by Dick Kirby
But when they were conscripted into the Royal Fusiliers, the twins decided to take on the army. It was a fairly unwise course of action but it was symptomatic of the Krays. They went absent without leave time and again, assaulted non-commissioned officers and spent time in the glasshouse, until eventually they were court-martialled, sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment in Shepton Mallet Military Prison and ignominiously discharged from the army.
Following their release in 1954, and for the next two years, the twins busied themselves, seamlessly taking over the Regal Billiard Hall, whereupon the violence there ceased as quickly as it had begun. Later, the Green Dragon Club became theirs, and shortly afterwards, the Double R Club opened in Bow Road In between times, they worked protection rackets and became ‘thieves’ ponces’ – taking a percentage from the local criminals’ illicit takings.
Reg kept his closet bi/homosexuality under control, but not so his brother; Ron was openly gay and gathered around him a coterie of effeminate young men who became his eyes and ears. Known as ‘Ronnie’s Boys’, they collected and collated useful information for him. They were generally feared; to upset them could cause Ron to receive damaging false information which might be dealt with by a variety of weaponry, including red-hot pokers, a Ghurkha kukri (knife) or Ron’s favourite, a cutlass. This last had replaced the open razor, since Ron now believed it to be ‘babyish’, saying, ‘You can’t put no power behind a razor’.
The Krays’ gang was now increasing in size, and they recruited local tearaways who were looking for excitement; with Bobby Ramsey, they got it.
Robert Edward Ramsey, a former welterweight boxer, was the co-owner of the Stragglers Nightclub in Cambridge Circus. There had been some rowdy behaviour there, and Ramsey suggested to his partner, William ‘Billy the Fox’ Jones, that the twins might be able to offer a level of protection. This job suited the Krays down to the ground – not only would they have extra revenue coming in and be able, almost legitimately, to beat up troublemakers, but it also provided them with an avenue into the nightlife of the West End.
The trouble at the Stragglers soon abated, but trouble linked with Ramsey was now coming from a different quarter. ‘The Watney Streeters’ were a disorganized gang of East End dockers who did not really represent a threat to the Krays. But trouble erupted between Billy Jones and one of the Watney Streeters named Charlie Martin, and Jones came off worse. The following night, Ramsey beat up Martin, and two nights after that, Charlie Martin and a considerable contingent of the Watney Streeters attacked Ramsey, punching, kicking and beating him with an iron bar.
Although this was a private quarrel, the twins were affronted because it was known that they were affiliated to Jones and Ramsey; to do nothing would be seen as a sign of weakness, but matters went further than that. Charlie Martin had been running a scam which Ronnie had found out about and he demanded 50 per cent of the profits; and Martin’s payments had been dilatory, to say the very least. Therefore, Ronnie had decided to shoot him, and now (if any of Ronnie’s insane acts required justification) the assaults upon his two associates provided an excuse for what was about to occur.
In September 1956 ‘Ronnie’s Boys’ made enquiries and ascertained that Charlie Martin and others of Ramsey’s attackers were in the Britannia public house. Ramsey, driving his Buick, together with Jones and Reggie Kray and armed with a bayonet, a crowbar and a machete, roared down to the pub. The car behind contained Ronnie Kray, who was armed with a Harrington & Richardson ‘Young America’ double-action revolver chambered to fire five shots. This one was loaded with dum-dum bullets to cause the maximum damage to whomever they hit.
Perhaps Charlie Martin possessed a sixth sense (or more likely, he heard the screech of the cars’ brakes) but he and his companions fled out of the pub’s back door, leaving their drinks on the bar. And perhaps Ronnie Kray believed that Terry Martin, one of the four remaining people in the pub playing cards, was his adversary’s brother, or perhaps he didn’t care, but when he screamed, ‘Come outside, or we’ll kill you here!’ it was Terry Martin who was dragged outside, where Ramsey kicked him and stabbed him twice in the back of his head with the bayonet – the wounds required eight stitches – and in his shoulder. Both the twins were involved in the assault; Reggie’s jacket was soaked in blood.
The attackers left; there were still the rest of the Watney Streeters to be found and dealt with – and there was still Charlie Martin to be shot. As soon as the coast was clear, Terry Martin’s companions conveyed him to hospital.
‘I was an aid to CID working out of Limehouse’, George Taylor told me, adding that at that time he and his partner, PC Freddie ‘Mexy’ Gamester, were night-duty CID which meant that they patrolled the whole of ‘H’ Division. ‘A call came to the station indicating that a man had been admitted to the London Hospital suffering serious stab wounds. Fred and I went to the hospital and Fred persuaded the doctors to let him speak to the victim. The information gained led us to believe that the Krays were involved and the wounding had occurred outside a pub known as “The Ash Bucket” somewhere near Arbour Square.’
Taylor and his companion searched the area and found the Buick, which Taylor knew from a previous enquiry belonged to Ramsey, close to a billiard hall. Inside were Jones, Ramsey and the Krays – a search of the car revealed the miscellany of weapons and a search of Ronnie Kray revealed the mercifully unused revolver.
‘Careful with it’, entreated Ronnie. ‘Can’t you see it’s loaded?’
Charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm, the four appeared at Thames Magistrates’ Court. William Hemming appeared for Reggie Kray and requested bail, saying, ‘One witness said both twins entered the public house while another said it was only one twin.’
‘The difficulty is to know which one to give bail to’, sighed the magistrate, Leo Gradwell, and to be on the safe side he remanded everyone in custody.
But now something went badly wrong – for the gang, that is. Terry Martin and the witnesses could not be straightened. At the Old Bailey, although Reggie Kray’s initial explanation of the bloodstains on his jacket (‘I ’ad a nosebleed’) was changed to the possibility of blood being sprayed over him whilst watching boxers sparring, that, together with some clever defence work regarding the identity of the twins, was sufficient to bring about an acquittal in his case.
‘A small dispute arose at the trial over the distance the car containing the weapons was from the billiard hall’, George Taylor told me. It was a matter not previously discussed by him and Fred Gamester. ‘I think I said about 200 yards; when the same question was asked of Fred, he replied, “As far as you could throw a cricket ball”. After a short discussion, the judge (Sir Gerard Dodson) suggested we move on!’
Doc Blasker, who had a surgery in Docklands, could usually be relied upon to remove bullets and insert sutures without necessarily informing the authorities and he had known the twins from his days as an Amateur Boxing Association doctor. He was now called upon to provide a character reference for Ron, as was a local member of the clergy. Both were given short shrift by the judge.
So although Reg was free of the toils, the other three were not; and after Ronnie admitted unlawful possession of a loaded revolver, on 5 November 1956 he and Jones were each sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Ramsey’s past now caught up with him. Although he had won thirty of his seventy-four bouts, he had received a pasting from Gillie van der Westhuizen during his final bout on 29 April 1947 in Johannesburg and at a loose end, still in South Africa, met up with Billy Hill. They had got involved in a fight, during which Ramsey had attacked his victim with a knife and a razor, slashing the back of his head and his buttocks which required the insertion of ninety-four stiches. Then, after Hill had skipped bail, Ramsey had been sentenced to five months’ imprisonment – now he was sentenced to seven years.
Ramsey really was unlucky; he had already been knifed by Frankie Fraser and later would be savagely beaten up by his codefendant, Ronnie Kray – the reasons
for both attacks are unclear. It’s only slightly amazing that he managed to outlive both the twins and died aged eighty-four in 2004.
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Ronnie commenced his sentence at Winchester Prison but was later certified insane and transferred to Long Grove Hospital. Meanwhile, Reggie and brother Charles were running the Double R Club and making a resounding success of it. The club started welcoming celebrities: Dame Barbara Windsor, Jackie Collins, Queenie Watts. But Ronnie’s plight pricked Reggie’s conscience; being certified insane meant his brother might never be released. Instead of deciding this might be a blessing in disguise, he swapped places with Ronnie during a visit to the hospital; and during his six months of liberty, with Doc Blasker liberally supplying him with pills, the family finally and irrevocably came to the conclusion that Ronnie was not only as mad as a box of frogs but highly dangerous as well. Eventually, they gave him up to the despised police. He was not re-certified but was transferred back to prison and, now heavily dependent on Stematol, released in the spring of 1959.
As probationary Police Constable 398 ‘N’, John Simmonds (later, head of the City of London’s CID) patrolled the streets of Stoke Newington during the late 1950s. He and other uniformed officers were requested by the CID to report back on any activity in and around premises owned by local villains, so when he was passing such places he would take the opportunity to chat to the occupiers and, in police parlance, ‘give his eyes a treat’. There was a spieler – an illegal gambling club – in Amhurst Road often used by taxi drivers, and Simmonds noticed that it was also frequented by ‘two rather dapper brothers’ who had moved into a block of art deco flats in Cazenove Road and who drove a large black limousine. As he told me:
One night duty, I saw the limo drawing away from the club so I decided to pull them. The driver had all the correct documents and they drove off; his name was Kray.
A few days later, I was walking past the house of an old taxi cab driver I had got to know and he called out to me and asked me if I had pulled the twins, the other night. I didn’t fall in straight away and then I realized he was talking about the black limo. I admitted I had stopped them and he said they were very angry about it. I expressed surprise, as I said to him they were very polite and I thought we had parted on good terms. He said, ‘Maybe to your face, but you want to watch them; they’re nasty people’. He used the spieler and obviously knew more than he was going to tell me.
Left to their own devices, Reg and Charlie could have stayed successful businessmen; crooks, certainly, but the violence could have been kept to a minimum. They had proposed an alliance with Albert Dimes and the Clerkenwell Italians which, given Dimes’ contacts with the US mafia, would have provided them with a toehold in the West End club scene. Ronnie ruined any such hopes at the first meeting he attended with his brothers, telling their proposed partners that he didn’t need any help from ‘a bunch of cheap Italians’; it looked as though plans for a profitable nightclub scene were going straight out of the window.
‘Curly’ King, one of many known as ‘The King of the Teddy Boys’, suggested to Ronnie, when referring to his skills at getting an attack force together, ‘You’re just like a colonel.’ Surprisingly for someone who despised the army so much, Ron decided that he liked the nickname and he was referred to thus ever after.
In the summer of 1959 Ronnie demanded a senseless confrontation with the Watney Streeters at the Hospital Tavern pub; he got one, and Reg was with him as side-by-side they lashed out with knives, knuckledusters and bicycle chains. The Watney Streeters were routed, and when the police arrived to survey the bloodspattered scene of broken glass, tables and chairs, the Krays had vanished; there were no arrests.
With the twins’ lifestyle spiralling out of control, Daniel Shay, a car dealer who was beholden to the Krays, purchased an expensive briefcase from a shopkeeper named Murray Podro. Within a few days he returned, told Podro he had been overcharged and demanded £100 – that or a cutting in default. Podro informed the police, who were waiting two days later when Shay returned in company with Georgie Osbourne and Reg, who head-butted Podro in the face to reinforce the demand.
The Recorder of London, Sir Gerald Dodson – who had previously sentenced Ronnie to three years and had seen Reg acquitted – made Reg Kray’s acquaintance once more at the Old Bailey. For the offence of demanding money with menaces, which carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, and knowing something of the Kray family’s background, Sir Gerald dealt with the matter quite leniently – eighteen months’ imprisonment each for Reg and Osbourne, three years for Shay. And with Reg safely tucked up in Wandsworth, this left Ron to do whatever he pleased.
*
In fact, Ron did not do very much. He dreamed his dreams of running an army of thugs throughout London and smoked incessantly; the profits from the Double R Club plummeted.
Reg, meanwhile, met two characters in Wandsworth who would later figure prominently in his and Ron’s life. The first was Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, then serving seven years for robbery; the other was Frank ‘The Mad Axeman’ Mitchell, a huge, simple-minded, keep-fit fanatic with a ferocious temper, now serving a life sentence.
Appealing against his conviction, Reg was released on bail and with Ron made himself busy. They fell out with Perec ‘Peter’ Rachman, the slum landlord, and after he neglected to contribute to the Kray finances, his thugs were methodically beaten up. Johnny Hutton, a car dealer, introduced them to Leslie Payne – owing to his financial ability he would become known as ‘Payne the Brain’ – and they took over Esmeralda’s Barn, a nightclub with a gaming room and restaurant in Wilton Place. They also found time to make their presence felt in the Pen Club murder before Reg’s appeal failed and he went back to Wandsworth to serve the remaining six months of his sentence.
Ron was no businessman; he unwisely allowed credit to gamblers, and with violence creeping in, many of Esmeralda’s Barn’s clientele left to go elsewhere. Not that the club was losing money; a discotheque had been added, brother Charlie was assisting in the management and Ron, living in a pederast’s heaven, was up to his armpits in dewy-eyed young men with long lashes. Then matters began to go badly wrong between the twins. Reg fell in love with a girl.
The object of his affections was Frances Shea; at sixteen, she was eleven years younger than Reg. She was completely unworldly, Reg was totally smitten and Ron loathed her on sight. Her father had run the gambling at the Regency Club in Stoke Newington in which the twins had an interest.
It was at this club that Mike Bucknole, then a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old police cadet, noticed the door lock was broken; when he looked inside he was confronted by a well-dressed, well-built man. Bucknole asked if he was the owner, and the man replied that he was. Bucknole now takes up the tale:
[The man told me], ‘We’re not open, we’ve come to fix it and we’re having a meeting’. I could see across the entrance hall that others, seated at a table, all ‘hardened types’, were now glaring across the room at me.
‘Don’t I know you?’ said the first man. ‘I saw you at York Hall a few weeks ago, didn’t I? Don’t you box for the Old Bill?’
He was right, as just before Christmas, I’d boxed for the Metropolitan Police at York Hall, Bethnal Green on a Repton Boxing Club night.
‘I remember you, you got some promise, you had a right paste-up with a tall boy from Brixton, enjoyed it, gutsy fight.’
‘Thanks’, I said.
Then one of the seated types, named Reg, said, ‘Leave it Ron, he’s a lightweight kid’, to which I replied, ‘No, mate, I box at light middleweight!’
They all laughed and I left.
Recounting the tale back at Stoke Newington, Bucknole was told the identity of ‘Ron’ and ‘Reg’ and advised to keep out of the Regency club in future!
But business was booming: more clubs in the West End were being minded by the Krays, long firm frauds were perpetuated, foolish and vulnerable people blackmailed. At the same time, the twins were busying themsel
ves with charities: boys clubs, old peoples’ homes and hospitals. Hardly a week went by without the East London Advertiser proclaiming their ‘generosity’. This was a fallacy – others contributed to the charities, not the Krays. And all the time they were surrounding themselves with more and more celebrities from the world of politics, show business and sport.
But now cracks were beginning to appear in the façade. Esmeralda’s Barn had started losing money and soon it closed; Ronnie’s violent behaviour was getting worse, with brandings and knifings, not that that concerned him. He had his newly established flat at Cedra Court, Walthamstow, where he threw wild parties. They were attended by the good and the great and the old and bold – and also a peer of the realm by the name of Lord Boothby.
When the Sunday Mirror proclaimed, ‘PEER AND A GANGSTER: YARD ENQUIRY’ in July 1964, it was hinted that the Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson KBE, was conducting a witch-hunt against homosexuals, which he truthfully denied. Mirror readers were probably disappointed to discover that the photograph described as ‘THE PICTURE WE DARE NOT PRINT’, later published in the Daily Express, simply depicted Lord Boothby and Ronnie Kray sitting on a sofa, both fully dressed.
Boothby sued, stating, ‘I am not a homosexual’ (in fact, he was actively bisexual) and was awarded damages of £40,000; Ronnie Kray received just an apology.
But an investigation was conducted, not into homosexual practices but into the activities of the Krays. Detective Chief Superintendent Fred Gerrard was in charge and his assistant was the new Detective Inspector at Commercial Street police station, Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read.
Read, a three-times winner of the Lafone boxing cup, had joined the police in 1947 and was a tremendous all-round detective who had also carried out undercover work and had assisted with the investigation into the Great Train Robbery. He formed his own team, mainly from the ‘G’ Division Aids squad, and set to work investigating attacks carried out by the Krays, while working hard to uncover witnesses for their long firm frauds. Read had his successes; after six months’ work seventy people had been arrested and committed for trial – but the Krays were not amongst them.