by Rita Smith
THIS IS A CARLTON BOOK
Design copyright © 2008 Carlton Books Limited
Text copyright © 2001 Peter Gerrard, Joe Lee and Rita Smith
Illustrations copyright © 2001 Peter Gerrard, Joe Lee and Rita Smith, unless otherwise stated
This edition published in 2008 by
Carlton Books Limited
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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of cover or binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition, being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978-1-78011-053-0
The twin’s cousins tell
their story for the first time
Joe Lee & Rita Smith
with Peter Gerrard, bestselling of the The Guv’nor
Dedication
RITA SMITH – In memory of my mum and dad, May and Albert Filler and for my children, David and Kimmy.
JOE LEE – To The Lee family who I’ve been proud to be a part of and my wife Ann. She probably kept me on the straight and narrow.
PETER GERRARD – To my wife Shirley whose honest criticism, editing skills and encouragement make my half of our partnership the easier option.
Contents
Introduction (Peter Gerrard)
1. The Southpaw Cannonball (Old Joe Lee)
2. Mother Lee (Old Joe Lee)
3. “Say hello to your brothers” (Joe Lee)
4. The “two-ones” (Rita Smith)
5. “They wouldn’t do anything like that” (Rita Smith)
6. The Double R (Rita Smith)
7. “Them Kray brothers” (Joe Lee)
8. The Firm (Joe Lee)
9. The Blind Beggar to Broadmoor (Joe Lee)
10. They never saw (Rita Smith)
Conclusion (Peter Gerrard)
Appendix (Reg’s letters to Peter Gerrard)
Index
Pictures
Introduction
Peter Gerrard
Ronnie Kray never tired of telling anyone who would listen that he was descended from a mixture of nationalities: Gypsy; Jew; German; Austrian; Irish; Dutch. No doubt he would have loved to add Sicilian to the list but this would have stretched an already overstretched truth. Reggie was more indifferent to the past but to Ronnie this colourful patchwork of ancestors set him apart, which was a state of affairs he strove for from an early age.
If he had had the inclination to study the past, he would have found that rather than set him and his family apart, these mixed-race origins were shared by most other East-Enders around him. For that part of London that lay to the east of the Tower had been first base for incoming communities since the 1700s.
Separating fact from romantic conjecture, it is family knowledge that Krays and Lees were in east London during the mid-nineteenth century. The great great grandparents on both sides seemingly arrived in the “land of plenty” around the late 1840s, which would fit into the history of what was happening in Europe and elsewhere around that time.
The London they disembarked into, from the decks of tall sailing ships, would barely change for at least another eighty years as far as social conditions for the working classes were concerned. Overcrowded streets seething with traders aside, the most powerful impression that would strike them would be the smell. As a boy fifty years ago I can remember days when the stink from the Thames at low tide was unbearable, and that was when the river was comparatively clean and I was some two miles away. A hundred and fifty years ago it was not only the river that polluted the air but the very streets. For at that time London had no system of underground drainage whatsoever and it would be another ten years before this was rectified. Until then Londoners continued to pour every conceivable type of waste into the open street-drains where it found its way into larger open channels before discharging into the Thames. Small wonder it was known as the “Venice of drains”. Many if not most of the stinking waterways that were turned into fetid drains were in earlier days rivers and streams, though people of the time might have been hard pressed to imagine them as anything other than the way they were. Though they have now disappeared inside brick culverts these medieval courses are still flowing under the feet of unknowing Londoners.
For those fortunate enough to have piped water in their homes or at least access to a standpipe shared by perhaps ten families, the advantage was tempered by the fact that the supply was only turned on for a couple of hours every other day. With no public services – and city government not to be established until 1888 – water was a commodity sold by a few private companies with no other thought than profit. For most, without this intermittent trickle, the alternative was to take all their liquid needs from those drains and small streams that carried the sewage. The only precaution taken against the filth and unimaginable debris that floated in the water was to fill a barrel one day and leave it overnight, by which time all the sediment would have sunk to the bottom leaving “clean fresh” water ready for use. Most must have been so immunized by this daily intake of microscopic disease that they were able to shrug off the worst effects of the contaminated water. But London’s other nickname,“Cholera City”, suggests that not everyone escaped so lightly.
The first thing our families would have to do, even before registering as aliens, would be to find some sort of accommodation. Now, when you allow that in Whitechapel, as an example, on each acre there lived in excess of 270 people, while in Hampstead one person per acre was the norm, they were going to face a problem. Their choice would be between a room in a common lodging house or a room in one of the hundreds of inadequate houses situated in courts, closes and blind alleyways.
At the turn of the nineteenth century the population of London was around the one million mark. Only fifty years later it touched two and a half million, with the highest proportion of inhabitants living in the east. Overcrowding was made even worse when thousands of residential properties within the city were torn down to make way for commercial outlets like offices and warehouses. To meet demand jerry-building outside the limits became rife, as London was cut up by new road and railway tracks.
Businessmen and artisans left their neat houses and fled to the suburbs. These inner-city properties were then divided and subdivided to the extent that, instead of sheltering one family, they became the single-roomed homes of ten families. But demand still outstripped supply so, without any planning or quality controls being in place, below-standard housing was thrown up on every available space, turning many areas into little more than shanty towns. Houses that were once airy and well ventilated became hemmed in and overshadowed by new buildings that began to deteriorate as soon as the last brick was laid.
Such was the value of every square foot, that the single entrance to perhaps twelve houses would be a narrow alley leading to a dark and sunless centre court that might never feel a breath of moving air. This area of twelve metres by nine would have three or four “privies” for the use of some sixty families, or between two and three hundred individuals.
Through no fault of the tenants these “rookeries”, as they were known, were manufactured slums from day one, and as such were mirrored throughout east London. A room for your family in such a place would set you back 8d. per night. A basement cellar, though it was illegal to let them out, could be had for 4d. However, since they lay six or seven feet below overflowing drains, the streets mig
ht have been seen as a preferable option. The fact that there were laws against letting out cellars shows that the authorities at least tried to keep standards up. Overcrowding too was illegal, and constables would regularly check out lodging houses to make sure the law was upheld. But there were many ways, not least a shilling for the “peeler” every now and then to look the other way, of avoiding the law, which most must have done because little changed for over a hundred years.
So why would any family wish to settle in an area that was the lowest sinkhole of poverty in England? The simple answer was that the alternatives were far worse.
Ireland, where the Lees came from, was suffering one of the worst human disasters of the nineteenth century – famine. Totally reliant on the potato for their staple diet, when the crop was wiped out by the blight, two million people died of starvation. The main meal of the Irish day was a pan of boiled potatoes placed in the centre of the table with a side serving of salt and a loaf of “boxty” bread, itself made from the humble “murphy”. Children took a baked potato to school in their pocket, and working men the same for their midday break. As the crop rotted in the fields and famine took hold, the British government turned a blind eye as the hundreds of dying turned into thousands, stating with reference to an earlier blight during 1841: “Once is an accident of nature – twice is your own folly.”
Faced with a bleak future or none at all, great-grandfather Lee, showing a fortitude that would be passed down through the generations, left behind his troubled homeland and set off for England.
The journey may not have been unfamiliar for, as a drover, he might often have been employed to take cattle to the English market by way of sailing ship over the Irish Sea. Even at the height of the great hunger English landowners were still exporting cattle out of Ireland. Once disembarked on this side of the water, he and others would drive the cattle into the city along the wide drove road of Whitechapel, an area he was perhaps familiar with, was the ideal place to escape to.
Europe was in turmoil in the early 1800s due to persecution and pogroms. These applied – as would be mirrored a hundred years later – to Gypsies, Jews, Poles, Russians and, for religious reasons, many Germans. Why the German family of Houghton were forced out of their homeland is not known, but one can assume that it was the possibility of death or displacement that saw them headed for England.
As happens today where ethnic groups congregate together in a strange land, the Houghtons settled in the German quarter of the East End.
The Kray origins are somewhat more obscure. The name is possibly the anglicized version of Krae or Kragh, both common German surnames, so one might assume they emigrated for the same reason as the Houghtons. Unless, of course, local conjecture about the Krays many years ago is true and they were in fact Roma or Gypsies. The dark and swarthy looks that were handed down to a lessening degree might have been the reason for suggesting this, but then as great-great-grandfather Kray married a Jewess this would also account for the looks.
Incidentally, the Christian name Reginald is from the old German and means “Power Force”, while the name Ronald is Norse, meaning “Decisive Ruler”. Knowing the character of the twins I think these names should have been transposed, though either way they would turn out to be extremely apt.
So these families, who would eventually merge into one and produce two of the most infamous people London had ever known, were settled into a new land, into a new city and into an area that contemporary outsiders saw as a place to fear, populated by the poorest of the poor – thieves, anarchists and criminals – but better this and life than the alternative they had fled from.
That these settlers raised families, who went on to produce the grandparents of the Krays and Lees, was a miracle in the face of statistics. Of all West End children born, 18 per cent would die before the age of five. In the polluted slums of the East End 55 per cent would die before the age of five, although in areas such as the Nichol it was not at all uncommon for 50 per cent of all children born to die before their first birthday, with 25 per cent of those who survived their first year dying before the age of five. The reasons for such a high infant mortality were many and varied.
Brought forth from mothers themselves weakened by malnutrition and disease, many babies were sickly from birth and had no resistance to the periodic waves of disease that were endemic in these living conditions. Cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria and meningitis were some of the serious illnesses they succumbed to. But, for babies that existed in an atmosphere so foul that the air was marginally fresher with the windows nailed shut, who never saw a shaft of sunlight, who shared their packing-box cradle with flies, bugs and vermin, the common cold was enough to snuff out their tentative hold on life. Those children who did manage to pass the five-year benchmark were often underweight, stunted by rickets and mentally backward.
People talk of “Dickensian” conditions to conjure up vivid pictures of the mean courts and alleyways inhabited by Oliver Twist and Fagin, as though that period when our early family might have passed the great man in their local streets was an isolated time, more fiction than fact. Yet as late as 1902, when the American author Jack London lived as one of the East End poor to write his People of the Abyss, nothing had changed. The two writers could have interchanged passages from their books and you would not have seen the joins.
One face of Victorian London, that sumptuous period so loved by BBC drama producers for its very visual sense of fashion, is represented by lofty dining rooms with tables groaning under the weight of excessive foods and wines, over-ornate draperies and fine yellow brick houses that all appear to front on to immaculate parkland. Yet only an imaginative stone’s throw away from the top hats and silk crinolines lay the obscene contrast of London’s East End ghettos.
Tower Hamlets is the collective name given to what were the separate hamlets of Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Mile End, Poplar, Limehouse, Radcliff, Stepney, Shadwell, Wapping and the Isle of Dogs. What in the late eleventh century were separate villages inhabited by no more than seven hundred peasants and effectively segregated from London by the city walls had become, by the eighteenth century, one unified mass, as housing extended from each until they were shoulder to shoulder.
These areas housed one third of the population of London. Their factories, docks, artisans and craftsmen serviced the city. Necessary but stinking trades – slaughterhouses, glue factories, rendering works and tanning yards that polluted the air and made life intolerable – were carried out within the residential areas of the workers, all overlaid with the sweet and sickly smell of yeast from the hundreds of breweries. Small wonder that those outside the boundaries of this stinking mass of humanity generally accepted that the only way its inhabitants could sink any lower was by dying. (Which, by virtue of their existence, they did with a regularity that made little difference to the overcrowding.)
There were no rich people in the East End, only levels of poor, and which category our families fell into we can only guess at.
In the late 1860s we know that great-grandfather John Houghton was a butcher, though it’s certain that he didn’t ply his trade from a tiled and chromed double-fronted shop. His workplace would have been in Aldgate and no more than a converted dwelling-house that would serve as both slaughterhouse and shop. The early morning scenes outside such places must have been chaotic. Terrified sheep waiting their turn until they were beaten and harried through the door toward the butcher’s axe, would mill frantically under the legs of cattle, passers-by and crowds of gawping children. Blood and urine would flow across the pavements, but apart from perhaps a lift of the skirts to avoid the gore, little notice would be taken. It was part of everyday life. Though if local vicar Samuel Barnett from St Jude’s had had his way, these “open peep shows” of horrible cruelty to dumb beasts would have been closed, to protect children from the moral consequences of witnessing such brutality.
Great-grandfather Lee would have added further mayhem to the streets, for as a dr
over his job was to drive the long-horned cattle from the docks or from further up country. Either way the latter part of the journey would be through the thronged streets of Whitechapel towards the abattoirs of Aldgate. Too often these semiwild cattle would run some unfortunate down or overturn carriages as their horns, at two feet long, became entangled in the spokes.
Their contemporary on the Kray side would have trodden these same roads into the East End as he followed his business as a horse trader – something which adds weight to the local suggestion that he was of gypsy stock, for this was traditional work among gypsy folk. As the main and only form of transport, good horses were in great demand. Even so, work would be intermittent with perhaps too many dealers vying for business.
Droving too was very lowly paid, but with a fortitude and an aptitude for extracting the most from any situation – a trait that seemed to pass down through the genes – these branches of the family would rank simply as poor.
John Houghton and his family, because of his trade if nothing else, would have eaten better than the average, though the fact that he lived and worked around the East End would have meant that until he bettered himself, as we know he did, he would initially not have lived any better than his neighbours.
At least our families were working and apparently in reasonable health. Take these two things away and the spiral downward would be swift and sure.
After the poor, who might have been classed as “well off ” by those below them, came the very poor. And below them came a stratum of people who lived their lives from crust to crust, too lowly even to be categorized. These people subsisted by carrying out tasks that only those on the borderline of starvation could consider. Like collecting “pure”, a Victorian euphemism for dog faeces, from the streets to sell to local tanneries for use in the tanning of hides – at one farthing a bucket. Scavengers paddling through drains and gullies often knee- or waist-deep in raw sewage searching for anything saleable; be it a coin, a bottle, rags, old iron or firewood – everything had a resale value. Mudlarks, as they were known, were the young boys and girls who scavenged similarly in the stinking mudflats of the river, eyes sharp for anything saleable. Dredgers or rivermen would haunt the shoreline and piers for the ever-present corpses of the drowned then, by dragging out these bloated bodies, secure themselves a small reward. Common practice then, and even up to present times, was that corpses found on the eastern shoreline would be boated across the river to where the southern authorities paid a few coppers more.