Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  Theoretically at least, boxing also offered an escape route out of crime. As young professional boxers they were trained and learned exactly how to fight, but their greatest asset was the fact that they were twins. The extraordinary synergy they developed meant that when they fought they became the equivalent of a single person with four fists. And they loved the excitement and the reputation that it gave them of following in a great tradition.

  So there were different influences working to ensure that the twins remained irrevocably together in the only life where they would stay united – by following the old East End traditions of the villains and street fighters they’d both been brought up to admire.

  One was that deviant culture of the past which still held its magic for them. But most of all there was the sheer intoxication of asserting their supremacy in the street fights they soon began to organise.

  It must have been particularly important for damaged Ron to have had this reassurance of supremacy in gangland culture, and these regular battles dispersed much of the aggression that was always building up between the Twins. It gave them a sense of power and adventure and esteem, all of which they needed. Surprisingly, it also gave them companionship, which Ron also needed.

  It also bound the Twins themselves together. As long as they fought together, they stayed together, and the bond between the two of them endured.

  In the tribal world of the old East End the local gangs were strictly territorial. The Bethnal Greeners’ deadly enemies came from nearby Watney Street, a step down in poverty, where people still remembered the old women smoking clay pipes as they made brushes in the street. (George Cornell, the first man Ron would murder, came from Watney Street.)

  The Twins weren’t particularly big. According to their passports the measuring tape showed that they were 5ft. 10in. (Ron typically insisted that Reg was a half-inch shorter) but they were extremely strong through unremitting exercise and they had taught themselves to be extraordinarily vicious.

  The point about this local gang warfare was that they did it because they were good at it, and it offered them an alternative society that they could dominate. And here at last the fact that they were twins became their greatest asset. It is scary to be up against an enemy in duplicate, and as fighters they were two in one. They were always eerily aware of the effect that their duality had on others. Word got round that because they fought in deadly silence they were telepathic. Neither of them denied this, and Ron certainly believed it.

  With the Twins determined to improve their stamina and skill as teenage boxers, it’s strange that it was boxing that finally became the greatest threat to their close relationship as twins. For as they trained and learned the rules of boxing, and trainers and managers began to notice them as possible ‘young hopefuls’ for the future, a difference between them which would for ever remain started to appear.

  Throughout their teens they remained virtually identical both in facial looks and in physique, and only Violet could tell the two of them apart. But beneath the surface, differences between them were becoming evident, and nowhere more so than in the boxing ring.

  According to one old trainer, ‘Ronnie was a fighter. The hardest, toughest boy I’ve ever seen. To stop Ron you’d have had to kill him. But Reg was different. It was as if he had all the experience of an old boxer in his fists before he even started. Just once in a lifetime you find a boy with everything it takes to be a champion. Young Reggie was one of them.’

  Reg was inevitably invited to turn professional. Ron wasn’t, and something that Ron had always feared began to happen. The straight world of success began to beckon his brother, and Ronnie knew quite well that once his Reggie tasted real success he’d lose him for ever. On no account could Ronnie let this happen.

  In the old days of the Twins’ grandfathers, nobody objected if a professional boxer had an occasional scrap with somebody as the result of an argument. But since then the rules had been tightened up, and it was now strictly forbidden for a professional fighter to engage in any sort of fight outside the boxing ring. So strictly was this enforced that for a professional boxer to become involved in a pub fight or a punch-up in the street spelled the instant end to his career.

  On 11 December 1951, all three Kray brothers fought as professionals at the Albert Hall, on a programme headed by Tommy McGovern, the lightweight champion of Great Britain. This was the biggest chance that all three of them had ever had. Charlie Kray lost his bout on points, Ron was disqualified, and Reg won decisively in three perfectly fought rounds.

  It was strange that Reg’s Albert Hall success was followed, just a few weeks later, by a particularly fierce battle with another gang outside the Regency Club in Walthamstow. It was stranger still that the Twins were caught by the police and their names appeared in the local paper.

  News of this inevitably reached the Boxing Board of Control, which was unfortunate for Reg who automatically lost his boxing licence and with it his hopes of becoming welterweight champion of Britain. It was a dreadful disappointment, but for Ron his brother’s disappointment had a silver lining. He knew that Reg would never leave him now to become a boxing champion.

  The other member of the family who was anxious to keep the Twins together was, of course, their mother Violet. Over the years she’d learned to play the part of the perfect cockney mother, and in many ways she was. But, as I finally discovered, she was not entirely the saintly figure she appeared. She was certainly utterly devoted to the Twins, who formed the purpose of her life and who for her could do no wrong. Luckily for her, the Twins were equally devoted in return, especially Ronnie who could never have survived without her. But this involved all three of them in varying degrees of deception, which at certain points in the Twins’ career assumed considerable importance. Once I discovered this, I began to find Violet, the perfect mother, faintly sinister.

  I got the first hint of something odd when I first met her late in 1967 in the kitchen of the Twins’ house at 178 Vallance Road. Three china ducks which she proudly told me Ronnie had given her were frozen in perpetual flight across the kitchen wall, the kettle was boiling as it always did, and the large-screen television (another gift from Ron) was also on.

  When she had made us both a cup of tea and we were sitting at the kitchen table where half the criminals in London must have sat before us, the first thing she showed me was an enormous album like a family Bible. In fact it was her own private bible, her large press-cuttings book dedicated to the most important people in her life – her Twins. I remember being puzzled at the time by the way she had pasted press cuttings of their successes in local boxing tournaments and pictures of them making contributions to some East End charity or other side by side with the sort of press reports which most mothers in the ‘normal’ world outside would have wanted to suppress – reports of violent fights in local pubs, gang wars, and woundings which were always featuring her boys. It was not until later that I realised how interchangeable the two activities of villainy and boxing were in Bethnal Green, – and also in the mind of Violet Kray.

  As long as the Twins emerged unscathed and got themselves a mention in the press Violet was happy. She was still the centre of the trio, and still relied upon the Twins for her self-esteem.

  Like many East End matriarchs, her role was sacrificial. But they had something else: they could fight, and in the old East End that also made you special.

  After all, Violet had been brought up to respect her father who was equally respected in the local community as a famous fighter. But Ron and Reg could be more special still. They were the Twins and they still depended on her, and she on them. They were her boys and, whatever happened, she was always going to be proud of them. If her sister Rose was right, and Ronnie did end up on the gallows (as he would have done had he been born five years earlier, and Melford Stevenson had had anything to do with it) she would still have been proud of him. As she often said, ‘What else are mothers for?’

  Yet Violet would always be the ne
arest thing to a conscience that the Twins possessed. Thanks to her, a great deal was forgiven and a great deal more was overlooked; for the truth was that Violet was a faulty moral compass. Whatever the Twins chose to do she was always ready to condone; and if she felt she couldn’t actively do so she would close her eyes to it.

  ‘If you have to choose between the police and your own children, what choice is there?’ she used to say.

  At some point in their adolescence the Twins received one further all-important item in their package of predestination – the fact that both of them were homosexual. At the time this struck them both as so shameful that they attempted to conceal it, even from their mother, though given the set-up in the family, with its absent menfolk and its doting women, it can’t have been completely unexpected.

  On the one hand remembering the fitful presence of Charles Kray Sr, now promoted from rag-and-bone man to champion deserter, they had a father for whom they were rapidly losing whatever affection and respect they’d ever had. So much so that, having reached the age of fifteen, and returning home one night to find his father asserting his old East Ender’s right to beat up his wife on a Friday night, Ronnie delivered his version of his grandfather’s left hook and laid the paterfamilias out cold. From then on, for a while at least, this became a fairly regular performance in the stuffy little house in Vallance Road; but the situation, far from discouraging Violet and convincing her that the time had come to end her marriage, made her more determined than ever to make the best of things. Boys would be boys and men were men, and with Mr Kray permanently on the run her Twins were, more than ever, all she had. Besides, though often absent, Charles Sr was still, and always would be, in close and jealous contact with her and maintained his role as family breadwinner.

  He had his little ways, of course, but he needed her. Everybody needed her. Such was her chosen role in life. Which left stately Violet in the role of provider and protector whose first task was to hold the family together and who was always going to be there for those who needed her. For Violet, always ready with a blind eye or a consoling cup of tea, her Twins remained incapable of doing wrong. Mr Kray, unsurprisingly, felt differently but there was little he could do about it now. Certainly, if one imagined the Twins as the product of a bullying father and a rough, tough world of horny-fisted males, one couldn’t have been more wrong. Once they were pubescent, if they weren’t beating up their father the Twins were being spoiled by Violet, Grandma Lee, and their two aunties, May and Rose.

  All of which conformed, of course, to a classic pattern; and with their warm, indulgent mother, their ineffectual father, and their surrounding cast of loving women, it was not surprising that, with adolescence, the Twins discovered that they were gay. Given their identical genetic make-up, it was virtually inevitable that if one twin was, the other would be too. What they didn’t realise was that, particularly for Ron, the time would come when this was also going to be an important asset and a source of valuable connections. But for quite some time it would have to remain ‘the sin that dared not speak its name’.

  Within the macho world of 1950s East End villainy, to cast the faintest doubt upon another’s masculinity was to invite fearsome retribution. So it was hardly surprising that, for the time being, both the Twins kept their sexual preferences to themselves. According to Ron, for quite a while they were so concerned to keep their secret hidden that the only sex they had was with each other.

  7

  God Bless the Royal

  Fusiliers: 1952–54

  THE GHOSTS OF the Twins have a way of suddenly appearing in surprising places but one of the most unlikely has to be the Tower of London. When the yeomen warders are conducting tourist parties round the ancient fortress and describing some of the famous characters who have been imprisoned here in the past, they always start off with the Princes in the Tower, followed by Anne Boleyn and Walter Raleigh, and these days they often end by mentioning ‘those two murderers, the Kray Twins, who were imprisoned in the Wellington Tower for deserting from Her Majesty’s armed forces in 1952.’ Even this is fame of a sort, and serves as a reminder of an important episode in the history of the Twins that often gets forgotten.

  Back in the 1950s it was always claimed that National Service was good for young tearaways like Ron and Reg and would end up making men of them; and undoubtedly the Twins’ service with the Royal Fusiliers, did help to ‘make’ them what they were, but not exactly in the way the army wanted. Instead of learning how to fight with the Royal Fusiliers, the Twins put everything they’d got into fighting against them and emerged from the two-year battle even stronger and more determined to pursue a life of crime than ever.

  The Tower of London had been the headquarters of the Royal Fusiliers from the time they were founded in the seventeenth century, and in the late summer of 1952 two identical official envelopes arrived at Vallance Road for Ron and Reg, containing orders to report to the Tower for their National Service with the regiment. Two years before, when their brother Charles was called up, he had loyally enlisted in the Royal Navy, became a model sailor, and ended up as light-heavyweight boxing champion of the Navy. Which goes to show that brother Charlie really wasn’t like the Twins. Where they were crooked, he was fairly straight, and it was only the combined influence of the Twins upon a character as weak as his that would prove his downfall. As for the Kray Twins, back in 1952 weak was one thing that they weren’t, and there was not the faintest chance of them following brother Charlie’s good example.

  They were just eighteen, and once they were in the army it’s difficult to imagine them acting any differently. For by now so many antisocial influences – environmental, pugilistic, and genetic – had been at work on them that they were totally conditioned for a life of crime, and for none other. All that they lacked was practical experience of the use of violence. The Fusiliers provided it.

  Not that the Twins joined battle with the British army unprepared. From earliest childhood they had watched their father’s example as a champion deserter. Nearly twenty years later he was still on the run, but he had now been away so long that the local police had all but given up on him and he was more than ready to advise the Twins on how to follow his example. This was one occasion when the Twins were prepared to listen to him and he proved a good instructor in the art of humiliating the military. ‘Whatever you do, you must start as you mean to go on,’ he told them. ‘Never weaken. Don’t feel sorry for them and never obey an order. And just remember this: if things get really bad, pretend to be barmy!’

  Not that Ron and Reg really needed much advice. And had the military authorities tried to organise a course in crime especially tailored for the Twins, they could hardly have improved upon their two years’ service with the Fusiliers.

  Although this was the first time they had been away from home so long, this never seemed to worry them. On the contrary, from start to finish the experience gave them added confidence. It showed them how to make a fool of authority, toughened them up and also taught them self-reliance. It gave them exercises in leadership and initiative, and ended up with a nine months’ residential course in the country’s most exclusive academy of crime, where they acquired further skills that would help them in the years ahead. In the process they enjoyed regular group discussions with other top young criminals, and made influential friends – and enemies – who stayed with them for life. But all of this came later.

  Until now, all the Twins’ street fights had been fought against ‘their own’, but this was different, and their two years’ running battle with the army was their first real confrontation with organised authority. From the start they made it plain that they had no time for the army’s notions of courage or nobility. Nor were they interested in official rules and regulations. Instead, they made up their own rules of engagement as they went along, following the precepts of non-caring villainy they had picked up from the old Guv’nors and villains of Bethnal Green. They fought as Dodger Mullins or Wassle Newman might have fough
t in a similar situation, and ended up by proving they could take whatever punishment the army could inflict – and in the process giving back more than they received.

  On their first day at the Tower, remembering what their father had said about starting as they meant to continue, they stayed just long enough to receive their uniforms and equipment before being marched into a barrack room where a corporal told them how they should prepare their kit and explained the turnout that was expected from the Fusiliers. He was in the middle of telling them about the pride that they should feel at being made a Fusilier when the Twins began walking to the door.

  ‘And where might the two of you be going?’ the corporal shouted. When they didn’t answer, he made the serious mistake of trying to stop them. The Twins still said nothing; nor did they stop walking, apart from pausing for a swift right hook from Ron which connected with the corporal’s chin, leaving him sprawling on the floor. After this, no one tried to stop them and they walked back to Vallance Road in time for tea before going out to celebrate with friends.

  Next morning, after breakfast, a police car collected them and returned them to the Tower, where they were put in the guardroom to await CO’s orders. Striking an NCO was a court-martial offence, but it would have been ridiculous to court-martial two recruits after their first day in the army, particularly when they were so alike that nobody could say for sure which one of them was guilty. So after giving them a lecture on the need to settle down and be good soldiers, the Commanding Officer told them he’d be lenient and gave them seven days’ confinement in the guardroom.