Frances: The Tragic Bride

by Hyams, Jacky

  It was at this point that their tortured on/off relationship moved into its strangest, most bizarre phase.

  In the early evenings, at around 6 p.m., Reggie would go round to Ormsby Street, remain on the pavement outside the house and talk to Frances, who would stand at the open window of her bedroom. It would have been romantic, had it not been so tragic.

  Albert Donoghue told me that he often accompanied Reggie on these visits. ‘She’d look out of the window and Reggie would poke an envelope through the letterbox containing money for her. I never saw her come down to answer the door,’ he recalled.

  ‘I thought it was all very sad. “I’ve put it in the letter box,” he’d tell her and she’d just stand there and say, “Okay”.’

  Then Reggie would get back into the car and be driven off, back to his smoke-filled clubs, his twin, the hostesses, the minders – the life he couldn’t relinquish for the love of Frances.

  At thirty-two, as much as Reggie had dared to fantasise about leading a normal life, he was incapable of being anything other than one half of a criminal and violent duo, dominated by both his need for his twin and the need to protect Ronnie from his most destructive impulses.

  Rather than searching inside himself to understand why Frances, so fragile emotionally, had been driven to breaking point following her exposure to his crazy and scary world, he continued, as before, to heap blame on the Sheas for the breakdown of the marriage.

  They’d interfered, he’d thunder to himself in his brooding drunken rages. He’d show that old cow Elsie what Reggie Kray did to people like her.

  The stories about what he did demonstrate how deluded Reggie must have been about the end of the marriage. He sent anonymous letters to Frank Senior, saying his wife was sleeping with other men. He wrote to the men Elsie worked with, claiming she was anyone’s for the asking. He even got someone to go round to the Shea house in the dead of night and damage the front of the family’s Mini car. Reg, yet again, was hell-bent on hitting back. Yet the Sheas had done nothing other than try to protect their beloved daughter.

  There is no rational explanation for any of this. Nor would there be any rational explanation for what lay ahead.

  For by then, Ronnie Kray’s illness was poised to send him completely round the bend. And despite all Reggie’s efforts over time to save them both from the consequences of Ron’s wilder outbursts, the whole house of cards, the artifice of the Kray reputation, the shocking pointlessness of their crimes and the end of their ‘immunity’ from the law loomed ahead. All would come crashing down in spectacular fashion within two years.

  With hindsight, it is still a harsh truth that the most undeserving victim of all the Krays’ activities was the girl Reggie claimed to love and worship above all else. He couldn’t love her in the normal way of man to woman, yet even now, with the marriage in tatters, he was determined to keep his hold on her. Was it this attempt to continue to possess her that drove Frances further down into depression and despair?

  Trevor Turner is a leading consultant psychiatrist who has worked for many years in the East End of London.

  He told me that no matter how nervous or fragile Frances’s state of mind might have been before they married, someone like Reggie would have only made her mental state worse through his possessive behaviour.

  ‘It’s well known in our business that that kind of possessive, morbid behaviour is a common generator of depression in others. From a psychological point of view, morbid jealousy of a partner can only make that person even more anxious – because the behaviour of the jealous partner is so unreasonable,’ he explained.

  ‘She was an anxious soul in a very strange, uncontrolled marriage, terrorised and trapped and because she was not very robust, it was assumed she was “ill”.

  ‘A good doctor would have tried to obtain some sort of corroborative history, i.e. from someone close to her, in order to understand what she was dealing with in her day-to-day life.’

  We cannot know for sure if any of the doctors Frances saw attempted to obtain this kind of history. From her diary it seemed as if when she did confide in one doctor, he did not exactly encourage her in her idea to seek escape via divorce, given the violent reputation of the twins.

  This is understandable in a sense, not just because of the potential for violence, but because divorce was complicated and expensive in 1965 – the changes to the divorce laws and the ‘no fault’ laws did not come into force until 1969 – and, at the end of the day, a doctor is not a legal adviser. Yet this reality, of the doctors who were treating Frances not attempting to find out more from those closest to her, does reveal how isolated she was. Yes, everyone around her knew what the Krays were capable of. Her family loved her, no question. But all those in her immediate circle were powerless to help her recover from the damage that had been done to her state of mind.

  There is also the fact that any kind of mental illness or nervous breakdown was less well understood in those days. There had been major breakthroughs in the treatment of mental illness, indeed something of a revolution in psychiatric care, as a result of the introduction of certain drugs in the fifties and sixties. It was this factor, Trevor Turner told me, that would have led to Frances’s doctors prescribing both antidepressants and tranquillisers for her as a means of dealing with her depression and fear.

  ‘The tranquillisers are a group of drugs that calm you down,’ he explained. ‘The antidepressants were given if the doctors saw depression as the problem. In those days too, for some people they prescribed combination drugs, a little bit of a mild tranquilliser attached to an antidepressant to calm someone down – and boost them up at the same time. At the time, everyone was very excited that these drugs might work for all sorts of problems.’

  But why did Frances continue to communicate with Reggie after all that had happened? There are complicated reasons. For a start, she’d known him virtually since childhood. He’d shown her things, taken her to exciting, exotic places that were way beyond the experience of any other young girl in that environment. Consider too that there had always been a certain intimacy between them, forged at the beginning through his time in prison, when he would have been at his most vulnerable, reaching out to her from captivity.

  Frances had, in a sense, defied her parents, married him against their wishes. So there was already a huge conflict which must have also pained her, left her feeling guilty, because she loved her family. She didn’t want to be at war with them. Yet she was trapped. She wasn’t capable of moving on, going to live in another part of the city, picking up the pieces of her life: financially she wouldn’t have been able to support herself, and emotionally she was too frail to make such a huge leap of faith.

  Frances, for all her beauty, wasn’t a party girl or someone who’d artfully use men as a means of getting what she wanted, and Reggie recognised this. It was the combination of Frances’s beauty and innocence, quite different from the other women he had around him, that had drawn him in at the beginning. And, of course, if she did attempt to ‘escape’ there was always the threat – which Frances believed – that the Kray network could seek anyone out, no matter where they went. Let alone what they could do to their family.

  Conversely, nice Reg, the polite, caring, considerate man who wanted to bring the moon to her doorstep when sober, was still turning up at Ormsby Street nightly – and he was the only man who had ever been in her life.

  Both of them had strong family loyalties – a hallmark of East End life back then – and neither was remotely capable of breaking away from those ties. So despite all the turmoil that had gone down between them, they wound up in this strange place of emotional dependency, neither together nor quite apart. And that is precisely where they remained…

  CHAPTER 9

  THE GIRL IN THE RED JACKET

  By the beginning of 1966, Ronnie Kray was convinced that the twins remained invincible. Reggie wasn’t quite so delusional yet and the club, El Morocco, was doing well. Their protection rackets
still brought in the cash. The various frauds they got involved with were mostly lucrative.

  Yet Ronnie’s illness, as usual, created a terrible unpredictability. The drugs he took couldn’t keep him stable. As winter ended, he went into a deep, black depression. It got so bad he returned to live at Vallance Road so that Violet could keep an eye on him.

  This might have been helpful – had it not been for a chance remark from one of Ronnie’s associates who was visiting him at Vallance Road.

  The man was probably trying to curry favour with Ron. That was how it went with the twins, tiny morsels, titbits of information were passed on to them all the time; a verbal Twitter feed where the consequences could be lethal. On hearing that a minor East End villain called George Cornell had been seen in a local pub, the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel High Street, a horrific scenario ensued.

  Effectively, George Cornell was an old adversary of Ron’s from many years earlier. On one occasion, Cornell had beaten Ronnie up very badly, something Ron would never forget. Nor had he overlooked a more recent story told him by another henchman, which was that Cornell had been overheard calling Ronnie ‘a fat pouf’.

  Paranoid and hyperactive, the news that Cornell was close by sent Ronnie into a frenzy. In his crazed mind he was consumed by the fear that Cornell was out to kill him – so he decided that he’d better sort him out once and for all.

  Within a short space of time he’d retrieved his 9mm German army Luger automatic from its hiding place under the floorboards. Then he and Reggie went for a drink at the Lion Public House in Stepney. As they left the pub, Ronnie propelled two of his minders, Ian Barrie and John ‘Scotch Jack’ Dickson into a car en route to the Whitechapel Road and in the direction of the Blind Beggar. Once outside the pub, Ron alighted, told the others he would only be a few minutes and asked Ian Barrie to go into the pub with him.

  It was early evening, 9 March, and the Blind Beggar was half empty. Cornell was seated at the bar, his first pint of the night on the counter before him.

  And it was all over in a matter of minutes.

  Ian Barrie strode into the pub, firing a warning shot at the pub ceiling. Behind him, holding his gun, came Ronnie. He marched up to Cornell and shot him at point-blank range, directly into his forehead. As the victim tumbled to the floor, Barrie and Ron marched out and into the waiting car and were driven off into the night; a completely senseless crime.

  When Ron, on a distressingly manic high from the killing, told his twin what he’d done, Reg went potty. All his hard work had been for nothing. His worst fears were coming true: his brother had committed the ultimate crime, which would drive everything they’d achieved away from them. And it would directly propel them into a prison cell for life. (Had Ronnie killed Cornell a year or two beforehand he’d have faced the hangman’s noose – the death penalty for murder was only abolished in England in November 1965.)

  Later, when they all continued drinking in a pub in nearby Walthamstow, a news item came on about the shooting in the Blind Beggar: the man who had been shot had died on the way to hospital.

  ‘That’s good,’ Ron said. ‘Dead men can’t speak.’

  Yet when Reggie had stopped cursing his brother, he still did what he always did: a well-organised mop-up job.

  He told Violet that if the police came to the house, to say nothing. He organised a local safe house for Ron to lie low in and got him there, with a minder to keep an eye on him. Then he made sure that all the witnesses in the pub knew exactly what would happen to them if they opened their mouths about what they’d seen.

  If he was already troubled by his obsession with Frances, his compulsion to be still in control of her life, even as her doorstep Romeo, the killing of Cornell seriously compounded all Reggie’s woes and fears. The Sheas, he reasoned, had already done their best to wreck his marriage. Now Ron had lost control and he would have to look out for him even more carefully or he’d drag Reg down with him. The madman was now in charge of the asylum.

  This was a pointless murder carried out by a homicidal schizophrenic. It wasn’t even a brutal attack in a darkened East London street. It had been played out on a stage – in full view of the pub’s staff and customers, witnesses to the senseless slaying. It could have been an open-and-shut case as far as the law was concerned. Everyone in the East End heard what had happened, the rumours and the stories spread like wildfire. Yet the witnesses, too terrified of Kray retribution to open their mouths, could not tell the police the truth about how, in a half-empty pub, George Cornell lay dying from a gunshot wound on the floor. They were sorry but they knew nothing.

  On 22 March, just under two weeks after the murder of George Cornell, Frances visited a firm of solicitors called Lowe & Company on Kingsland High Street, Dalston.

  The purpose of the visit was to legally change her married surname from ‘Kray’ back to her maiden name of ‘Shea’ by deed poll.

  I believe these two dates in March are connected. Frances and her parents would have heard all the gossip and stories about what Ron had done in the Blind Beggar. Being married to a criminal was bad enough, but being the wife of a man whose twin had committed murder – and seemingly got off scot-free – put everything on a different level. At least, Elsie would have argued, Frances would no longer be a Kray. Their name, therefore their reputation, would be rescued.

  Once she’d sorted this out, Frances made it known to Reggie that she wanted a legal end to the marriage. The marriage had not been consummated, therefore there were grounds for an annulment. Typically, on hearing this, Reg resorted to devious tactics. Okay, he said, he would handle the petition through his solicitors. He’d talk to them tomorrow.

  Of course, he did nothing to push this forward as she wished he would. Reggie Kray’s marriage annulled? For non-consummation? No way. Bad for the image. He didn’t even dare to think what Ronnie’s reaction would be.

  Yet the death of George Cornell, while not directly connected to Reggie, told the Shea family, in no uncertain terms, that what they were dealing with had now gone way beyond anyone’s control, including the law. The name change was merely a sad attempt to disassociate themselves from it all, to save the family from being besmirched by the twins’ reputation.

  In the end, alas, this didn’t work: Reggie Kray was far too cunning, as future events would demonstrate.

  There were other consequences as a result of the Cornell killing. That summer, there was a noticeable decline in the twins’ fortunes. As much as Ronnie loved reliving the moment when he shot Cornell – there are ugly stories that he told people he reached orgasm when he pulled the trigger – and while he had convinced himself that his status as a gangster was now elevated by the murder, not everyone that did business with the twins saw it the same way. He’d pushed the boundaries way too far.

  Some of the twins’ valuable ‘minding’ contracts with club owners ended abruptly – with a big payoff, of course. Other business started to drain away.

  Ever mindful of their reputation, Ron started to scheme, to dream up ways to retrieve their standing, show themselves to the world as a force for good again. Yet again, his fantasy world took over. And in the midst of all this, Reggie ran between the two situations, trying to cope with Ronnie’s mania and worrying about the health of his estranged wife.

  Despite all his efforts – he’d even persuaded her to take a short weekend trip with him, that spring, to Devon, where they visited the twins’ old friend Frank Mitchell in Dartmoor prison – Frances remained, as she had been for some time, extremely nervous. There were bad headaches and frequent spells of bleak depression. She was now more or less dependent on her medication. The smallest thing could upset her, have her reaching for her packet of pills, legally prescribed by the doctors and now a consistent feature in her life. She was in a bad way.

  This visit to Mitchell, or ‘The Mad Axeman’ as the press eventually dubbed him, took place partly out of Reg’s loyalty to a fellow crim but also because Ron had begun to draw up a plan designed to
restore themselves in the world’s eyes as good guys.

  Put simply, the plan was to help Mitchell escape from Dartmoor, get him into hiding in London and then, via the huge publicity their involvement in his escape would attract, their efforts would convince the authorities to release Mitchell. The former convict would then be free – and the world would know the twins could do virtually anything they wanted. It would enhance their prestige, give them even more power.

  The crazy plan, which preoccupied Ron throughout 1966, did eventually culminate in a very public and almost laughably easy escape from Dartmoor. However, it went badly wrong after that – resulting in the killing of Frank Mitchell. Once in hiding, Mitchell had proved difficult to control. Tragically, this resulted in his ‘disappearance’, by order of the twins, on Christmas Eve 1966.

  The police were never able to prove, beyond doubt, the full details of Mitchell’s slaying. The body was never found. In 1996 Freddie Foreman admitted in his biography, Respect, that he and another gunman, Alfie Gerrard, had killed Mitchell, as a favour to the twins. In 2000 he repeated his confession in a TV documentary.

  Because Foreman had already been acquitted of the deaths of both Mitchell and Tommy ‘Ginger’ Marks, in the sixties, under the former double jeopardy rule (an English law that meant at that time that no one could be tried twice for the same crime) he was not prosecuted for the Mitchell crime, nor was there sufficient evidence to prosecute him for perjury.

  But all this lay ahead. Frances’s problems had clearly worsened dramatically. In June 1966, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward at the then Hackney Hospital in Homerton High Street. (The Hackney, which was closed down in 1995, was one of the largest NHS general hospitals in London at the time.) Frances had already seen a psychiatrist at the Hackney Hospital the year before as an outpatient. But now the psychiatrist had decided it would be better for her if she was treated there as an inpatient.