Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  Once, in the middle of the night, his terrors were so frightful that he tried to kill himself by slashing both his wrists. If it hadn’t been someone in the next room who heard his groans and summoned Reg, Ron would have bled to death. Later there were times when Reg would wish that he had. Instead, he found himself telephoning Doc Blasker and once more dragging the old man from his bed. Not that there was much for the accommodating doctor to do when he arrived, except dress Ron’s wounds and warn him yet again against taking large quantities of alcohol with his medication. But when he was alone with Reg the doctor warned him that his brother was seriously sick. He needed far more expert treatment than Blasker could give him and ought to be in hospital.

  But how to get him there? At the best of times, Ron was terrified of hospitals and at a time like this, with a manhunt going on for Mitchell and his bullet-riddled body only recently consigned to the English Channel, too much depended on keeping Ron safely under wraps and as far away as possible from the eyes of the police. As it was, Ron had already convinced himself that Scotland Yard knew where he was and had his flat under constant observation.

  In fact of course they hadn’t, for by now the Mitchell search had stalled and the police had not the faintest inkling where he was. No one had talked and so far no one had connected his disappearance with the Krays. Still less had those searching for him heard the faintest whisper of what had taken place in Lennie Dunn’s drab flat in Barking, of all unlikely places.

  Smart as ever, Reg had made arrangements for postcards to be sent at intervals from France to fellow prisoners at Dartmoor in Mitchell’s handwriting, wishing them all the best and signed ‘Your old friend, Frank’. Thanks to this, the police, ably assisted by Interpol, would soon be switching their attention to the Continent.

  Not that this did anything to reassure Ron, who by now was spending all his time peering through the curtains at the road below, convinced that anyone he spotted waiting at the bus stop had to be a plain-clothes detective. Like all his other fears this soon became obsessive and rapidly reduced him to a state of misery. Finally Reg was able to persuade him that he needed help but, as he still refused to enter a hospital or even a doctor’s surgery, this was difficult to arrange. So Reg explained the situation to a psychiatrist he trusted and arranged for him to be picked up in Reg’s car by the traffic lights in Trafalgar Square. Reg would be sitting in the front seat by the driver and Ron, heavily disguised in wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses, would be in the back.

  This was the only way that Reg could think of to convince Ron he was safe from the police and from his enemies – and surprisingly, it worked. For the next three-quarters of an hour as the car drove slowly round Hyde Park, Ron was sitting in the back, anxiously discussing his problems with the psychiatrist. Not that there was much the man could do, apart from prescribe fresh medication and suggest a change of scenery from the Finchley Road. But, for whatever reason, after meeting him Ron started to recover.

  Reg found him another smaller flat above an antique shop in Chelsea. Quite suddenly Ron no longer felt that he was under observation. He stopped drinking and the deep depressions lifted. A few days later, heavily disguised, Ron ventured out with Reg beside him, and for the first time since his hibernation had started, Reg felt safe in bringing Violet to see him.

  Until now, Reg had always stopped their mother seeing Ron in hiding, knowing how much it would upset her. He’d told her that since Ron had to hide from the police, it was best that she remained in ignorance of his whereabouts. This seemed to satisfy her, but now that she had seen her precious Ronnie once again she began to worry. At this point she had no idea of the truth about Frank Mitchell, but she certainly knew what had happened to Cornell. She also knew her Ronnie well enough to spot the signs of what was happening.

  What did upset her was less the harm that he might cause to others than the thought that he could end up on his own in some dreadful institution like Long Grove mental hospital, where he had been so lonely and unhappy. Some time later, when she and Reg met for a serious discussion over what to do with Ron, she produced an idea of her own to solve the problem. In the next few months all the houses in Vallance Road would be demolished, so what was to stop her and old Charlie moving to the country? They were both getting on, and she thought she might enjoy it. It would need to be somewhere nice with a bit of peace and quiet so that she could make a home for Ronnie and look after him. Ron had often told her that he’d like to live in the country, like a country gentleman, and he could have his own apartment and feel free to come and go. Violet knew this would make all the difference to poor Ronnie and she wouldn’t have to worry herself sick about him any longer. Couldn’t Reg do something about it?

  Reg said he’d think about it, and the more he thought about it the more he felt it might not be a bad idea.

  In the meantime Reg continued to keep business ticking over until better times returned. The only trouble was that they didn’t and all of Reg’s self-control was needed to hold things together. Brother Charlie was a help when it came to ‘doing the milk round’ – collecting the weekly protection money from the West End clubs they ‘looked after’ – but even here there were problems. The truth was that the murder of Cornell had not been good for business. News of what had happened had inevitably reached the underworld, and the Mafia-backed owners of the Colony Club were becoming nervous of the Kray connection. Reg had just managed to smooth things over, thanks largely to the intervention of the Twins’ old friend and loyal ally George Raft, when a few weeks later came the news that Raft had been expelled from Britain by order of the Home Office. Even then, Reg kept his nerve. Then, late that April, something happened which, if the rumours were correct, must have added a forbidding burden to his already over-burdened shoulders.

  By now it appeared as if Ron was miraculously back on track to recovery. This often happened after one of his attacks. His stamina was remarkable and he could emerge apparently unscathed from periods when he had seemed close to death. If it had not been for the court order still having three months more to run, there was nothing to prevent him coming out of hiding and starting life anew as if nothing had happened. But something did happen on that April day which has never been explained and probably never will be. Instead, I imagine it will join the other mysteries that the Twins have left behind to tantalise the curious. The Twins enjoyed doing this in life and now that they’re dead we must rely on what evidence there is to make up our minds about what occurred.

  What we do know is that on that fine spring day the Twins, together with their brother Charles and Teddy Smith, took a day off from their troubles and drove to one of their favourite seaside haunts where they could enjoy the sea air and relax – Steeple Bay in Suffolk, where they had a caravan. Even at the height of summer it was never crowded, but at the end of April they would almost certainly have had it to themselves. In retrospect, what made this particular day important was that this visit to the Suffolk coast was the last time that anyone ever heard of Teddy Smith. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, during that day at Steeple Bay Mad Teddy somehow vanished from the face of planet Earth.

  So what happened to him? The strict answer is that no one knows for sure and that one or two survivors from that period are stubbornly convinced that he is still alive. Frankie Fraser claims to have heard from him in Australia, and Danny la Rue’s former minder Frank Kurylo insists that he once spotted him in a cinema queue in Leicester Square. So if all we had to go on was the fact of Teddy’s sudden disappearance he would have to be consigned to the ghostly band of other possible victims of the Krays, including Ron’s gay driver Charlie Frost, and another Scottish gangster, Jock Buggy, whose battered corpse was found floating in the sea off Brighton.

  Apart from adding to the cloud of mystery which still hangs around the reputation of the Twins, it is important to remember that, long before they murdered anyone, many who had known them well were thoroughly convinced that they were murderers. Anita Pallenberg, for instance,
that time when she was on holiday with Keith Richards, and met the Twins on the beach at Tangier ‘looking like the Blues Brothers’, took it for granted that they had long been killers, as did most of her friends in the Chelsea ‘Popocracy’. Certainly by then all of them would have heard persistent rumours that the Krays were in the habit of disposing of their victims in the concrete pillars of the recently completed Chiswick flyover.

  This was also quite untrue1 although one of the reasons for the persistence of this particular rumour was the way that it connected with one of the less appealing tales of the US Mafia and how they encased their victims in ‘concrete boots’ before dumping them in the Hudson River. So powerful was the image that connected concrete with the Krays that even today I can’t drive past the Chiswick flyover without a sense of lurking apprehension.

  Despite this there are several reasons to suspect that Teddy Smith was murdered by Ron Kray. The first is that he vanished from the scene so swiftly and completely. Previously he’d been something of a fixture in the Firm and suddenly he just vanished, which is a fairly commonplace phenomenon in gangster circles where an unexplained disappearance signifies an untoward demise.

  The second reason is that, for all his Sunny Jim qualities, Mad Teddy always had an unappealing way of screwing up and nowhere more so than during his participation in the Frank Mitchell fiasco. The fact that the real cause of the disaster was entirely Ron himself had only served to make Mad Teddy’s situation that much more precarious. For someone as emotionally unbalanced as Ron, particularly with his mind fuddled and bemused by solitude and alcohol, there would have been an irresistible temptation to offload the blame for the death of his previously much-loved friend, Frank Mitchell, onto the pathetic shoulders of a subordinate as silly as Mad Teddy.

  I personally believe that this is almost certainly what happened, but if this were all the evidence we had we would still be in the misty realms of supposition. I have, however, recently discovered one further, more conclusive reason for believing that Mad Teddy Smith met his death quite literally at the hands of Ronnie Kray at the caravan site at Steeple Bay sometime in April 1967.

  Many years later when Ronnie was in Broadmoor and described to his friend Wilf Pine how he killed George Cornell, Wilf ended the conversation by asking Ron if he’d ever murdered anybody else. Apparently Ron paused and thought a while, as if uncertain whether to continue, then replied;

  ‘Yes, one.’

  ‘Who?’ Wilf asked.

  ‘Mad Teddy Smith.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I got his head in an armlock and broke his neck. That’s all. It was easy.’

  However, when Wilf asked him why he did it Ron became evasive and muttered something about ‘trouble with a boy’. When Wilf asked what sort of trouble he wouldn’t say.

  Although I realise this still isn’t proof I’m tempted to believe it. In the first place, by the time they talked Ronnie and Wilf Pine had become close friends, and Ron had no incentive to lie to Wilf about something that had happened all those years before. On top of this there was another piece of evidence that totally convinced me that he told the truth. Early in 1968, less than a year after Mad Teddy disappeared and the Twins were still at liberty, I was seeing quite a lot of them while I was working on my book The Profession of Violence. I remember how, as part of my research, Ron said he’d show me how to kill a man. A macabre demonstration followed in which, before I could refuse, he had placed his boxer’s arms around my neck and, with practised expertise and undisguised enjoyment, started squeezing. It happened very quickly. The blood rushed to my head, and just as I was on the point of passing out Reg intervened with the memorable request, ‘Ron, for Christ’s sake stop. He’s got to write our fucking book.’

  Fortunately for me, Ron did as he was told. But I’m pretty well convinced that poor Mad Teddy Smith was not so lucky.

  Since it is unlikely that we will ever know much more about events that day at Steeple Bay it’s fairly pointless speculating on the effect that Mad Teddy’s death would have had upon the Twins. We know that following his nice day out Ronnie returned to his hideaway over the antique shop off the Fulham Road, and there he stayed until his court order expired at the end of that July. We also know that if, following a hard day’s work, the Krays had found themselves with an unwanted corpse on their hands, this would not have been an insurmountable problem. If nothing else, the neat disposal of Frank Mitchell’s body by the ‘Little Facility’ in Newhaven had shown exactly how this could be done and the absence of a body following Mad Teddy’s murder is no proof that it had never happened.

  One thing we do know is that, during the weeks following the trip to Steeple Bay, Reg suddenly began to show an unaccustomed interest in his now estranged wife Frances. Whatever else might have caused this it was clearly no longer because of her lively sense of fun or the cockney starlet style of her glamour which originally attracted him. After two unsuccessful suicide attempts Frances was in a fairly pitiable condition. One of her old friends described her as ‘looking like a ghost of her old self’ but in spite of this Reg had recently been seeing more of her than at any time since the marriage foundered.

  There could be several reasons to account for this. One was the fact that Frances had recently moved from the strongly anti-Kray regime of her parents’ home so close to Vallance Road to the more relaxed family of her brother Frank in Wimbourne Court, a modern block of flats in Walthamstow. Another possibility was that Reg and Frances had both been going through a lot of nervous strain and were simply finding comfort in each other’s company. But I am convinced that for Reg there was one further, more compelling reason now for seeing her.

  As we saw in the run-up to his marriage, one of his most important reasons for marrying Frances in the first place had been his desperation to break the bonds that tied him so inescapably to Ron. Somewhat naively, he had been envisaging marriage leading to a relatively normal life that would include a settled home, sociable hours, new friends and even children. And, as we have also seen, this profoundly serious attempt by Reg to use his marriage as an escape route from the nightmare situation with his twin had failed before it really started. The sexuality he shared with Ron had been against it, as had the all-embracing life of crime they also shared. But the overriding reason for Reg’s marital disaster had undoubtedly been Ron himself, who had looked on Reg’s marriage as a battlefield on which he had to struggle for his own survival.

  For Ron his need for Reg had always seemed far deeper and more desperate than that of ‘that useless silly girl’, as he referred to Frances, and he employed all his ruthlessness and cunning to defeat her. In the process he had all but destroyed her – until now, when I believe that Reg suddenly saw her as his last chance of fleeing from the nightmare that was starting to engulf him.

  For whatever else he was, Reg was realistic. Unlike Ron whose life was dominated by the fantasies and fears of schizophrenia, Reg was still relatively sane, and ever since the murder of Cornell in every crisis it had been Reg who had protected him. He had always done this in the name of the twinship that united them. But more than ever now Reg realised the truth. By tying him so tightly to his twin, those twin bonds did not merely bind him to a brother. They also tied him permanently to a homicidal madman. But must these terrifying bonds last for ever? If they were destroying him, why not break them while there might be still a chance – by going back to Frances?

  During this period, Reg and Frances certainly increased the time they spent together and afterwards Frances told a friend of her surprise at how much Reg had changed. It could almost have been the old Reg she remembered from the days when they’d been courting. He was so gentle and so understanding and he had actually apologised for what had happened. He had even been in tears as he swore to her that he realised his mistakes, and had vowed that all he wanted was to make amends for the sadness he had caused her. When she asked him if he still loved her, he said he loved her more than ever. He also said he longed to have her ba
ck and promised her that she could trust him.

  And, after all, legally she was still his wife. He would find another flat, this time as far away from Ron as possible, and he would abandon his old life, becoming a successful businessman instead. One thing he’d learned from crime was that there wasn’t that much difference between straight business and the other kind, and he was sick to death of the life that he’d been living.

  I can remember that Reg often spoke like this, but to prove to Frances that he was serious he now suggested they should go on a foreign holiday together, as they had done in the days before they married. He would spoil her and make a fuss of her as he always did, and they could start enjoying life again. It would be like a second honeymoon, and he suggested going to Ibiza at the end of June. As usual, Reg was so persuasive that he ended up by convincing himself, as he was inclined to. Whether he convinced Frances is another matter, but they got as far as calling at the local travel agent’s there and then, and booking tickets for Ibiza.

  Reg kept those tickets for the rest of his life and the memory of that day haunted him for ever. It was a long time since he’d seen Frances so excited as when they talked about that holiday together. When finally he took her back to Wimbourne Court and they kissed goodnight, they promised they would meet again next day.

  Reg firmly believed in premonitions. He claimed to have known when Ron had his first attack of madness all those years before at Winchester, and it would be the same years later, after Violet died. Now the same thing happened to him over Frances. I remember him telling me how he woke in the middle of the night and knew for certain that something terrible had happened. After this there could be no question of going back to sleep, so as soon as it was light he drove round to Wimbourne Court intent on seeing her. But as he was about to ring the bell he realised it was far too early for anyone to be awake, so he drove away.