My Story

by Ronald Kray

  For a time we were evacuated to a farm out in the country, at Hadleigh in Suffolk. We loved it, me and Reg, running in the fields, breathing in the air and seeing the animals. Our mother didn’t like it so much, away from the East End, but me and Reg, we liked the country.

  When we are free again we both want to live in the country. In the sixties we bought a nice house at Bildeston, which is a village only about four miles from Hadleigh. We gave the house to our mother but she had to sell it when we were put away and the money started to rim out. It was a pity because it is worth a lot of money today. Funny enough, someone sent my wife an estate agent’s particulars, recently, advertising a house they were selling at Bildeston. There was a photograph of the house on the front. Yes, it was The Brooks, the house that me and Reg used to own. This is how they described it:

  A SUBSTANTIAL VICTORIAN COUNTRY HOUSE ENJOYING A SECLUDED VILLAGE SETTING.

  FIVE BEDS, TWO BATHS, FULL CENTRAL HEATING AND DOUBLE-GLAZING; AN ANNEXE COTTAGE, STABLING AND STORAGE ROOM;

  POOL, GARDENS, PADDOCK.

  OFFERS INVITED IN THE REGION OF £295,000 FREEHOLD.

  Looking at the photograph brought back some nice memories. It would have been a good place for me and Reg to retire to. We both love Suffolk.

  When we went back to London we used to make some money by selling firewood. Some days we would get up very early and go out with our uncle, Joe Lee, our mother’s brother, to Billingsgate fish market where he worked. He used to turn up outside our house at four in the morning with his cart pulled by Shire horses.

  Some days we would go on a pony and trap with a man called Harry Hop wood, who used to buy and sell rags and woollens. Harry Hopwood was a friend of our father. He used to sit us on his knee and try and get us to drink from a bottle of brown ale. He seemed a good man, but he turned against us later. Years later he was a prosecution witness against us. He died an alcoholic. Maybe he turned to the drink because he had bad things on his conscience.

  When we were twelve, the war ended. We started back at school, at Daniel Street. To earn a bit of money we used to help our grandfather, Jimmy Kray, on his old clothes stall in Brick Lane. We used to keep an eye on his cash box while he was selling the clothes. And when we were twelve we had our first trouble with the law. Or Reg did, anyway. We had been with some friends to Chingford, in Essex, for a picnic. On the way back, on the train, Reg fired a few shots from his slug gun out of the window. A slug gun is similar to an air pistol. He wasn’t trying to hit anybody, but the guard stopped the train and locked Reg in his cabin. When we got back to London the Transport Police were waiting. They made something out of nothing and even took Reg to court. They treated him like a hardened criminal. He got off with a warning after the Reverend Hether- ington spoke up for him.

  The Reverend R. H. Hetherington was a man we had respect for. He ran a youth club in the Bethnal Green Road, which we joined. He was a tall and powerful man and he knew how to deal with East End kids. He even had us running errands for him. Sometimes we went to his church and I remember he had such a clear and powerful voice. He was a good friend to us over many years and he spoke as a character witness for us more than once. He also presided at our mother’s funeral.

  The boxing started when we were about twelve, too. Our mother let us have a room at Vallance Road, which we turned into a small gym, and our older brother Charlie started to teach us some boxing technique. Charlie was in the navy by now and he was quite a good boxer. He let us have a navy kitbag which we stuffed full of rags and old clothes and used as a punch ball. It was suspended from the ceiling by a hook, and held down by a meat hook in the floor boards. One night our father crept into the room after he’d had a few drinks and the meat hook went straight through his foot. He was in agony, but we all had a good laugh.

  A lot of the local kids used our homemade gym, including a kid called Kenny Lynch, who later made his name as a singer, and the Gill brothers, the Nicholson brothers and Charlie Page, who all became pro fighters. Most people know the story of how me and Reg sort of made our professional d6but. A travelling fair came to Bethnal Green, in Turin Street. The big attraction for us was the Alf Stewart boxing booth where one pound was offered to any man who could go three rounds with one of the fighters on the booth. It wasn’t easy because the fighters they had, Buster and Steve Osbourne, Les Haycox and Slasher Warner, could handle themselves. On the opening night there weren’t many takers, so Alf Stewart said he would pay any spectators who would get in the ring and fight each other. Me and Reg shouted out that we would fight. And we did. We had a good scrap for three rounds. Reg’s face was bruised and my nose was bleeding. But the crowd enjoyed it and Alf Stewart gave us seven shillings and sixpence (about thirty-five pence in today’s currency), which was a lot of money then. That was something else the film got wrong. In the film, they tell me, our grandfather, John Lee, is seen in the ring in the boxing booth. And he’s getting a pasting, which is why me and Reg wanted to fight. That never happened, our grandfather didn’t fight at the boxing booth.

  But another fighter, Charlie Simms, saw us and he thought we had some talent. He persuaded us to join the Robert Browning boxing club and he became our trainer. By the time we were fifteen, in 1948, Reggie won the London Schoolboys’ Championship, was a Great Britain Schoolboys’ Championship finalist, South East Divisional Youth Club Champion and London ATC Champion. I won the Hackney Schoolboys’ Championship, a London Junior Championship and a London ATC title. We even got in the newspapers. One paper said, ‘The Kray twins could go on to become as famous as another pair of sporting twins, the cricketers Alec and Eric Bedser.’

  It was at this time, when we were fifteen, that I was in a film. I was in the famous Repton boxing club, one night, when another man who was there, a film director, said he needed extras for a film he was making at Ealing Studios. The film was called The Magic Box, starring Robert Donat, and me and a friend called Shaun Venables were in it. So was the great boxer Jack ‘Kid’ Berg but I never spoke to him then. Many years later he became a friend of ours and used to come to our clubs. We were very sad when he died in 1991. The Magic Box was shown by BBC Television in 1991 and a friend of mine saw it and recognized me - even though I was only on the screen for a few seconds! My friend took a photo of me in the film as he watched it on his TV set. I was pleased he still recognized me after all these years!

  By the time we were sixteen me and Reg had our own gang. Most kids in the area belonged to gangs because it was such a tough area. We also carried weapons when we went to dances and so on, because if other gangs knew you were tooled up you were less likely to get bother. I was given a gun at about this time, but I never used it. We used to keep our weapons hidden under the floorboards at Vallance Road and if we got wind that the police were coming to the house we would move them to friends’ houses.

  We got into a bit of bother after a fight outside a dance hall in Mare Street, in Hackney. We were charged with GBH against three men, Dennis Seigenberg, Walter Birch and Roy Harvey. Years later, in Parkhurst prison, Reg met up with Seigenberg again. By then he’d changed his name to Dennis Stafford and he’d been convicted of murder. We were sent to the number one court at the Old Bailey, in front of Judge McClure. The Reverend Hetherington spoke for us and we were acquitted through lack of evidence. At the end of the trial the judge said to us, ‘Don’t go around thinking you are the Sabini brothers.’ The Sabinis were well-known gangsters at the time and later they became friends when one of the brothers, Johnny Sabini, used to visit me in Broadmoor. Our good relationship with the Reverend Hetherington carried on through the years. He was a fine man and he gave us a lot of good advice. I remember he once told me that he never once saw an instance of a person who was dying who failed to turn to God. I had proof of this with my own uncle Albert, my auntie May’s husband, who was one of the kindest, gentlest men I ever met. He, too, turned to God, and his last words to my auntie, before he died, were, ‘I am not a wicked man, am I, May?’

  F
ather Hetherington used to say to me, ‘You don’t have to go to church, but you must believe in the Creator. You must find time to think about Him.’ I think that is why many people in prisons and hospitals like Broadmoor turn to God. They have the time to think, to analyse their lives. I know, because it has happened to me.

  We had no more trouble with the police for another year. Nineteen fifty, when we were seventeen, we were still doing our boxing, and doing well, and we did some work, mainly in the markets. Shifting boxes around gave us a bit of money and helped to build our muscles. When the next trouble with the police came it wasn’t really our fault. I was standing with Reg and some friends outside a caf6 in the Bethnal Green Road. A policeman told us to move along. Then he gave me a shove in the back. I hit him. We ran off, but the police came looking for us. When they tried to arrest me, Reg became involved as well. We both got charged with assault. We were lucky. The Reverend Hetherington spoke up for us again, and we got probation.

  A few months later, we both turned professional as boxers. We weighed an identical nine stones, nine pounds - we were lightweights - and we both did well. We won our first fights at the Mile End Arena. Reg beat Bob Manito, from Clapham, and I knocked out Bernie Long, from Romford. In all, Reg had seven fights as a pro and he won them all. I had six fights, won four and lost two. Our older brother Charlie turned pro, too, and he did well, winning twenty-one out of twenty-five fights. They used to call him Evergreen Charlie Kray and he was a stylish fighter. I’ve only ever seen him lose his temper once, and that was when he knocked out a fellow called Jimmy Cornell, in the first club we owned called the Double R. Jimmy Cornell had a brother called George. I had to kill him later.

  I think we could have gone all the way as boxers, but then they called us up for the army. We were ordered to report to the Tower of London to join the Royal Fusiliers. We didn’t want to go in the army, but we hoped they would let us be PTIs (Physical Training Instructors). They didn’t, of course. The next two years were a waste of time. We spent them either escaping, or locked up in the guardhouse. Once, when we were in the guardroom at the Tower, our father came to see us. He was still on the trot himself, so he had to come in disguise. Nobody recognized him. I have some happy memories of my father. He was a good man when he wasn’t in drink. Once, when I was a boy, he was going off to the bookmaker’s, and he said to me, ‘Go on, Ron, choose a horse and I’ll put a quid on it.’ I looked at the runners in his newspaper and I picked a horse called Gay Donald. It won at thirty-three to one. So I’d won thirty-three pounds, which was a lot of money in them days.

  Once, when we were on the run, we borrowed a car and drove to Southend for the weekend with a friend of ours. We sent the commanding officer at the Tower a postcard saying, ‘Wish you were here. Reg and Ron Kray.’ He had a sense of humour and he pinned the card to his office wall. Another time when we were on the run the police arrested us and put us on an identification parade. They said they suspected us of attacking a man with a truncheon and stabbing him with a knife. We were not picked out on the parade so the police handed us back to the army.

  Another time we were in a cafe in the Mile End Road when a policeman began to get aggressive. So I hit him and Reg got involved as well. We were sent before Thames Magistrates. They gave us a month’s jail for assaulting a policeman and we were sent to Wormwood Scrubs. At the end of that month, on Good Friday 1953 when we were nineteen, they decided to send us to the army barracks at Canterbury, in Kent, to be court-martialled. We went down there by train, handcuffed to military policemen.

  When we got to Canterbury Barracks we overpowered the guards and escaped. It was easy.

  We were arrested twenty-four hours later at Eltham, in the suburbs of south London. They took us back to Canterbury where we were later court-martialled and sent to the glasshouse at Shepton Mallet in the West Country. That’s the place where they shot some of the film, The Dirty Dozen. It was very hard there. Among the people we met was Charlie Richardson, who later ran his own gang with his brother in south London. We gave as good as we got at Shepton Mallet. Once we smashed the guardhouse up; then we set fire to it.

  Finally, when we were twenty, they let us out of the army. We had no money and no jobs. Because of our records we had no real chance, now, of making it in boxing. But we still had the pact we had made when we were young: if we couldn’t make it as fighters, then we’d make it as villains.

  CHAPTER TWO: The Living Years …

  The first thing me and Reg did when they slung us out of the army was to go and see a friend of ours called Billy Jones.

  They called Billy ‘The Fox’, and he and a feller called Bobby Ramsey ran a club called Stragglers in Cambridge Circus in the West End. Billy said he’d give us a few quid to tide us over and we’d do odd jobs in return, a bit of bouncing, that sort of thing.

  It was fine for a while, just while we sorted ourselves out, and we were grateful to Billy. He stayed a good friend of ours and we were sorry when he died recently.

  But me and Reg wanted to better ourselves. We were only a couple of working-class lads from the East End, we’d both been in bits of bother with the law and we’d both been booted out of the army. I suppose you could call us undesirables! You could say we were going nowhere fast. But still we fancied ourselves. We were young, we were fit, and if we weren’t exactly well educated we were very street-wise.

  The turning point for us came when we heard about a billiard hall in the Mile End Road. It was known as a real trouble-spot: there were a lot of fights there and the place was always getting smashed up. We heard the lease was up for grabs, so we went and saw the man who owned it, Mr Martin. He said to us, ‘No one has been able to handle this place. What makes you two think you can do different?’

  I said to him, ‘If you let us have this place, if any fighting starts, we’ll stop it. There’ll be no more trouble, and you’ll get your money every week.’ So he said, right, he’d try it. We were as good as our word. We smashed a few heads together and the fighting stopped - and Mr Martin got his rent. We called it the Regal and turned it into a really nice place, with fourteen tables and a bar.

  John Pearson, who wrote the first book about us, said the Regal was a run-down snooker hall with two tables. It wasn’t. That was one of a lot of things about us he and other people got wrong. People have said that me and Reg were behind most of the trouble at the Regal, that we started a lot of the bother ourselves, just so that we could get our hands on the lease. They even said that the feller who had the lease before us used to keep an Alsatian behind the bar to frighten off trouble-makers, and that we used to chuck fireworks over the bar to drive the dog mad.

  None of it is true. We got the lease because Mr Martin could see that we were just about the only fellers who could deal with all the trouble at his club. It was as simple as that. It wasn’t easy, and it was at the Regal that we came face to face with the protection racket for the first time. Protection was rife in London at the time and I expect it still is in towns and cities everywhere. The Chinese communities do it a lot. All it is, a gang will threaten to damage a property or a business unless the owner agrees to pay them money not to. Then, once the owner is paying money to the gang, the gang will make sure no other villains try to put any financial pressures on him. If they do, they will be sorted out. The club or business will be protected. Most people pay up to avoid trouble.

  I was serving drinks behind the bar one afternoon when a Maltese gang walked in. One of them came up to the bar, asked me if I was running the club, and said he wanted to talk about business. I asked him what he wanted. He said in future he’d be coming in every week to collect protection money. If we didn’t pay it, he said, the club could have a bit of trouble. What sort of trouble? Oh, you know, a few smashed windows, maybe a petrol bomb, a fire, a few of the cloths on the tables ripped, a big fight. That sort of thing.

  I picked up a bayonet we kept behind the bar. I threw him across one of the billiard tables, and I stuck that bayonet straight
through his hand. Pinned him to the table. It was him that needed protection then. There was now a right skirmish going on in the club, so I grabbed a Japanese sword we kept hung on the wall, took it down, and chased the rest of the Maltese bastards out of the club. They all jumped into a Ford car, but they couldn’t get it started. So I started to smash it up with the sword. I smashed up the roof and the bonnet and the windscreen. In the end they were lucky: they managed to get the motor started and drive away. They were lucky because if they hadn’t, I would have smashed them up as well. After that we never had no more trouble with protection gangs. But, like I always say, in our business you have to meet fire with fire. We were like soldiers, soldiers of the streets, defending our territory against the enemy. And that’s all we ever did when it came to violence, we only ever fought with our own kind. So, we worked hard and we did well with the Regal.

  It was about this time we started to go to a restaurant called the Vienna Rooms, just off the Edgware Road. A lot of well- known villains used to go there. It was a real meeting place for the top men. It was there we met two of the biggest men in the underworld, Jack Spot and Billy Hill. Both of them were powerful men. Jack Spot’s real name was Jack Comer, but he was called Spot because he was always on the spot whenever a big crime was committed. He was from Aldgate. Billy Hill was from Camden Town, and he was The Man as far as me and Reg were concerned - tough, smart, violent if necessary, but with a great brain. He was a true professional. Both he and Spot were smart dressers and that also impressed me.