Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  ‘We used to get the chairs out in the back garden and he would go and get jellied eels and she loved it.’

  Rita noticed a distinct tension between Frances and Ronnie: ‘She’d be sitting in Aunt Violet’s house and he would go, “Why don’t you make a cup of tea?” and she would just ignore him. Then Reg would say, “Leave her alone. I’ll make the tea.”

  ‘She wanted to go to work. He’d give her money and say, “There’s no need to go to work.” But you didn’t know, perhaps she was too scared to go to work.’

  Maureen Flanagan, former ‘Page Three’ girl and actress, was a regular visitor to the Kray twins’ home in the early sixties.

  Maureen, or ‘Flan’ as she’s known, was a hairdresser at the time. At twenty, she was a newly married girl working in a local salon. She’d go round to the Vallance Road house each Thursday evening to do Violet’s hair. Her friendship with the Kray family became one which would eventually span a lifetime, until the end of their lives.

  ‘The first time I met Frances would have been around the end of 1961,’ Flan said. ‘She was sitting in the kitchen, where Violet made the tea.

  ‘I didn’t have to ask who she was, of course, because I already knew that Reggie was going out with the Shea daughter. Everyone knew who she was. I’d also heard that she was very lovely. I’d got that from Mrs Kray. “Oh, you know, Reg’s got a girlfriend, she’s very pretty, Flan,” she told me.

  ‘I remember looking at Frances and thinking, “Oh yes, you are lovely.” She was a beauty, hazel eyes, thick browny auburn hair, nice skin and a nice little rounded figure.

  ‘But it was her face that drew you in – especially her eyes.

  ‘Knowing the twins, and with me thinking Reggie was a far more handsome man than his twin, I did think: “Hmm… they make a nice looking couple, especially when the man looks as if he’s been around a bit, like Reggie.”

  ‘That was how it worked in the East End back then, a good-looking young girl and a man several years older. And I knew Reg well enough to know that he’d want someone who was outstanding to look at. So that when he walked into a place, she was on his arm and they’d be a pair close to perfection.’

  In those days, Flan, a stunning leggy blonde, was also well known as a local beauty. ‘So as girls do, I checked her out carefully. And she was immaculate, just a straight pencil skirt and a sweater. But not a hair out of place.

  ‘I went straight into hairdresser mode: “Oh you must be Frances, I’m Maureen,” I said. “D’you ever wear your hair up?”

  ‘“Yes, in a pleat,” she said shyly. Well, we all had that hairdo. Upswept hairdos were all the rage.

  ‘“Before I go, I’ll put it up for you,” I promised her.

  ‘I could see she was shy. I suppose she didn’t like to say no. She just nodded.

  ‘She seemed a bit timid. But she had a lovely smile. Then I did Mrs Kray’s hair, put the rollers in. When I’d finished I said, “Sit here Frances and I’ll put your hair up.”

  ‘What I noticed was you had to keep talking to her to get a response. And when you asked her a direct question, she seemed a bit cagey when she answered you. Like I’d just been to see Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood in a film called Love with the Proper Stranger. I’d been telling Mrs Kray how handsome Steve McQueen was, so I asked Frances, “Have you seen that film?”

  ‘“I don’t go to the cinema,” she said.

  ‘That was a bit unusual. All young girls of her age went to the cinema. I was only a couple of years older than her but it felt like I was ten years older. Later, I realised that Mrs Kray talked to her as if she was about ten.’

  After a while, Flan noticed something else about the young girl.

  ‘The other funny thing I noticed that first time was she seemed fixated on the clock.

  ‘“What time is it?” she said after about an hour – even though she was wearing a watch. It was about 9 p.m. “What time do you think Reggie will be here?”

  ‘This went on constantly. It was obvious she was worried about when he was coming back.

  ‘As I did her hair, she asked again. I kept thinking, “Why do you keep asking the same question?” It was very odd. If he left her there at 8 p.m. and said he’d be gone for a couple of hours, why bother to ask? You could see that she was depending on him coming back for her. It was strange. It was as if she was worried he was going to leave her there.

  ‘I did a lovely pleat at the back for her, with a bun on top. Lots of backcombing and lacquer of course. Then she looked in the mirror. Silence. You couldn’t tell if she liked it or not.

  ‘Then she asked Mrs Kray, “Do you think Reg will like it?”

  ‘“Of course. It looks lovely,” Violet assured her.

  ‘I thought to myself, “What about you, do you like it?” It was all about Reg.

  ‘To me, she seemed like a very nervous girl. I’m quite good at drawing people out. But whatever you said to her, you could see it wasn’t just shyness that made her so reticent. She seemed to live on her nerves. Maybe she’d been like that before she knew Reggie, that was her personality.’

  The next time Maureen went round to do Violet’s hair, she asked her why Frances had kept asking about the time.

  ‘I think she thinks once he’s gone out of that door with Ronnie, he’s never coming back,’ Vi said.

  Maureen Flanagan said she was convinced that by that time, Frances sensed danger whenever Reggie went out with Ronnie.

  Which was pretty accurate. Ronnie had a very dangerous presence; there was no question of that. It was part of what made the Kray twins so charismatic, yet so feared.

  An insensitive or less-thoughtful girl might have chosen to believe Reggie when he reassured Frances, time and time again, that his twin was really a lovely person underneath the scary menace. However, Maureen’s account makes it clear that Frances was already troubled by the dangerous aura around Ronnie, long before they married. Instinct alone told her he was a seriously malevolent force. He scared the life out of her. And there was no mistaking Ronnie’s rejection of her very existence. He couldn’t hide it and didn’t care to try to.

  ‘She might have been naive and vulnerable. But she would have known straight away that Ronnie didn’t like her, was jealous of her taking Reg away from him,’ said Maureen. ‘So every time he left the house with Ronnie, leaving her with his mum, that’s what would have been what was going through her head.’

  But if Frances was starting to be scared a lot of the time, Reggie too was feeling edgy. Ronnie never let up with the sneers and taunts to Reggie about Frances when he was with his twin. It all made for a very tense atmosphere at Vallance Road.

  One night, Reggie took Frances to the Hirondelle cabaret club, just off Regent Street, where they had dinner and watched a floorshow. Frances wanted to go home afterwards but Reggie insisted on looking in at Esmeralda’s.

  It was quite late by then. Both twins were seriously drunk, Ronnie even more so than Reggie. A sly comment from his twin and Reggie, who’d managed to restrain himself until then, flipped, lost it. A vicious fight ensued, typical of the kind of scrap they’d been having all their lives, though this time they didn’t hit or roll around on the floor battering each other. They just screamed insult after insult at each other. Verbal abuse of the worst kind. Frances, terrified and unused to the volley of violent abuse, burst into tears and ran into the ladies’ loo. By the time she came out, Ronnie had staggered off into the night, still muttering evil threats to his twin, reminding him what a useless, sick bastard he was. He’d had it with him.

  Ronnie then left Vallance Road and moved into a luxury flat in a thirties’ block in Cedra Court, Clapton, but the change in their day-to-day living arrangements didn’t really alter the twins’ relationship very much. No matter how violent their exchanges or rows, Ronnie was always going to be able to hook Reggie in, and to push him towards extremes.

  Yet witnessing the row had triggered something in Frances: it brought it home to her, in no uncerta
in terms, that all the smart clothes in the world, all the beautiful trinkets or the trips to glamorous places couldn’t hide the fact that she had unwittingly become a part of the underworld, a hidden realm where violent men schemed, fought, swore vengeance, drew blood and where fear, that sickening terror she felt inside every time she saw Ronnie’s face, was running the show.

  She hadn’t been completely blind to what the Krays represented, certainly. It was impossible not to know, anyway. Everyone talked about them in the East End, though she’d noticed that these days very few people asked her anything at all about Reggie or their courtship: now she was known as Reggie’s girl, people were too scared to probe – in case she ran back and told him they’d been asking questions.

  Now Frances was starting to see for herself where her place was within the twins’ world: a pampered doll, controlled by an intense, possessive man who wanted her to be influenced only by himself.

  She’d gone along with it. Hadn’t she left her job, stopped work because he said there was no need for his fiancé to have to work, that he’d take care of everything? He wanted to own her – and keep her to himself at all times in a beautiful, gilded cage, someone to take out and show off, certainly, as a partner for the successful businessman he believed he’d become. Yet socially, as far as other people were concerned, she was a no-go area: Reggie’s property.

  She’d speak up, tell him what she thought. Then would come promises galore that they’d leave the cage, build a dream home in the suburbs, have their own life one day, away from Ronnie and all the ‘taking care of business’ distractions.

  Reggie would do everything in his power to reassure her of all this. They’d had some lovely weekends together at the family’s caravan in Steeple Bay, Essex, just the two of them. Then, Frances felt they were like any other normal couple, but most of the time Reggie inhabited that other world, the gangster world of smoky pubs, bars, nightclubs and extortion through fear, the only world he felt comfortable in. With his scary twin.

  Reg knew all too well how much Frances hated the endless barhopping. Yet he continued to drink to excess, surrounded by his minders most of the time. When he took Frances out at night now, there were always the hangers-on, the people who wanted to keep in with the twins, sucking up to Reggie, wanting his approval, paying their respects. People said they had everyone in their pocket: the law, the press, nothing could touch them. ‘Well-known businessmen’ the press called them. The journalists didn’t care to describe them otherwise.

  She’d spend hours getting ready, carefully choosing her outfits, making sure her hair was perfect, on their nights out – yet it was wasted energy really, because it was impossible to relax or feel comfortable with him when they went out to pubs or nightclubs.

  Reggie would be constantly jumping up all the time, moving around the place, shedding largesse and instilling fear in equal amounts. She felt isolated, shut off from the rest of the world.

  The consequence of all this was the rows between them that started to be a regular occurrence. They usually began when they were on their way home from a night out or after she’d spent an evening in the kitchen at Vallance Road, waiting for Reg to come home.

  That was her life: waiting for Reg to finish whatever it was. It was too much, she kept telling him. It wasn’t a life she wanted. Sometimes she’d be defiant, determined: it’s over, she’d tell him, and run out of the car, climbing the stairs at Ormsby Street, falling on her bed sobbing, resolute that she had to finish with him for good.

  Then there’d be a day or two’s silence, and he’d turn up again, all promises and apologies. Huge bouquets of flowers like she’d never seen. More jewellery. A beautiful gold bracelet. A necklace with a small diamond at the bottom, prettier than anything she’d ever owned.

  Then, under the intensity of his persuasion, his insistence that they had a wonderful future to plan, she’d relent, in the way women do when, deep down, they still want to believe in their man, hoping for change – even if everything was starting to point to the contrary. And all the time, there was a nagging question at the back of her mind. Suppose she did break off with Reg for good? Who was going to dare to start coming round Ormsby Street to take out ‘the Kray bird’?

  It was so frustrating. Reggie insisted he loved her. He’d say it all the time. So why couldn’t he see that love meant being together, sharing everything, not dumping her there at the kitchen table with his mum while he went out with his twin?

  Violet, Frances sensed, wasn’t really her ally. She saw no wrong in her twins. She seemed to lap up the glamour around them, thought everything her boys did was marvellous. She was so proud of them. Oh no, there was never a word of criticism from Vi’s mouth. Not like Elsie, who’d make her disapproval known if she saw or heard something she didn’t like.

  In fact, Violet Kray was very well versed in domestic politics. To Frances, she was outwardly maternal, because that was what her Reggie wanted. Underneath it all, she didn’t really think this girl was good enough for her Reg, he’d yet to find one that was. She looked good. But she didn’t seem interested in cooking or doing things for her man. She just sat there. Looking nervous.

  Maureen Flanagan remembered a night out at the Astor Club with the Kray family: ‘Charlie Kray, the twins’ brother, invited me. Vi was going too. I didn’t want to come with my husband so it was agreed with Charlie that I’d accompany Vi. I told my husband I was going out with the girls.’

  Maureen and Violet dressed to the nines for their night in Mayfair. Mrs Kray was immaculate in a beautiful blue dress with a fur stole, Maureen in a slim sheath with a little mink bolero. They were driven to the club in one of the twins’ cars, by one of their minders.

  ‘It was obvious Violet had been there before,’ remembered Maureen. ‘We all sat at a little round table. We’d been told that Lita Roza [a successful popular singer of the fifties] was going to be singing. Freddie Mills [a very well-known boxing champion who later committed suicide in highly suspicious circumstances] came over to say hello, then we were joined by Charlie with two male friends.

  ‘Then Reggie came in with Frances. She was perfect. She had her hair swept up with a sleeveless blue brocade tight dress just to the knee and a mink stole, the kind with all the tails hanging down.

  ‘I thought to myself, “You never went out and bought that, Reggie’s got it on loan for the night, just to make sure you look as smart as his mum”. Mrs Kray’s stole was white mink; Frances’s was dark brown. Then Lita came on and started singing: she too had the same upswept hairdo.’

  About a half an hour later, Maureen said, Ronnie turned up with a driver.

  ‘Then from nowhere Ronnie’s fave boy of the time came in. But he didn’t sit with us. Everyone kept coming over from the other tables to pay their respects to Vi. That was the twins’ rule. If you come to our table, you show respect to our mother.

  ‘What I noticed about Frances before, at Vallance Road, was she was wearing these little white fabric gloves, with little stones embedded in them. The more nervous or agitated she got, the gloves would be off, on the table, but she’d be twisting them around. That night at the Astor I noticed she was doing it again. The gloves were pale blue to match the dress. The more people came to the table to say hello, pay their respects, the more she’d be twisting those blue gloves around.

  ‘Reg noticed. At one point he put his hands over the gloves as if to calm it, his hand over her hand and over the gloves. So she’d stop twisting them for ten minutes. But if he got up and left the table to talk to someone, it would start again.

  ‘The table-hopping was quite a Mafia style thing, going over to say hello to the other wives and girlfriends. But the minute he got up she’d be “Where you goin’, Reg?”

  ‘He’d just give her a lopsided smile and say, “I’ll be back.” Then he’d look at his mum as if to say, “Take care of her”. Once he left the table, you could see she was on tenterhooks. The minute he was back, she’d look relieved. “He’s back, everything�
�s okay.”

  ‘I think the story was, he didn’t really want her to go anywhere without him. He didn’t want people stopping her, asking her questions. He was probably quite charming when they were on their own. Because his twin wasn’t there. Yet he didn’t want to leave Frances with her family, so it was always Mrs Kray.

  ‘I always used to say to Mrs Kray, “Don’t you think Reggie’s a bit overprotective?”

  ‘She didn’t disagree with me but she said, “Look how people come up to me all the time in the street. ‘Oh, Violet, how’s the boys?’ Frances wouldn’t be able to handle that.”

  ‘I must admit, Mrs Kray was very clever at handling people. She’d turn the questions round. Charlie was the same way. He looked like a movie star and he could talk to anyone, turn it round to “’Ow’s your little boy, then?” deflect the attention away from the family, what the twins were up to. Charlie and Vi both had fantastic memories. So anything anyone told them about themselves they could remember and bring it up.

  ‘Violet knew her son was overprotective, but she also knew Reggie didn’t want Frances to have friends. Anyone who might have had influence with her against him, he didn’t want her anywhere near them.

  ‘I would have gone out with her. I actually asked Mrs Kray one day if I could take her out.

  ‘Mrs Kray said no. “What about the cinema?” I pushed. The answer was always no.’

  And so Frances started to worry more and more. Underneath the fear, the nervy gestures, she was beginning to wonder what would happen to her without him. She was stunning, no question of that, her hair longer, nestling on her shoulders, making her look more luminous, especially when she gave that smile. Yet the dazzled young teenager, awestruck by the travel, the perfumed glamour of the West End clubs, the smiling, bowing maître d’s had gone. For good.

  Alone in her bedroom at Ormsby Street, she’d go over it again and again in her mind: how could they have any kind of life together if there were always these guys around them? Let alone even thinking about him, the mad twin who hated her. Well, the feeling was mutual. He was a fat pig.