The three bullets that shattered my dreams of a quiet, peaceful and successful future were fired in the saloon bar of The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel Road, around 8.30 P.M. on 9 March 1966. The first was fired by Ronnie into the head of a man sitting at the bar. The next two were fired into the ceiling by a member of the twins’ Firm, Ian Barrie.
The victim was George Cornell, a member of a gang operating in South London. He was known to the twins as flash and loud-mouthed and was supposedly going around town boasting that he was ‘going to put that fat poof Kray away’.
On that Wednesday evening, Ronnie and the Firm were drinking in a pub we called The Widow’s. Suddenly Ronnie got up and said to Barrie and Scotch Jack Dickson: ‘Let’s go for a drive.’ He often suggested this if the mood took him and the other two thought nothing of it. They followed Ronnie out of the pub.
Cornell often spent some weekdays in the East End; that night, Ronnie wanted to have a look in a few pubs to see if he was, in fact, around. There’s not much doubt Ronnie hoped he was. For he didn’t like what Cornell was saying, and was determined that if anyone was going to be ‘put away’ it would be the South Londoner, not him.
After the fatal shots, Dickson drove back to The Widow’s. Ronnie told Reggie and their close friends, ‘I’ve done Cornell.’ He suggested they went to a pub away from the scene of the crime and within minutes they were on their way to Walthamstow.
Earlier that day I’d seen Reggie at Vallance Road and he’d asked if I was going drinking that night. ‘We’ll be in The Widow’s,’ he said.
‘I may see you later,’ I replied. I never committed myself. If I fancied a drink with the boys I would go; if I didn’t, I wouldn’t. I liked to be able to please myself.
That night I did fancy a drink. But when I got to the pub it was half empty. ‘Where did they all go?’ I asked Madge, the missus.
She shook her head. ‘They had to see someone. Don’t know where.’
I walked round to Vallance Road and asked Mum but she did not know where the twins were either. I nipped back to The Widow’s in case I’d missed them and no sooner had I walked in than the phone rang. Madge looked at me. ‘It’s Reggie. For you.’
I took the phone. Reggie quickly gave me the name of a pub in Walthamstow. ‘If I was you I’d pop over here and see us.’
When I got there Reggie motioned towards Ronnie and said, ‘He’s just done Cornell.’
I looked at Ronnie. ‘I shot him,’ he said.
He spoke so matter-of-factly, I couldn’t take it in at first. Then I started asking questions: Where? How? Was it bad? Was he dead?
Ronnie told me what had happened. But he didn’t know if the shots were fatal. Just then the news came on the pub radio. Everyone was listening to it: ‘A man gunned down in a Stepney pub earlier tonight has died in hospital.’
I looked at the faces of all Ronnie’s friends then told Ronnie, ‘You’re in trouble. Everybody knows.’
But he just said, ‘I don’t care.’
After a couple of drinks I decided to make a move.
‘Better not go home,’ Ronnie said.
‘Why not?’
‘The law will be about.’
‘Why should I worry about that?’ I asked. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘You know what they’re like. They’ll try and involve you.’
‘I’ll take my chances,’ I said.
‘Well, we’re not going to be around for a few days.’
And they weren’t. As the law buzzed around the East End looking for witnesses to the killing, the twins stayed in Walthamstow, out of sight in a friend’s flat. About a week later they surfaced and carried on as if nothing had happened. The heat was off. No one was coming forward to say who had shot Cornell. Ronnie, it seemed, was getting away with murder.
If the police were not sure who had killed Cornell there was one person who was in little doubt – the dead man’s widow. She came round to Vallance Road and threw a brick through Mum’s front window; fortunately she and the old man were out at the time. Cornell’s widow stayed outside the house, yelling insults and accusations until Aunt May told her that, no matter what the woman thought the twins had done, it was nothing to do with the parents. Finally, Mrs Cornell left. I can understand her wanting to vent her anger and hate, but her reaction did nobody any good.
The Cornell murder shook me, naturally, but I should not have been too surprised. The twins and I had had our rows about guns. I tried to make Ronnie see that it was daft to walk around London armed to the teeth like some commando but he would reply, ‘If they’re tooled up, so will I be. They won’t have me over.’
‘Hold up,’ I’d say. ‘Think about what is going to happen.’
But of course he wouldn’t. ‘I’d rather accept the consequences than have my head blown off,’ he’d say.
The twins were very disappointed in me for not sharing their views about weapons, and I did not endear myself to them when I put my foot down over a row between two of their Firm – Connie Whitehead and Scotch Jack Dickson. Ronnie had already told them to cool it but Connie and Jack took no notice. Then one night when I went to one of our clubs, The Starlight in Oxford Street, the doorman, Tommy Flanagan, said, ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Charlie. Jack’s inside, waiting for Connie. With a gun. He’s going to do him.’
‘It’s not going to happen,’ I assured him.
Relieved, Tommy said, ‘Tell him, Charlie.’
When I walked through into the club Ronnie came up, wanting to know why I was there. I told him I’d popped in for a drink, then asked what was going on between Connie and Jack.
Ronnie said, ‘I could have guessed you’d interfere.’
I went up to Jack and asked him if he had a gun. He admitted he had. ‘So you’re going to shoot Whitehead.’ I said. ‘You were pals a little while ago. Now you’ve had a row, you want to shoot him.’ I turned to Ronnie. ‘Are you just going to stand there?’
‘Let ‘em get on with it,’ Ronnie said. ‘If he wants to shoot him, let him. It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘You can’t just stand by and watch,’ I told him.
But Ronnie said, ‘Don’t interfere. Get on with your own business. I couldn’t care less.’
I turned to Jack again. ‘The only reason you have a gun and you’re standing there like a big guy is because Ronnie is standing with you. You wouldn’t have the bottle on your own.’
Jack said nothing. Ronnie drew on a cigarette, watching me. We stood there in silence.
‘Well, it’s not happening,’ I said finally. ‘I promise you that.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ronnie asked.
‘If Connie comes down here, I’m taking him away. I won’t let it happen.’
Ronnie launched a tirade of abuse at me, but I ignored him and I looked at Jack. ‘Give me the gun,’ I said.
He didn’t want to, but after a few minutes he handed it over.
‘Happy now?’ asked Ronnie.
I continued to ignore him and went upstairs with the gun and told Tommy to dump it.
‘Thank God for that,’ Tommy said. He was pleased I’d intervened. No one else would have stood a chance of overruling Ronnie.
But Ronnie thought I was an idiot.
For the next five months the East End was alive with rumours: everyone, it seemed, knew who had shot Cornell. People would come up to me and try to pump me, hoping I would confirm what everyone suspected. ‘I hear old Ron had Cornell over, then,’ they’d say. ‘Is that right?’
‘News to me,’ I’d reply. ‘Better ask Ron.’
I was up to my eyes running my theatrical agency, a coat factory and distributing potatoes, and did not see a lot of the twins. When I did see them, neither mentioned the murder. They did not seem the least concerned; it was as if it had never happened. But throughout that spring and summer I was on edge all the time, expecting something to happen – waiting for it, almost.
In August, it did. Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler swooped on a number of East End houses – including the twins’ in Vallance Road – and took in several men he felt might be able to help with his inquiries into the Blind Beggar mystery. Ronnie and Reggie appeared in identity parades at Leyton police station; neither was picked out, but it was clear that if they felt the heat had gone out of the police investigation they were wrong.
I came up with a suggestion that the twins should leave the country for a while, and for once they took the advice. I insisted that only two people, apart from the three of us, should know where they were going – Mum and the old man. The twins loved that idea, too, and a few days later took a private plane from Lydd in Kent to France, where they picked up a scheduled jet to Tangier. To keep the secrecy watertight, I told them never to phone the house but to dial the number of a public call box in Bethnal Green Road. They agreed to phone every Tuesday and Thursday at 8 P.M.; if the phone was engaged they would keep ringing until I picked it up. For the next month I felt like a spy, slipping out quietly just before eight and waiting for the phone to ring, and of course the twins loved the intrigue.
The effect on the East End was startling: the twins’ friends were very curious, but not as much as the police were. Soon, rumours started flying around, including one that the twins had been murdered. When I told them, they roared. It wasn’t easy keeping the secret for four weeks but somehow we managed it. And it was worth it. It gave the police something to think about and, as far as the twins’ so-called friends were concerned, the rumours proved something I’d always suspected: that they couldn’t stop bragging that they knew everything about the twins when, in fact, they knew absolutely nothing.
When the twins were due to return, I decided to see how fast the truth travelled by telling just one person where they’d really been. It was all over the East End in minutes.
When they finally arrived home, tanned and rested, Ronnie and Reggie took a great delight in the fuss their sudden absence had caused. A lot of people were glad to see them back, but in Tangier many – chiefly hotel waiters and taxi drivers – had been sorry to see them go.
Ronald Kray was the biggest tipper the city had ever seen.
With the law still buzzing on the Cornell mystery, Ronnie and some pals started spending their evenings at the Baker’s Arms, a quiet pub a couple of miles away in Northiam Street, Hackney. One summer night Detective Sergeant Leonard Townsend from Hackney police station walked into the saloon bar with a colleague called Barker. Ronnie and most of his friends walked out.
Townsend looked at one who stayed behind. ‘They have got to drink somewhere,’ he said. ‘And they might as well use this pub. If you see the Kray twins tell them if they want to play ball with us, we’ll play ball with them.’
When Ronnie heard this he went spare, but he agreed to meet Townsend in the pub the following night.
They went into a private room at the back of the pub and Townsend quickly came to the point. ‘I know you like it here because it’s nice and quiet. But if you want to be left alone it’s going to cost you a little bit of rent. There are two of us in it – a pony a week each.’
Inwardly Ronnie was boiling. Fifty quid a week to be allowed to drink in a pub! He felt like laying Townsend out on the spot, but he controlled himself – he had had an idea. He asked for a day to talk it over with Reggie and agreed to meet Townsend in the pub again the next night.
When Townsend left, Ronnie told the licensee, Eric Marshall, who exploded. ‘I’m going to Scotland Yard,’ he said. ‘I’m a straight man. You’ve done nothing. You and your mates spend your money here. You’re always treating the old people. The police are driving you away. I’m not having it.’
Ronnie quietened him down. They needed proof, he said, and he knew how to get it. He would meet the greedy copper the next night, as arranged, but this time the conversation would be taped.
When Ronnie asked my opinion of the plan I said it sounded a good idea because it would put a stop to the police corruption we knew had been going on for years. It would do the public good to learn that while the Kray twins had been accused of demanding money from people, the police had been demanding it off them. But I knew Ronnie well and suspected he wouldn’t follow it through all the way. ‘You’ll get them nicked all right,’ I told him. ‘But when it comes to court, you won’t give evidence.’
‘Oh, yes I will,’ Ronnie said. ‘They asked for this trouble. And I’m going to give it to them.’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t bother wasting your time. You should go through with it, but you won’t.’
I suppose Ronnie really believed he would. But I knew him better than he knew himself.
Before the meeting Ronnie contacted a private detective friend who set up two tape recorders in the room – one in an empty tin, the other strapped to Ronnie’s chest under his shirt. The trap worked like a dream: Ronnie got Townsend to spill out all the incriminating evidence of corruption, then he took the recording to a solicitor who went to Scotland Yard.
Four days later Eric Marshall kept a rendezvous with Townsend carrying ten £5 notes, the numbers of which had been listed by a Scotland Yard Detective Chief Inspector. Townsend got into Mr Marshall’s car at the Triangle, Mare Street, Hackney, and a microphone hidden under the front seat recorded the conversation as the money was handed over. The hard part of the plan was over: the greedy cop had taken the bribe. But sadly, the watching police made a mess of the next part of the plan. Over-zealous C11 men blew their cover too soon and Townsend made a run for it, throwing the incriminating packet into the road. He was caught after a mild chase, but not with the evidence on him. As it turned out, it didn’t matter; the tape recordings were enough to convince the police Townsend was guilty of corruption and he was duly charged.
All that was needed now was for Ronnie to make a statement and go to court and Townsend would be kicked out of the force, possibly jailed.
Surprise! Surprise! Ronnie said he couldn’t, and wouldn’t do it.
I tried to reason with him. I told him he had gone through all the aggravation so far and it would be easy to follow it through. When Ronnie still refused I said he owed it to other victims of police corruption to try to end it once and for all. No joy there, either. Finally, I told him straight out that he would be totally in the wrong if he turned his back on the case: not only would a bent copper go free on his money-grabbing way but Ronnie would have wasted everyone’s time: his own, Eric Marshall’s and God knows how many police.
I may as well have been talking to a brick wall. Ronnie said he would never go into a witness box to put somebody away, no matter who they were. Yes, Townsend was a bad copper, but giving evidence against him would make them as bad as each other, Ronnie argued. It was a strange, maddening philosophy and I tried my damnedest to change Ronnie’s mind. I should have saved my breath, for when a summons arrived in December ordering Ronnie to attend Old Street Court in North London as a witness, he promptly went into hiding. The case opened, but without Ronnie there it could not get very far and, not surprisingly, Townsend was remanded on bail.
We found Ronnie a flat in Kensington, near Olympia. He took a few chances to come to Vallance Road to see Mum, but generally he stayed in that flat. The police did not make a huge effort to find him and whenever I got the chance I told them they didn’t want to. The absence of a key witness was a good excuse for their man to get off, wasn’t it? With the case unlikely to be heard for a few months, Ronnie prepared himself, somewhat reluctantly, for a Christmas away from the family.
The case against Townsend started at the Old Bailey in April 1967. He was accused of trying to obtain £50 from Ronnie as an inducement to show favour and of corruptly accepting £50 through Eric Marshall for showing favour to Ronnie.
The jury was out nearly eight hours, but could not agree and a new trial began two months later. The tape recordings were present, but Ronnie wasn’t; he was still holed up in Kensington. It didn’t matter. Again, the jury could not agree and Mr Justice Waller ordered the detective to be found not guilty and discharged. Town-send was dumbfounded – he knew how lucky he was – but one person who probably was not surprised by the verdict was the prosecution’s own counsel, a barrister named John Mathew. As prosecuting counsel his job was to prove Townsend guilty. For some inexplicable reason, however, he gave the jury the impression the twins were on trial. In his opening speech, he said: ‘It may well be that some of you have heard of two persons known as the Kray brothers, Ronald and Reginald Kray. They are notorious characters. They are persons of the worst possible character. They have convictions between them for violence, blackmail and bribery. Their activities were always of interest to the police.’
Mr Mathew, one might be interested to learn, was prosecution counsel when the twins were cleared of demanding money from Hew McCowan two years before!
The day after Townsend walked free Ronnie came out of hiding, pale and wan from his self-imposed imprisonment. As we were leaving an outfitter’s in Bethnal Green Road next to the police station two policemen saw us. ‘All right, Ron?’ one of them called out casually, as though Ronnie was a dear friend he saw every day.
‘I’m all right now,’ Ronnie replied. ‘Do you want me?’
The policeman said, ‘No. We heard you were in Tangier. You don’t look very tanned.’
‘No,’ Ronnie said. ‘I’ve been here all the time.’
The policemen laughed and walked on. We got in the car and drove to Vallance Road.
That ended one dramatic episode in Ronnie’s life. But another was already hitting the headlines and it was to end at the Old Bailey with Ronnie facing a charge of murder. It was The Strange Case of Frank Mitchell, a giant whose brutality had earned him the nickname ‘Mad Axeman’.
Mitchell stood over six feet, had enormous muscles and was immensely strong. Yet he was shy and inarticulate, with the mentality of a child. He had had a sketchy education at a school for the sub-normal and turned to crime early in life, quickly progressing from remand homes to Borstal, then to prison. He was four years older than the twins and had spent most of his life in one institution or another.
Reggie met him in Wandsworth Jail in 1960 while serving eighteen months for demanding money from Podro the Pole. Almost from the moment they came into contact Reggie felt compassion for the gentle giant. Mitchell was constantly being beaten up by sadistic prison officers, but he never complained and always came back for more, fighting his persecutors with the power and strength of a bull. At the same time, though, he responded readily to a kind word or gentle gesture, and when Reggie went out of his way to make his life more tolerable, Mitchell developed a bizarre sort of hero-worship for him.
He demonstrated this in a spectacular way that endeared him to Reggie and, with tragic irony, prompted a chain of events that would lead to him being murdered in the most violent way.
Reggie had just three weeks of his sentence to go when some officers started winding him up, tried to light his notoriously short fuse. It was not difficult. From the moment he had gone into prison he seemed to be the target for officers’ bullying and he had never taken it lying down; this occasion was no exception. He was just about to retaliate when Mitchell roared from his cell, ‘Leave the bastards to me, Reg. You’ve only got three weeks. They’re only trying to keep you in here.’
For some reason it did the trick and made Reggie see the sense in swallowing it. He didn’t lose any remission and left the jail three weeks later. But he never forgot Big Frank and ensured, through various means, that he never went short of comforts. Some time later, Reggie got a chance to prove his friendship in a more profound way. Mitchell was accused of stabbing another prisoner with a knife, and Reggie arranged for him to be defended at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court by a brilliant young barrister named Nemone Lethbridge.
Thanks to her superb defence Mitchell was acquitted on a charge of causing grievous bodily harm. He returned to Wandsworth, but was later transferred to Her Majesty’s Prison, Princeton, Devon, a massive, dark, forbidding Dickensian building more commonly known as Dartmoor. And although he often worked outside the prison he wanted nothing more than to be free permanently. Reggie had been doing his best to get his case investigated by persuading influential friends to write to the Home Office. But no hope was on the horizon.
Then, one wintry afternoon – while Ronnie was playing Puccini in his Kensington hideaway – Scotch Jack Dickson went to Reggie with a story that Mitchell was threatening to kill one of the prison officers to draw attention to his case. Reggie thought about it carefully, then made one of his swift decisions. He gave Dickson a couple of hundred quid and told him to get Mitchell out of jail for Christmas.
Dickson enlisted the help of a couple of mates – Albert Donaghue and a former boxer named Bill Exley – and planned the escape. It was surprisingly easy: on the morning of 12 December the three of them turned up in a car at a pre-arranged spot and Mitchell, who had slipped away from a group building fences on a military range, was waiting for them. Later that day, radio and TV news reports informed the nation that helicopters and commandos were scouring the moors for ‘Mad Axeman’ Frank Mitchell. But by then the subject of their search was tucking into a fry-up at a council flat in Barking.
As Londoners packed the shops in the frenetic pre-Christmas shopping build-up, two of the most infamous men in Britain sat it out quietly in their comfortable ‘prisons’ on opposite sides of the city: Ronnie in upper-crust Kensington in West London, Mitchell on the outskirts of the more modest East End.
I was a virtual ‘prisoner’, too. I’d developed a throat infection, which confined me to bed at the time of Mitchell’s escape and for some days afterwards. I could not get involved in the big man’s problems, even if I’d wanted to. For no sooner had I recovered than I had to get busy, tending to Ronnie’s needs. I felt like someone from MI5 again when I went over to Kensington to see him: just in case I was being followed, I jumped on and off buses, in and out of taxis and sometimes walked round in circles just to shrug off would-be pursuers. With Ronnie wanted by every policeman in London I couldn’t be too careful. It was a bit of a drag sometimes, having to go through all that fuss, but I didn’t mind. I couldn’t expect Reggie to spend a lot of time with Ronnie: he was having great problems with his in-laws over Frances who, sadly, was suffering from depression.
I quickly discovered that Mitchell had had no intention of killing anyone: Dickson, Donaghue and Exley had dreamt it all up as some sort of exciting escapade. To them, minding a dangerous man on the run was a huge joke. But, tragically, the joke misfired. An attractive nightclub hostess, Lisa Prescott, was hired to satisfy Mitchell’s sexual urges, but the poor man – unworldly and naive as they come – mistook her professional competence for true affection and fell in love with her. Then he got hold of Exley’s gun and suddenly what had been a manageable, if troublesome, situation was out of control. Something had to be done.
It was decided that Mitchell would be smuggled out of the country. More money was provided and Donaghue was told to take him to a remote part of Kent, on the first leg of his journey. On Friday night, 23 December, the two men left the Barking flat together. Frank Mitchell was never seen again.
As that 1967 spring turned into summer, tension in the East End mounted. The police were no nearer to bringing Cornell’s killer to court and now they had another East End mystery on their hands. However, a far more significant event had been taking place at the Old Bailey which was to have a serious knock-on effect for the twins, their Firm and me. A South London gang, led by one Charles Richardson, had received massive sentences in what had become known as The Torture Trial. The victory had given police chiefs at Scotland Yard a tremendous boost in their war against London’s gangland. The spotlight, we quickly discovered, switched from south of the Thames to the East End, and the twins’ manor in particular.
I didn’t see a lot of the twins but whenever we did meet I got the feeling that they were under scrutiny – in their favourite pubs there always seemed to be somebody in a remote corner, watching points, taking notes.
Ronnie and Reggie had followed the sensational month-long Torture Trial and appreciated the dangers ahead. But they had such a total lack of fear that they took the increasing pressure lightly, particularly Ronnie. In the Grave Maurice pub in Whitechapel Road, for example, he would wave a mocking greeting to anyone he detected was a copper, and invite him over for a drink. Once he walked down Vallance Road to find detectives watching the house from a car. He apologized for keeping them waiting, then went in and told Mum to make some tea. He took it out to them in four of her best china cups and told the surprised policemen to make sure they returned them when they had finished.
Always the more dominant, more fearless, more reckless twin, Ronnie was convinced that he was above the law and that the Cornell business proved it. It was over a year since the killing. If the Old Bill were going to nick him, he said, they would have done it by now. The fact that nothing had happened proved they couldn’t touch him.
I told him to cool it and warned that both he and Reggie were heading for serious trouble. But as usual Ronnie didn’t listen. With this air of invincibility he started embarking on wild, extravagant plans to make vast fortunes with Alan Bruce Cooper, the moustachioed, stuttering American who was now permanently on the scene. I didn’t trust the man; he reminded me too much of Leslie Payne, whose elaborate plans also came to nothing. I was to discover that my intuition was right.
In the spring of that eventful 1967 I went to Spain with Dolly and my daughter Nancy on an all-expenses-paid trip organized by an American friend, Joe Kaufman, who had gambling connections and an antique shop in New York. Shortly after our arrival at the Avienda Palace Hotel in Barcelona, Joe, a keen amateur photographer, told me he’d been taking some long-range pictures from his balcony and seen someone else’s telephoto lens focused on him. At the time I was amused: I told Joe he probably wasn’t the only photographer in Barcelona. However, the incident was to have sinister implications.
We all went on to the resort of Sitges, further along the Costa Brava, and who should turn up but A. B. Cooper and his wife. He claimed he was in Spain on business and had decided to drop in and say hello. I presumed that Joe had told him and thought no more about it. But we discovered later that Cooper was, in fact, an informer for the CIA or FBI and had provided the police with a comprehensive diary of the twins’ movements over the previous couple of years. We tumbled him when he tried to trap the twins into parting with some incriminating evidence in a room bugged by police. Cooper’s plan, almost infantile in its conception and execution, began with a spate of phone calls and telegrams to the twins, and culminated with a frantic phone call from a Harley Street nursing home. He was, he claimed, suffering from a duodenal ulcer and wanted the twins to visit him. Precisely why was not clear. The twins were convinced it was a set-up and sent Tommy Cowley instead.
Tommy told me later that he smelled a rat the moment he walked in; Cooper simply did not look like a man with an ulcer. Then, shortly after they began talking, a nurse burst in, the Old Bill written all over her. She handed Cooper a menu and asked him what he wanted for dinner, which Tommy took to be a cue for Cooper to turn up the volume on the mike, probably hidden under the bedclothes.
As soon as the nurse left the room Cooper started talking about the gelignite Paul Elvey had gone to Scotland to get. Tommy looked suitably puzzled and asked why Elvey had gone there to get gelignite.
‘To blow something up, of course,’ said Cooper.
Tommy roared with laughter. ‘You delirious or something?’ he said. ‘We’re supposed to be the guv’nors in London. If you want any gelignite, I can get you some today.’
It was all too ridiculous for words, and shortly afterwards Tommy made his excuses and left, without giving the listening law one shred of information that could have landed the twins in trouble. That was the last they saw of A. B. Cooper – until he turned up at the Old Bailey to testify against them.
A friend of the twins’, Harry Hopwood, called at my flat wanting £2,000. The twins had decided to buy a pub and needed the money. I wasn’t very happy about the hurry-up approach and sent Harry back with a message that I’d see them tomorrow. In those days it was easy to buy a pub and within a matter of weeks The Carpenter’s Arms in Cambridge Heath Road was ours. We suggested Harry’s sister and her husband ran it for us, in return for a weekly wage plus a flat above. The couple had no home of their own at the time and were delighted with the deal. A ‘godsend’ was the word used.
The pub was to become a regular meeting and drinking place for the twins and their Firm. But for a while a different type of customer made a name for himself. He was a tramp who Ronnie befriended after seeing him looking for dog-ends at the front of the house in Vallance Road.
Most of our family smoked, and the old man used to collect all the dog-ends and put them on the pavement, much to the delight of the local tramps who thought all their birthdays had come at once. The hoard was like gold dust, especially Ronnie’s throwaways; he used to take only one or two puffs, leaving virtually a full cigarette. Ronnie, who had no idea the old man looked after the local tramps in this way, came out one morning and was horrified to see a shabby bloke with a beard and unkempt hair rummaging around the dog-ends.
‘Throw them away,’ Ronnie said. He took a packet of cigarettes from a pocket. ‘Have some of these.’
The tramp, a shortish, stocky guy in his mid-forties, could not believe his luck. Later, Ronnie mentioned the incident at home.
‘I’ve always left the dog-ends out there,’ the old man said.
Ronnie shook his head. ‘You can’t expect people to smoke dog-ends, Dad,’ he said, horrified.
After that, Ronnie used to wait until the tramp came along then go out and give him some fags. Over the next few days he got to know him quite well and took him to the public baths in Cheshire Street for a clean-up and shave. The next thing we knew, he had bought his new-found, fresh-smelling friend a new suit, shirt and tie and wheeled him into The Carpenter’s Arms. ‘Let’s give him a few quid,’ he said to Reggie and me. ‘And if he wants a drink, don’t charge him.’
The mounting police interest did not bother Ronnie. And Reggie had a far, far bigger problem on his mind early that summer – Frances. She was becoming more and more depressed and seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She had always been a highly strung woman; Reggie did not know it when he met her but she had had a couple of minor breakdowns in her teens. In the early days the Shea family had accepted Reggie but gradually as he became more and more successful and Frances was taken to West End shows and one champagne party after another, they grew to resent the relationship. In a strange way, they seemed jealous of their own daughter and this, I’m sure, played on her mind.
For several months, just before Christmas and after, she was very depressed. Reggie suggested it might do her good to stay with her parents for a while but Frances didn’t seem too keen. A few days later, however, she suddenly disappeared. Reggie was out of his mind with worry. Nothing was heard of her for three or four days, then Reggie got word that she was in hospital. When he discovered that her family had known where she was he hit the roof, unable to understand why no one had bothered to tell him. He rang me at the time in a terrible state. ‘How do you think this makes me feel,’ he said, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘A wife in hospital and the husband doesn’t know!’
I couldn’t say it to Reggie but I wasn’t too surprised at the Shea family’s behaviour. They had never treated Reggie with any respect. Whenever he called round at their house to pick her up – before they were married – the parents never invited him in. They would call down from an upstairs window, ‘She’ll be out in a minute.’ And they would leave him to wait in his car. Sometimes he’d wait an hour. I told him I could not have stood for it, I would have driven off, but Reggie loved Frances enough to put up with anything.
Naturally, he went to see her in hospital and a day or two later she came home. But she did not look well: her eyes were lifeless, her face pale and drawn. All the vitality and effervescence she had displayed on her wedding day two years before had gone, leaving her looking much older than her twenty-three years.
Then she went to stay with her brother, and the next time Reggie saw her she was dead.
It was a Wednesday morning in June. I was at home when the phone rang, and the moment I heard Reggie’s voice I knew something was wrong. He started breaking his heart. For some time I couldn’t make out what he was saying but eventually he got out that Frances had taken an overdose. He had gone round to see her at her brother’s house and when he hadn’t got a reply he had located the brother and they’d found her in bed. Dead. I couldn’t take it in. It didn’t seem possible. Reggie was sobbing on the phone and I told him to go to Vallance Road; I’d see him there. I dropped what I was doing and raced round but Reggie was already there and had told Mum. She was as devastated as we were. Reggie just sat in a chair, staring ahead and repeating, ‘If she’d been with me it wouldn’t have happened…it wouldn’t have happened…’
I told him it was an accident; Frances had surely not meant to kill herself. She was probably feeling neglected and took an overdose to try and get some attention. But Reggie did not even hear me. He just said, ‘Why did she do it? Why?’
Reggie’s heart was broken. He wanted to see Frances’s body after the autopsy at Hackney mortuary, and he asked me to go with him. There is a police station near the mortuary and while we were in a small room waiting to be called two policemen walked in. We couldn’t believe it. Reggie started to choke with anger but I begged him to ignore them: they would probably have excused themselves by saying they were checking that Ronnie wasn’t around. They just stood there, watching us. I felt like saying, ‘Can’t you find a better time?’ but heeded my own advice to Reggie. Having a row in a place like that would have been dreadful; it would have made us lower than them.
Finally, we were called and went into another room where we could look through a window at the body. The two policemen moved so that they could half-see us in a mirror. Reggie and I stood looking at Frances and then Reggie started to cry, and I walked out of the room, leaving him to release the grief and heartbreak he’d been bottling up since that terrible Saturday morning. The policemen were watching him, and as I passed them I felt like lashing out. But I just sat down and ignored them and waited for Reggie, and when he came out, still choked, I just said, ‘Come on, let’s go home.’ The policemen followed us out and were still watching us as we drove away.
It was then that I began to understand my brothers’ rebellious attitude towards the police.
Mum, the old man and I tried to give Reggie support, but more than anything he needed the companionship of his twin, who could understand what he was going through without the need for words. However, the Townsend second trial had still to be heard and Ronnie was holed up in the flat in Kensington. He felt he would make things worse for everyone if he suddenly reappeared.
Reggie wanted Frances to be buried in her wedding dress but the family said no. They blamed him for her death, and their hatred was so deep that they tried to have her maiden name of Shea substituted for her married name on the coffin and memorial stone. But, of course, Reggie resisted that.
The funeral was held at the church where Frances and Reggie bad been married just two years before and it caused a personal problem for Father Hetherington, who would conduct the burial service. He was a very Christian man and couldn’t come to terms with his resentment towards the Shea family for the appalling manner in which they were treating Reggie: it hurt him to feel so badly towards them. Nevertheless, he refused to be hypocritical and insisted that Mr and Mrs Shea did not travel in the first car with Reggie. He also called me into the vestry and made it clear Ronnie must not turn up at the funeral. He urged me to make him promise not to come, even if he felt he had a duty to be present. Ronnie wanted to pay his last respects to his brother’s wife but he thought too much of Father Hetherington and Reggie even to consider breaking his promise.
The police did not know this, of course, and on the day, police cars lined the route to the church and detectives mingled incongruously with mourners. The occasion was bad enough for all who had known and loved Frances. To have her death robbed of the dignity it deserved just made it worse.
Reggie did not speak to the Shea family after Frances was laid to rest. He didn’t want to know them; they blamed him for their daughter’s death and he blamed them; they said he had always been bad for her and he said they caused her mental problems by trying to pull her away from him. It was pure hatred on both sides.
For Dolly and me, our springtime trip to Spain had not changed anything: we continued to drift apart and by August I was going through my own domestic crisis. I adored my kids, of course, and was enjoying watching them grow, but the marriage itself was virtually over. The rot had set in the night I learned about George Ince, and the relationship had never recovered. That summer I was ripe for another affair and, when the chance came I threw myself into it with all the boundless joy of a carefree teenager.
Her name was Diana Ward and she had been hired as a waitress for a casino-nightclub I was opening in Leicester with a partner, Trevor Raynor. The club was due to open officially in the autumn and one afternoon I went to Leicester with Tommy Cowley to see how it was progressing. Within a few minutes Tommy spotted Diana. He was knocked out by her beauty and eagerly pointed her out to me. My mind was more on business, and I told him to keep his eyes off the staff. Secretly, though, I admired Tommy’s taste: Diana was stunning.
Over the next few weeks, I got chatting to her and learned that although she was married it was not a relationship made in heaven. I was not in a position to ask her out, though. In London I was up to my eyes with my other businesses and I was not able to pop up to Leicester as often as I would have liked.
However, I did have to see how the club was coming along, so I set aside Wednesday as my ‘Leicester day’. Diana was on my mind a lot, and as I drove north a warm feeling of pleasure would flow through me at the prospect of seeing her.
What I did not know was that on the eleventh floor of Tintagel House, a towering office block on London’s Embankment, behind a door marked ‘Krayology’, the spider’s web was being spun carefully, hour after hour, day after day. A pile of damning documents was growing steadily – detailed reports and sworn statements on the movements and activities of the Brothers Kray by so-called friends and associates, eager to trade a lifetime of loyalty for the promise of freedom. Suddenly that summer, betrayal was in the air.
Reggie could not cope with the loss of the beautiful woman he had idolized. For weeks after the funeral, he tried to drink himself into oblivion every night to ease the pain. Thanks to the Valium the doctor had prescribed him he found this relatively easy. Mum hated going to pubs every night, but she came with Reggie and me because we were so worried about him. He didn’t seem to care about anything any more, he just drank and drank. And when he had drunk too much he would drink some more until the effects of too much gin and Valium would explode in his head making him incapable, and we would take him home and put him to bed.
Reggie had always taken immense pride in his appearance, but in his misery even this went out of the window. Once, someone saw him at five in the morning walking along Whitechapel High Street with no jacket and his shirtsleeves rolled up. Two policemen called out, ‘What are you doing?’ But Reggie just glared at them and walked on without saying a word. Evidently his look was enough for them to get the message. In the state he was in God knows what he would have done to them if they’d got busy.
Frances had been his life and now she had gone life would never be the same again. If she had not died so tragically young, if she had been around to give him love and a purpose for living, Reggie’s entire existence would have taken a different direction. As it was, the whole appalling episode crucified him, and took away everything except an overwhelming desire to destroy himself.
The only reason he had for living, it seemed, was to die, to join his beloved Frances. He pumped more gin, more Valium, into his body to take him away from the terrible reality of her death, and inevitably his personality began to change. I watched the transformation hopelessly with a kind of dread. Reggie was disintegrating before my eyes and there was nothing I nor anyone could do. He was on a wild, crazy rollercoaster that was hurling him round and round, faster and faster, and he didn’t care where it took him or where he ended up. More gin. More Valium. As the heat of that summer of 67 cooled and autumn brought an early warning of winter’s chill to the East End streets, the transformation was almost complete and Reggie’s death-wish was about to shatter the barrier that separated him from Ronnie, and change all our lives for ever.