by Rita Smith
As he got older, it’s a sad thing to say but he couldn’t be trusted. When my mum moved in with me from her flat upstairs, she left a cupboard full of spirits and other drink that had built up over the years. When I popped up there to get some for Christmas it was all gone. Gary and Charlie had sneaked in there and cleared the lot without saying a word.
Strange when you think that my dad took on the whole Lee family through marriage, yet looked upon every one of them as though they were blood relations. Any other in-law, if you like, would’ve said “Eff your family, they’re not my problem,” but he wasn’t like that and helped out any of them that asked. He worried about the twins getting into trouble. He worried about his sister-inlaw not having enough money for visiting the boys and he was always upset by Ronnie’s mental state. All in all he cared for every one of the family.
The shock of Auntie Violet dying brought on his first stroke because he thought the world of her. Over the next two years he suffered more strokes and, as it always seems to in those cases, his personality changed as well. Mum couldn’t understand why and she’d often say to me, “Why’s he saying that? Why’s he snapping at me? It’s not like him.” She never accepted he was as ill as he was. Not even at the end.
She got a phone call from the hospital saying that the end was coming, but she didn’t go up there because in her mind if you ignore these things they might go away. It wasn’t until I came in from shopping that I found out about the phone call. I immediately dropped everything and rushed to the hospital. He died just before I got there. My dad – my lovely dad had died without any of us holding his hand. I was crying as I stood by his bed, and so was the nurse who had looked after him. He was like that. Anyone who knew him saw what sort of man he was and took to him straight away.
Great Grandad Lee and Grandad Lee both had serious accidents as younger men by falling off of horse-drawn carriages. So had my father. Perhaps it was one of the risks of that kind of job. He was riding on what they called “the Dickey seat” when he fell down among the four horses, hurting his head. He recovered but lost most of his hair. Being vain, like most men of his generation, he wore a trilby hat for the rest of his life. I still have a small lock of his snow-white hair that the nurse cut off for me before he was covered up, but I don’t need a memento to remind me of him. Every year of him being my dad is locked in my head.
This was something that the twins, locked in another world, never had to suffer. As family members were taken away one by one, they were upset by every death, but they didn’t have to live with the slow deterioration that we did and in some ways that can be more painful than the final release.
I was lucky to have my mother for another three years after we lost dad, but if she hadn’t had the Lee stubbornness I might have had her beside me for much longer. But none of the family had time for illness and she was no exception.
For a long time it was obvious she wasn’t right. She was short of breath and had to keep stopping if we were out shopping, but no way would she admit anything was wrong or allow me to take her to the doctor. In fact in all seriousness she said that if I put her in hospital she’d put a curse on me. How was I to know she had angina? Something that even then could easily be kept under control with tablets. The end came quickly with a massive heart attack, but at least I was with her. On her death certificate the doctor wrote that she’d died of a heart attack, but to me she said, “It’s not really an acknowledged medical condition, but I think she died of a broken heart”. I thought the same because she never got over losing Dad.
She was the last and the most important to me, of the strong, funny, warm and caring women that I’d shared every day of my life with. The loss of anyone in the family is hard enough, but a mother is something special and suddenly I felt very alone. Though as always life goes on, but it would never be the same for me again.
So many people supported me at that time I couldn’t begin to mention them all. There was a lovely wreath from the Kemp brothers that reminded me of the time they both came to my flat to meet Mum when they were making the Kray film. They arrived with an enormous bunch of flowers, which she was obviously pleased to get, but afterwards in her usual outspoken way she said to me, “I wish they’d brought chocolates instead – you can’t eat flowers”. Those two boys really did take to her and said that she reminded them of their own grandmother and family.
My Kimmy was so busy getting autographed photographs for her friends – who were big fans of Spandau Ballet – that she forgot to get one for herself. Something she always regretted, especially now that Martin is the heart-throb star of EastEnders.
Ronnie’s wife, Elaine, came to pay her respects and ended up washing the dishes at the after-funeral tea. She was such a nice ordinary girl. I often wondered why she’d married Ron but she never said and I thought it might be rude to question her about such a thing. A year after that she was divorced and Kate Howard took her place.
When Ron rang to tell me what he was planning to do and I asked him what was so special about her, he said, “She’s so funny, Rita. She makes me laugh every time I speak to her.” In my opinion I doubt whether it was her humour that appealed to Reg when he introduced her to his brother. Unfortunately both my cousins had become just like Charlie, and would knock you over to take a shilling from you. Reg in particular began to look at everyone he met as a “mark” as they say in the con game. I can remember him commenting on the fact that this girl had her own business and her own personal letterheads, which seemed to impress him for some reason.
I can only imagine that his idea was to get her to invest money in one or another of his schemes, but that went all wrong when Ron took a real fancy to her. I’ve never spoken to Kate and I’ve never met her, but something about her personality must have appealed to Ron because he was never one to make friends very easily.
Reg brought them together and he split them apart in the end. Kate wrote a book suggesting that Ronnie condoned an “open marriage” – that he didn’t mind if she saw other men. That might have been true, but when Reg saw it in print he took it as a personal insult to the family. He was furious when he rang me up. All he kept doing was shouting, “Ronnie’s going to divorce her. He’s got to get rid of her.” When I calmed him down he told me about this story and that Ron would go mad when he read it, so I gathered that Reg had already made his mind up as to how it should be dealt with, even before he had consulted his brother.
Not long after, they were divorced so Reg, as usual, got his own way. Kate had the last laugh though. Reg might have thought she was just another fool he could squeeze money out of, but since Kate parted from Ron she’s made a good living by writing books while trading on the Kray name – something Reg hated her for until the day he died.
He always made excuses for falling out with various people, but underneath what he was saying was the fact that he couldn’t bear anyone making money out of the Kray name unless he was getting a percentage. He fell out with Charlie and other members of his firm when each of them wrote books to make money as compensation for what they’d been through. Reg rubbished them all because he was getting nothing out of them.
A story that shows he missed nothing was about a young boy who’d been writing to him for quite some time. As often happened with his special friends Reg had sent the boy a drawing he’d done. Whether the boy fell on hard times or simply wanted to buy a new bicycle, I don’t know, but he auctioned this picture, and with it selling for something like £600 it was newsworthy enough to get written up in a local Leeds paper. In the next edition Reg wrote a piece saying the picture was a forgery and he’d never heard of this lad in his life.
Something that hurt me and perhaps showed a change of mental state of mind was when someone told him that I had the original film that had been found in either his or Ronnie’s cine camera. To him that meant someone had something that was worth money and he didn’t have control of it.
He rang my daughter, drunk and abusive, demanding that this film be
handed over. When she told him that her Grandad had bought it and it now belonged to me, he got even more angry and screamed foul language down the phone. Kimmy doesn’t take after her mother – she takes after my Auntie Rose, so although she’s never said as much I’m sure she gave him as good as she got, but what I do know is she slammed the phone down. He rang back – she did the same again.
He rang an old friend of the family to get my telephone number but Kimmy had pre-warned him and he left his answering machine on until Reg sobered up and calmed down. He’d been telephoning me every week throughout the years of being in prison, yet he didn’t have my number on that particular day? That’s the only redeeming thing about that incident. He knew he was out of order and couldn’t bring himself to verbally attack or upset me.
He might have been behind the walls but, as I say, he missed nothing.
A chance remark let him know that I still had the pair of shorts he wore when he won some championship as a boy – complete with silver badge. Next thing I had some young ex-prisoner knocking on my door saying Reg wanted them back. They were his so I didn’t argue – just handed them over, but I don’t think he ever got them, or if he did they were given away to some “friend” or other. I’ll never be surprised to be told they are up for auction on the Internet.
In 1995 we suffered a double blow when first Gary died of cancer at the age of forty-four, then shortly afterwards, Ronnie.
We knew Gary was going to die because of the nature of his illness, and in another way knew that Ronnie was slowly killing himself with cigarettes. On the telephone he was always breathless, and I used to ask him when he was going to cut down or give up smoking. He’d always say, “Don’t worry, Rita, there’s nothing wrong with my lungs”. And perhaps there wasn’t but forty cigarettes smoked in two and a half hours wasn’t doing his heart condition any favours and it finally stopped on the 17th of March.
Another media circus. I couldn’t help thinking as we drove through thousands of people lining the streets of the East End, that 99.9 per cent of them had never known the real Ronnie Kray. Few of them were genuinely grieving for him. It was a spectacle to tell their children and grandchildren about, but more than that they wanted to see Reggie in the flesh. And he put on a show worthy of the Pope for them. His tears and his grief were genuine, and who but a twin could know what it was like to lose one half of yourself, but behind all this his mind was still scheming.
Photographs are for weddings and are very rarely taken at funerals, yet Reg had every moment filmed, then sold copies of the video at ten pounds each.
Once again he stopped at Frances’ grave, kissed the headstone and laid white roses for her. Twenty-eight years and she was still in his heart.
By the time Charlie was sentenced to twelve years for being involved in a multi-million pound drugs deal, I was beyond being shocked by anything that happened within the family. When I look back to the pain and tears of when Ronnie was sent down for three, I found I couldn’t relate the same to Charlie’s sentence even though I knew I would never see him in the outside world again. At his age it just wasn’t feasible. Perhaps I was numbed by the years and years of heartbreak.
He rang me from the prison and said, “Don’t believe all you read in the papers, Rita. It’s a fit-up and things are different from what they look.” I did believe him, because knowing him like I did there was no other alternative. If he was involved in any way it could only have been on the very fringes where he thought he could earn a few pounds for doing very little. Mastermind? Up until then he was making a living by turning up in clubs and at parties as a celebrity – the Kray name was still enough to draw people in. In his seventies he was too old to be a threat to anyone, yet I can’t help thinking someone up there wanted to show they could crush the Krays out of existence. Just as they had back in 1969.
He rang me one day in April and we had a nice talk about nothing in particular. As he was going he said, “Bye then, Rita,” paused for a moment then added, “Love you”. It was only after I put the phone down that I realized he’d never said that before and it gave me a very strange feeling. He died the next morning.
I’d criticized him, got upset over certain things he’d done, and sometimes been ashamed of his greedy ways. But underneath all that he was a gentle, nice man and, as with the others, I’d always loved him and would miss him. You can’t help thinking that he would’ve had a better life if the twins hadn’t been born. But when that same question was put to him on The Richard and Judy Show he thought about it, then said, “No. I never wished that, but my life would’ve taken a different path if they hadn’t been around.”
Little did I know that seven months later the whole story would come to an end. Reg hadn’t been in the best of health for some years. He’d had a couple of operations that were surprisingly never given the usual publicity. Whenever he telephoned me or Kimmy he was always said, “Fine. Don’t worry.” Typical of the family, ill health wasn’t something to be talked about. He kept it to himself the same as he did about anything to do with his wife, Roberta.
When he first met her I gathered from the way he spoke that he was very impressed by the fact she was “middle class” or “posh” as he put it. Other than that he said very little, almost as though he thought I might disapprove of this new relationship after what he’d said about Frances over the years.
Personally, I think he was looking for a new secretary and she happened to come along at the right time. For a lot of years I know he had a business relationship with an honest, caring woman who looked after his affairs for no reward, and knowing Reg at that time in his life, for little thanks. If tickets for some Kray function had to be sold, she was the one who made the phone calls. If celebrities had to be contacted for support in money-making schemes, she was the one who had to call them. From her front room she was the marketing director for such things as T-shirts, books, used Reg Kray phone-cards and signed drawings. Because she could be trusted, she made a large number of friends, but when Reg deliberately started to rip off these people or entice them into projects that were little more than scams, she drew the line; had a blazing row with him and walked away from helping him out.
A week later Roberta was on the scene. Where she came from or why she wanted to marry Reg I don’t know. Maureen Flanagan, the very first page three girl, was very close to my three cousins (particularly Reg who at one time had asked her to marry him), told me that Roberta was just one of many gangster groupies. Knowing that Maureen was in daily contact with Reggie she pestered and pestered her for an introduction. Eventually she gave in and personally took Roberta to Maidstone prison to meet Reg – the rest is history.
Something that did make me laugh was when Maureen was being interviewed on television. She was asked “He’s proposed to you a number of times but why would you want to marry Reg Kray” and she replied, “At least I’d know where he was every night”.
Roberta never introduced herself to any of us who were left in the family, but that was her choice and really none of my business.
Only once did he ever let his guard down and admit that he felt a bit concerned about his health. Training and working out in the gym was what kept him going over the years and sometimes I thought he took it too far, but what else was there to do? I happened to make some remark about was he still doing a hundred press-ups every morning and he surprised me by saying, “ No, Rita, I’ve cut right back on all that what with this stomach of mine”. I said, “What, have you picked up a bug or something?” And he said, “I think it’s a lot more than that. Wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve got the same as Mum.” I said, “Don’t be silly, the doctors would’ve picked that up in no time”. But he said, “That’s the trouble. They won’t take it seriously. I keep on to them but they just ignore everything I say.”
I couldn’t believe that even prison doctors would let someone suffer constant pain, so stopped myself worrying by thinking that they were right and it was just something and nothing. Reg was proved right i
n the end and if earlier treatment could’ve saved him but was denied, it’s a terrible indictment of the prison service.
Joe went up to see Reg as soon as he was taken into hospital and when he rang me afterward he told me that it had been quite upsetting to see him looking so ill. He was even more upset when he wasn’t allowed in the following time and he said to me, “Rita, you wouldn’t believe it. Our Reg must be days away from dying and they’re setting up cameras and what have you. Surely they’re not going to film him in that state?” As it turned out they were, and I can only think that set the cash register tinkling again for someone.
It seemed to me as though there was a definite reluctance on the part of those around Reg for any of us family to visit. What was the problem? Did someone think that either Joe or myself would take a photograph of our dying cousin then sell it to the papers for thousands? Or did they think we might get some last words and again sell the story. I know it’s only my opinion, but if that was the case, how sick some people’s minds can be. Over the years I have seen the enormous amount of money newspapers have been prepared to pay out for any stories about the Krays and speaking for myself there have been times when a bit of extra would’ve been welcome. Yet not once have either Joe or myself been tempted to betray any of our cousins for reward. In fact over the years I know that Joe has dipped into his own pocket more times than can be counted just to help the boys out.
Thankfully the end wasn’t long in coming. As usual it was a day out for sightseers and miles of copy for the newspapers. But what seems to have been forgotten was that for some of us we were burying another loved member of our family. None of them were ever famous gangsters to us; they were just Charlie, Reg and Ron – warts and all. And it’s not hard to imagine what thoughts were going through my head as the funeral cars paused alongside the site in Vallance Road where we’d all grown up and spent happy years and sad years. If any good can come out of their wasted lives, it’s that youngsters might reconsider following the same road. But in honesty it’s unlikely the message will get across, so other families will end up suffering what ours did – and that’s a shame.