Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  Reggie had suggested she see a psychiatrist when she came back from Torremolinos in August because her nerves were ‘terrible’.

  Reggie, she wrote, talked to her ‘like a pig’ in front of people. He was always arguing with her in front of his family at Vallance Road.

  He repeatedly threatened her family, especially Frank and his girlfriend Bubbles. ‘It will come back on them,’ he told her.

  Frances wrote that she had told a doctor she would get a divorce for mental cruelty.

  She noted ‘honeymoon sex about 3’, and before she went to Ibiza ‘about 2’. Reggie, she wrote, was frequently saying things to deliberately upset her. When they were at the airport, before she flew to Ibiza, he told her she should stay as long as she liked – he didn’t care if she stayed there for six weeks.

  After she had left him, she wrote that a doctor suggested she go to a solicitor and pretend she’d hired a detective to follow Reggie, and say that there were photos of Reggie in a hotel with a girl, which would thus enable Frances to obtain a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Frances responded by saying she’d tell the truth. The doctor’s response, she wrote, was: ‘They won’t like it if you mention guns and knives’ and ‘Aren’t you frightened?’

  Reggie had told her ‘there may have been hostesses’ at the clubs he visited and now she would have to put up with it. This, he said, was because when she’d broken off with him before the marriage and he visited her at Ormsby Street she had talked to him ‘like a friend’ telling him she’d been ‘out with a boy’. Now, he’d told her, she would have to suffer and listen to him talking about girls. (This was typical Kray twin behaviour, storing up the memory of an insult or an affront, waiting for the right moment to pounce in revenge or recrimination.)

  Frances spent one week in a private hospital in October 1965. After she came out she wrote in the diary that Reggie started talking about the clubs he had been to while she was in there, deliberately mentioning this in front of his family, just to provoke her.

  Again, after she came out of hospital and they were watching television at Vallance Road, Frances laughed at something funny on television (she thought her laughter seemed very nervy and shaky). Ronnie had looked at her and burst out laughing, saying, ‘And Jesus wept’, being funny, she said.

  On another occasion, after Frances had been sitting in the Vallance Road front room after being in hospital, a friend came to see Reggie, so Frances went in the kitchen. And this was where Ronnie started talking about girls writing the twins letters, and how they were going to take them out, a speech aimed at tormenting her.

  One night Violet made a sandwich and Frances left the crusts. When she got in the car to go back to the flat with Reggie, Violet threw the crusts out in the street in front of the car.

  On another occasion, Ronnie brandished a sword knife (stick) at her, saying, ‘I’ll put this through you’, then started laughing, turning it all into a joke.

  Then the diary becomes a list; presumably these descriptions were the grounds Frances hoped would enable her to divorce Reggie:

  ‘Mental cruelty – never speaking, shouting, swearing, aggravating, provoking. Threats. Habitual drunkenness. Knives and guns. Offence regarding s’ (‘s’ is underlined).

  He’d kept all his clothes at his mother’s, had all his food there. Frances was living under extreme strain, she wrote.

  Every night at the Marble Arch flat Reggie came back drunk at 2, 3, 4 a.m. Then he’d leave her alone there all day, returning again at 3 a.m. He’d swear and fall all over the place. He’d kept a photograph of a hostess in L’Hirondelle club, which he showed to Frances when she came back from Torremolinos. They went to the club. ‘Barely spoke to me – only to her.’

  He had left her to stay in hotels alone after her trips to Ibiza and Torremolinos.

  At Vallance Road he was swearing or abusing her verbally, frequently making comments like ‘shut your mouth’.

  Reggie frequently threatened Frances about her brother Frank and the £1,000 Reggie owed him. He also kept telling her ‘the same thing will happen to you as will happen to Hannah.’

  These last two notes need some clarification.

  The £1,000 debt was cash Frank Shea Junior had lent to Reggie who had told him he needed the money for ‘legal expenses’. Reggie never returned the money, despite Frankie’s many efforts to retrieve it. Reggie told Frances that in asking for the return of the money, Frankie had ‘fucked this marriage up over £1,000’.

  Hannah was a girl called Hannah (or Anna) Zambodini who had alleged that Reggie was the father of a baby girl born to her in East London in June 1965. She took out a summons for an affiliation order against Reggie and the story made the newspapers in October 1965. The summons was contested by Reggie’s solicitors, Sampson and Company, and the case was eventually dismissed. What happened to Hannah remains a mystery.

  The diary notes continue:

  ‘Married 19th April 1965.’

  ‘In Ibiza from 4th June – 14th July’. Frances wrote she stayed in a hotel on her own.

  From 14 July to 2 August she also stayed in a hotel alone.

  ‘2nd August to 15th August 1965, Torremolinos.’

  After Spain, on 19 August, she wrote that she had returned to London and booked into the Alexandra National hotel, Finsbury Park, alone. She stayed there until she went to the Marble Arch flat, after which time she stayed alone in a bed-and-breakfast hotel in Stamford Hill called the Carmel.

  Reggie kept a small arsenal by the side of the bed: a gun, a sword, a knife, a chopper and a flick knife.

  Following an argument, Frances phoned her brother Frankie, asking him to come and collect her. She mentioned the guns. Ronnie swore at her and started collecting the guns in a laundry bag. He phoned a man called Wally from the Green Dragon, told him to collect the guns, get rid of them.

  Reggie never spoke to Frances when Ronnie was in the room. In front of Ronnie and Violet she mentioned something about her looking for a new flat. His response was, ‘Shut your mouth.’ (As mentioned earlier, this was a common insult he used.)

  Before going to the private hospital in October, Frances had told her doctor: ‘I must go away somewhere (I had nowhere to go) for a rest.’ The doctor had booked the stay in the hospital the very next day. Reggie and a friend had driven Frances there. Her husband was swearing and shouting at Frances in the car, repeating his threats to do the same to her as he’d do to Hannah, the girl in the ‘baby claims’ case.

  Following several days in hospital, Frances returned to her husband at Cedra Court. He came in drunk every night. All his suits were kept at Vallance Road. She ‘had to keep on’ because she needed the money he’d give her for food – and what she described as ‘tablet money’. Reggie ate all his meals at Vallance Road.

  He’d bought a rifle in a false name and kept the loaded firearm by the side of their bed. He also locked every door in the flat before going to sleep.

  This tyrannical man kept telling her she was ill, and that he had been with other women from the clubs: now she’d have to suffer. Ronnie would torment her if she went to Vallance Road.

  Reggie swore and shouted at her constantly. He was frequently drunk, slurring his words, falling all over the place. If she mentioned money, he’d talk about her brother Frankie in a malicious way. He’d stand in front of her, shaking his hands, trying to provoke her.

  Frances couldn’t stand it any more and decided to leave. As she was packing her case, Reggie told her he would win any divorce case and would bring in character witnesses and others to tell lies against her.

  This final section of the diary brings home, in no uncertain terms, the truth of Frances’s marriage and explains why an already nervous, anxious young woman became overwhelmed with fear and depression.

  The note about ‘had to keep on’ for food and tablet money implies that she was already reliant on certain types of medication as well as being financially dependent on Reggie.

  Loaded guns. Locked doors. Kni
ves under pillows. Consistent, habitual drunkenness. Threats to Frances and her family. Frequent verbal abuse. Left to stay alone in strange hotel rooms… It is a shocking catalogue of despair – and the debilitating emotional decline she experienced was just weeks after the farce of their wedding.

  As Micky Fawcett put it to me in no uncertain terms: ‘Bad nerves? Reggie Kray would make anyone’s nerves bad. Full grown, successful, confident men would still say that to this day.

  ‘Reggie could never have anything near approaching a normal life with her at all. One day, after they married, I remember him saying, “I’m going to have a night in tonight.” But he was saying it with such trepidation; he was usually out every single night.

  ‘This particular night he said, “Oh, I’m buying lots of stuff to take home, crisps, lemonade, it’s gonna be so boring.” He sounded like a teenager. Even the next day when we saw him he kept going on about “Oh I was wondering where you all were.”

  ‘Reggie was the most selfish person you’ve ever met. Once, Frances said to me, “How would you like to have a gun pulled on you to get your own way?” He would’ve been threatening to shoot her brother all the time. That was his modus operandi.’

  Maureen Flanagan discovered, on her weekly hairdo visits to Violet, that during the weeks after the marriage, Vallance Road was a very tense place.

  ‘Every time Ronnie wanted his twin and Reg said, “I’m with Frances” that would cause even more rows between the twins,’ she explained. ‘I got all this from Mrs Kray.

  ‘“Oh I don’t think they’re talking today,” she’d whisper over the cups of tea. And of course, Charlie saw what was going on between the twins and would tell his mother about it.’

  ‘When I did see Frances at Mrs Kray’s, she seemed even more nervous. And it was even more obvious how much she disliked Ronnie if he turned up while she was there.

  ‘Her face told you the story. As soon as he came in the door, there was fear, nervousness; she couldn’t wait to get out. She’d pick up her bag and say, “Are we goin’, Reg?” She never pulled faces. But that fear of Ronnie… after the wedding you saw a nervous girl who was even more nervous.’

  ‘“Take this apple pie home,” Mrs Kray insisted one day. But Frances didn’t want it.

  ‘“No, I won’t take it, it’s alright,” she’d say in that nervous way. I don’t think she wanted to take anything out of that house.

  ‘I did find out from Mrs Kray at one stage that her [Frances’s] family were already trying to get her back with them. They loved her, the father, the brother… they just wanted her away from Reg.’

  As for the couple’s sex life, Maureen noticed that Mrs Kray never said a word.

  ‘Sex was never mentioned in that house. I don’t think Mrs Kray was curious, either. She’d have been too scared to ask Frances anyway, in case something was wrong.

  ‘If you asked her how they [Reggie and Frances] were, it was either “Oh they’re alright” or “they’re not alright.” Then one day I heard, “She’s left him for good. She’s gone back to her family.”’

  From what is written in Frances’s diary, she started seeking psychiatric help for her nervous, troubled state ‘after Torremolinos’, which is around late August/early September 1965.

  Her writing in the diary is not completely legible. She wrote that psychiatric help came from ‘the same doctor who gave his brother tablets’ and while the doctor’s name is not clearly decipherable in the diary note, I was later able to ascertain that the doctor’s name was Dr Lewis Clein, a London consultant psychiatrist with a practice in Harley Street, one of the UK’s most prestigious addresses for private medical practitioners.

  Dr Clein retained his Harley Street practice until 2011 when he retired. He agreed to meet me in his house in London’s West End, close to the exclusive thoroughfare of Marylebone High Street.

  Recently widowed, as we talked in his kitchen, Clein, eighty-eight, told me he was preparing to sell the house and move to a retirement home in northwest London.

  A slight, stooping figure, he did not appear to be very robust and his memory, at times, seemed confused. Yet he was courteous and helpful. I got the impression that any enquiry about his long career in psychiatry, treating troubled or depressed patients, was welcome: his work and his long life were one and the same. While I was there, he took a call from a patient.

  Clein said he still had most of his patient records from 1970 onwards. Unfortunately, however, he had not kept his records before that time, so he couldn’t refer to his notes on Frances. Yes, he remembered treating Frances and, yes, he had treated Ronnie Kray as a private patient. Clein had originally worked at Long Grove Hospital in Surrey, where Ron had been treated, yet strangely, he told me that he had not personally treated Ronnie there, despite my understanding that he had originally treated Ronnie at that hospital.

  Clein said he had been directed to help Ronnie by a Dr Blasker, whom he didn’t know, and who lived on the Isle of Dogs.

  According to Clein, Blasker rang one evening and asked him if he could do a home visit, as a psychiatric consultant, to Ronnie Kray. (Blasker had known the twins since their teenage boxing days. He was not a specialist but he always helped the twins out when there were emergencies: that is, when the person involved could not be sent to a public hospital because the nature of their injuries would raise queries with police.)

  Clein said he duly visited Ronnie at Vallance Road, saying, ‘He didn’t need hospitalisation, he was slow and slurred of speech, so I put him on antidepressants. Then later he came to see me at my Harley street surgery. I probably saw him about four times.’

  The first time he learned about Frances’s nervous state was, said Clein, following an unexpected phone call from Violet Kray.

  ‘She said her other son Reggie was getting married,’ the doctor remembered. ‘“It’s not going to work out because they don’t get on,” she told me. Then she asked me, if anything happened, would I able to see the girl?’

  ‘I told her if her GP arranged a referral, I’d be happy to see her.’

  Weeks after this call, Clein said he saw the stories about the wedding in the newspapers.

  ‘Then I got a phone call from Reggie Kray. He told me his new wife was depressed, very up and down. They got the referral from the GP and arranged to come and see me in my Harley Street office. He came with her to the appointment. But he didn’t come into the consulting room.’

  ‘She was very low. She said she was sleeping badly. She didn’t say very much at all, she seemed very reticent and quiet.’

  Clein said that Frances told him she was already taking prescribed tablets for depression from her NHS GP.

  ‘I suggested we change them and wrote out a different prescription for her. I would have prescribed one of the early antidepressants, a medium dose, three times a day.’

  Clein suggested that a stay in a private hospital would really help Frances.

  ‘She was cooperative when I suggested a place she could stay in called Greenways in Hampstead, a very old fashioned private hospital with older nurses. She stayed at Greenways for about a week.’

  Clein says that he saw Frances at Greenways that week and that she seemed better. He suggested she remain there for another two or three weeks.

  ‘But she wanted to get out. So she left. Then she had another appointment booked with me. But it was cancelled. I never saw her again after that week in the hospital.

  ‘I thought she was a severe depressive. For Reggie’s part, I got the impression he felt she was not getting the right attention through the NHS, which was why they had contacted me.’

  My research afterwards backed up what Clein told me. Later on, I discovered a bill for Greenways Nursing Home in Hampstead, dated 30 October 1965, for the week 22–29 October. The bill was addressed to Mrs Kray.

  Greenways had been located in a house in Fellows Road, Hampstead and was well known in sixties London as a nursing home-cum-private hospital. (Enid Blyton died there in November 1
968. It was demolished some time ago and is now an upmarket apartment block.)

  Here are the details of the bill, paid on 31 October, 1965. It was for £47.18s.6d (forty-seven pounds, eighteen shillings and sixpence). In today’s terms this sum of money is equivalent to just under £900, money that an ordinary family like the Sheas would not have been able to drum up, so it is fair to assume the Greenways hospital bill was paid by Reggie.

  There were a number of small items of money on the bill, including £1 for phone calls, £1.11s.6d for tea for visitors, and 5s for newspapers. There were sums for items purchased from the chemist totalling £4.3s.6d. The two biggest items on the bill were the room charge of £32.11s and a charge for ‘special nurses’ on 29–31 of £9.6s.

  When Frances returned to Ormsby Street for good in the late autumn of 1965, she’d been married for seven months. Much of that time had been spent living apart from her husband. The Sheas, not surprisingly, forbade Reggie from even entering their house.

  He had no choice but to accept that the terrified and nervous woman he’d claimed as his bride could no longer live with him and that the best place for her was with her family.

  Yet just as before, he still could not bring himself to stay away for good, to leave her to get better. Or allow Frances to have her own life. As traumatic as those weeks after the marriage had been for her, the suffering woman was still unable to disassociate herself from Reggie completely. The truth was, he would not let her out of his life.

  Now she existed in a sort of limbo: on regular medication to calm her down, in theory, at least, able to do as she pleased, to see friends and go out and about.

  But of course, she was now a married woman with a gangster husband, a man who still insisted he played a role in her life in ‘looking after her’. So much damage had already been done to Frances’s fragile state of mind through that brief exposure to the twins’ inner world, yet in leaving Reggie physically, she remained a ‘marked’ woman: she was still seen as ‘Reggie’s girl’.