Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  All Reggie’s ideas for the future of the business, carefully crafted with his more law-abiding brother Charlie, the months of avoiding trouble, making businesslike liaisons with useful allies, drawing up serious plans to get involved in the new West End casinos (gambling was due to be made legal very soon) were in danger of crumbling now that Ronnie was back. Ronnie seemed determined to destroy it all with more scheming, aggression, bloodshed and gang warfare. Reggie’s plans for a more legitimate front for their activities were at risk of going down the drain.

  All Reggie could hope for now was business as usual, continuing to give his all to clear up any mess Ronnie left in his wake, as he’d always done. The madman and the mopper-up. His twin was sick, no question. But he had to be there for him. No matter what went down. He wasn’t about to abandon his other half.

  Yet as difficult as it all was, stretching Reggie to breaking point at times, the sane brother still persisted with his fantasy of a different, respectable life with a beautiful young woman beside him to share his dreams.

  He’d found Frances. She was young, beautiful and he was utterly captivated by her looks. She was bright, lively and, most importantly, virginal, untouched. And he was a young man, still in his twenties with a future before him. Whatever had happened before that moment on the Sheas’ doorstep, nothing was going to keep him away from her, his dream girl, whom he vowed to convince of his love.

  Yes, he had gone soft. To the world he was a tough hard nut, a criminal with a mad twin. But now he was bewitched by a teenage girl. He was crazy about Frances Shea. And he had a big advantage over other men, because he had everything a guy needed to tempt her: money, cars, travel, nightclubs. What girl wouldn’t want to be treated like that? So he embarked on the pursuit of Frances.

  Why did she agree so readily to go out with him at all? He was ten years older. He already had a reputation for violence. The truth was it was a time of imminent big social changes, and very few ordinary, innocent young girls would have been able to resist the lure of a good-looking, beautifully dressed older man inviting them out in his expensive car, taking them places and showing them a good time.

  A local young admirer, even a law-abiding guy working in a steady job, couldn’t compete with all that. As Dick Hobbs told me, Frances may have been bright and intelligent, but as far as her environment was concerned, typical of so many young working-class women in the fifties, her life options were limited.

  ‘What could a young woman do with their life then?’ said Hobbs.

  When you consider the fifties landscape for ordinary women, you see exactly what he means.

  Like her mother, Frances’s expectations were a low-level job, followed by courtship with someone from a similar background, then marriage and kids. No travel, no career and ultimately, no financial independence once the children arrived.

  Women couldn’t get a mortgage, buy a car or even rent a TV unless their husband or father countersigned. Abortion was illegal. The contraceptive pill was still in the future. And as far as society was concerned, the only sex was within marriage. Divorce was out of reach too, as it was difficult, costly and usually disastrous for a woman’s reputation.

  ‘It was so unusual in those days to be wooed by one of these men, a local man who had money,’ said Hobbs. ‘The Krays were known locally – everything in the East End was so localised. People didn’t travel, they didn’t even move around London.

  ‘So she was a local beauty – and he hadn’t even stepped off his manor; he was not comfortable outside it. From Walthamstow to the West End, those were the places where the Kray twins were comfortable, their bit of the old East End.

  ‘Frances had luminous good looks, the “look” of the time, so for him, regardless of the ambiguity around his sexuality, she was a catch. And he had to have that.’

  As Hobbs pointed out, at that time there was no limit to the the Kray twins’ belief that the world was theirs for the taking – at a time when most people were still living through a period of great restraint and austerity.

  ‘Reggie would have thought: “I can have everything, I can do whatever I like, I can have the best looking boy or the best looking girl – I’ve got to have the lot.” Having children? You’re a man therefore you have a family – he wanted that too. Why not?

  ‘Reggie liked to present himself as a traditional East End male – don’t swear in front of women – have kids, look after old people, give to charity. In reality, he wanted it all, boys, girls, money, fame, everything.

  ‘The Kray twins were really greedy people.

  ‘From her point of view, at fifteen, here’s the most wealthy person she’s ever seen in her life. Who had flash cars, bespoke suits, jewellery then? She was a child. It wouldn’t take much to impress people in those days. For her, it would have all been incredibly alluring.’

  But what about her family? They knew who the Krays were, their reputation, the fact that Ronnie had ‘gone away’ while his brothers were running The Double R. It wasn’t just gossip. Everyone in the area read about them in the local paper, the East London Advertiser, anyway. Frances’s parents already knew that Frankie had been friendly with Reggie for some time. Why were they willing to accept that this older man wanted to take their daughter out, dazzle her with the bright lights?

  Elsie surely had her doubts. She understood that the Krays’ well-honed façade of respectability, their legendary generosity to charity, was a cover for the traditional compulsion of East End hard men to inflict harm by violence. Yet initially she kept her counsel. Her husband was impressed with Reggie’s polite ways, his soft voice, his good manners. You could see, he argued, that Reggie was respectful, not a man to take liberties, whatever people said about the twins. Their Franny was safe with him.

  But it was Frankie Junior, as attractive as his sister, as personable a young man as anyone would wish, who already knew quite a bit more about Reggie Kray than he dared to let on.

  Car dealer Frankie was becoming a bit of a wide boy. He too was attracted to the good life, the flash cars, the smart suits, the West End drinking clubs. As a result, he’d gone the way of many young Hoxton boys and had not been discerning or cautious in the company he kept; he’d been in trouble with the law even after the stint at the young offenders’ institution.

  Frankie knew what he knew. And his sister, the tiny baby he’d cuddled as they huddled for safety under the kitchen table, was very close to his heart. But the young man stayed silent, didn’t attempt to interfere with this new development or put in his two bob’s worth.

  It was a mistake that would go on to haunt Frankie Shea for the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER 4

  COURTSHIP

  Reggie may have made up his mind that Frances was ‘the one’, yet there was a huge obstacle in the very early days of their courtship, beyond his relationship with Ronnie. It was, of course, the occupational hazard of their chosen profession. The loss of freedom.

  By now, the twins were adroit at the ways and means of keeping the law at bay: expensive lawyers and barristers, intimidated and terrified witnesses who would always clam up, remember nothing, private doctors who would quietly sew up the damage, cash bribes in the right places, coppers who’d pocket them.

  As with the legendary Long Grove ‘switch’, if it came to the crunch and either twin were imprisoned, they’d ignore the hand of authority, forget about the lock and key and deploy all their cunning to continue their activities via those working for them on the outside, while forming alliances with other criminals on the inside: prison was a nuisance, a blip in their activities. In no way was prison a deterrent. As their later history would demonstrate.

  Yet in the summer of 1959, not long after he’d fallen heavily for Frances, Reggie found himself facing a two-year prison sentence for his part in a protection racket. He’d been on remand (remanded in custody) in Wandsworth prison for a few months, then he’d started taking Frances out regularly once he was out on bail for several months, awaiting court proce
edings for his appeal against the conviction. Which he confidently believed he’d win.

  Very soon, he’d introduced her to his family in Vallance Road. Violet was pleasant and motherly, Ronnie unnervingly polite and the twins’ cousin Rita liked the young girl immediately.

  ‘The first time we met we seemed to take to one another,’ recalled Rita. ‘She had shorter, quite dark hair then. Very pretty girl. Big brown eyes. She was quite shy, quite an innocent really – as you are at that age. But intelligent, you could see that.’

  Reggie took to meeting Frances outside her office in the Strand after she’d finished work. They’d go to the movies. There were drives out to the country. He’d buy her clothes, jewellery, give her money. On other occasions he’d take her ‘up West’ to places like the Astor Club, a swish nightclub off Berkeley Square in Mayfair, though he continued, after dropping Frances off at her parents’ house, to live his usual nocturnal life with Ronnie, moving around various clubs and drinking haunts, imposing order, looking after their investments, organising feuds – and boozing.

  Frances wasn’t keen on drinking. She’d smoke the odd ciggy. But even then, she was bemused at the amount of heavy drinking that seemed to go on every night in Krayworld. It never seemed to stop.

  Proudly, Reggie showed everyone the photos he’d had taken with Frances in the Astor club that February, 1960, the first of many photos of the couple in a glamorous setting.

  ‘She looks like Brigitte Bardot,’ said his friend Danny. Reggie was chuffed. His girl looked like a French movie star – yet she was from the mean streets of the East End, just like him. She was his trophy.

  Incredibly, he also took sixteen-year-old Frances on a trip to Jersey in May 1960 in their early days of courtship. They flew there. Of course there’d be separate rooms, Reggie assured Frank Senior beforehand, and this was no lie: Frances had no intention of losing her virginity and her glamorous, free-spending older boyfriend was nothing but respectful of this.

  By now, the Shea family were well and truly caught in the Kray net. Both the Shea children were already drawn into the seemingly glamorous, high-spending life of the Kray twins. Reggie had also hinted that he might be able to find work for Frank Senior in one of his clubs. So Frank Senior wasn’t set against him: to the older Shea, Reggie seemed so polite, almost shy sometimes. He wouldn’t do her any harm, Frank Senior kept reassuring his wife. It was fine. Everyone knew the Krays respected women. Violet had brought them up the right way.

  It may be difficult nowadays to understand how dazzled Frances would have been with the world her older boyfriend was showing her. But as Dick Hobbs pointed out: ‘To get on a plane and fly to Jersey at that age would have been an extraordinary experience. It was a traditional courtship that was going on there – and he had the cash to do it. People didn’t take girlfriends away for trips like that then – it was unheard of.’

  Yet the nightclubs and the plane trips were but a distraction from the reality: Reggie had not expected his appeal against his two-year sentence to be rejected but that is exactly what happened. Later in that summer of 1960 he was back in prison. And now that their relationship seemed to be ongoing, the separation from Frances turned out to be really painful for him.

  Frances’s everyday life went on. She went to work weekdays, saw her girlfriends on weekends and dutifully perched on her bed at home, writing to him, as promised, twice a week, visiting when permitted.

  Reggie, in prison, unable to control his brother, had far too much time on his hands to think – and to dwell on his obsession with his teenage girlfriend. He was paranoid in the extreme. If a letter didn’t arrive for a day or two, he’d be tormented with rage. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, or about how, in his absence, someone else might decide they wanted to take Frances out and pursue her. Or turn her against him.

  On 2 September 1960 he wrote to Frances, telling her he was in such a bad mood at not receiving any letters from her, ‘I nearly choked a fella in my cell for having too much to say’. Luckily, he wasn’t caught. But he was ‘more mixed up than ever’ he told her.

  Controlling everyone was part of the Kray twins’ repertoire. Indeed, at that point, business was starting to boom, sixties style: they’d achieved their goal of moving beyond the East End, into the West End of London and had taken a share in Esmeralda’s Barn, in swanky Knightsbridge. Originally it had been a posh nightclub but now, with the legalisation of Britain’s gambling laws, it was one of the first high-end gambling clubs in London.

  This was just as well, because The Double R had already gone into decline and closed once Reggie was not around to run it. However, it didn’t seem to matter, because Esmeralda’s was pure gold. With its rich, upmarket clientele dining in the swish restaurant or seated beside the green baize table, focused on the roulette wheel and gambling huge sums, the move to Knightsbridge was the gift that kept on giving, earning the twins around £800 a week, a huge sum of money for the times.

  Reggie was now rich. But his obsessive jealousy about Frances – locked away, unable to do little but worry and write letters – was something he’d never encountered before. Until then, all he’d really troubled himself with was the mental state of his mad twin. Now all he had were bits of paper to channel his thoughts and emotions towards Frances, to convince them both that they had a real future together.

  Even in July 1960, just after his court hearing, even though Frances was not yet seventeen, his letter made it very clear he was determined to marry her, to ‘take her off the market’, as it were. He couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else getting close to her.

  His one consolation while serving the rest of his time in prison, he wrote to her, was knowing he was engaged ‘to such a nice person as yourself’. Then he asked her to have a full-length photo taken in her black dress, wearing a new necklace he’d chosen for her. After he’d finished the prison sentence, Reggie said, he would make sure she’d never leave him again. He was looking forward to getting married as soon as possible.

  Frances knew she was too young for marriage. But she obviously agreed to commit herself. In August 1960 she wrote to say she wanted to wait two years. ‘I want to get married not next year, but the July after,’ she wrote, pointing out that this would give them enough time to get a house built and organise the wedding properly. They didn’t want to rush, she told Reggie, because it had to last a lifetime.

  This must have given Reggie enough encouragement to feel reasonably confident about their future. In a letter written on 16 September 1960 he mentioned ‘our new wedding date’ and told her he was hoping her dad, Frank Senior, ‘likes being called my father-in-law’.

  How he envisaged their married life makes for intriguing reading too, given their respective backgrounds, where their mothers had known little but hard slog, coping with husbands who were anything but regular providers.

  ‘Please don’t look at marriage as scrubbing, cooking, and all work,’ Reggie wrote.

  As far as he was concerned, she would have no manual tasks. There would be a comfortable home, ‘decorated nice’, good furniture, lovely clothes, records to play, a car – ‘and the company of each other’. He assured her there would be no worries whatsoever. If she was concerned about cooking, they’d eat out, should she wish. He was marrying for love, he told her, not because he needed a cook. Finally, he reminded her, there were six requirements for happy marriage. The first was faith. ‘And the remaining five are confidence.’

  When they were married, he told her, all he wanted to do was sit around cuddling her. ‘Your name should have been cuddles.’

  That night, the letter continued, he was going to dream of their wedding and their married life. ‘I honestly believe it will be a success.’

  Reggie Kray wasn’t used to being deprived of anything: if he wanted something, he just took it. Prison and loss of liberty lowered the opportunities to operate, yet crime itself could still continue to function on the outside. Yet in this situation, he worried all the time that Frances w
ouldn’t have him, or be distracted, without the promise of marriage. Possessive in the extreme, the correspondence shows he was desperate to be legally tied to her as soon as he could possibly arrange it.

  An engagement at seventeen or eighteen, making the traditional statement of commitment, was not at all unusual at that time. Some of Frances’s friends at school would have been going steady by sixteen and engaged a couple of years later. Many girls then considered themselves ‘on the shelf’ if they weren’t married by twenty. At twenty-one, you’d reached spinster status. But you have to wonder at the anxiety that seemed to be driving Reggie’s obsession, the belief that marriage to a teenage girl was a springboard for long-term emotional security.

  Was he also desperate to escape the bond with Ronnie? It seemed like it. Marriage then would have certainly changed everything. Separation from his twin quite recently had given Reggie an opportunity to see life quite differently; it had nourished a dream to break free from their claustrophobic twinship.

  While the isolation of the prison cell day in, day out brings extreme frustration, at the same time, it can only serve to fuel a fantasy life, an ideal world to cling to. The frustration would end with his prison sentence. Yet unquestionably, he was deluding himself: separation from his twin remained a fantasy. Ronnie knew exactly how to push his buttons, reel him in, jeer at him for loving a smelly woman. Ronnie, by now, needed his twin more than Reggie needed him. Still, while the sneering and jibing might lead to furious fighting it still served its purpose for Ronnie in keeping his twin locked into their twisted relationship. So the idea that Ronnie would be there, outside, flinging abuse at him, trying to turn him away from his dream, merely added to Reggie’s conflicting emotions.

  In the time they’d spent together, it was a joy to adorn Frances with beautiful new clothes and jewellery. She was his doll, his toy. And although she was as keen as any young girl on doing her hair, getting made up, spending hours making herself look nice, he’d noticed that she didn’t seem as wild about possessions and having new things as he’d imagined.