by Hyams, Jacky
Later, after divorcing, Carol-Anne corresponded with Reggie and visited him for a few years. He frequently confided in her but she ended the friendship when she realised he was getting far too serious about their relationship.
‘He said he was scared of going to hell for what he had done in his life – and that given the chance, he’d have done things differently.
‘He said Frances was the most pure thing in his life and that part of him blamed his brother for what happened. It was a threesome, not a twosome.
‘“When you come from a very tight knit family, it’s very hard for other people to come in,” he said.
‘I didn’t see a monster. I saw a man who regretted everything,’ Carol-Anne told me.
Purity. It’s not a word you can easily connect with the Kray twins, is it? But from all that I had learned, Frances Shea died as she had lived in her brief marriage, a virgin bride.
She was certainly innocent of the world when Reggie met her as a schoolgirl. But by the time Frances decided to kill herself many years later, she’d seen and experienced far too much that was utterly shaming for a young girl who was already emotionally fragile: that very innocence itself, so appealing to Reggie, was brutally corrupted by her exposure to Reggie’s world.
Whether Reggie could not consummate the marriage because he preferred male sexual partners or because he simply could not bring himself to damage or defile that purity in any way has to remain an unanswered question. Most likely, it was a combination of both. Yet he succeeded in defiling Frances mentally, totally destroying her peace of mind – without any physical expression of love.
At the final count, the veil of sentimentality that Reggie Kray nurtured through his life around Frances is the last thing left to consider, some sense of his true motivation.
He insisted that she should be buried in her wedding dress and had this poetic inscription by William Shakespeare engraved on her grave: ‘If I could write the beauty of your eyes/ And in fresh numbers number all your graces/ the age to come would say “this poet lies”/ such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces’. These gestures do not seem, at first glance, to be anything other than hugely sentimental ways to mark the passing of a much-loved woman.
Or are they?
Consider the insistence that Frances had to be buried as a virgin bride: pure, untouched. There is dramatic symbolism in that: virginity before marriage is no longer an ideal in much of Western culture today, yet it still carried some meaning in Britain half a century ago.
Yet the idea of the virgin bride, pure and untouched forever IN THE TOMB would have had immense appeal to Reggie: it was his bride, his tomb. Again, this was about total control, the same control he exercised so thoroughly by scooping up all her possessions – and even buying the freehold to the plot on which she was buried.
But surely the Shakespeare sonnet on her memorial stone is a relatively innocuous, fitting tribute to Frances’s beauty?
It is. But only at first glance.
Until you realise that William Shakespeare wrote the sonnet, ‘Sonnet 17’, as an ode to procreation, to having children (as he did the preceding sixteen).
Knowing how much time Reggie Kray put into reading poetry, the Bible and so much else in prison, he’d have surely known about the history of that particular Shakespeare sonnet – and for whom it had been written.
The sonnet, you see, had not been penned by Shakespeare for a much-loved woman at all.
It had been written as an ode, a dedication to someone who had inspired the writer.
An ode to an exceptionally beautiful young man…
Ronnie and Reggie in the late forties: talented teenage boxers – yet a very different fate awaits them.
(© Getty Images)
March 1965: the twins’ mother, Violet, and their grandfather, ‘Cannonball’ Lee, greet them in Vallance Road after their release following the Hew McCowan trial.
(© Getty Images)
The twins and their older brother, Charlie: jailed for his part in their crimes, Charlie never aspired to follow their path of violence and intimidation.
(© Getty Images)
1965: the couple pose for the cameras after the Hew McCowan trial with Mitzi, the dog Elsie Shea refused to have in the house; weeks later, they were man and wife.
(© Pat Larkin/Associated Newspapers/REX)
April 1965: Frances arrives at the church with her best man, brother Frankie Shea. Frankie lived to regret his youthful relationship with Reggie.
(© Daily Mail/REX)
Just married: leaving the church in Bethnal Green.
(© Daily Mail/REX)
Outside the church, flanked by friends and family. Violet Kray is on the extreme left and just behind Reggie are Charlie’s wife, Dolly, and behind her Elsie Shea.
(© Jack Manwaring/Daily Sketch/REX)
The wedding reception at the Glenrae Hotel, Finsbury Park.
(© Getty Images)
Frances and Reggie on honeymoon in Athens – unhappy and tense after the wedding night that never was…
(© Newsteam)
El Morocco, April 1965: amidst a sea of celebrity-strewn glamour, Frances (far right) stares ahead bleakly. Next to Frances are Reggie’s mother, Violet, and Charlie’s wife, Dolly, with actors Adrienne Corri and Victor Spinetti to the right of Reggie. Reggie, his hand on actor Edmund Purdom’s shoulder, looks at his wife sadly.
(© Getty Images)
El Morocco, April 1965: unimpressed by actor Edmund Purdom’s attention, Frances reaches for her cigarettes. Newly returned from Athens, she’d already told Micky Fawcett that Reggie hadn’t laid a finger on her while they honeymooned.
(© Getty Images)
June 1967: Charlie and Reggie Kray leaving St Pancras Coroner’s Court in London after the inquest into Frances’s death.
(© Dennis Hart/Evening News/REX)
July 1997: thirty years later, Reggie’s second wife, Roberta, on their wedding day at HMP Maidstone, Kent.
(© Times Newspapers Ltd/REX)
Frances’s memorial stone at ‘Kray Corner’, Chingford Mount Cemetery pictured at foot of this page. Her parents fought to have her remains transferred to a different resting place – to no avail.
(© Alex Woods/REX) (pictured at foot of this page © Dean Houlding/REX)
The twins’ final resting place. Their legend lives on…
(© Dean Houlding/REX)
The gravestone of Frances’s beloved brother Frank Shea.
(© Jacky Hyams)
The doomed couple today. Frances (played by Australian actress Emily Browning) on her wedding day, and with Ronnie (Tom Hardy, who plays both twins) on the set of Legend, the forthcoming film about the Kray twins and their lives during the sixties.
(© Splash News/Corbis)
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Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: WAR BABIES
Chapter 2: A SCHOOLGIRL READING TENNYSON
Chapter 3: THE MAN ON THE DOORSTEP
Chapter 4: COURTSHIP
Chapter 5: THE GILDED CAGE
Chapter 6: PRELUDE TO A MARRIAGE
Chapter 7: THE WEDDING OF THE YEAR
Chapter 8: SPIRAL
Chapter 9: THE GIRL IN THE RED JACKET
Chapter 10: GRIEF
Chapter 11: AFTERWARDS
Chapter 12: THE LAST LETTER
Chapter 13: AN ENDING
Plates
By the Same Author
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