by Bobby Teale
Pogue had even tailed us to East Anglia on our ‘holiday’ with the arsonist Geoffrey Allen – when, terrified for my life, I’d made my bid to get a message back to the Yard saying they had a grass on their side who was feeding the name ‘Phillips’ back to the Firm.
And Pogue was absolutely right when he said that, although I was unwilling at that time to give evidence for use in court, I would do so if I knew the twins and Scotch Ian had been arrested. He could have added: ‘and stayed arrested’.
This was the same thing that Read had been gambling on all that summer when he’d made his move to arrest the twins first – and then used me to persuade the faint-hearts to come forward once they’d been nicked to give statements that could bring them to trial. And they had come forward, once I’d been detonated like a bomb in the committal proceedings.
Read had been adding to his collection. After Albert Donoghue, Nipper had got Scotch Jack Dickson to come over. He made a statement on 24 September in Brixton saying how he had driven Ronnie and Scotch Ian to the Blind Beggar on the night Cornell was shot. On the return journey to the Widow’s pub in Tapp Street, Ronnie had said: ‘I hope the bastard is dead.’ That’s what I told Pogue Ronnie had said in the Chequers pub in Walthamstow at one of our meets two and a half years before.
Ronnie Hart came over to Read’s side on 2 September – and pretty soon he was telling what he knew about the butchering of Jack the Hat in Blonde Carole’s flat, which was a lot. And that’s what they charged Reggie with on 19 September, after which they’d come back to me looking for more stuff on Reggie. And I’d given it to them, lots of it.
Although of course I knew the Krays could still walk. Just like they’d done before when they walked out of the nick when Butler had screwed up the identity parade in August 1966. After that Butler had just given up and I’d been hung out to dry. Maybe Read was made of tougher stuff.
He was going to have to be. What would a clever brief make of what I’d said? They might say that the police had planted me deliberately. That I was put into the Firm to urge Reggie to kill. Whatever I said, it was going to be acutely embarrassing for the Yard – especially for the reputation of the great Tommy Butler.
Well, history knows quite a lot about the rest. By the end of October, the committal proceedings had been concluded for murder in the cases of George Cornell and, missing bodies or not, Jack McVitie and Frank Mitchell. The trial date was set to begin on 8 January 1969 at the Old Bailey.
But there was another trial to get out of the way first – the trial of our mother, Ellen Teale.
On 28 November 1968 Mum appeared at the Old Bailey. It was over very quickly. She’d had been told to plead guilty by Nipper Read because she ‘let the thieves in’ and had no proof that she was not involved in it. As far as we, her sons, were concerned, she was made to plead guilty but we had been reassured she would not go to prison, as long as we told all we knew about the Krays in the full-scale trial that was now just a few weeks away.
Alfie was with her that day, though he had to stay in a private room with two of Read’s men during the proceedings. He was not allowed to go in the court because of being a witness at the forthcoming Kray trial.
He told the policemen, ‘If my mum gets one day in prison then I’m going to make the Kray trial look like a parking fine.’ They looked really worried for a moment then reassured him, ‘Don’t you worry, Alfie. It’s all been arranged.’
And yet Mum was now pleading guilty to stealing £25,000. She got two years, suspended for three, for housebreaking and larceny. She passed out in the dock – partly from shock, and partly from overwhelming relief that she wasn’t going to prison. Nipper Read had come good. Half an hour later Read himself came rushing through the door to see Alfie. ‘Are you all right? I heard you were a bit upset. Don’t worry. Everything’s being taken care of.’
So it’s the end of 1968 – what a year. And it’s Christmas. Usually it would be the time when my brothers would go out and work the streets, bringing home about five times as much as usual. But having just come out of prison and not having two bob between us we were all flat broke. Not only that but with the prospect of having to give evidence against the Krays in January, life could not have been more bleak.
Alfie, Wendy and the kids had moved by then from Millman Street to Bramber Court, a block of flats in Cromer Street, still in Holborn. The police got David a flat above them so that they could have them all in the same block. They were in and out of one another’s flats all the time, as were the police bodyguards. They were never physically threatened, so they told me later, although they got a few dodgy looks once or twice in the pub. They also had the opposite treatment, with complete strangers coming up and shaking them by the hand, telling them how brave they were being.
So Alfie and David and their families were under some sort of protection. Meanwhile I was taken out of London and installed in an anonymous safe house in Ipswich, Suffolk. It was a flat on a top floor somewhere in the city. It had its own private entrance, one main bedroom and a small bedroom and a living room looking out at the main road. I had the big bedroom and the coppers who were with me had the small bedroom. But only one would stay overnight.
Some extra security men drove me there but they only stayed if I wanted them to. I had a girlfriend at the time who lived near my mother on Clerkenwell Road. Chris, one of the security men, would drive her home after coming out to visit me.
Now all we had to do was wait until the Krays’ trial started.
CHAPTER 22
INTO THE LIONS’ DEN
ALL OF US Teale boys were out of prison, living under police protection. Alfie and David in Holborn, me in Ipswich. The start of the big trial was just a few days away. Then in the first days of January 1969, David was called to Tintagel House for a last-minute briefing. While he was there, he had something very personal to say:
I talked to Nipper Read and another officer called Frank Cater. I told them how Ronnie Kray had forcibly raped me at Vallance Road in the summer of 1966. It wasn’t easy. I stopped and stumbled several times. As soon as they realised what I was saying, they asked me to ‘put it all down in a statement’.
A week later they told me they would keep my statement safely, but that they had so much on the Krays already they would not need to use it in open court. But they would if the other charges failed. Meanwhile I was not to mention Ronnie’s sexuality. I was OK with this, as at the time I wouldn’t even have wanted what I’d told them about being raped to be printed on a toilet roll, let alone a national newspaper.
They said not to worry, that the Krays were ‘not going to see daylight’ for a very long time. Maybe so.
The time had come. The opening of the full trial was just a few days away. The newspapers were full of it. The order of witnesses was going to be Alfie, David, his wife Christine, and then me. They were keeping me until last. The defence meanwhile had clearly spent a lot of time finding out what we might say, what we might know, all about our mum, our background and so on. We were all of us going to be put through the mincer. Alfie was up first. He recalls:
The atmosphere was electric, like that on the morning of a wedding, or perhaps I should say a funeral. We all had to get up at the crack of dawn to get dressed and prepare ourselves psychologically for what was coming. It was Tuesday 14 January 1969.
David and I were not allowed to see one another, or speak, and were taken under separate guard to the Old Bailey with another extra police car behind us.
I don’t care who you are, if you find yourself standing in the solicitors’ office in the Old Bailey, waiting to give evidence against thirteen of the country’s most notorious villains, you’re going to be afraid. Nipper Read said he had another thirty charges he could have used against the Krays, if the ones already filed hadn’t been enough. Maybe he had, but the twins had got off before and they could get off again.
I’d been told by Nipper the day before the trial not to make myself look smart. He didn’t want the
jury looking at me and thinking that I looked the part of a young gangster. But then I thought: ‘I can’t do that.’ So in the end I wore a silver grey mohair suit, which was absolutely fabulous, made by Paul, my tailor from Berwick Street.
I was kept in another room to David, being minded by about six armed policeman with revolvers, and a few plain-clothes as well. By this time we all knew one another quite well. They were trying to encourage me not to feel nervous, but I was. Dick De Lillo, one of Read’s team, had his car nearby so we went for a quick drink to stiffen my nerves.
The police gave me a talk about what the courtroom would look like, where the Krays and the other defendants would be sitting. In fact it was the same Court Number One where we’d been tried two years before. I was told: ‘Take no notice of any of them. Whatever they say, whatever they do, ignore them. Tell the complete truth. Don’t add anything on or you could get found out.’
We didn’t have to add anything on. We knew more than enough already. So I walked in and there they were, the Krays and all the rest of the gang, looking at me from across the court.
I felt terrified as I walked into the witness box. Even though I knew I had the protection of the police, meeting the eyes of the men sitting in a line in the well of the court, about twelve feet away from me, guarded by an officer at either end, was daunting. And every single one had his eyes fixed on me.
Then it began: ‘Who was in your car? Was Reggie there? What did he say? Did he say he’d shot Cornell? Did he tell you Cornell was dead?’ I answered as best I could. And then the defence started, trying to trip me up.
I’d been called as ‘Mr A’. Ronnie’s defending counsel, Mr John Platts-Mills, let rip in cross-examination with an attack on me as to why I might want to conceal my identity. It could not be on account of fear of his peaceable, law-abiding client. It could not be to protect my children. I’d said that my youngest had been told when I was in prison that I’d been away in the army.
Then Platts-Mills starts really sneering.
‘Your way of life is the most sordid known to British crime,’ he said to me.
‘You seem to think so.’
‘Are you homosexual yourself?’
‘No.’
‘Any tendencies that way?’
‘None at all,’ I replied.
‘You seek out older men who have respectable positions in life and have homosexual tendencies. Then you blackmail them,’ he said.
Then he lists off every juvenile misdemeanour and adult crime on my form sheet. I get a lot of questions about Tapp Street and just where and at what time David had supposedly stopped his grey Ford to be met by Reggie saying: ‘Get us off the manor!’
The defence claimed that Ronnie had never been in the Blind Beggar. There had been no siege of Moresby Road. There might have been a party there, which Ronnie had attended much later, but that was all.
It turned into the second day of questions. It’s all in the trial transcript:
‘Do you remember singing and dancing?’ he asked me.
‘No, I remember drinks there – nearly every night there was drink,’ I answered.
‘And some girls, people’s wives and so on?’
‘I don’t remember no people’s wives.’
‘Dancing going on?’
‘No, there was a record player.’
‘Do you remember one of the songs?’
‘I should imagine it was all modern records.’
‘You and your brothers sing very well, do you not?’
‘No, we sing.’
‘And you sing together?’
‘Now and again.’
‘One of your favourites is “Zorba the Greek”?’
‘You cannot sing that, it is music, there are no lyrics to it.’
‘The neighbours sent for the police that night because of the row you were making, singing “Zorba the Greek”.’
‘What night was that?’
‘About a week to ten days after the night when Cornell was killed… and the uniformed police came in and carried the protest of the neighbours.’
‘Well, I cannot remember it.’
‘You mean it is the kind of thing that could happen any night at David’s?’
‘No.’
‘The impression you sought to give yesterday was that David’s flat was used as a hide-out for a week?
‘Yes.’
‘And I suggest, the only occasion Ronald came was either at the end of that week or at a later stage when there was quite a noisy party, far from being a discreet hiding place…’
Well, they were wrong. Then they opened up on me about Bobby. They clearly knew a lot.
‘If Bobby had a meeting with Chief Superintendent Thomas Butler before September 1966, he managed to conceal that from you?’ I was asked.
‘He did.’
‘And neither Chief Superintendent Butler nor anybody else came to ask you any questions?’
‘Nothing at all,’ I said. They were trying to make out that that me and my brothers were good friends of the twins. We had no reason whatsoever to fear them. We were saying all of these lies because of police pressure or because we were being paid to say them.
‘You were on extremely friendly terms with the Kray family until June of 1968, were you not?’ Platts-Mills asked me.
‘I suppose we had to be friendly.’
‘We had to be friendly… I suggest… is simply a vicious addition to your evidence to try and blacken the people in the box,’ he said. Then he opened a new line.
‘The [Krays] were great people for going to a caravan… Mother Kray had a big caravan on a site?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘Where?’
‘A place called Steeple,’ I said.
‘And you went frequently to the caravan at weekends with or near the Krays on the same site?’
‘No, I went with my wife and children.’
‘You have, have you not, been yourself a party to the taking of a number of photos showing you and the Kray families in very happy domestic friendship? [the pictures the police took from Christine] … That was all under compulsion, was it?’
‘Well, up to a certain point, yes.’
Then the defence got to our mum.
‘Your mother is Ellen, is she not?’ he asked me. ‘At about the time you first gave a statement to the police, June [sic] of 1968, had your mother been arrested?’
‘Yes, she had.’
‘[She worked at] a house of titled people?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think ennobled people?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was there £25,000 worth of jade involved?’
‘I don’t know how much was involved,’ I replied.
‘Mother was alleged, as housekeeper to this house, to have opened the doors and let the burglar in?’
‘That was what they said.’
‘And Dad, so it was suggested, was the burglar…’
‘Well, why wasn’t he arrested?’
‘I am going to ask you that in a moment. Is this the bargain that was made with you: you help to put the twins inside, Dad will be let off [and] Mum will plead guilty and get off with virtually nothing?’
‘No, it was not.’
And then it was over. No more attacks on my character. All I did was to tell it exactly how it was. Nipper Read came rushing up to me, and I asked him: ‘Was I all right?’ Placing his hands on my shoulders he stood back and told me, ‘Alfie, you were absolutely brilliant! You didn’t let them get away with anything.’
So that was Alfie, first Teale brother to go into the lions’ den. Then it was David’s turn:
It was the second day for us at the Old Bailey, Wednesday, 15 January 1969. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared before in my life. I had a couple of stiff drinks before we went in. It started even before we’d got into the main court.
The police put us in the same room as Scotch Jack [Dickson] when we were both waiting to give evidence. Jack came over
and shook my hand, telling me: ‘You’re doing the right thing.’ But I didn’t trust him, I never had, as I knew he was a Jekyll [Jekyll and Hyde – snide]. I gave him some fags. He’d run out as he was smoking like a train, he was so petrified. We both were. He kept asking Nipper’s men for more.
The time had come. I crept into the court like a little weasel, hearing Ron and Reggie and others all hissing at me as I entered. I kept remembering what Ronnie had said to me when I’d said I was worried about my wife and kids: ‘Dead men can’t speak.’
I didn’t know then and still don’t, whether Ronnie meant Cornell was dead and couldn’t speak, or did he mean if I said anything either about the murder or the night he’d raped me that I would be dead too? He kept spitting ‘Liar!’ at me each time I spoke, hissing and glaring at me in an attempt to put me off. So I looked straight at him and said: ‘You know the truth, Ron,’ referring both to Cornell and the rape that as far as he was concerned, only he and I knew about.
