Inside the Kray Family

by Rita Smith

  How jealous he could be showed up early one evening when the three of us were at Vallance Road. We were outside my Auntie’s house and Frances went over to the sweet shop to get some cigarettes or something. As she came out of the shop two men said something to her and they all laughed. When she got over the road Reg wanted to know what they had said that was so funny and her without thinking said, “Nothing really, I just think they were trying to chat me up”.

  He went white, ran over the road and punched both of them to the ground, and carried on punching them as they lay there trying to cover their faces. Once we were back indoors he took his bloodstained shirt off, gave it to me and asked me if I’d wash it in cold water before the blood dried. Frances said, “No don’t you, you’re not his mother”. So soft touch me said I’d do it, but even then she said to me, “Don’t you. Make him do it himself – he was the one who got it messed up.” This showed he was jealous but it also shows that she wasn’t as under his thumb as a lot of people seem to think.

  No matter how much Charlie tried to prop it up, the Double R had closed after Ronnie let the place go while Reg was in prison. They had taken over Esmerelda’s Barn, so Frances would have spent night after night in its smoky atmosphere with nothing else to do but look pretty. Days would be spent in the company of lots of men, and if they went to Vallance Road there was always Ron and she said he made her feel uncomfortable. She got herself a job after Reg went back to prison, but as soon as he came out he made her give it up, so more and more she was finding excuses to stay at home. But as I’ve said, Reg could be persuasive and in the end she said she’d marry him.

  Because he’d been a good family friend all our lives and helped the twins out of trouble more times than they’d like to remember, Father Hetherington was Reggie’s only choice for someone to perform the ceremony. Hindsight is unfair because it allows you to read all kinds of things into the past, but what did the Father see in the future when he said he wouldn’t do it? He wasn’t our local priest any more because he’d moved to another parish, but Reg was quite happy to get married outside Bethnal Green – that wasn’t a problem. Reg told me that he’d said he didn’t approve of this marriage and left it at that. But I can’t believe Reg would’ve accepted that without there being a good reason, so I feel that something was said that he kept to himself.

  Either way, our local man said he would do it and the wedding took place in the spring of 1965 at St James’s in Bethnal Green Road. Whenever I look at the photos from the day I’m always struck by the body language. Charlie in the background as usual, but Ron and Frances turning their bodies away from each other.

  Whether it was “typical man” or just Reg, once the honeymoon was over things changed for the worse and not many months later Frances left the flat they had in Sussex Gardens, not far from Hyde Park. Every time Reg sat in my flat with tears in his eyes, asking why she didn’t love him, I’d try and tell him a girl needed more out of life than gold rings and chains. Then he’d start talking of the big house he would buy in the country with ponies for the kids and everything, as soon as this was sorted or that was cleared up. I’m sure he meant it at the time, but by the time he did it would be too late for Frances.

  When I think how stubborn, obstinate, strong-willed or just pigheaded Reg could be, I was amazed at the patience he took to win Frances back. Night after night he’d stand outside her window telling her how much he loved her and pleading for a second chance to make things right. He could make the toughest men shake with fear and this little girl with the big eyes had him at her feet. Mind you, I know from experience that a man will say anything when he wants to get his own way, but I’d learned this the hard way. Frances would have to find out for herself when she finally gave in.

  Reg rented a flat right next door to Ron in Cedra Court, and her life went right back to where it was before she left. More and more, Reg started asking me to spend time with her as though he didn’t want her to be left on her own. Their flat was beautiful with rugs and furniture of quality I’d never seen in my life. I used to take Kimmy and David with me when I visited her, and being the age they were they climbed on chairs and spilt food and drink occasionally. Frances never turned a hair. “Don’t worry – it doesn’t matter,” she’d say after some little accident. She just didn’t care. What’s that song? “A Beautiful Bird In A Gilded Cage”. That could have been written with her in mind, and I didn’t envy her one bit.

  She had a maid to do all the cleaning so it’s not surprising a bit of mess didn’t upset her. All she had to do all day was buff her incredibly long fingernails. I’m not saying she was lazy or wouldn’t do anything – it was that Reg wouldn’t hear of her lifting a finger.

  Outside of that posh sort of environment she was a much happier person and what she really liked was to come and see us all at Vallance Road. For a while she could relax in ordinary homely surroundings, and then for a time we’d see little flashes of how she used to be.

  Just the other day a man named Johnny Squibbs said on national television that our family didn’t treat Frances very nice. I shouldn’t really answer such a stupid remark from someone I don’t remember being around Frances very much or from someone who was too cowardly to attack us while Reg was alive. But I will anyway. If we weren’t nice to her, why did she want to spend so much time with us? The truth is none of us knew how to be nasty to anyone. Even people who deserved to be disliked got treated with politeness, it’s just the way we were. But in Frances’ case, because she was always so vulnerable we went out of our way to let her know that we all loved her, hoping that by making her feel wanted it might help to throw off the terrible depressions she was going into more and more.

  I know that my conscience is clearer than most of the people who seem to be crawling out of the woodwork and trying to make a name for themselves with malicious accusations now the twins are gone.

  It would be easy to blame Reg and his lifestyle for the way she was, but she’d had problems with her nerves long before she met him. Her own mother admitted that on two occasions she had tried to kill herself in her very early teens. These may have been just cries for help, but still it goes to show something was wrong. I can only think that it wouldn’t have mattered who Frances had married – the end result would’ve been the same. It didn’t help that she didn’t like most of his friends, and that there were all kinds of things going on with the twins. Like them who saw all kinds of bad things between their mum and dad but kept it locked in their heads, I wonder if she was in the same position.

  She’d never talk about it, but she must have overheard many conversations between Reg and Ron that for a young highly strung girl would’ve been quite frightening, because by now it was an open secret that Ronnie had killed George Cornell in the Blind Beggar. The police might not have had any proof that Ron was involved, but Mrs Cornell came to Vallance Road one night and smashed Auntie Violet’s windows, then stood in the road screaming that she was the mother of a murderer. My mum went flying out and told her to clear off and when she wouldn’t, Mum gave her a couple of punches. I think she felt sorry for the woman afterward, but there was no way she could stand by and see her sister abused like that.

  As it turned out Cornell’s wife was right about what she had been shouting, but at the time my auntie didn’t believe a word of it so couldn’t understand why she was being attacked. The twins were away on holiday but when they came back they were really furious with what Mrs Cornell had done to their mother so they had the caravan she lived in burnt to the ground.

  About this time we all got letters from the council informing us that the whole area was under a compulsory purchase order and that we were to be rehoused. None of us owned the properties so from the point of view of renting, all it would mean to us would be that we’d be paying our rent to a different landlord. But from an emotional view it was going to be a terrible wrench for all of us.

  Each house was small, decaying, damp and overrun with rats and mice, but every brick held a
memory. I’d lived there for twenty-seven years. I couldn’t remember ever living anywhere else, although Mum and Dad didn’t actually move in until I was three years old. My little Kimmy was exactly the same age at that time as I had been when we arrived and now we were going to have to move out.

  Auntie Violet was the first to go, and if you’d seen our tears you’d have thought she was emigrating instead of going a short bus ride to a flat in Bunhill Row. Until it was our time to go I think my eyes filled up every time I passed the front door of 178.

  Next were Nanny and Grandad and they were virtually carried kicking and screaming to a lovely little maisonette in Cheshire Street.

  Mum went to Charles Dickens House in Mansford Street, and I got the upper part of a maisonette in Blythendale House in Hackney Road. Below me was Jenny Crossley, and eventually I would bless the day we became neighbours.

  In a matter of months we were all settled in these clean modern homes with inside toilets, modern bathrooms and kitchens – and not a mouse in sight – but life wasn’t the same.

  We had become a small example of what was happening right through the East End. Families the same as ours were separated from friends and neighbours they’d lived and shared their lives with for, in some cases, seventy or eighty years. It tore the heart out of the part I knew – Bethnal Green – and it was the end of an era.

  Eventually I got myself an exchange and moved into the flat under my mum’s because I missed her so much. But before that whenever I visited her we’d sit and look out of the window down to the empty site that used to be our homes, and say to each other “D’you remember this? D’you remember that?” and it was quite sad. Mum was always waiting for a letter from the council that would tell her that when they’d finished building whatever was to go up on the site, she could move back over there – but it never came.

  When the fuss over that murder had died down the twins helped Frank Mitchell escape from Dartmoor and, as they’ve admitted since, eventually had him killed. But for years, even indoors with us family they could trust, they always said Frank had gone abroad and would turn up one day – but I can’t blame them for that.

  So with all these things going on in the background I suppose it made Frances’ nerves even worse than they were normally. And something she had confided to me in the strictest confidence would have made my nerves bad as well in the same circumstances.

  She said to me one day, “I know you’ll give me an honest answer, Rita, do you think I’m attractive to men?” It was a silly question really but I could see she was deadly serious, so the only obvious thing I could say was, “You’ve seen the way they look at you and every one of them is thinking you’re beautiful – but why are you asking me?” She said, “Reggie doesn’t come near me”. Naïvety again! I said, “Well, you know how busy he is with the clubs and everything else, but that’ll change when things slow down”. Her eyes filled up with tears and she almost whispered, “I don’t mean that, I mean he’s ... we’ve never actually done ... you know what married people do.” Then she started crying, asking me, “What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t he want to touch me?” I could see she was really upset so I said the first thing I could think of: “That sort of thing can affect any man if he’s worried or under stress. They can’t help it but it certainly doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to make love to you.” I’d obviously got it wrong because she said, “ Oh Rita, you don’t understand. I’m saying that he doesn’t touch me in any way, not just that.”

  I couldn’t get my head around what she was telling me. They’d been together for years and she was telling me that they’d never shared any intimacy whatsoever. Seeing her so heartbroken at what she saw as her failure as a woman, I couldn’t doubt what she said was the truth. But when I thought about it afterward I wondered if she was lying to me for the drama of it all, or that in her troubled mind she was somehow mentally rejecting herself.

  Ronnie’s sexuality had been out in the open for a long time and in different circumstances I might have considered that being twins Reg had the same tendencies. But I could think of a number of girls that he’d gone out with for a long time and the majority of them had been round the block more than once. In fact they were of a type that would have chucked him on the second date if he hadn’t performed his duty, so I’m sure there was never any question about his virility. He had loads of one-night stands and what he’d do was pick some girl up in the club, spend the night with her then walk out in the morning leaving us to make small talk with this person we’d never seen before. This would go on and on until Auntie Violet would say, “I think it’s time you went home now, dear. Reggie must have got tied up somewhere.” This wasn’t just once – it happened time and time again.

  I’m not a psychiatrist so I can only guess what was going on in Reg’s mind. But judging it from things they both said it strikes me that the only answer is that he put her so high on a pedestal that something as basic as the sex act would somehow spoil what he felt for her.

  At the inquest after her death the coroner broadcast to everyone in the court that he had discovered during the autopsy that she was still a virgin. The shock for me was that what she had said had been true all along. Now it was too late to give her a hug and tell her I was sorry that I hadn’t believed her when she was crying out for help and advice.

  She’d been under a Harley Street specialist for years and was always taking pills, but half the time I don’t think they did much for her. It only took the slightest upset to have her crying, then she’d reach for the pills, and I’m sure she didn’t keep count of what she was taking. Poor Reg didn’t know what to do for the best. They used to have blazing rows and most of the time she started them over something silly, but I’ve got to say that no matter what Reg did to other men, he never raised his hand to her once. I knew he wasn’t like that with women anyway, but I did ask her more than once if he hit her and she always swore that he never had, and she’d no reason to lie to me because we were very close.

  She’d been in hospital to try and get her medication sorted out once and for all, and when she came out she went to stay with her brother Frank for a little while. Her and Reg hadn’t broken up or nothing, but he was giving her a bit of space. Well, it goes to show that they hadn’t split up because they had arranged to go away for a couple of weeks’ holiday on the 8th June. He called into my flat quite early in the morning on the day they were supposed to be setting off and he wasn’t too happy.

  When I asked how Frances was he said, “Rita, I don’t even know if we’re going away today”. I asked him why not and he said, “Frankie was doing her nut yesterday because her hair’s gone all wrong and she said she’s not going out of the door looking like that.” Whether it was lacquer or dye Reg didn’t know, but her hair had gone all stiff or something, and that’s all it took for her to go into despair. Reg had told her it was no problem because it wouldn’t take a proper hairdresser twenty minutes to sort it out first thing in the morning. But nothing he seemed to say had any effect in calming her down so he left and went home.

  We had a cup of tea and he sat looking out of the window and didn’t speak for ages. Then he suddenly said, “There’s something wrong with Frankie”. I said, “We all know that but a nice holiday will make all the difference”. He stood up and paced around the room. “No, I mean now. Something’s not right.” Then he pulled his sleeve up and said, “Look, my arms have gone all goose bumps”. He sat down again staring at his arm for a couple of minutes, then jumped up shouting, “I’ve got to go,” and with that he practically ran out of the flat without even saying goodbye.

  He’d got me worried because though these flashes of telepathy, if that’s the word, were rare, they weren’t that unusual in our family and often came when something serious was happening. But as I couldn’t do anything else I put that out of my mind and started to give the kids their breakfast.

  The next time I saw Reg he was so grief stricken I thought he’d go out of his mind. He’d left my fla
t and raced over to Ormsby Street in his car and banged on the door. When he got no answer he broke a small window at the back, climbed in and found Frances dead in her bed. At the inquest they said it was suicide, but even after all these years I’m still personally convinced that it was as simple as taking one pill too many, especially with the drama she went through over her hair only hours before.

  They had only been married two short years. She was twenty-four years old with her whole life in front of her. Mixed up, confused, sometimes out of her depth in the world Reg had introduced her to and often frightened by emotions she felt but couldn’t control. Nevertheless, Reg loved her more than she could ever know. We all did. She was a lovely innocent girl who always looked on me as a friend and I missed her terribly.

  Some people have said that Reg turned her into a drug addict. She might have been as far as her medication went, but in no way was it down to him because he hated all drugs. When I was having awful problems with Ritchie and my marriage, the doctor had prescribed Valium to help me get through it. On a visit to Reg, who was serving his life sentence then, he studied my eyes for a while then said, “Are you taking something, Rita?” When I told him it was Valium 10, he took me by the hand and made me promise I’d throw them away as soon as I got home.

  Others have written that Frances was escaping from a violent and abusive marriage. But the worst, and something that hurt me very much, was the person that wrote a second hand story in our local paper claiming that Reg had sex with another woman while Frances lay beside them unconscious with drugs. This man knows who he is and he also must have known that this cheap publicity was a cowardly attack on a man who had been dead for less than a week and an insult to us family left behind. Time has passed since then, but I’m still so angry if I ever meet him in the street I’ll slap him.