by Hyams, Jacky
What must it have been like for Frances – and the Sheas – to live with the knowledge that everyone in the world was now aware of the twins’ criminality? Stories and rumours are one thing. National newspaper notoriety or exposure is another.
For their part, Ronnie and Reggie didn’t turn a hair. Exposure, to them, was oxygen. Instead of courting anonymity, a sensible path for any dedicated crim to follow, they would continue to court publicity, and to use the exposure in their incessant thirst for wider recognition.
What is so baffling about it all is that Frances, after all her previous efforts to shake Reggie off and push him away, had now drifted towards him again, in spite of all this. She was now a luminously beautiful player on their stage. Perhaps it was Reg that convinced her somehow that it would all be fine now; there would be no more talk of police and prison, they were in the clear. Or was it simply the threat that the twins now openly represented that stopped her from trying to escape from their world?
But if Reg was so determined to have Frances, what of Ronnie? Tragically, his power over his twin, his ability to draw him closer, away from her company, seemed absolute by then. He was a paranoid schizophrenic whose illness was barely under control – given the huge amounts of alcohol he imbibed along with the powerful drugs he needed for his illness. Knowing that he could do whatever he wanted because he was now ‘untouchable’ was essentially a death knell for an unsuspecting victim.
Now, only the chance to prove himself to the world as a killer, a fearful warrior, would satisfy Ronnie’s bloodlust. As his twin’s murderous impulses started to take over his entire existence, Reggie remained, as ever, in the same dreadful situation: compelled by their blood ties to try to protect his brother from himself, yet still cherishing his fantasy of a life away from Ronnie. Pushed one way, then the other, Reggie still believed that he could make an ‘escape’, via the marriage he’d been talking about for so long.
His generosity to Frances knew no bounds. As an engagement gift he’d got her a stunning red Triumph Herald sports car, a very fashionable car in the sixties – John Lennon was seen whizzing around London in such a vehicle at one stage. Frances couldn’t drive but lessons were duly booked. She had a couple of lessons, then edgy, paranoid Reg took umbrage at something the driving instructor said and Frances, quite sensibly, decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. Reggie adored the idea of his Bardot lookalike sitting behind the wheel of a snazzy motor. But not the reality of another man sitting next to her, guiding her through the Highway Code. Or worse.
That November, the couple went on a two-week holiday organised by Reg to southern Spain and Gibraltar. This time, the opportunity to get away from it all and spend time together nudged Reg and Frances closer. There were still separate hotel rooms, and, just like on their other trips, guys from Reg’s entourage hovered in the background. But as they wandered hand in hand around the strange, exotic narrow streets together, Reggie eager to buy Frances whatever took her fancy – especially the cute little Flamenco dancer dolls she’d started to collect on their travels – their conflicts and rows seemed to have abated. She was still very much his beautiful princess. And he was so proud of her. Once he married his Frankie, Reggie told himself, everything else would fall into place. Her parents weren’t going to stop him. How could they?
But just a month later, something happened to stop everything in its tracks. Ronnie and Reggie were unexpectedly arrested at the Glenrae Hotel, Finsbury Park and remanded in custody.
A certain Detective Chief Inspector, Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read was determined to bring the Kray twins to justice, and to end their reign as London’s most feared criminals. Then, as luck would have it, a significant, if somewhat weak, opportunity to bring the twins down came his way. This chance for Read became the catalyst to a series of events – and, effectively, these led to the sealing of Frances’s fate.
It all focused on a man called Hew McCowan. He ran a drinking club in Soho’s Gerrard Street. It had been called the Bon Soir but McCowan had recently taken it over, done it up and renamed it The Hideaway. He came from a classy, well-heeled background and he knew the twins. At one stage, they’d approached him for a loan for the ill-fated Nigerian project. But McCowan wasn’t interested in putting money into the venture; he wanted to put his money into The Hideaway. Very soon he’d made contact with DCI Read and what he had to say interested the man nicknamed Nipper very much.
Hew McCowan told him that the twins had attempted to muscle in on The Hideaway, demanding a 50 per cent share of the profits. This was perfectly normal for the twins – but the admission to police that the Kray twins had tried to cut themselves in on the deal was an incredibly bold one for a club owner to make. Normally they were far too intimidated by the twins’ reputation to report their attempts at extortion to the police.
Yet, frustratingly, there was nothing to back up McCowan’s story. Until an incident at The Hideaway in January 1965, when a friend of the Krays, ‘Mad’ Teddy Smith, attempted to smash the place up, demanding money from the club owner. Smith wanted everyone at the club to know that he was acting on behalf of the Kray twins. The money, he screamed, was for the twins.
Police arrested Smith at the club and on 10 January, they hauled in Reg and Ronnie. The trio were accused of demanding money from Hew McCowan with menaces. No bail would be permitted.
The twins’ response was to pull out all the stops to show the law they were, indeed, untouchable. From Brixton prison, they hired the best, most expensive lawyers in London. They also hired a private detective to dig up any dirt, if possible, on McCowan – and find out more about the prosecution witnesses.
Later, the twins would claim on BBC TV to have spent many thousands of pounds to prove their ‘innocence’ and there are stories that, in fact, Ronnie’s friend Lord Boothby, flush with cash from the Sunday Mirror apology, had lent him money to fund their defence. Whatever the truth of this, they certainly wanted the world to know they had run up a huge bill.
With Reggie now in Brixton Prison and determined to be released quickly, Frances wrote to him almost daily. Yet again Reggie wrote back that the time had come for them to embark on that happy married life together in the ’burbs. Yes, once this was behind them, they’d definitely get married, Frances promised Reggie.
How come he’d now managed to convince her to commit herself? They’d been more off than on in the previous year or two. She’d tasted a little bit of freedom. But she’d had her twenty-first birthday the previous September, a landmark occasion and, possibly, with that came a realisation that with no one else on the horizon, Reggie was, for better or worse, her most likely spouse to be.
By the East End standards of the times too, Frances had hit the ‘on the shelf’ situation. Girlfriends were already married, expecting their first child. Social pressure, in other words, must have played a significant part in her thinking. And being an aunt to baby Frances or spending time with Rita’s little Kimmie had awakened a strong maternal impulse: Reggie wanted children, he’d told her so many times.
‘Reggie loved children,’ recalled cousin Rita Smith. ‘He used to say to me, “Don’t babies SMELL nice?” He would have loved kids.’
Maureen Flanagan recalled going round to Vallance Road for Mrs Kray’s weekly session with the rollers and hairpins around this time. She remembered Violet being quite definite that a wedding was on the cards very soon: ‘“Oh, Reggie will definitely marry her,” Mrs Kray would say. “When he comes out, they’ll do it. She’s a lovely girl, doesn’t want anyone but Reggie.” Mrs Kray obviously felt the wedding was inevitable.’
In Brixton Prison, the twins pulled out the stops to secure bail. They even offered £18,000 as surety and audaciously got their friend Lord Boothby to ask questions in Parliament about their imprisonment. But in prison they remained. Finally, a trial date was set for 28 February.
The jury couldn’t agree. So there had to be a retrial. In the meantime, the private detectives had done their work: they’d dug up some juicy in
formation about Hew McCowan: years before he had been involved in a number of cases involving homosexuality; there were also hints that he was a police informer. As a result, he was discredited as a witness. And the case fell apart. The jury gave its verdict: not guilty. After two months in custody, on 5 April, the Krays and Teddy Smith were free men.
Just over an hour after the twins left the dock at the Old Bailey, Reggie was being publicly greeted at the front door of Fort Vallance by Frances. As his twin climbed out of the fawn-coloured Jaguar that had transported them home, Reggie hugged Frances and told the waiting press how happy he was to be back with his sweetheart. ‘All we want now is a bit of peace and quiet,’ he told the Daily Mirror.
Soon they were joined by the proudly beaming Vi, her dad ‘Cannonball’ Lee, chirpy in his braces, their neighbours, relatives, friends – everyone smiling, all over the moon that the boys’ innocence had been proven once and for all.
Outside Fort Vallance, Frances cuddled their little dog, Mitzi, and posed, somewhat diffident, for newspaper photos alongside Reggie. Her hair was now a reddish blonde and shoulder length, her pretty, loose Indian cotton smock-top a bang up-to-the-minute fashion statement. Yes, they were getting married. Yes, it would be very soon.
For that brief moment in the mild spring sunshine, it seemed Frances had convinced herself that somehow Reg’s dreams of their golden future were becoming reality. They’d fought, they’d waited, but now they could have their happiness, her and Reg. Briefly, her fears of Ronnie and her ‘bad nerves’ seemed to have been put to one side. On that day, at least, Reggie Kray appeared to be her knight in shining armour. But was he? Or had Reggie merely told her that she had no choice: if she didn’t marry him there would be trouble ahead for her family?
Three weeks later, she was his wife. And in a vengeful gesture so typical of the twins, they rubber-stamped their court victory in the McCowan case – by buying into The Hideaway Club – and renaming it ‘El Morocco’.
Nonetheless, even in that short time before the wedding the dark storm clouds were already looming over the two East End families.
Up until then, Elsie had made no attempt to hide her feelings. Now, she was furious, already embittered at the prospect of her family being in any way linked to the Krays. No, she told her daughter, she couldn’t marry Reggie Kray.
Again and again she ranted to her husband, saying she didn’t want Reggie Kray, that scum of the earth, as a son-in-law. Elsie wasn’t fooled by any of it, all the hypocritical, two-faced posing with film stars and celebrities such as Judy Garland, when everyone knew they went round knifing people, doing terrible things to anyone who stood up to them or got in their way. She hadn’t brought up her daughter up to wind up living as the wife of a criminal with a mad twin, someone who would always be in trouble with the law, in and out of prison. Frank Senior sided with her: the wedding could not, would not happen.
Frances had heard it all long before now. She said very little, switched off, put all her focus into the big day, choosing the dress, working out how she’d do her hair. Initially she’d told Reg she wanted a quiet do, something low-key, even modest. But as usual, he’d overruled her wishes, told her it had to be a big affair, a major event. Of course she had to be married in white, in a traditional wedding dress. Everyone in the East End would want to see ‘the wedding of the year’. The Krays were famous. It had to be a big wedding, a media event, no matter what.
Her brother Frankie kept quiet but he knew his mum and dad were right. His kid sister was bright and lively, she wasn’t on the take all the time, in it for the glamour, what she could get. He knew that.
But he also knew all too well you didn’t cross Reg or Ron or get in their bad books. They had incredible memories, both of them. The twins never forgot a bad word spoken against them. They had their ‘spies’ everywhere, running back and forwards with titbits of information. They’d always lash back at you if they heard you’d started trashing them. Or get someone else to stitch you up somehow. He knew their power. But Reg was good to his sister, wasn’t he? Frankie told himself, somewhat unconvincingly.
Word soon got round Bethnal Green that the Sheas were telling everyone they were going to stop the wedding.
‘My husband’s brother told me, “The Sheas are going to do everything they can to stop it. They think Frances is under Reggie’s spell, she’s bewitched by him,”’ remembered Maureen Flanagan.
Naturally enough, the next time Maureen went round to Vallance Road, she mentioned it to Violet.
‘There’s bad blood from the Sheas, Vi,’ Maureen told her.
‘It’ll be alright on the day,’ was Mrs Kray’s response. ‘They can’t stop the wedding.’
She was spot on. The loss of face for the twins if the big Hello!-style wedding didn’t happen exactly as they wished didn’t bear thinking about. Maureen couldn’t help but wonder what Ronnie Kray, let alone Reggie, would do to the Shea family if it didn’t happen now. The event itself was going to generate huge amounts of positive publicity for the twins.
‘Even though he didn’t want it to happen, Ronnie Kray couldn’t allow it not to take place,’ continued Maureen. ‘Imagine what people would be saying about the twins if the wedding didn’t happen after all?’
Elsie Shea, however, wasn’t the only person to let it be known that she didn’t want the wedding to happen. One man, neither family nor criminal, was very definitely against the idea of Frances and Reggie taking their wedding vows. And he made his feelings known to Reggie in no uncertain terms.
Unknown to Frances, Reggie had already booked the church, St James the Great in Bethnal Green. He very much wanted the twins’ childhood friend and supporter, Father Hetherington to marry them. Yet when Frances and Reggie went to ask the priest to officiate, they got a shock.
No, said Father Hetherington, he wouldn’t be prepared to marry them. In fact, he said, he was hoping they wouldn’t go through with it at all. The much younger Father Foster could marry them.
Years later, the author John Pearson talked to Father Hetherington at his Rectory in Ealing, West London after his retirement.
As he wrote in his book about the Krays, The Cult of Violence, Pearson had asked Father Hetherington what his reasons were for refusing to marry Reggie and Frances.
‘Because they’d simply no idea of what marriage was about,’ said the priest. ‘Not merely was there not the faintest hope of either of them finding happiness together, but I could see them causing serious harm to one another.’
Reggie respected Father Hetherington, so no matter how much he had wanted him to officiate, he accepted what the priest told him and asked Father Foster to conduct the ceremony.
Yet the wise priest’s words were eerily prophetic. How well he understood that this marriage, born mainly out of Reggie’s desire to escape his destiny and present himself to the world as a normal, respectable man with a beautiful young wife, was never going to be anything other than a fake, a farce in every way.
Frances was already apprehensive, but she couldn’t have known just how accurate Father Hetherington’s prediction was. Reggie was lost in delusion. Ronnie wasn’t for his twin’s marriage in any way. But he knew his other half’s vulnerability where their twinship was concerned, felt confident he could always hook him back in, no matter what. That silly cow wasn’t going to come between him and Reg.
As for the Sheas, they were helpless now, up against the combined might of the Kray twins’ reputation and their ability to manipulate everyone and everything to their own end. They had every reason to feel fearful for their daughter’s future.
The day of the wedding, 19 April 1965, was overcast and chilly. The promise of early spring and the sunshine of a few weeks previously seemed to have vanished.
That morning, Maureen Flanagan jumped into her little Mini and drove round to Vallance Road to do Mrs Kray’s hair.
Maureen really wanted to go to the wedding, see it all for herself. But her husband, no fan of the Krays, flatly refused t
o accompany her.
‘This was the 1960s and I was married to a man with a ferocious temper,’ says Maureen. ‘I couldn’t get away with sneaking off to the wedding because everyone knew that the wedding was going on and that I knew the Kray family. So I couldn’t go behind his back.’
Inside the Vallance Road house, Maureen found the usual pre-wedding flap. Charlie Kray Senior plodded down the stairs, fiddling with his necktie, muttering that he didn’t like it. Mrs Kray was in her dressing gown, wanting her hair to be done before donning the wedding outfit. A celebratory glass of sherry was handed to Maureen.
‘Mrs Kray said Frances was getting her hair done at home,’ she remembered. ‘She had a school friend called Pat who was going to get her into the wedding dress and do her hair.
‘I sat there with the rollers and portable hood dryer next to me on the table and got busy with Mrs Kray’s hair. Charlie – The Old Man – was still moaning about his tie when Ronnie marched in.
‘“Oh, so this wedding’s going to take place then,” he said, half laughing, but mostly sarcastic.
‘“Don’t start The Old Man off!” snapped Vi.
‘You could see her husband was already getting on her nerves,’ Maureen went on.
‘“She’s told me all about the dress,” confided Vi. “It’s satin, really lovely.”
‘Apparently it was going to be a long dress, very traditional, very beautiful,’ recalled Maureen.
Mrs Kray continued to gossip. The Sheas hadn’t wanted the dress, oh no. But Reggie had insisted. This had all gone back to Violet who told Frances, ‘Wear what you like. Whatever you like, Reggie’ll like.’
Finally, a long spray of hair lacquer and Mrs Kray’s immaculate hairdo was in place. Maureen finished the little glass of sherry, packed up her vanity case and started to leave.