Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  The shelter was damp, cold and cramped. Elsie grew to hate it. Even if you attempted to heat it by using a lit candle underneath an upturned flowerpot, it was still dank and uncomfortable.

  She hated it so much that there were times when the air-raid warning went and Elsie, little Frank and baby Frances remained inside their tiny house, sheltering under the sturdy wooden kitchen table until the all-clear siren, with the baby snugly wrapped up inside the little case that contained the much-loathed – and fortunately never used – gas mask, issued to everyone in Britain just before war was declared. During World War One, mustard and other toxic gases had been used against troops by both sides, causing terrible casualties, and there were initially considerable fears that in Word War Two the Germans would try to attack civilians in this way.

  People always said: ‘Oh, things ’ave to get bad before they get better.’ And by the time little Frances reached her first birthday, it looked as if they were right: D-Day, the Allied landings in Europe in June 1944, meant that Hitler was on the run.

  Yet despite this, as well as the constant rumours that the war would be over later in the year, the war from the air continued, giving Londoners more even more grief than they’d have ever believed possible. This was thanks to Hitler’s secret weapon of terror, the buzz bomb, or flying bomb, a very early version of what we now call a cruise missile. A pilotless super powerful aircraft, called the V-1, it was launched from the French or Dutch coasts with over one ton of explosive power. This could be devastating in urban areas, ripping off roofs, blowing out doors, wrenching out windowpanes and shattering glass in every direction. People’s ears would nervously be attuned to their arrival, initially heralded by a distant humming sound, growing ever louder to become a distinct rattling noise. But then, chillingly, the engine would cut out and there would be total silence – for just fifteen seconds – before a massive explosion wreaked havoc and destruction all around. Even worse, these weapons weren’t at all predictable. Sometimes one could be heard getting closer and closer, only to inexplicably veer away, then to return just at the point people believed it had gone. It played hell with people’s nerves.

  Many Londoners insisted that the effect of these weapons was worse than the terrible times they’d already experienced during the Blitz. This was because these lethal unmanned robot planes were so much harder to accept than an aircraft with a man inside, who was risking his own life in order to destroy yours.

  The first V-1 struck London just a week after D-Day, on 13 June 1944, landing in Bethnal Green’s Grove Road and making 266 people homeless. At first it was believed the damage was caused by a piloted plane that had crashed, but where was the pilot? A few days later the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, reluctantly made an announcement that London was being attacked by pilotless planes. During that summer of 1944, a million Londoners left for the country for a second time. Many had only recently returned to the city, believing the worst of the bombing to be over. Now they were on the run once more.

  Deeper bombproof shelters opened at Underground stations in north and south London. What people didn’t know, thankfully, was that the government feared these new weapons of horror might be used to deliver chemical or biological charges.

  Then, between September 1944 and March 1945, more than 1,300 lethal V-1s and V-2s (a supersonic guided rocket with a two-ton warhead, against which there was no practical defence) rained down all over London, killing 2,500 and seriously injuring nearly 4,000. When they stopped – if you’d come through without loss – the April spring mornings had never seemed sweeter.

  Elsie was tempted to flee the city. Not surprisingly, morale had plummeted in London to previously unknown depths. People’s spirits were at their lowest ebb. Yet they all stayed put, Elsie gratefully taking the free cod liver oil and orange juice supplied by the authorities for the children’s health, queuing each day outside what was left of the local shops with the baby, with a supply of newspaper in her basket to wrap up her purchases. Stoically, the Sheas and their neighbours struggled through those final months of the war. They were longing for an end to the rationing of everything (including soap), having to use the tinned powdered eggs, and the meals of kidney, hearts or liver that so often turned up on the table (offal was never rationed, so women cooked it frequently).

  By the time VE Day came, in May 1945, people were relieved but totally exhausted. They’d got through intact. You could envisage a future without bombs, noise and the terrors of war. Elsie wondered if perhaps there would be work for her in a local factory once the kids were a bit older. Little Frank was scheduled to start primary school that autumn.

  Frank Senior was due to be demobbed, and like all those other ex-servicemen pouring out of the armed forces, he’d have to find something, somehow. The demob payment of £60 was welcome – but it only went so far. Life in Ormsby Street was still tough in every way. But peace of a sort had arrived.

  Under a mile away, in Bethnal Green, the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary pair of twelve-year-old identical twins also settled down somewhat after the upheavals of war.

  The Kray home at 178 Vallance Road, into which the family had moved in 1939, wasn’t very different to the Shea home in Ormsby Street. It was a cramped but slightly bigger, four-roomed house in a row of Victorian terraces, a home without a bathroom, with an outside lavatory in the little backyard, and an alarming propensity to shake as the trains heading for nearby Liverpool Street Station went past the bedroom windows.

  This was the home of Violet and Charlie Kray, their oldest son Charlie Junior and their twins, Ronnie and Reggie, idolised and doted on by their cheerful blonde mother and nearly all their family virtually from the moment they arrived in the world in 1933.

  Theirs was a very tightly knit family. Violet’s parents John Lee (known as ‘the Southpaw Cannonball’ because he’d been a good boxer at one stage) and Helen lived just around the corner, as did her sister Rose. Her other sister, May, lived next door but one; Violet’s brother John ran a cafe across the street. At one point, locals called the area ‘Lee Street’.

  When war broke out, Charlie Senior was called up like everyone else to do his duty for King and country. Until that point he’d earned a decent living as a ‘totter’, buying and selling gold and old clothes around the country, though he was rarely home, either away on working trips or in the pub, and his influence on his children was somewhat limited.

  However, the free and easy life he’d led, ‘on the knocker’, held too powerful an allure for him to give it up, and he went on the run from the police, becoming a deserter with an established penchant for gambling and drinking. At one point, Charlie hid from the police in the Vallance Road house in the coal cupboard under the stairs. He remained a fugitive from the law for over a decade.

  When the Blitz started, Violet, the twins and Charlie Junior had joined the hordes of evacuated London families in the countryside, initially in Hampshire, then with a family in Hadleigh, Suffolk. There, the twins ran wild for a time and developed a passion for the English countryside which remained with them throughout their lives. But it wasn’t long before the family missed life in Vallance Road and they went back. Despite the bombs.

  By the time war ended, the twins had developed a local reputation for fighting, not at all surprising given the influences of both boxing grandfathers, Canonball Lee and Jimmy Kray. At age ten, the inseparable, uncannily alike pair had discovered boxing, via a boxing booth at a Bethnal Green fairground. This was sited on a local bombsite, where so many of their early violent escapades took place.

  The ‘Two Ones’ (as they were sometimes known, from their cousin Rita’s childhood term for twins) were already imbued with the love of violence that was to define them and were enthralled by the fighters on the stage in their boxing boots and dressing gowns. So they leapt at the chance to step into the ring when onlookers were invited up to fight for a few shillings during a break in the contests. They’d regularly scrapped fearlessly with other boys on the bombsit
es amidst the debris and the rubble, and also often fought each other with an astonishing ferocity – although they made sure that when their mother was around they were always well behaved and polite. Their utter devotion to her was cemented by the prolonged absence of their dad.

  But on one particular occasion in 1943, they donned the battered, torn boxing gloves for the first time and fought three furious rounds, earning themselves seven shillings and sixpence for their efforts. This launched them into what could have been a long-term career as professional fighters, encouraged by brother Charlie, who was also an accomplished boxer and who had made sure he taught them all the right moves.

  Certainly, this call to fight was an established way of life where they grew up. There was nothing unusual about it at all. But their two-for-one power as vicious twin street fighters, who could always take on much older boys and prove themselves again and again, saw the early dawning of their legendary reputation for ruthless violence.

  And so ‘The Terrible Twins’, the cute, identically dressed, dark-eyed, pretty babies in the angora hats and coats that Violet had pushed around in their pram so proudly along the streets of Bethnal Green, were now approaching adulthood. And infamy. Their schooling interrupted by the war, they started their secondary education at Daniel Street School, Bethnal Green, at the age of twelve. Here their boxing talents were encouraged, and they spent three fairly unremarkable years there until they left, aged fifteen, to work briefly at Billingsgate Fish Market as trainee porters for six months, the only full-time jobs they ever held down.

  Elsie Shea and Violet Kray, two wartime mothers living in an unrelentingly tough world, both loved their kids to bits, though Violet’s slavish devotion to her twins had not left much room for attention to Charlie, seven years older than his brothers. And these women had one other thing in common: a powerful, driving desire for respectability and social acceptance, a fairly common trait amongst those matriarchs of the East End who understood all too well that there was a better world out there for them and their families – if only you knew how to get it.

  Elsie and Violet may have ignored the finer details of what was being promised to the British people by the politicians after the war. No one knew it in 1945, but the ten years immediately ahead still held much deprivation and struggle for ordinary people, with terrible winters and food rationing that continued until 1954.

  The women’s husbands may have returned to post-war life with a concern for the betting slip or the public bar above all else, yet the promise, at least, of an improved existence was unquestionably all around them once the sirens stopped. A brand new free Health Service was launched in 1948, and there were major changes to the education system, making it possible, for the first time, for working-class children to be educated, via a streaming system, to university level. These were bold new ideas for social change, designed to sweep away the squalor of the past once and for all and to build a leafier, sunnier existence in the safer confines of the suburban streets. Bigger and better horizons for all.

  In Violet’s case, that desire to ‘be someone’ would be fulfilled, to a greater extent, by the ultimate celebrity power of her ‘Twins’, the showcasing of their own unquenchable yearning for fame, which allowed her to rub shoulders with – or even, incredibly, make cups of tea in Vallance Road for – some of the big showbiz names of the era. Her sons’ violence, manipulation and reputation turned out to be a golden pass for entry into the dazzling world of the movie star, the nightclub maître d’ and the starched white tablecloth.

  Yet it is one of the less acknowledged tragedies of this story that by the time the twins’ outwardly glittering world started to impinge on the Sheas’ modest lives, the truth behind the Krays’ cleverly constructed façade of respectability – the charity events, the write-ups in the papers, the ‘country squire’ living and what was, effectively, an illusion of social acceptance – would be revealed to them in the starkest terms. Because underneath the glitter was an ugly, blood-drenched and repressive world of madness, violence, alcohol, manipulation and control gone haywire.

  Ronnie and Reggie Kray, born minutes apart, were inseparable but also locked into an impossible love-hate relationship with each other. This meant that a wholly separate identity for each of them, a normal life removed from the madness of one twin, could only ever be a dream, since their lives were so inextricably linked thanks to the overwhelming power of their bond as twins.

  Fame didn’t just happen to these men. They set out, right from the start, from the time of their very first local newspaper picture as teenage boxers, to be the engineers of their own astonishing notoriety.

  Without question, the Kray twins instinctively understood how public relations worked long before the words slipped into the everyday language of the twentieth century. Yet those that innocently got caught up in their slipstream, as the Shea family did, amongst others, couldn’t possibly have had any idea of what they were really getting into. Until it was far too late.

  CHAPTER 2

  A SCHOOLGIRL READING TENNYSON

  They were itchy, burning little red swellings on your toes, fingers and earlobes. You got them from being too cold, too wet or sometimes if you ran inside from the freezing cold street and immediately rushed to warm up in front of the fire. It didn’t help if your shoes were too tight because you’d grown out of them. Or if your feet weren’t encased in decent socks or stockings.

  Many growing up in the immediate aftermath of World War Two can recall chilblains: their most vivid memory of childhood would often be the biting cold. Britain experienced cruel, freezing-cold winters after the war finally ended, and the winter of 1946/7 was the harshest. Across the country huge twenty-foot-high snowdrifts, floods, coal shortages and endless power cuts and blackouts made for very hard times indeed.

  It was a dark, stricken time of struggle for millions who’d hoped for so much with the war ending, only to find themselves enduring years of more hardship. Rationing continued. Some foods that weren’t even rationed in wartime became rationed after the war ended. Basic staples such as bread went on the ration book in 1946 for two years. Even potatoes were rationed for over a year, when heavy frost and the biting cold destroyed potato stores.

  For millions of mothers like Elsie Shea and Violet Kray the endless rationing and the hardships in feeding a family were definitely tougher after 1945. This didn’t feel like any kind of victory: surely they all deserved better. The devastated streets, the rationing, the queues and the damaged, bomb-scarred houses remained as they were. There was no swift rebuilding programme in this grey, bleak post-war world.

  Theft, burglary and crime soared, with men pouring out of the armed forces and jobs being as hard to find as a decent meal. A hard core of risk-takers with cash – developers, as we now call them – snapped up some of the wrecked, barely habitable buildings with a beady eye on the future. Wherever possible they let them out, which was not difficult because so many had been made homeless or had returned to the capital, thus creating sub-standard, semi-derelict housing all over the city. The country itself was bombed out, knackered – and bankrupt. The capital was shockingly drab, dirty and, some believed, facing decline and decay. Peacetime: the worst of times.

  In Ormsby Street, the struggle for survival in the late 1940s must have seemed like an endless curse. But, as in Vallance Road, people were used to being resourceful. Poverty was all around, yet black-market trading, especially in food, remained consistent, given the East End’s many street markets and the ‘nudge nudge, wink wink, off-the-back-of-a-lorry’ traditions of the area. Such was the popularity of the black-market clothing trade, for instance, that clothes rationing ended in 1949, before it finished for other items, such as petrol, meat and sugar.

  If homes were spartan and threadbare in the little two-up, two-down terrace houses, most, despite the bomb damage, would have been seen as spick and span in any cleanliness contest. Being neat and clean was a bit of an obsession, especially to Elsie, to whom a grime-free respecta
ble façade meant so much.

  Heating in these homes came from coal fires in tiny grates. Fitted carpets were unknown; floors were usually only bare wooden boards covered by thin rugs. Walls were covered with faded wallpaper, while furniture was of the very plain ‘utility’ type, often purchased with rationing coupons. The two downstairs rooms tended to be used as a front or living room with a bedroom at the back; then there was a step leading down to a scullery, which doubled as a kitchen, with an all-purpose sink and a tap in the corner. After climbing up the narrow stairs from the cramped hallway there would be two small bedrooms, one overlooking the road.

  Some houses in these streets boasted an ancient open range in the ground floor back room, good for heating water, since there was no supply of running hot water here until two decades later, by which time the houses were marked for demolition. Few families could readily afford to install an ‘Ascot’, a small gas water heater, ignited by a pilot light inside a white enamel box, which became increasingly used in homes throughout the fifties.

  Until white goods became more affordable on the ‘never never’ – hire purchase schemes of the mid-fifties, where families paid off small weekly sums for household appliances – there were no fridges, just a downstairs larder for food storage. Washing machines, dishwashers and microwaves were unknown. Inefficient carpet sweepers or brushes, rather than vacuum cleaners, helped you to clean the threadbare rugs. It was not until after 1953, and the televised broadcast of the coronation of the youthful Princess Elizabeth, which everyone wanted to watch, that the TV set started to filter into everyday British life. This accompanied, and sometimes eventually replaced, the big brown Bakelite radio (or wireless, as it was known), the sole source of news and entertainment in the home throughout the war years. A phone was, at that time, still regarded as an expense too far by most, although a few families opted to install a less expensive ‘party line’, meaning that they would share the line itself with another home.