Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  By the time the Twins were born in 1934 poverty had been grinding on for so long that it had produced its own culture of survival. A government report published two years before the twins were born concluded that sixty per cent of the children in Bethnal Green were malnourished and eighty-five per cent of the housing was unsatisfactory.

  It had also produced its own morality. Few could afford the luxury of passing moral judgements on anybody else and if crime, petty or otherwise, was the only way to put food in the bellies of their children, it was better than the alternative. It was also a deviant society in which poverty, hopelessness and rejection produced an inverted image of the prosperous world outside.

  The one activity that did flourish here was crime, and each separate quarter of the old East End had its criminal speciality. Around King’s Cross there were the burglars, living off the rich houses in nearby Regent’s Park, Hoxton had its pickpockets and the notorious ‘whizz mob’ who worked the crowds at football matches, Hackney traditionally had its forgers, Limehouse its pimps and their prostitutes servicing the sailors from the docks, while con men and cheats were supposedly south of the river. This left Bethnal Green, Whitechapel and parts of Hackney at the bottom of the heap. This was where the greatest poverty existed, together with the poorest and most hopeless criminals – the so-called villains, whose one time speciality was violence.

  Since life in Bethnal Green was cheap, the local heroes were the desperate chancers you find in Dickens, like Bill Sykes and the Artful Dodger. The odds were against them and the best they could hope for was a memorable funeral. When the time came the Twins would not forget those funerals with black-plumed horses that they had seen as children, for they were growing up in a world that, as the criminologist Chris Jenks puts it, ‘had lionised its most ostentatious villains and scoundrels’.

  Before they were arrested the Twins introduced me to one of them, an octogenarian called Arthur Tresaden who had once been the ‘Guv’nor’ of Bethnal Green and whose memories went back to the grim years of the late nineteenth century.

  ‘The truth about old East End villainy was that it was no more than the senseless criminality of poverty and despair. The old-style tearaway died young and never made much money. He lived like an animal and he died like one. Take Dodger Mullins, the last of the old Guv’nors of Bethnal Green. He really was like Bill Sykes. Dodger was strong and game as anyone alive, but any brains he ever had had been knocked out of him by the time I knew him. He was lazy and drunken, with a bashed-in face. Today you’d say he was a brute, but then it was a brutal world. Once when he was drunk he threw the woman he lived with out of an upstairs window. The police issued a warrant for his arrest and caught him at the Epsom races. They saw no point in sending him to prison, so they took him to the police station underneath the grandstand, and one of the coppers, a big bloke called Sergeant Rainer, took a knuckleduster and sploshed him on the face. It broke his nose, and didn’t do anything to improve his looks, but Dodger didn’t take the blindest bit of notice.’

  ‘So what was the ordinary East Ender’s attitude to the police?’ I asked.

  ‘Make no mistake, in the old days when I was in Bethnal Green the police were hated and despised throughout the whole East End. At best the police were indifferent to what was going on, and at worst they were corrupt. Their general attitude was to let villains like us get on with fighting one another, if that was what we wanted, “and so keep the numbers down”, as I remember a copper saying to me once. They simply didn’t want to get involved with the likes of us. They saw no point in it. You’d be surprised how often I’ve seen men stabbed in front of a policeman who just walked away. Life was cheap, and in those days all the Law was really bothered with was property.

  ‘But there was one thing that we all kept clear of – killing, except for real loonies, like Spud Murphy, who had a tattoo on his forehead and killed two police and then shouted he’d be back later with a machine gun. And there was Rudge Martin out of Bethnal Green, who killed three coppers up at Carlisle. Rudge and Spud both swung for it, and the truth was that the rest of us were always fearful of ending up on the nine o’clock walk. Before we got into a fight I’d always check my boys beforehand for guns and knives. Guns were forbidden. So were knives as far as I was concerned, and I told them to confine themselves to glasses and bottles in a fight if they didn’t trust their fists.’

  But all of this was really over by the time the Twins were growing up and, like the old-timer that he was, Arthur Tresaden made it clear that the Bethnal Green he remembered was far tougher and more brutalised than anything the Twins encountered. What was odd about the Twins was that these old villains from the past made such a powerful impression on them both just as their world was about to vanish entirely, together with so much of the old East End itself, as the bulldozers completed the destruction started by the German bombs.

  The reason for this almost certainly began with their father, old Charlie and all the years he spent as a deserter on the run from the authorities. Not long before he died he actually confessed that he blamed himself for not having moved away from Bethnal Green before war broke out, ‘and if I had perhaps the Twins would then have turned out different’. But that was an old man’s might-have-been and a very big ‘perhaps’. Back in 1939, when he first went missing from the army, things were very different.

  The truth was that Charlie wasn’t stupid enough, or man enough, to have been a criminal himself. But as a deserter always on the run from the police he became ex officio a member of the underworld in order to survive. With the outbreak of war it was not surprising that in Bethnal Green there were some who felt no obligation to fight for a country which up to then had never shown any interest in them or in their families. In Vallance Road there were several more besides Charlie Kray who felt like him, so much so that the area around his house was known as Deserters’ Corner.

  When the Blitz was turning dockland into an inferno the Twins were evacuated to Tring in Hertfordshire and later they would recall nostalgically their earliest piece of villainy – stealing apples from Lord Rothschild’s apple trees. But although they always said how much they loved the country – Ron actually once dreamed of ending up as a country gentleman – the Twins were city dwellers through and through and couldn’t wait to return to Vallance Road.

  They missed the togetherness of the family and back they came to their little house in Vallance Road. As a result, from the age of six and with a father who was on the run from the police, they became involved in a real-life game of cops and criminals which came to dominate their lives. Whenever their father was in London he generally holed up in Camberwell with an old villain he knew called Bob Rolfe. When he was there Violet kept in touch with him by sending him messages via the Twins, which helped to keep the family together; and the Twins began to idolise Bob Rolfe who told them gruesome tales of the bad old days and long-dead villains that he remembered.

  During these exciting times the Twins’ real heroes weren’t only the old villains like Bob Rolfe that they met through their father. They were also the legendary characters of East End he loved to talk about. And throughout the war it was the police and not the Germans who were the real enemy, just as it was from their father that they first picked up his hatred of the Law together with his admiration for the villains and fighters he knew so well.

  The Twins learned their hatred of the Law from the times when the police were searching for their father and turned the house over in the middle of the night. If a policeman asked them if they’d seen their father, Violet had taught them to reply, ‘Our Dad an’ Mum’s divorced, an’ we haven’t seen our Dad for months,’ although they knew that he was hiding in the coal hole in the yard or, as happened once, that he was underneath the kitchen table, hidden by the tablecloth while the police were searching for him everywhere.

  It was a world that had its own mythology. At a time when, on the other side of London, small boys of their age dreamt of becoming fighter pilots or command
os, the shared ambitions of the Twins centred on characters like Dodger Mullins or Wassle Newman or Spud Murphy. Their roots were deeply sunk into the legends of these people and the code they learned was to be special through violence, never to grass, to understand that coppers were bent and not to care, and to fight the senseless fight until you dropped.

  The most important thing the Twins were learning was the old East End’s cult of criminal celebrity, which at the time existed nowhere else. Already they could see themselves as outlaws, modern Robin Hoods owing nothing to society and taking money from the rich to feed the poor.

  What they had latched onto was the tail end of a long tradition of villains and so called Guv’nors of adjacent ‘manors’. For true East Enders the real enemy had always been the Law, since the police, when they saw fit to intervene, were attempting to enforce the rules of the prosperous foreigners intruding from the world outside. It wasn’t because they were frightened of the consequences that people didn’t shop the Twins but because they had been taught that no self-respecting human being in Whitechapel or Bethnal Green or Hoxton shopped anybody to the Law. The first commandment of the old East End was still in force: ‘Thou shalt not grass’. Had they tipped off the boys in blue, the consequences would have come less from the Twins or their henchmen than from their neighbours.

  In spite of this the Twins were still isolated, still locked together in their claustrophobic world, and it was to overcome their sense of loneliness that they had already started to create a legend for themselves into which they could retreat and mentally act out whatever roles they fancied, based on a mix of legends from the time of Dickens and the American gangster movies that they would soon be seeing at the local cinemas.

  6

  Crime as Destiny:

  1954–58

  ‘WHAT YOU MUST understand about the Twins,’ their old friend Dickie Morgan used to say, ‘is that they were born to be criminals and there was nothing that they nor anybody else could do about it.’

  Ron’s favourite aunt, Aunt Rose, went further. ‘Ronnie,’ she’d say to him when he’d been particularly wicked. ‘Your eyebrows meet in the middle, and you know what that means, Ronnie?’

  ‘No, Aunt Rose, what does it mean?’

  ‘It means you’ll end up being hanged if you don’t behave yourself.’

  Most of those who knew the Twins as children were more or less convinced, like Aunt Rose, that they had been born wicked, and one can’t avoid the feeling that by the time they reached their teens their lives had already been criminally mapped out for them.

  To some extent this was obviously true. Since, as identical twins, they were born with the same genetic make-up, the views of the criminologist Lange, about what he termed ‘crime as destiny’ make a lot of sense when applied to them. Any genetic influence they inherited would have affected them identically, and if there really are certain genes that carry a propensity to violence and hence to crime, then there were a lot of very violent genes floating around in the gene pool of their immediate relations.

  In their day both grandfathers of the Twins had been celebrated local fighters. Violet’s family, the Lees, were gypsies who had settled here in the 1880s, originally to look after horses. But despite being such a strict teetotaller and something of a martinet within the family, the old grandfather, Cannonball ‘the Eastern Southpaw’ Lee, was a local character in Bethnal Green and one of the most unforgettable old men I have encountered. A skinny, gnarled old boy who was still living off his reputation as a fearsome fighter in his youth, he reminded me of a very ancient toothless crocodile who had ended up entertaining the visitors to the zoo.

  In his day he’d been a famous East End boxer, and since he was left-handed his secret weapon was his irresistible left hook from which he derived his ‘Southpaw’ fighting name. If what he said was true, that old left hook of his had spelt the doom of many a brasher, bigger fighter during his long and varied fistic career, which hadn’t prevented him acquiring an even greater reputation for battling outside the ring as well. One of his favourite stories, which he often told the Twins, was of how he broke the nose of the famous East End villain Mike Thomson, who had had the temerity to set about him with a brick one night in an alleyway in Wapping.

  ‘Up came the old left hook, and down went Thomson. He never tried anything on me again.’

  Cannonball also instilled into the Twins’ childhood memories the stories of the famous local boxers he had known, including Jimmy Wilde of Stepney ‘who had his strength in both his hands, where I had it only in my left’ and the great Ted Kid Lewis, who grew up just around the corner and became world champion at three separate weights, ‘a fine clean-living man he was, and one of the gamest fighters ever to enter a boxing ring.’

  The Twins’ formidable Aunt Rose was the only one of Cannonball’s children who took after him. A powerful gypsy of a woman, she had inherited not only his dark hair but also his pugilistic prowess, including the family left hook which helped to make her one of the greatest female fighters in the old East End. In her prime she claimed to be a match in a straight fight with any one man or two women in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green combined.

  The Kray connection was more mysterious. When I asked the Twins’ father where the Kray name came from he simply answered, ‘Buggered if I know.’ But then he thought a while and scratched his head and added, ‘My old man, Jimmy Kray, that was a costermonger, always said as the name was Austrian’.

  ‘Why Austrian?’ I asked. He shrugged and changed the subject. But I thought it worth consulting the 1967 Vienna telephone directory and found eight entries with the name of Kray as against two in the London phone book for the same year (Charlie himself and the Twins’ elder brother, Charles Kray Jr). And when I got to know the Twins I understood what a valuable inheritance they had as criminals in the name of Kray. Depending on how it’s spoken, it can sound both menacing and violent, with undertones of crab and craw and crow, making it a name that’s not easily forgotten.

  The other thing about the Twins’ Kray grandfather is that they could have inherited their aggressive genes from him as easily as from old Cannonball Lee. For in his prime old Jimmy Kray – a.k.a. ‘Mad’ Jimmy Kray – also had a reputation as the sort of old-style bar fighter it was wisest to avoid.

  If Lange’s theories about criminal predestination were correct, as I suspect they could have been, this would mean that, as identical twins, whatever violent traits Ron and Reg had inherited from these battling grandparents would have had a similar effect on both of them. But although this could explain how they might have influenced each other on a life of crime, soon a more compelling force than this was prompting both of them to violence.

  Once puberty began, the discordant nature of their identical-twin relationship increasingly affected them and made them utterly unlike any normal pair of adolescents.

  We have already seen how the effects of Ronnie’s childhood diphtheria had made his identical-twin relationship with Reg ‘discordant’, and how from early childhood Ron made Reg misbehave in order to maintain the identical-twin bond between them. The misbehaviour usually meant fighting, and with adolescence this dominating tendency increased dramatically.

  The fighting between them had always been abnormally fierce for two young children. There is a famous tale of how, when they had just turned eight, they asked the man who ran the boxing booth in Victoria Park if they could compete, and since no other boys of their age would take either of them on they ended up fighting with each other. In the end the fight had to be stopped before one of them got seriously hurt.

  In fact, this went on all the time. But this constant pattern, with Ron continually driven to involve Reg in this sort of mutual wickedness and brawling, was caused by something far more serious than a shared genetic tendency towards aggression. As we have seen, this compulsive fighting had started early on, but as the Twins grew stronger and Ron learned how to manipulate his brother he was actually discovering how to use violence as his m
eans of survival.

  Whatever the damage to his nervous system caused by that early battle with diphtheria, the result had left him at a crippling disadvantage to Reg and this was getting worse with age. As they developed it was clear that Ron was slower, lacking in dexterity, and appeared less mentally agile than his brother. He also clearly lacked Reg’s charm and the social graces which are so important for a child’s popularity.

  This produced the sense of isolation and apartness from which Ron suffered all his life, and which at times came close to destroying him as he retreated increasingly into himself. As he grew older and began to suffer from the schizophrenia that would finally attack his sanity he had to fight the demons that assailed him. Worst was the fear of loneliness, and the dread of being different from the normal world around him – and worst of all was the fear of being parted from the only people in his world who mattered – his twin brother Reg and his mother Violet.

  Although Whitechapel and Bethnal Green were among the poorest districts in the old East End, they were also places where families stuck together in order to survive. The Lees had done exactly that, and had been there for so long that the locals called that part of Vallance Road ‘Lee Street’ (later on, ‘Deserters’ Corner’). Family solidarity was needed for survival and the twins took the spoiling and the loving from the women in the family for granted.

  By the time they were in their teens it already seemed inevitable that they were heading for a life of crime. They had no skills or qualities that fitted them for anything, except violence and to follow in the footsteps of their heroes, the villains of the old East End. Just to encourage them in this, there was already an exciting range of lawless activity on their doorstep. As twins they’d inherited a double dose of toughness from their past, so they continued to assert their status as something special more than ever. They were strong, and the fact that they were not particularly big meant that they needed to assert themselves simply to survive. It was old Grandfather Lee who taught the boys to fight using the famous left hook that was part of the legend of Bethnal Green.