Inside the Kray Family

by Rita Smith

  Even then he was funny without realizing it. An orderly came round with the menu card for dinner. All hospitals are the same – you choose from what’s on offer in the morning for your meal later on.

  So he’s said, “What you got then, gel?” The woman must have noticed that he only had one tooth in his head so as a joke said, “We’ve got best sirloin steak”. Well his eyes must have lit up at that because, like Uncle Joe, he really did enjoy his food.

  When a plate of boiled fish and mash turned up at five o’clock he kicked up a terrible fuss. It was a different orderly and while she was telling him that the fish was on the form, he’s telling her, “No, you’ve got it all wrong. I ordered steak.” He sulked for days after that. Another time he caused a scene when the nurse brought him a glass of Guinness to build him up. He’s shouting at the nurse, “Get that bleeding gut polish away from me. I won’t have it near me.”

  When he was given a medical examination the doctor commented to him that he had the insides of a man half his age. Grandad said, “An’ I’ll tell you why that is, I ain’t never been with no other women.”

  Mum brought him home so that she could look after him, but when he got worse she had to take him back to the hospital to die. Nanny wouldn’t have it that he was ill. She used to say, “Him? He’s as strong as old iron,” but he died on his birthday aged ninety-four, crying to come home and crying because he thought Nanny didn’t love him any more because she wouldn’t visit. He couldn’t understand that with her suffering from thrombosis, as much as she wanted to, she wasn’t able to travel.

  I used to think what a lovely example they were to young people who get divorced after a couple of arguments. For seventy years they stuck together through all kinds of hardships. She effed and blinded at him every day and he’d shrug it off with a “Gerrout of it,” but it never meant anything. He was loyal, proud and jealous, and I’ll always carry a mental picture of him singing to Nanny “Beautiful picture in a beautiful golden frame”. She always told him not to be so bleedin’ daft, but she loved it and knew he meant it.

  She went downhill after Grandad died, and was in poor health, but even so every now and then we’d see a spark of what she used to be. Like when she had an argument with a neighbour who was scrubbing her front doorstep at the time. Nanny picked up the bucket of dirty water and tipped it over the woman’s head. They weren’t parted for too long because she died within the year. A typical Lee, fighting to the end.

  My dad used to pass her house every day on his way to work and just glance over to see that everything was in place. On this particular morning he noticed all the lights on and the door wide open, so he stopped, went inside and found her collapsed on the floor. She was conscious and saying, “He done it – that’s him and his bleedin’ armchair, tripped me over he did”. Dad tried to tell her that Grandad was dead and buried but she wouldn’t have it. “No, he pushed that chair right under my feet and down I went.”

  In the late 1800s when Nanny grew up one of the worst things that could happen to you was to die a pauper. There might not have been enough money for food or clothes, but that seemed to have been less of a worry than whether there would be enough money to pay for a respectable burial. I know Nanny worried about this because she told me often enough, and with that in mind whenever the twins gave her a few pounds she salted some of it away in her handbag. That was her insurance and in the later part of her life it was never out of her sight.

  I really don’t know how Auntie Violet coped with the loss of her boys and the constant visits she made to different prisons. Since then the twins have both publicly admitted that they killed her, and that thought couldn’t have been easy for them because she was their world.

  I think the real blame lay with the newspapers and cowardly people who wrote horrible letters to her saying things like she was guilty of giving birth to evil monsters, or it was her fault they turned out like they did. Time after time she would come over to my mum’s clutching a letter or paper and breaking her heart. She couldn’t understand why she was being personally attacked, and no matter how many times we told her that she couldn’t have prevented what her sons did and that she’d been a good mother, nothing stopped the tears. One day after she’d read a letter in the papers from a woman saying that the twins’ mother should’ve killed them at birth, she was so distraught she almost walked under a bus.

  You see what I mean? The twins lived their lives exactly how they wanted. They did unspeakable things for their own satisfaction and never considered how it might affect anyone else. They never saw their tough old hero Grandad Lee with tears streaming down his face. They never saw the heartbreak caused right through our family and the families of the other men involved, and they never saw their mother hunched in a chair wracked with grief and sobbing uncontrollably.

  They’re seen as heroes by millions, but how heroic is it to inflict that sort of punishment on those you love. I’m not so sure they even considered or appreciated the efforts other people made in showing they weren’t forgotten. In their minds they were the victims and visits from family and friends were taken as something to be expected. From their point of view these visitors magically appeared in the prison and disappeared after a couple of hours.

  I wonder if they ever thought about what effort had gone on between the two? A journey of buses, trains or car might have started at five in the morning, and the same evening while they might be having a meal or watching television in the recreation room, their visitors were still trailing their way back to the East End in the rain or snow. I’m not saying any of us begrudged the time and we always looked forward to seeing them, but did they ever stop to think how all our lives had changed because of what they did?

  While they were in Parkhurst we spent our holidays on the Isle of Wight, just to be near them. That’s Mum, Dad, the kids and me. Blackpool or Margate might have made a change, but no – year after year we rented the same caravan and saw my cousins every day for the fortnight. It was our own decision to do it and my cousins would never have asked us to go to so much trouble for their benefit. We did it willingly but I doubt if the Isle of Wight would’ve been our first choice if they hadn’t been in prison there. What we were doing wasn’t normal visiting but we had an arrangement with the governor and knowing we were on holiday on the island he was kind enough to let us visit whenever we liked, within reason.

  You might think that in over thirty years of regular visiting we would’ve learned every secret and every hidden thought of those boys. But each one of them was the same as the one before. A kiss, a cuddle, endless cups of tea. How was the journey? Meet this friend, meet that friend, and questions and answers about family and old friends. Why they were inside or anything to do with their past life of crime was never mentioned, but then that sort of thing had never been discussed with us women – or for that matter any woman.

  Reg and Ron both had an uncanny knack of reading what was going on in your mind, and I suppose this sort of thing is less to do with clairvoyance and more to do with the dangerous atmosphere they lived in. I can remember asking Reg why he kept looking over his shoulder and he said, “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was doing it. There’s some funny people in here and it comes a habit to keep an eye on your back.”

  I’ve mentioned that Reg noticed that I was taking Valium, but another time, without saying what was on his mind in front of his Mum and mine, he asked me to revisit on my own. When I did he held both my hands and asked me what my problem was, because he could see or sense things weren’t as they should be. My problem was that my husband Ritchie was putting me through hell, but I couldn’t say that to Reg in case he passed the word to friends outside and had him seriously hurt.

  I hated Ritchie at that time for the way he was treating me, but I couldn’t live with the thought that I might be responsible for having him hurt just because of my complaining. I made some excuse about being under the weather with a woman’s complaint – something guaranteed to stop a man asking further
questions, but I knew he didn’t believe me. He said, “If it’s money, don’t worry because we won’t be in here many more years, and when we come out we’ll set up some little business. You and Kimmy will be with us and you’ll both get a nice wage.”

  It was never going to happen but I thought it was nice he thought that way.

  Another time when I took my David to see him he said, “David, I want you to promise your mother and your Uncle Reg that you’ll never get into any trouble. Nothing’s worth spending your life behind bars, so if you’re ever tempted just think how I’ve ended up.” In his own way he was saying that if he could turn the clock back he would’ve chosen another way of life – so even though it was too late he was more or less saying he did have regrets.

  It was the same with Uncle Charlie. He was upset by the way Ritchie was behaving and went after him. Not to do anything physical because he was never a fighter, but just to try and talk some sense into him. When he caught up with him he told him, “You must be mad to treat your lovely wife and kids the way you do. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. The day will come when you’ll regret it, then you’ll be sorry. I am, and I know what I’m talking about. When I was younger I didn’t treat my Violi nice at all. Now I want to make it up to her but she won’t have it – she’s turned against me; just don’t want to know.” He was so right. She’d turned against him so much that she wouldn’t even accept a cup of tea if he made it for her. Perhaps in her own heart she blamed him for losing her boys. She never said as much, but seeing the way she looked at him most of the time, something was going through her mind.

  At the end of 1981 Auntie Violet was seventy-two years of age, and looked ten years older. From what my Mum told me, up until the age of sixteen her sister was full of fun – always singing and laughing. Then she met Uncle Charlie and her life was never the same again. And looking at her over the last Christmas we’d spend together, I saw that she was frail and tired, with a sadness in her eyes. It seemed everything her husband and sons had put her through was etched in every line of her face.

  Shortly after that she came to me complaining of stomach pains, and would I make an appointment for her to see my doctor as she didn’t have one of her own. I told her that she might have to pay because she wasn’t registered, but that didn’t put her off so I could see she was quite worried. She’d always been a bit shy so one of her reasons for wanting to see my doctor was because she was a woman.

  In the meantime she kept up her visits to the twins, and I don’t know where she found the strength to travel all those miles, then put on a smile when she arrived at whatever prison, pretending everything was fine.

  Eventually she was diagnosed as having a cancerous tumour in her stomach, and that it was only a matter of time. Mum and me visited her in hospital and she was very frightened. She didn’t want us to leave but kept making excuses. “Don’t go, stay and talk. Just a bit longer.” I wished we had because we never saw her alive again – she died the following morning during an exploratory test.

  The twins both cried on the telephone when I spoke to them. They never had a chance to say goodbye, to give her a last cuddle and say they were sorry for what they’d put her through, and I can only imagine that there was a touch of guilt among their genuine tears and grief.

  Her funeral was a media circus and she would’ve hated it. Reg and Ron were out into the world for the first time in thirteen years, but I’m sure they would have given that up for the sake of knowing their beloved mother was still alive. On top of the sadness of that day, it brought a lump to my throat as I saw Reg tenderly place white roses on Frances’ grave and kiss the marble headstone. Did he think it was worth being Britain’s most famous gangster at a time like that?

  When you think of how Uncle Charlie treated his wife most of their married life, it would’ve taken a heart of stone to hold that against him when you saw how he was affected by losing her. It was like he had no reason to carry on living and within six months he followed Auntie Violet, who in his own way he had loved, even though he had a strange way of showing it.

  I seem to have criticized him a lot and there must be people out there who think I’m being unfair because they never saw any of the things I mentioned. And that was Uncle Charlie – without drink and in company he could be kind, charming and funny. But behind closed doors or in front of family that he didn’t think he had to impress, he let his other side show, and I think that most of his behaviour was caused by insane jealousy.

  First of all he was jealous of young Charlie, who came between them in the early days of their marriage, then later on it was the twins who took up every minute of Violet’s time. And like too many men of his generation, outside the home he was jealous of any man who might look at her twice or talk to her for more than a few minutes. Which was sad really, because Auntie Violet never looked at another man in her whole life. All she ever wanted for herself was inside the walls of 178.

  Uncle Charlie seemed to give up soon after the funeral, and eventually I took him to my doctor. In private Dr Phyllis told me she couldn’t understand how he was alive and walking about because there were so many things wrong with him. As well as that she said that apart from his physical ailments, she didn’t think he could go on much longer because he seemed to have lost the will to live.

  After my cousin Charlie was divorced from Dolly, their son Gary had been brought up by Nanny. When she died he moved in with Auntie Violet. In the February of 1983 he came out of his bedroom and found Uncle Charlie lying dead on the stairs with his eyes wide open.

  A lot of people think that Reg and Ron chose not to ask permission to attend their father’s funeral because of the past, but that just wasn’t true. They might not have had a great deal of time for him in life, but as often happens when someone dies, bad thoughts and old arguments get forgotten. The twins were no different, he was still their dad no matter what he’d done in the past and they were both upset at losing him.

  If a few years had gone by between the deaths of their mum and dad, I’m sure it would have been different, but as it was, the shock of what should’ve been private being headline news only six months before was something they didn’t feel they could go through again. So Charlie represented the three of them as their father was laid to rest.

  Of his ten-year sentence, Charlie served seven and those years changed him from a generous man into an obsessed money-getter. Everything about him came down to taking cash off anyone who was gullible or caring enough to hand it over to him, and he didn’t make any distinction between family, good friends or strangers.

  My Ritchie, who was serving seventeen years for armed robbery, had given me a beautiful solitaire diamond ring. Only trouble was once I realized that he had become a criminal I was convinced this ring was part of the proceeds of some jewel theft, and I was frightened to wear it. I was talking about it to Charlie one day, and because he was in the business of buying and selling gold and what have you, he suggested he would sell it and get something else. It seemed the best thing to do, but I did make a point of telling him to make sure he traded it for something equal in value because I knew mine was worth a lot of money.

  Weeks and weeks went by and every time I saw him I asked had he come up with anything yet, until getting fed up with me he produced this “jargoon” [fake ring] as Reg would’ve called it that must have come out of a Christmas cracker. I was horrified that my own cousin would trick me in that way, but I’ve always been too soft for my own good so I accepted it without a word.

  When Ritchie heard what had happened he went mad and told me to dig out a box of his papers where I’d find the original receipt. I did and found that it never had been stolen and it had cost well over four figures from a well-known jeweller.

  At one time my mum, Auntie Violet and my daughter Kimmy all worked part-time in the Blue Coat Boy in Bishopsgate. I think when the twins were outside they had some sort of interest in this pub, but whether that was a legal interest or not I’ve no idea. The landlor
d was a skinflint and every week without fail they had to chase him for their own wages. Yet when Charlie went to him for a loan of £2,000 he gave it to him on the strength of this family connection. Full of the flannel that had become his way by then, Charlie told him that within a few weeks he’d pack the place out with his friends – both faces and celebrities. It never happened and the money disappeared along with my cousin.

  Auntie Violet was so embarrassed she wanted to pack the job in but the landlord wouldn’t hear of it, saying the deal was between himself and her son and nothing to do with her.

  Because he’d borrowed money from my dad in the past and never bothered to pay it back, Charlie was crafty and got his mother to ring my dad asking if he would lend him a hundred pounds. She said that he desperately needed the money because he was in trouble but had promised that without fail he would pay it back within two weeks. “In trouble” was all anyone had to say to my father and his hand would be in his pocket, so it was understandable that he was very hurt when Charlie never repaid him – yet always seemed to have plenty of cash, nice suits and gold dripping off his arms.

  Only recently one of the old firm told me that when he was released after serving his sentence, a benefit was held for him in a local pub and it raised almost £3,000 – a nice sum to get him back on his feet again. Whether Charlie had set up this benefit night I don’t know, but he collected the money from the landlord saying he’d take it personally to this man, and none of it was seen again.

  It might seem as though I’m being disloyal but I can only say how things were and how nothing him or the twins did changed how I felt about them all. Whether it was violence, murder or simply confidence tricks, I never stopped loving any of them – but too often I found myself not liking them at different times.

  Even young Gary picked up his father’s ways. As a child he used to wind Grandad up over money. As compensation for not living with his parents, Charlie and Dolly slipped him money every time they saw him, so he always had a pocket full of cash. If he wasn’t rattling it about like Ronnie used to, he was carefully counting it every five minutes. But he wouldn’t part with a penny of it. Grandad used to say, “That Gary is a greedy little bastard”.