Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  In 1957, the business-minded Reggie had spotted a golden opportunity to make more money by creating something quite different from the billiard hall. His idea was a drinking club in the East End in the Bow Road, Bow, named after the twins, ‘The Double R’. Yet again, a semi-derelict building was transformed. Only this time, the clientele weren’t all East End villains and crims; the majority of the regulars were smart couples, local celebrities, journalists, people in the know, who were all looking for a good night out, without any trouble. That was the point: Reggie could see that in order to attract the ‘right’ people, you had to remove the element of violence and menace.

  Reggie, as the slickly dressed genial host, clad in immaculately tailored double-breasted suits, revelled in this smart club life. He positively relished all the celebrity contacts that eventually started to come through the doors. There was Reg, from humble Vallance Road, on first-name terms with gorgeous young women such as Jackie Collins, Barbara Windsor, Diana Dors, even Richard Burton’s first wife, Sybil Burton. The Double R became the hot new place in the East End for a good night out. It positively thrived; Reg’s confidence soared.

  Cannily, he started to make even better contacts beyond the local villainy, men with real money to invest in criminal activity. He also started to enjoy life more in areas further away from his manor, going to upscale West End nightclubs or spending time in the countryside at weekends.

  Alone, he was a catch, a local lad made good. A twenty-something with cash to splash. He was good looking. Immaculately dressed. Drove expensive cars. He had a playboy image, and women wanted to be around him.

  It was a distinct sea change in the life of Reggie Kray. Because up until that point, women or girlfriends didn’t really feature in Reggie’s life.

  Certainly, it was a man’s world back then and the twins’ day-to-day life, nurtured by their adoring and adored mother, revolved around a very male, East End bar room environment. Yet Ronnie, always excessively jealous and obsessive when it came to the unbreakable bond with his twin, had always made sure that he steered his twin away from any involvement with women beyond superficial polite exchanges.

  Up to this point, while both twins had been sexually active as homosexuals since their teens, Reggie had never openly shown any sign of being interested in other men. Any indication or hint of attraction to a woman had, of course, been immediately stamped on by Ronnie. Women, he would tell Reggie, ‘smell and give you diseases’. Reggie was being a cissy looking at women.

  At this time, homosexuality in Britain was still illegal: it was not until 1967 that it was decriminalised. Before that there was no such thing as ‘coming out’; men could be sent to prison for homosexual behaviour. Lives could be ruined by exposure of a same-sex relationship. Certainly, the world of gay people existed, as it always had. Yet it was very covert, underground, and there was a huge social stigma attached to being gay.

  In a macho environment like the East End, it really was the love that dared not speak its name.

  Ronnie wasn’t exactly shy in his younger years about preferring men as sexual partners. So once the word was out that the laws would be changing, he made no attempt to hide his sexual preference for men, mostly younger men in their late teens or early twenties, ideally straight or heterosexual men whom he’d claim to ‘turn’. Later on, conversely, he claimed to be bisexual, eventually marrying and divorcing two women whilst serving out his thirty-year sentence, though the reasons for these marriages were more to do with his understanding that marriage itself might improve his image – or even the remote chances of release.

  As for Reggie, towards the end of his life he admitted to his second wife, Roberta, as she wrote in her book, Reg Kray: A Man Apart, that ‘although he had experimented (as many young men do), he had never perceived himself as even bisexual until he was almost fifty.’

  One rather startling example of this ‘experiment’ was described in Villain’s Paradise: A History of Britain’s Underworld by Donald Thomas: ‘A gruesome story in Michael Connor’s biography of the South London protection racketeer Billy Howard describes the twins in their car picking up a youth at night from the so called “meat rack” of male prostitutes outside the Regent Palace Hotel, near Piccadilly Circus.

  ‘According to Howard, they broke into a house near Sloane Square and made use of the rent boy simultaneously, choking him to death in the process. They put the body in the boot of the car and, according to Howard, disposed of it in Norfolk. Howard was employed to pay the owner of the house for the damage caused by a “wild party” at a mistaken address and to persuade him not to complain.’

  It’s an ugly story and one of many of the twins’ ‘crimes’ that they would never be called to account for. Yet whatever Reggie’s sexual history, when he and his genial married brother Charlie were running The Double R, while Ronnie was inside, Reggie was not only increasingly drawn to the good life. He had also started to see the appeal of a more ‘normal’ existence, involving a woman, and a nice home with marriage and children to complete the picture. Respectability, in other words, versus criminality and violence. So at that point, without his twin goading him and dominating his existence, Reggie was beginning to think outside the box: success and money, he started to reason, should also be bringing him the ‘reward’ of this other, more acceptable, outwardly stable way of life.

  Professor Dick Hobbs is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Criminology Centre at the University of Essex. He told me that this thirst for social acceptance was a hallmark of the way the Kray twins ran their lives: ‘They seem to have craved respectability, courting, getting married, one side of the coin being the traditional respectable bit, but at the same time there’s all the schemes, the scams, the pill popping, the hidden bisexuality. Yet they won’t let go of the respectability. It’s a switch from one to the other all the time.’

  This trait isn’t that unknown with serious criminals, said Hobbs. ‘I know people now who maintain that respectable side of their life – but alongside it they’re using hard drugs, making money in all kinds of morally repugnant ways, yet the respectability goes side by side with it all. These people are not one dimensional – yet the Krays are the most extreme case of this.’

  Hobbs explained that the era where the Krays flourished had a lot to do with it. ‘The sixties are book-ended by two major changes in the law, the end of capital punishment [in 1965] and the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales [in 1967, between two men over 21 years of age]. Those two changes define the Krays. They nearly faced the death penalty, hanging. But the gay thing could never be overt at the time.’

  ‘“Oh we always knew Ron was gay,” their associates will tell you now. But did they REALLY know? They were nicknamed “Gert and Daisy” (after a well-known female radio double act of the forties, Elsie and Doris Waters) maybe because of their voices, which were lisping and quite high pitched, not those of gruff cockney stereotypes.

  ‘But were people really sure of this ambiguous sexuality? It was covered up very well at the time. There was nothing effeminate or even fashionable about the way they looked. In many ways they were throwbacks to another age, old school, local hard men from the thirties East End. But visually? Warner Brothers gangsters.’

  Status. Looking the part. Playing a Hollywood role. Moviemaking always needs the right props to showcase the stars, underline their affluence. And high on Reggie’s list of essential props was the car, that most potent status symbol.

  An expensive car remains a marker of worldly success – and the owner’s desire to impress. Back in the 1950s, it was a thousand times more potent as a power trip extraordinaire since expensive cars were a rare sight on London’s streets. Less than 2 per cent of Britain’s total population even owned a car. And that was likely to be an Austin 7 or a Morris Minor, inexpensive and ordinary family cars.

  A young man drawing up outside a humble East End two-up, two-down in an American Ford Galaxy (one of Reggie’s favourite toys in The Double R day
s) or, later, a dazzling green Mercedes Benz 220SE two-door saloon, would have been an astonishing sight around those still-battered post-war streets.

  Reggie, though mad about new cars, was a lousy driver. Ronnie didn’t even bother to get a licence. And so, as they established themselves as crime lords, the twins started to hire young, pretty men to drive them around in the flash expensive cars they never paid for. Chauffeurs too were status symbols, right? In the early days of the Regal billiard hall, second-hand cars could also be bought and sold from the forecourt in the front, yet another ‘nice little earner’ for the twins.

  Whether it was through a chance meeting with the twins at the Regal – new faces, especially good-looking young men, tended to find themselves receiving drinks sent over by the twins with increasing regularity – or, as Reggie Kray preferred to tell it, via a friendship that started because he wanted a new car, it was Reggie’s association with Frankie Shea Junior that was the link that drew Reggie into Frances’s life.

  Already a car-crazy teenager and with a growing reputation for being ‘a wheel man’ around Hoxton, Frankie Shea was ‘about eighteen’ and already establishing himself as a car dealer when Reggie claimed he first met him. Other accounts differ: some say that Frankie knew both twins from the billiard hall when Frankie was younger, maybe seventeen.

  Reggie recalled that ‘first’ meeting in his book, Reggie Kray’s East End Stories – and how he had recruited Frankie Shea to work for him: ‘I decided to look for a different car from the Vanguard I was driving at the time. He had a car lot in north London and although he had nothing that suited me, we struck up a friendship that led to him becoming my driver.

  ‘He was a good-looking kid with brown eyes, dark hair and an olive complexion. As a driver he was the best I had come across, while his personality made him exceptional company.’

  Frankie Shea reached his eighteenth birthday in October 1957. From correspondence (previously mentioned in Chapter 2) written to his family in August 1959, it is clear that by then, he already knew Reggie quite well. That letter from the young offenders’ institution also made brief reference to Frankie Junior writing to Reggie, asking his parents to ‘please post letters to Reggie and Babs [presumably a girlfriend] as soon as you can’.

  At that point, judging by other correspondence from Reggie while in prison in July 1959 – he wrote to Frank Shea Senior, saying he was writing to both Frankie Junior and Frances – it is apparent that by then Reggie was already closely involved with the Shea family, and that he had recently started seeing Frances. She was then still fifteen.

  So Reggie’s subsequent ‘official’ recall of events in books – that he had met Frances while visiting Frankie at the Shea house when she was sixteen, that is after September 1959, her sixteenth birthday – does not give the true picture.

  She was younger, still a schoolgirl when they first met. Indeed, in later prison correspondence to Frances in April 1961, Reggie himself recalled this, saying:

  ‘I’ve known you since you were fifteen years old and have never stopped loving you all the time.’

  Reggie’s cousin, Rita Smith, still lives in the East End. Rita’s mother, May, was one of Violet Kray’s sisters. An attractive, immaculately groomed seventy-something blonde woman, just three years younger than the twins, Rita grew up next-door-but-one to them in Vallance Road. They’d pop in and out of each other’s houses all the time. In many ways, she saw herself as a sister to them, more than anything else. Biased she may be, but family is family and there is no doubting the sincerity of her affection for Reggie as they grew up together.

  ‘Reggie was so nice when he was young; he had Violet’s nice ways. Charlie too was totally charming. Ron was more like his dad. But the whole family thought they were special,’ she recalled.

  Rita vividly remembered Reggie, then in his mid-twenties, telling her how he’d first met and fallen for Frances whilst she was still at school. ‘He used to go round to the Shea house to see Frank,’ she remembered. ‘That’s when she would come in from school. And one day Reggie came to see me and said, “I wanna ask you something. Frankie Shea’s got a sister. Oh, he’s got a lovely sister. She’s so nice. I do like her. But… I think she’s too young for me. She’s still at school.”

  ‘I said, when she leaves school, ask her out with you. And he kept on about her.

  Reggie said, “She’s got lovely eyes. Don’t you think I’m a bit too old?”

  ‘I’d say, “Not really. If she wants to go out with you, what’s the difference?”’

  Reggie’s relationship with Rita was, without doubt, a very strong one: he’d confide in her frequently. She recalled her surprise when he first mentioned Frances. This, she told me, wasn’t really the Reggie Kray she knew: ‘I’d never seen him like that before. Women? He could take them or leave them before he met her. He’d go out with these girls and they’d stay the night with him at Violet’s.

  ‘Then he’d drop them off in my mum’s house next door. And they’d wait for him to come back. Well, he wasn’t coming back, was he? And he always picked good-looking girls.’

  That day, on the doorstep of the Shea house, when Reggie knocked on their front door to be greeted for the first time by schoolgirl Frances, was certainly a moment in time Reggie would never forget.

  Wherever his sexual tastes lay up to that point, whatever the complexity of his relationship with Ronnie or his crimes, there seems little doubt that the minute he saw the pretty auburn-haired teenager with the big eyes, he experienced something of a shock. It is what the French call ‘le coup de foudre’, a bolt of lightning – which some describe as love at first sight.

  He recalled that moment in correspondence to Frances in May 1961. In his letter, Reggie told her he’d been thinking about the first time he saw her. He’d knocked on the door to see Frankie and she had opened it. ‘You looked at me with a curious look in your big dark eyes and made me feel a little awkward. I never thought at the time I would depend on you so much, just goes to show you never can tell.’

  Reggie’s letter then told her that ‘falling in love with you was the best thing that ever happened to me. Any time you want to put me in my place, just give me a look with your big dark eyes.’

  The letter goes on to recall how he’d even conveyed the significance of that first doorstep impression to her brother. ‘I said, “Your sister gave me a look and weighed me up and down and made me feel awkward…”’

  Frank had quipped back and said that was nothing: ‘You should talk to her.’

  ‘I said, “She looks saucy”.’

  Since that moment, Reggie recalled, he knew Frances was saucy, curious, mischievous, better looking than ever, everything he dreamed a girl should be. He went on to say he had never regretted knocking at her door ‘because I’ve been in love with you ever since and always will be.’

  Whether it was Reggie’s arrival in her life that led to Frances leaving school before her sixteenth birthday in 1959 or whether the decision had nothing to do with it is not known.

  But the fact remains that Reggie, on that memorable day, fell so in love with a pretty schoolgirl, he could only dare discuss his romantic feelings with a woman he’d trusted since childhood. He would never have dared confide all this to his twin. He knew all too well what the response would be.

  It looks like he simply took Rita’s advice and waited until Frances was working. There were, indeed, other serious preoccupations for Reggie in those years from 1957–60.

  His brother, for one. Once certified insane at Long Grove, and prescribed a new type of drug called Stemetil, which seemed to curb his suicidal impulses and calm him down, Ronnie started to realise, on Reggie’s visits, how successful his twin was without him – and soon insisted he was ‘cured’ and could go back to prison, to finish his sentence.

  The doctors said no. He had to wait. But that wasn’t likely to mean much to the twins because what followed was the Kray twins’ legendary ‘switch’ one day at Long Grove when Reggie came
to visit.

  Both were dressed identically – and, at the time, it was very difficult to tell them apart. As a consequence of a cunningly hatched plan to fool the authorities and switch places, Reggie, of course, could not be detained once Ronnie had walked out and Reggie identified himself with his driving licence. No crime had been committed. Ronnie had simply walked out of the mental hospital and into a waiting car. He was free. Then he was driven to a hideaway, a caravan in Suffolk. Without his medication. Men from ‘the firm’ were enlisted to look after him as best they could. But without the pills he really needed, Ronnie’s madness, his paranoia, started to manifest itself again.

  In the end, Reggie took his twin back to London, found a trusted doctor (normally useful for repairing slashed faces) and managed to get the drugs Ronnie needed so badly to calm him down. Then the pair enlisted the help of a compliant Harley Street doctor who saw Ronnie and wrote a letter saying he was perfectly sane – and could therefore be sent back to prison to complete his sentence. Which he did.

  In the spring of 1959, Ronnie finally came out of prison. He managed to get the drugs he needed and, despite frequently drinking copious amounts of alcohol, potentially causing very dangerous situations when combined with powerful drugs like Stemetil, he was back with Reggie, both of them living at Vallance Road with their mum.

  Yet Ronnie, schizophrenic, drug dependent and scarily crazy, no longer looked the same as his once-identical twin. At twenty-six he looked monstrous: fleshy and coarse featured, he was a very different man from his good-looking twin. And, of course, once he divined that Frances had caught Reggie’s eye, he went into action, taunting, sneering, goading his brother, the way he always did.

  Ronnie could be in love, he could be sentimental, even romantic about his affairs with his boyfriends. But as for his twin forming a romantic attachment to a dirty woman? What had gone wrong with him? Had Reggie gone soft?