by Bobby Teale
‘Right, Dave,’ the officer said, and pulled a load of photos from his desk drawer.
They were of me, of my wife, Christine and my children, of Alfie, Bobby, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, all going in and out of the flat in Moresby Road. We’re going shopping, getting in and out of my car, going to Vallance Road, different pubs, lots of us at Steeple Bay, the caravan site. They were surveillance photos. They had clearly been taken when practically the whole Firm had been camped out at my place after the Cornell killing. I don’t know what chilled me more, the memory of that time two years before or the fact the coppers knew all about it. How did they know? Why hadn’t they stormed the place?
‘So you don’t know the twins?’ he asked again.
‘Well, I do know them… They used to go up my mother’s club in Islington.’
‘But you still don’t want to make a statement?’
‘No.’
At that moment, the telephone rang. Picking up the receiver, the officer answered, ‘Yes, he’s here. Do you want to speak to him?’
Passing the receiver across the table to me, he whispered conspiratorially: ‘It’s the wife!’
I felt myself starting to sweat with anxiety. ‘Hello, love. You all right? Where are you?’ I said.
‘Hello, Dave. I’m in Albany Street Police Station. They brought me here. They’ve been round a few times asking about Ronnie Kray and the Cornell murder. They’ve taken the photos of us and the Krays, the ones that were taken down at the caravan. I had to give them to them.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about it. Where’s the kids?’
‘They’ve got a policewoman looking after them.’
Telling Christine not to worry about a thing, I put the receiver down with a shaking hand.
‘Listen, Dave,’ said the officer now. ‘I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You and your wife are both going to make statements. You know your mother has been nicked?’
Well, I didn’t know. I just sat there with my mouth open. What the hell was this? It had to be some kind of trick. It had to be just a crazy story to make me say something. Surely.
‘It’s true,’ said the copper, ‘and just to prove it, tomorrow we’ll show you the court papers.’
‘Nipper Read is working on all this in Tintagel,’ the other policeman present told me. ‘You’re going to be doing a lot of bird if you don’t tell us what happened on the night of 9 March 1966 when you drove Reggie Kray from Bethnal Green to Walthamstow.’
‘Alfie and Bobby have made statements,’ the copper continued (I found out later that Bobby in fact had yet to do so). ‘I suggest you do the same. Do you realise you could be charged with harbouring a murderer? If you don’t play right by us you’ll be looking at twelve to fifteen years, your wife and mother could both get five, and your kids will end up in care. If you want to make a statement tomorrow morning, we will pick you up early and take you down to London. The other prisoners will be told you’re to have an operation so that no one starts asking too many questions.’
There was no way out. Stuck between the twins and the police, we were now completely cornered.
I answered: ‘You’ve got a deal.’
Early the next morning they came to pick me up. On the drive to London I asked if I could see my wife. They told me I couldn’t see her yet, but that after I’d made the statement, I’d be allowed to see her.
So I’m taken from West Sussex and smuggled into an anonymous office block across the Thames from the House of Commons. It’s 2 July 1968. I recognise Inspector Read from the time at the Hideaway and the McCowan business. And he recognises me. ‘Hello, Dave, how are you?’ He could not have been friendlier.
He was surrounded by piles of photos. He told me they’d got everything on me but he wanted me to continue giving them information. A couple of police officers took me downstairs to the canteen to have something to eat before taking me into a large room where one wall was completely covered in pictures of the twins at Vallance Road, Steeple Bay, everywhere, with all the members of the Firm. My brothers and I are in loads of them.
Just to make the point, the police showed me Ronnie’s statement, claiming: ‘All I know about the Cornell killing is that the Teales were involved.’ I recognised his childish scrawl from the letter and cards I’d seen him write in Vallance Road, so I knew it was really his statement.
I told Read and his team what they needed to know. How the twins had moved in on the 66, how Ronnie had pursued me and used my flat as a meeting place. I told them about the night of the phone call from Madge’s and how I had driven to Tapp Street with my brothers. How Reggie had got in my car and told me to ‘get them off the manor’, the drive to Walthamstow and the days of mayhem that had followed. Read loved it. ‘That’s good, David, that’s great, and then what happened…?’
Nipper Read told me what he wanted to happen. ‘What we want you to do is to go to Bow Street first. That is where the committal proceedings will be before the main trial. The prosecution are going to ask you some questions and you’ve got to tell them everything you know,’ he said.
I agreed to everything.
They took me to visit my wife, and to the pub. I knew that they wanted to talk to her as well – that she was going to have to give a statement. I told her not to worry and to say what she knew. They came round the next day, by which time I’d been taken back to Ford Prison. It was 3 July 1968.
I found out what she told them, a little afterwards. She’d given them lots of family photographs of us with the Krays at Steeple Bay. She said that I’d come home that night two years earlier ‘with some friends’ who she recognised. Ronnie had asked ‘permission’ to stay (hardly) and said ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ to the Firm when he saw her. Well, that bit was true.
She told them how there had been all sorts of comings and goings, how Alfie had not been allowed to go home on his own. How Alfie had said: ‘What do they think we are… cunts?’ – meaning he didn’t like the way Reggie and Ronnie were dominating him.
‘There were a few drinking parties held at the flat. I think Madge’s daughter came to the flat one night. She was friendly with Bobby Teale,’ Christine told them. It’s in the statement she gave, I’ve seen it.
On the last night before they finally all left, Ronnie, Reggie, Ian Barrie, me and my brothers had all gone out to the pub they called the ‘Dead Pub’, she told them, when a policemen knocked on the door asking about a burglar being held at the flat. She had shown the policeman round. That’s what Christine said anyway. And to be frank, her version might have been nearer the truth.
I had bought a caravan at Steeple Bay after all of this, Christine had said, where we’d all gone down. And I did have a car, a grey Ford, which in the end had either been stolen from outside the Regency Club or repossessed by the finance company – more likely the latter. So, as far as the coppers were thinking, all I’d said checked out.
But I could see the way Read was thinking. What sort of charges could be brought out of all of this? A defence could say it was all a great big party. Dancing, drinking, outings to pubs – all of which was true. That the police had come round to Moresby Road because of neighbours complaining about the noise. In fact, that’s exactly what they would say.
CHAPTER 17
ALFIE’S STORY
WHILE ALL THIS was going on, Alfie was still holed up in Lewes Prison. David and I could have no contact with him. He also remembered what he was hearing on the landings around the same time that the Krays got nicked:
A lot of the Firm tried to visit me during the course of the two years that I was in Lewes Prison. I used to get called into the governor’s office and told: ‘You’ve had a couple of people try to visit you, Teale. But I’m afraid under the Home Office rules we can’t allow it.’
‘Why, sir, who was it?’
I worked out who they were from his descriptions. One was Dickie Morgan, another was Mad Teddy, and then there was Connie Whitehead. I knew, without seeing the
m, why they had come. They had been sent to tell me that if anyone asked about Ronnie or Reggie, to say I didn’t know anything. Reggie also sent me a couple of books. They were signed: ‘Reggie and Ronnie Kray.’ So I am getting the feeling someone wants to warn me off – but the books I was grateful for.
A little later I was also sent in a complete set of oil paints. To this day, no one has told me who these came from, but they did inspire me to start painting. I won a prize in a national prison art competition.
I knew, really, they could only have come from the Krays. No one else I knew could have afforded something like that. Nobody else would have bothered. Both the books and the painting actually gave me great comfort. I was missing my wife and children terribly and often cried myself to sleep in my cell at night. Then I got the news.
A friend of mine, Bob, an old con who’d done a lot of time, went on home leave in June 1968 and on his return came to see my cellmate, Georgie Mutton, and me in our cell, whispering something to Georgie so I wouldn’t hear. When I asked what they were talking about, Georgie said to Bob, ‘You might as well tell him’. Turning to me, Bob said, ‘I’m so sorry, Alfie. Your mum and dad’s been nicked – for doing Lady Hamilton’s place.’
I was astonished. I knew my mum had been working as a housekeeper for a toff family for a while but I also knew there was no way she would be involved in a robbery of all things. It was only later I found out what really happened. For now I was just told that my father had been interviewed at West End Central back in March. They’d let him go but told him: ‘We’re not charging you, but we’re charging your wife.’
Mum and Dad were then remanded until July. They’d never told me. I really felt life couldn’t get any worse. But Georgie reassured me, saying, ‘Don’t worry, Alfie. It’ll work out, I’m sure. Someone will get in touch with you.’
And sure enough, a few days after this, someone did.
I was called to see the governor. But instead of going to his office I found myself taken to a small private meeting room. ‘You’re allowed to smoke, Teale,’ I was told by the screw.
Suddenly two coppers walked in. One of them said, ‘Hello, Alf. Nipper Read sent us down from Scotland Yard.’ I knew Read’s name from that time with McCowan and the Hideaway. So he was back on the Krays’ case. Well, he would have to try harder than last time.
‘What do you want?’ I asked nervously.
‘Your mother’s been nicked, as you probably know.’ I did know. The whole prison knew.
‘Is she all right?’
‘Yes, Alf, don’t you worry. We’ll look after her for you. Here you are – twenty fags.’
I grabbed the packet of Senior Service gratefully, dreading what was coming next.
‘We might as well be blunt with you, Alf,’ the officer continued. ‘Your mother looks like getting five to seven years. We’ve been told by Scotland Yard that she’ll be put in Durham Jail with the likes of Myra Hindley and a few others… unless, of course, you want to help us with some information about the murder of George Cornell and a couple of other things about the twins. It’s up to you. If you want to write a statement we can more or less guarantee your mother will go free.’
My instinct was not to grass, under any circumstances. So I said to them, ‘See you later, mate. You must be on drugs or something telling me all this nonsense. I do know the twins; everyone knows them. But I didn’t have anything to do with Cornell or any of it.’ Then I asked the screw, a huge man from Dartmoor who’d been listening to all this, to take me back to my cell.
As I stood up to go, one of the policemen said, ‘Well, it’s up to you. But we’ve got three statements written by the Firm saying that you and your brothers were the ones who did Cornell.’
This really terrified me. I couldn’t believe that the twins would really try to pin this on us. But they had. It was true. I found out later that David saw the statement written by Ronnie at Tintagel House claiming that we were responsible.
I was taken through the prison gate and back to my block, and the policemen disappeared, probably off to have a drink, I remember thinking. When I got back to my cell, I told Georgie and asked for his advice. He didn’t say anything immediately but later in the evening after I’d had my tea, he sat down on the bed opposite mine. I stared around the cell looking at our books, the sugar and milk on the table between us, the fruit we’d bought out of our canteen money we always shared, and waited for him to speak.
‘D’you want some tobacco, Alfie?’ he asked.
Georgie always had a few quid and often gave me half an ounce of tobacco when I was low.
I asked him whether he’d thought about what I’d told him.
He nodded and said, ‘Let me tell you something. You want the truth? You would be a truly evil man if you allowed your mother to go away for five to seven years with that slag in Durham. Get the governor to get the coppers back down here and tell them you will help them. Because if you don’t, you won’t see daylight again, Alfie.’
There was another reason. I knew about the Krays being arrested in May. Everyone did. But I didn’t want to say anything then because they would have stopped my home leave, which was due on 18 May. They would have put me on ice.
When I did go out that weekend, I told my parents some of it. Mum was on bail – though at the time I didn’t even know she had been arrested – and said I should go the police. The Krays were in Brixton on remand but I was frightened of them and of the rest of the Firm obviously. Then one Sunday – 30 June 1968 – there was a story in the paper about a man being arrested at the British Oak pub in the Lea Bridge Road in connection with the Cornell murder. It had to be Scotch Ian Barrie, who I was especially afraid of.
So that morning I walked into the PO’s office and asked, ‘Can you make an arrangement for me to see the governor, please?’ He looked at me, and knowing exactly what was going on, answered quietly, ‘Certainly, Teale. I’ll do that straight away.’
A day later, down came the cops again. ‘All right, Alfie? What have you decided to do?’ and there was another twenty fags on the table in front of me. Again they promised me that our mother wouldn’t do a day in jail if I cooperated.
I replied, ‘Could I speak to one of my brothers, please?’
So they got David on the phone from Ford – and he told me they had been to talk to him too.
When I heard that I knew the game was up. I told David, ‘You might as well tell them everything you know because I’m going to. They’ve got Mum and I don’t see what else we can do. They must know about you and Christine and the flat, all of it.’
David told me they’d got photos and everything. I hadn’t seen my brothers for two and half years and I was pretty low, counting the days off until my release. And now this.
The next thing I know, I was being taken over to the remand wing, on strict instructions that I should tell other prisoners I was waiting to be taken to a prison in London. They were going to smuggle me out for a meet. I was taken to Tintagel House, a police office block on the south bank of the Thames. On 1 July 1968 I made my statement. Detective Chief Inspector Henry Mooney took it down.
I gave him a full account of the night of 9 March 1966. How I was having tea and watching television with David, Bobby and Christine, when Reggie had rung the flat in Moresby Road to invite us Teale brothers over for a drink at Madge’s.
I told him how when we got there, Reggie had got into the front seat of David’s car and said: ‘Cornell’s just been shot.’ How we’d driven to the Chequers pub in Walthamstow and how, when Ronnie, having received some sort of a message, said ‘He’s dead,’ and turned to David and said, ‘We’re all going to stay at your house.’
How Ronnie and ‘Ian Scott’ (that’s what I knew Scotch Ian Barrie as) had come into the flat. How Scotch Jack Dickson and Pat Connolly had left and come back the next morning. How shotguns, one of them a repeater, appeared all of a sudden but I wasn’t sure who had brought them.
I told Mooney how Bobby had b
een sent out to get the morning papers, which were ‘full of the Cornell murder’. How I’d been allowed home to get some clothes and had a row with Wendy because I’d been out all night. And how I told her I absolutely had to go back to David’s house.
I described the comings and goings over the next two weeks, how Firm members Harry ‘Jew Boy’ Cope and Sammy Lederman had brought in supplies of salt beef sandwiches. How I’d been sent to pay off Reggie’s furniture bill for fitting out his flat in Green Lanes at the Harrison Gibson store in Ilford.
I told him about an outing with the Krays to the drinking club at the Lebus furniture factory in Tottenham. And then how we’d gone for a drinking session in the Grave Maurice pub where Ronnie had set up the reconnaissance mission to Dartmoor with me and Fat Wally to find Frankie Mitchell.
