My Story

by Ronald Kray

  Terry Downes, another great British boxer who beat Sugar Ray Robinson to win a world crown, is one of my boxing favourites. A very tough man, but with a heart of gold. Terry pays regular visits, also, to my friend in Broadmoor, Charlie Smith. He’s such a down-to-earth, modest feller, Terry would never realize just how much his visits mean.

  Karl Gizzi and John Griffiths are two Welsh fighters who come and see me, and John always comes loaded down with books, usually biographies, which he knows I like to read.

  Joe Louis, ‘The Brown Bomber’, was a man whose friend¬ship I valued greatly. Everyone knows that he was one of the greatest fighters of all time and he was in touch with me right up until his death in 1981. In the sixties he used to come to our clubs in the East End and he helped us raise a lot of money for boys’ clubs in the area. I once took him to Broadmoor, many years before I was a patient here, to give a talk to some of the patients. I remember him telling the patients about his climb to fame, and how his trainer told him before his first world championship fight: ‘I’ve done all I can for you, Joe. Now it’s up to you.’ And Joe told the patients: ‘The staff here at Broadmoor are doing all they can for you. Now it’s up to you.’ It was good advice, which I’ve always remembered. He died in Las Vegas in 1981 after two strokes. The boxing writer Reg Gutteridge once said: ‘He was a marvellous heavyweight champion, a decent man. The sport of boxing never produced a more loved person.’ I agree with that. Like us, Joe Louis came from a poor background, in his case a dirt farmer’s shack in Alabama, but he made it to the very top. I was proud to call him a friend.

  Charlie Magri, the ex-flyweight champion of the world is a good friend of ours.

  Danny McAllinden, a former British heavyweight cham¬pion, and Pat McAteer, ex-middleweight champion, have also been good friends. So has Sammy Reason, the former British lightweight champion.

  And Terry Spinks, the former British featherweight cham¬pion. Always a good friend and a game little fighter, Terry managed to spend his money quicker than he earned it, but he never lacked friends. A genuine feller. Like John H. Stracey, the former world welterweight champion, and another Bethnal Green boy who battled his way out of the slums.

  Jimmy Wild was one of the greatest boxers I have ever met. He was flyweight champion of the world. Me and Reggie met him in an old people’s home just outside of Cardiff. He was so good they used to call him ‘the Ghost with the Hammer in his Hands’. They also used to call him ‘The Mighty Atom’. He was one of the greatest fighters who ever lived, and we were very proud to have met him. Poor Jim died in that old people’s home.

  Among our other sporting friends have been footballers Colin Pates and Justin Fashanu. I was pleased when Justin wrote and told me he wanted to visit me in Broadmoor. He spent much of the time telling me how he’d become a born-again Christian. I think he was hoping to convert me, but I told him: ‘I don’t need to be reborn to have good thoughts and to look after other people.’ Maybe it wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but it hasn’t stopped us being friends.

  The great snooker player Jimmy White has also been to visit me. Even though I am not a snooker follower, I admire his talent and his attitude. He does a lot of good work for charity.

  Reg and I have been lucky to know so many good people from show-business and sport, and there are others who have come to see us and written to us. One of the most unusual letters came from the entertainer Max Bygraves. Max wrote to me from Australia a couple of winters ago. He told me he’d been having a quiet drink in a bar in Sydney, when a feller sidled up alongside him and said I was upset at a remark Max had made about the Kray twins in his autobiography. Max said he ‘didn’t want to kick a man when he was down’, and said he would get the offending words taken out of the book. To this day I do not know what he wrote because I have never read his book. But to show there were no hard feelings I sent him a nice ornamental teapot for his wife. When he wrote and thanked me for it, he said: ‘I was frightened to open the box at first, Ron. I thought it might be a bomb!’

  Reg and I know we have many other friends out there, ordinary people, not famous, but still important to us. Maybe you are one of them. We have had many thousands of letters from ordinary people, too many to answer. But I would like everyone who has written to us to know that we appreciate their thoughts. We have had a lot of support. Twenty-nine thousand people phoned the Sun newspaper in June 1989, to say ‘Free Reggie Kray’. The paper had asked its readers if they thought it was time to set Reg free, and twenty-nine thousand said yes. At the same time Reg received more than three thousand letters of support and I received nearly one thousand five hundred. That kind of support gives us the strength to carry on, even though sometimes the fight looks hopeless.

  Friends have always been very important to me and Reg. He once wrote a poem called ‘Friendship’ … and to me it says it all.

  Friendship is An eternity … of sorts.

  Valueless, unlike money,

  A true friendship never aborts … his friend.

  Friendship is Stronger than steel,

  Steel will break in the end,

  But what better bond Than a true friend?

  Friendship is Entirely, utterly selfless,

  Helps you straighten out When you are in a mess.

  What more to say?

  Friendship isn’t words, it’s feeling,

  Sharing, caring,

  Understanding and believing! Friendship’s qualities I can’t define,

  But I have a friend called Ron Who’s a true friend of mine,

  And if you look closely,

  Ever so closely at Ron,

  You’ll see diamonds and gold Are as none,

  When compared to the friendship I share … with Ron.

  Epilogue

  I’m sixty years old now. I’ve been locked up for twenty-five years. That’s what people don’t remember, they forget we’ve been away for so long. People still think we’re young, like the photographs show us, like the film about us. But we’re not young, not any more. Me and Reg, we’re old men, now.

  When we were about thirty-five, we used to weigh twelve and a half stone. We were rock solid and my neck used to measure seventeen inches. It doesn’t any more, and these days I weigh under eleven stone. These days I’m really skin and bone.

  But I’m still not frightened of anyone or anything. I’ve never been frightened, not once in my life. I’m older now, of course, older and wiser. But I’d do it all again. I wouldn’t change anything, because your life is mapped out for you anyway, isn’t it? But if I had a son I would tell him not to go into crime. It’s a bad thing to go into. Kids should go into sport, boxing, football, running. They can make money at it and it’s good for them. Sport is a good thing, crime is no good. I can never escape from my notoriety as a criminal. I hit the headlines yet again in June 1993.

  The Star devoted most its front page to a story headlined ‘Ronnie Kray Chokes Nutter’. Their story said: ‘Gangland killer Ronnie Kray has tried to strangle another Broadmoor inmate. The victim was seconds away from being throttled to death when staff prised Kray’s hands from round this throat.’

  The facts are these. The doctors at Broadmoor were bring¬ing my medication level down. They were trying to see if I could do without my drugs. This was a difficult time for me as my body tried to adjust. I was depressed, the weather was hot, the atmosphere was oppressive. I was doing all right, but a patient called Lee Kiemender kept trying to wind me up. Everyone here regards him as a pest. Normally, I would just have told him to fuck off. Unfortunately, with all my problems, when he kept trying to gee me up, I just snapped. I went for him. I didn’t really hurt him, but I could have. I think he will stay away from me in future.

  The authorities at Broadmoor didn’t punish me because they knew they were partly to blame for the problem. My life still goes on as normal. My medication is down a bit, which is a good sign. But the publicity I had over that incident will almost certaintly count against me in the future. I don’t worr
y too much about that. I hope it won’t affect Reg, though, because this had nothing to do with him.

  It’s just another chapter in my story, I suppose. It was the first bit of trouble I have had for a long time, it wasn’t a major incident, but it still got splashed all over some of the newspapers. It’s just part of the price I know I have to pay.

  I don’t think about the future any more. It’s too late for most things now. My life is here, now. This is my life. It’s all there is, it’s all there probably ever will be. I really don’t care any more.

  APPENDIX

  Broadmoor’s Story

  On 15 May 1800, a man called James Hadfield tried to shoot King George HI as the King sat in the Royal Box at the Drury Lane Theatre, in the West End of London, watching a play. The theatre was packed with people, many of them there just hoping to catch a glimpse of the King.

  At the end of the production the audience cheered the actors and then remained on their feet to cheer King George. He stood up in his box to acknowledge their applause - and that was the moment when Hadfield seized his chance and fired the shot.

  Hadfield was unlucky because, at the precise moment when he fired his pistol, the King happened to bow his head to the audience. The bullet narrowly missed him and embedded itself in the theatre wall. The would-be assassin never got another shot in because, as the King slumped back in his seat in a state of shock, members of the audience threw themselves on Hadfield. He was overpowered, the police rushed across and arrested him, and he was carried away shouting. It must have given the King a hell of a fright, though, because later he became mentally ill.

  Some weeks later Hadfield came up for trial, charged with high treason, but the case wasn’t as open and shut as it might at first have appeared. Hadfield had an interesting defence: he had, he said, been acting on the specific instructions of God, whose voice he had heard quite clearly telling him he had been chosen to save the world, but the only way he could do it was by sacrificing his own life.

  Hadfield told the court he had thought long and hard about what God had told him. Suicide was the obvious answer to the dilemma but he had ruled that out because he thought it was wicked to take your own life and, if you did, you went to hell. So then he hit upon the idea of killing the King. That way, he reckoned, he would be swiftly executed. It would all be over very quickly, he would have done what God had told him to do and he would have saved the world. He was only carrying out what he saw as his ‘divine mission’.

  All of this left the judge with a problem. Hadfield was clearly guilty, he said, but he couldn’t sentence him to be hanged because he was obviously insane. The humane thing to do would be to lock him away. The problem was, where? Prison wasn’t the ideal answer, but where else could he go? Normally lunatics were sent to a place called Bethlem Hospital, which later came to be known as Bedlam, but the judge said he couldn’t send him there because there wasn’t enough security, and Hadfield had told the police officers who arrested him that, wherever he was sent, he would try to escape and finish off the job God had given him to do. In other words, he was still determined to kill the King.

  The judge said he had no alternative but to send Hadfield to prison but also said that he was doing it without legal justification because, in the eyes of the law, the insane should be treated as innocent. Furthermore, said the judge, all the other certified lunatics in jail at the time - and there were many of them - shouldn’t have been there. They should be placed in a lunatic asylum built especially to deal with them.

  The case, and the judge’s comments, caused uproar and, within weeks, the government passed the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1800. Under it, anyone found guilty but insane could be held in custody ‘until His Majesty’s Pleasure be known’. And a Select Committee of the House of Commons recommended that ‘a building should be erected for the separate confinement of all persons detained under the Criminal Lunatics Act’.

  And that is how Broadmoor came into being - all because of a madman who tried to kill the King. The story, though, did not have a happy ending for King George. He spent the final years of his life confined to his palace with mental illness under medical supervision.

  And James Hadfield? Well, it wasn’t a happy ending for him, either. He lived another forty-one years, until 23 January 1841, when he died, still under lock and key, at the age of sixty- nine. He never did manage to save the world.

  It also seems that the government of the day didn’t act any more quickly than modem governments over the business of sorting out people’s health. It took them until 1856, fifty-six years after Hadfield had made his ill-fated attempt at regicide, to give the official go-ahead for the building of a special asylum for the criminally insane. It was to be called Broadmoor because, presumably, it was going to be built on a broad moor in Berkshire. And it took them another seven years, to 1863, before they built it. In all those years in between they put all criminal madmen (and women) in extra buildings they had erected at Bethlem Hospital and at Fisherton House, an asylum near Salisbury in Wiltshire.

  Broadmoor, thirty-five miles from London, was to be the country’s first state institution for mentally abnormal offenders. Rampton, in Nottinghamshire, which some people believe to be the oldest such establishment, wasn’t built until 1910. Inmates at Broadmoor used to be known as HMPs (His/Her Majesty’s Pleasure) and, unofficially, as ‘Pleasuremen’. There was, though, never any pleasure in being sent to either Broadmoor or Brampton and the term has now died out.

  Quite why the authorities placed Broadmoor where they did is uncertain but presumably in those days few people lived in the area, even though it wasn’t far from London and civilization. The hospital is set on a high ridge less than a mile from Crowthorne in the middle of the Berkshire pine forests. Its close neighbour is Wellington College, about a mile away. Broadmoor is set on top of the ridge and the college is in the valley below it. The story goes that the asylum and the college were built at about the same time and had to decide between them who should have which site. According to an official document of the time, ‘The boys are more fitted to play football on a flat surface - the lunatics like to look at the landscape.’ So Broadmoor went to the top of the ridge.

  The view from the terrace at the back of the hospital is spectacular and standing on it you can see for miles and miles, as far as the beautiful countryside of Hampshire and Surrey, way in the distance. The architect was Sir Joshua Jebb, who also designed Pentonville prison. Prisons and institutions were his speciality, although beauty of design certainly wasn’t. Broadmoor is an ugly place: tall, severe blocks with barred windows, built in dark red bricks. The boundary walls are huge, making even the gardens feel claustrophobic. If Jebb designed this place to be intimidating, he succeeded. If he felt that his creation would - even for a moment - lift the spirits of the poor souls locked inside it, then he failed, miserably.

  Most of the building was done by convicts and, even after the first patients arrived in 1863, the convicts carried on working for another couple of years. Jebb designed the hospital so that it would be totally self-contained and self-sufficient; it would need to have little contact with the world outside. The hospital has its own water supply and sewage plant, kitchens, gardens, small farm, and workshops for tailoring, carpentry and metalwork. There is even a cemetery here and the coffins for those who die are made by patients in the carpentry shop. Even the burial service is carried out inside the hospital, which has its own chapel.

  Ralph Partridge wrote about the cemetery: ‘There are flowers on some of the graves. But the old cemetery, where 1445 of the dead lie buried under matted grass, numbered from left to right as if on parade, is one of the saddest places on earth.’

  One of the many sad souls who died in Broadmoor was called Billy Giles and he sums up the hopelessness that this place has meant for hundreds of its inmates. According to the records, Giles was sent here in 1886 for setting fire to a haystack. Is that really the crime of a raving lunatic? The authorities apparently thought so, beca
use Billy Giles never got out. He died, still a patient, in 1962. Seventy-six years inside this place for setting fire to a haystack, apparently in a fit of pique after an argument with a farmer. It cost him very dear.

  Many patients have been in Broadmoor for thirty years or more, often for minor crimes. An official government document states that as many as 50 per cent of patients over the years should never have been sent here in the first place. About one hundred patients are discharged every year, but many won’t leave until they are decrepit - or dead. On average, twelve people die here every year. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, against such a background, that there has been a lot of violence here, much of it directed against those in charge. These days they call the top man the general manager, but he used to be the superintendent. In the eyes of the inmates, he has always been the symbol of the authority which put them inside here.

  Violence was directed in 1863 at the first superintendent, Dr John Meyer. Within a few weeks of his arrival there was a mass escape from the ‘strong box’, where the most dangerous patients were (and still are) kept. They were all recaptured but discontent simmered within the hospital walls. The patients were not happy in their new surroundings, or with the way they were treated - and they blamed Dr Meyer. Eventually and inevitably there came an attempt to murder him.

  It happened when the doctor and his family were attending a service of Holy Communion in the hospital chapel. A patient rushed forward and struck him a severe blow on the head with a large stone wrapped in a handkerchief. Dr Meyer’s life was saved by one of the nurses who saw what was happening and managed to divert the full force of the blow by throwing himself between the doctor and his attacker. But Dr Meyer was apparently never the same man after the incident and died less than seven years later in 1870. It was claimed by his family and friends that his death was accelerated by the after-effects of the blow he received.