeen years old and didn’t know much. He knew so little he didn’t know how much he didn’t know.
Like me and Alfie, David had never really been to school. He went once or twice and hated it, mainly because he just couldn’t understand what he was being taught. At the time he just assumed that he must be stupid. Certainly, that’s what everyone told him.
Also like me, David had been sent to an approved school, after being caught selling stolen cigarettes. Joining the boxing club was his one release, but I know he had a hard time there, just like I did.
In the end he spent just over two years there. He got back to Liverpool Street station with his few possessions in a small bag, and made his way home to Theberton Street near the Angel, where our family then lived. No one made much fuss of him when he got back, apart from Alfie and Mum, who both looked up with a sort of ‘Oh, it’s you’ expression when he walked in. David was fifteen when he came back, and had changed from being a child to a young man while he’d been away.
When he was about sixteen, David got a job as a waiter on a ship that took emigrants to Australia. When that ended, he came back to London and started working the door at our mum’s club. And now he had just tried to turn away Ronnie Kray. Alfie did not hesitate to explain to our younger brother what a major mistake he had just made.
David got over his embarrassment and went back into the main room of the club, where he saw a man in a flash suit laughing and joking, sitting up at the bar.
‘Come over here and sit with me,’ he said. ‘I do like it here. It’s lovely and private.’ Nervously, David perched on a bar stool next to Ron.
‘Well done, son, you’re a good boy,’ Ronnie continued. ‘You look after your mother, and if your mother says don’t let anyone in, you don’t. I need someone like you in our clubs.’
That was it. Ron stayed until about four in the morning, drinking brown ales one after another. After that he started coming up the 66 Club night after night, bringing people to meet my brothers. It was that way David and Alfie got to meet the rest of the Firm. It was that way they got to understand how he was the undisputed commander of this little army. They all called Ronnie ‘the Colonel’. He loved it. Soon I’d be calling him that too.
He kept insisting that David come and see one of his clubs, but although David didn’t know at first that Ronnie was gay, he was instinctively wary of his interest. His own sexual inclinations certainly didn’t lie that way – in fact, he was already seeing a girl at the time. But Ronnie was like a stalker. He would lay siege to someone or something until he got it.
By now Ronnie was coming to our mum’s club at least four times a week. At first it was all very friendly up the 66. Ronnie especially loved our old man and he was very fond of our mother too. He’d call her Nell. He thought our mum was like his and Reggie’s mother, which she was. She was a very loving woman who adored her sons.
As much as Ronnie would come to the 66, so Alfie and David would regularly be summoned to wherever he was. If they didn’t come immediately he’d send a car round for them. Sometimes it was to go to another club, sometimes to Vallance Road. Whatever it was the Colonel wanted, you couldn’t refuse. It seemed Violet Kray liked the idea of my brothers being there because it made Ron happy. She would greet the two of them with: ‘Oh, Ronnie will be pleased to see the pair of you. Come in the kitchen, and I’ll make you a lovely cup of tea.’ She would always steer them away from the room where the Firm would be meeting.
‘Do you want a sandwich?’ she would smile.
‘Yes please, Mrs Kray. Thank you so much, Mrs Kray,’ my brothers would dutifully reply.
About this time, Reggie was released from Wandsworth Prison on bail pending an appeal. So where do the Krays come to celebrate? To the 66 Club, of course. And that was where Alfie and David first met Reggie.
Reggie liked them both straight away. He was a lot like Ronnie, obviously. People thought he was the serious one, the not-quite-so-crazy twin who had ideas about running a legitimate club and entertainment business in a way that didn’t always end with someone being hit over the head or smashed in the jaw. But it was Ronnie who had the power. It was Ronnie who was the real ‘character’. He was the ‘Colonel’.
Meanwhile I continued to stay happily down on the Isle of Wight working at the boat business. David and Alfie were now coming down to see me every couple of weeks, helping me with the work, and staying with me in the seafront flat that Johnny Quinn and I shared in Shanklin, above a place called the Radcliffe Restaurant.
They’d come over even more in the spring, as that was when I really needed help getting ready for the summer season. They got themselves officially registered as ‘longshoremen’, meaning that if ever a boat got into trouble, the coast guards could call on us for help.
While my brothers and I worked recovering deckchairs, or taking the launch out, we’d be chatting all the time about what was happening to them in London – about the latest doings of Reggie and Ronnie. I pretended not to be that interested, getting on with working on an engine or something without saying much. But in my mind I was becoming quite jealous. The way Alfie and David told it, there were lots of women, loads of booze and lots of partying. I compared it to my own existence. Trips round the bay.
It was around this time that the Krays made their big move Up West. London in the early sixties was all about gambling clubs. Changes in the law were supposed to clean up illegal gambling but the new laws made these clubs magnets for rakeoffs and extortion rackets, as the twins had already found to their advantage. This time they were going to run their own place and no one would be stupid enough to try to stop them. It was called Esmeralda’s Barn.
There was the East End, there was Islington, there was Holborn and there was Soho – in a straight line, east to west. That was our universe, the London we knew best. But there was a world beyond that, too: Mayfair, Knightsbridge, the West End. Alfie got an old-fashioned Armstrong Siddeley limousine and used to drive around west London feeling quite at home. But it wasn’t all lords and la
dies in that part of town.
Around Bayswater and Paddington, there were lots of villains and lots of grafters. The Vienna Rooms in the Edgware Road is where the old faces like Jack Spot and Billy Hill used to hang out – and where the Krays used to come and learn from the masters. And then there was Notting Hill, filled with streets and squares of crumbling tenanted houses. This was the territory of Peter Rachman, the infamous slum landlord.
To get in with the Krays – and you had to be in with the Krays – Peter Rachman had introduced them to a man called Stefan de Faye, who had a gambling club in Knightsbridge. The Krays naturally enough just took it over. They had a new face around, a geezer called Leslie Payne who’d been a sergeant in the war. He was some sort of money-man adviser to the twins – what the Mafia in America called a ‘consigliere’. He helped them to run their new acquisition, Esmeralda’s.
The club was in Wilton Place and the twins just took over the management one day with its staff and membership none the wiser. David and Alfie used to go there a lot. The casino was on the top of three floors with a restaurant beneath and the Cellar Club beneath that. That was a disco for lesbians.
Reggie was away again (he was back in Wandsworth for six months, his appeal having been turned down) and Ronnie was not getting very far without him. He didn’t have clue about gambling. The customers kept coming, however. I suppose they found it amusing to be in a place run by gangsters. The men were in evening dress, black tie, and the women were in pearls. But if Ronnie didn’t like a punter, he’d be thrown down the stairs. It was all part of the entertainment.
As Alfie and David would tell me, what Ronnie really liked about Esmeralda’s Barn was seeing what he’d call the ‘flash cunts’ losing money. Management was a joke, with all the decisions being based on Ron’s whims. Punters would have no credit left but Ronnie would still let them gamble if he liked the look of them. The club attracted lots of well-dressed women with their boyfriends, most of them Guards officers because the Household Division cavalry barracks was just round the corner. Alfie and David would look at the women and wonder who they were with, and whether they could try it on with them.
