by John Pearson
By nature Reggie was quite easy-going, but Ronnie never missed the opportunity of a fight. He was immensely touchy. No possible slight, no ‘liberty’ from another boy went by unnoticed; whenever a chance cropped up to involve Reggie, Ronnie would take it – partly from jealousy. Since Reggie was the general favourite, there was satisfaction in proving that the ‘little pet’ could behave as viciously as he. It evened things up; it also kept Reggie under his domination and stopped him growing away into the respectable world and leaving him alone.
The twins used to sleep together in a double bed in the back bedroom at Vallance Road. One night at two in the morning the light went on and the twins woke to face a police sergeant from Bethnal Green Station waiting to ask some questions. Someone had tipped the Law that Charles was at home. The twins had the sense to keep the policeman talking until their father could escape over the yard wall. But the policeman was not satisfied and pulled them out of bed to question them. Parrot-like and sleepy the two nine-year-olds gave the reply they had been taught: ‘Our mum and dad’s divorced. We never see ’im now.’
For the twins this was another important lesson for the future. ‘We were both scared of that old copper the first time we saw him in our room, but we soon grew wise to him. We never had been frightened of no copper since.’
One night the police arrived when Charles was eating supper in the kitchen. He had time to dive beneath the table which had a long white tablecloth all round it and the twins continued eating while the police searched the house. Another time when they came unexpectedly, Charles jumped into the coal cupboard beneath the stairs. Just as the police were opening the cupboard door, Ronnie piped up, ‘D’you think my old man’s barmy enough to ’ide in there?’ The policeman missed the easiest capture of his life.
As this corner of Vallance Road became known as a place of refuge, more men began hiding there from the police. Aunt Rose’s husband was on the run. So was their parents’ best man, a dealer called Harry Hopwood, and there were many others. This was when the houses got the name ‘Deserters’ Corner’.
Nobody cared much for the Law in this part of the East End; as Mr Evans says, ‘In Bethnal Green they used to have an eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not grass.” And no one did.’
The neighbours all observed the East End’s code of silence and nobody was caught at Vallance Road. As for the twins, dodging the Law became a way of life. They had to keep a lookout for the police, and soon became cunning. They were often questioned, and learned to guard their tongues. The police became just one more enemy.
Ronnie’s favourite memory of his Aunt Rose is how she used to shake her mats from the window when a policeman walked below, and there was a friend of his father’s who had a saying which stuck in his mind. ‘Coppers is like Germans. The only good one’s a dead one.’
Apart from their father, the only member of the family who really understood the twins was their Aunt Rose. Their mother didn’t. The twins were always careful to keep their fights and outside life from her. Even as small boys they would tidy up after a fight: whenever anyone complained about the twins, Violet would invariably defend them. ‘Someone had to. Their father wasn’t there. I’d say to the twins, “Well, what ’appened?” And they’d say, “Well it wasn’t our fault.” If a mother has to choose between her own and someone else’s kids, what choice is there?’ But wild Aunt Rose was not a homemaker like Violet. She had her father’s toughness and his temper. ‘Our Rosie was a tearaway herself.’ She loved the twins and they loved her, Ronnie especially. ‘She would fight anyone our Rosie would. She might see a couple of girls in the street an’ think they was lookin’ at her. “Oo’s she lookin’ at?” she’d say out loud. “Oo she think she is?” An’ she’d be picking a quarrel with them in no time. Same with her husband. She’d go out to find ’im in a pub and punch him if he’d had too much. One night in Vallance Road, I see ’er fight two women on her own. They’d said something rude about her mum. Kept the fight going more’n an hour, and beat ’em both. Genuine punching too.
‘She couldn’t cook, our Rosie. Wasn’t bothered. But she loved the twins. Soon as ’er ’usband gave her fifty bob on Friday night she’d say, “What’d the twins like?” And she’d get it for them straight away. So there was never much of her fifty bob left by Saturday night.’
The marriage didn’t last, but Aunt Rose and her children stayed at Vallance Road, where she became Ronnie’s heroine. According to his mother, ‘Rosie hated the police. When Mr Kray was on the run, they was always bursting into the house at Vallance Road, and they’d ball up Rosie something dreadful. The things she’d call them really shocked me sometimes.’
When the twins were in trouble, Rosie always knew. ‘You’re a born devil, Ronnie,’ she would say. ‘You know what those eyebrows of yours mean, meeting in the middle of your forehead?’
‘No, Aunt Rose.’
‘They mean you’re born to hang.’
When the twins were young, cockneys could still enjoy their own big annual fair in Victoria Park. Today the fair is one more part of the vanished East End, but it remains one of the twins’ few childish memories: to begin with they always went with Grandfather Lee, but at ten they started going on their own.
There was always one moment the twins waited for – the opening of the boxing-booth, with five pounds to anyone to go the distance with one of the booth boxers at their own weight. Up they came, brawny dockers, rash young tearaways, anyone tough or silly enough to risk a beating from a professional for a fiver and a night’s notoriety.
The first night the twins came on their own, the tent was crammed. Two of the best local boxers, ‘Slasher’ Warner and ‘Buster’ Osbourne, were on the bill and the booth boxers knew how to please the crowd. There was hard punching, several knock-outs, just the right amount of blood. One of the challengers lasted the distance to collect his five pounds.
‘And who’s the next gentleman tonight to take five pounds off me?’ shouted the booth proprietor. ‘We’re giving it away.’
‘I will,’ said Ronnie Kray.
Some of the audience laughed, but Ronnie looked so serious that the man in charge explained it would be hard to find someone to fight him at his own weight. Reggie stood up.
‘I’ll fight him,’ he said.
A minute later the twins were in the ring, stripped to the waist, waiting to begin the first boxing match of their lives.
They were perfectly matched and fought with the same cold fury as they did at home. The crowd was soon cheering them for their gameness, and after three rounds Ronnie had the makings of a black eye and Reggie’s nose was bleeding. Everyone cheered as the owner of the booth declared the fight a draw and gave each of them seven and six. The twins’ careers as boxers had begun.
It was inevitable they would start boxing sooner or later. Both their grandfathers had been fighters, and in the navy their brother Charlie was a successful inter-services welter-weight. The East End had produced many great fighters. Mendoza, the greatest prize-fighter of all time, came from Whitechapel, and Charles sold second-hand clothing to one of his great-grandsons. In Bethnal Green boxing still seemed to offer a tough, determined boy the quickest way to fame and fortune.
But boxing was something more than this for the twins. That night in the Victoria Park boxing-booth, they had their first taste of notoriety; from then on, boxing was a passion, absorbing their lonely energies and setting their hopes for the future. If they were ever to find fame legitimately, this would be the way.
The East End is still full of retired boxers on the lookout for the treasure trove of ‘a likely young’un’ they can discover and coach to success. The twins began lessons with a wizened ex-flyweight who ran a ‘Midgets’ Club’ for schoolboys in a cellar in Whitechapel. Charles encouraged them and they began training at the Browning Club, south of the river. At eleven they were in the ring again, fighting each other in the Hackney Schoolboys Final.
This time some of the audience were shocked by the
violence with which these twins attacked each other. Reggie won the decision on points. When the trophy was presented there was a muddle over who was who. People were saying it was wrong to allow twins to fight each other, and Violet made them promise never to again.
Charles was in the hall to see the fight. He was still wanted by the Law, but now the war was over, life was more relaxed. He thought boxing would be the making of the twins, give them the discipline they needed, take them off the streets and give them something other than mischief to occupy their minds. It could also help the family finances: champion boxers made big money. So he was more philosophical than Violet over the twins fighting one another. ‘If they’d not, they’d have both needed to stand down and some outsider would have won the trophy. We couldn’t have that.’
‘Ronnie was a fighter,’ says one of the men who trained him, ‘the hardest boy I’ve ever seen. To stop him you’d have had to kill him. Reggie was different. It was as if he had all the experience of an old boxer before he started. Just once in a lifetime you find a boy with everything to be a champion. Reggie had it.’
In the East End a promising boxer was treated like a hopeful racehorse, and Charles’s friend and one-time great professional, Ted ‘Kid’ Berg, became their trainer-manager. Cannonball coached them; their brother Charlie sparred with them and they suddenly became the great white hopes of Vallance Road.
The front bedroom was turned into a gymnasium for them, complete with a punch-bag anchored to the floor with a meat-hook (on which Charles gashed his foot one night when making an unobserved entry to the family home in stockinged feet). Violet gave them a high-protein diet. Every penny they could save went on boxing books, and they began training with total dedication. Some people found this worrying. They could allow themselves no slacking off. If one felt inclined to miss a training session, the other would notice. Having each other to live up to, they soon appeared fanatics. ‘I’ve never known boxers take it more serious than the twins. Never late. Whatever the weather they were out each morning at six for road work. They was in bed by ten each night, and absolutely no smoking or drinking. I never saw either of them out with a girl.’
Soon they were in perfect condition with the punch of a pile-driver. Until sixteen, when they turned professional, they won every bout they fought. Father Hetherington blames boxing for much of the trouble of their middle teens. ‘Everything went wrong once the local papers published the twins’ photographs and wrote about them as super boxers when they were really two ordinary East End boys.’ But with their strange shared life of identical twins, they were far from ordinary, and their career as boxers started to disrupt their private lives. Ronnie had toughness and determination, but Reggie was patently the star, with the real career ahead of him. Soon after the twins turned professional, the street violence they were involved in mysteriously increased as well.
The boy’s name was Harvey; he was sixteen, smartly dressed, worked as a clerk in the East End and lived with his family in Hackney. When the ambulance men picked him out of the alley off Mare Street where the gang had left him he was still conscious. He collapsed on the way to hospital and a doctor later testified in court that he had been hit hard in both eyes and on the nose, ‘had suffered multiple contusions about the neck and chin consistent with his being beaten with a length of bicycle chain’, and kicked thoroughly all over. It seemed a common enough case. In 1950 the wars between the local teenage gangs in Hackney were increasing. No one knew why, but the actual woundings had been growing more serious. There were rumours of guns, and the police were half expecting someone to be killed. But this new outbreak of violence was puzzling. Nobody knew the leaders of the gangs, and nobody would talk.
But this time there were witnesses: a nineteen-year-old girl and an insurance salesman who had seen the fight and could recognize the boys. They named the twins, and Harvey confirmed this to the police. It seemed as if the twins had finally slipped up.
For years now they had kept their gang fights secret and nobody in the respectable world around them knew what was going on. Certainly few can have suspected their hidden need for violence – except possibly Aunt Rose. The only hint had come at the age of twelve when they were put on probation for firing an air rifle from a train. But this was something any boy might do and their discreet routine of violence left no evidence. Already the twins showed skill as leaders with a certain prestige for those who went with them. They were accepted as the wildest ones around, who used coshes, chains and broken bottles for their fights, and by sixteen Ronnie had already perfected the technique of cutting an enemy in the face, preferring a large sheath knife to the old-style cut-throat razor. At sixteen the twins also bought their first revolver and hid it under the bedroom floor. In all their fights one thing distinguished them once they began; the way they would ‘go the limit’, carried away by an orgy of violence as if blood and brutality satisfied a need they shared in secret. Even their allies could be frightened by their fury and the pleasure they obviously derived from giving pain.
At the preliminary hearing the North London Magistrate, Mr Herbert Malone, KC, examined the bicycle chains the police found near Harvey, ‘in pools of clotted blood’, and declared that the ‘beasts’ who used them evidently thought themselves above the Law, and would be taught a lesson. Both twins remained in custody and were brought for trial at the Old Bailey.
Meanwhile things were happening behind the scenes. The girl witness had been discreetly told that she would have a razor ‘put across her face’ if she gave evidence. The insurance salesman received a similar threat. Harvey, still in hospital, had various visitors pointing out the need to be sensible. He was an East End boy and ought to know it could be most unwise to talk. At the Old Bailey trial the twins’ case was speedily dismissed for lack of evidence, and Herbert Malone was right. Their trial did teach the twins a lesson.
In the summer of 1951, the twins fought several bouts as professionals and won them all – Reggie with the precision of the natural boxer, Ronnie by slogging. In September they were at Wembley Town Hall on the same bill, and both were on form. Reggie had his man, Goodsell of Cambridge, down for a count of eight in the second round. He finished him off in the third after a display of fancy footwork and neatly placed hooks to the heart and the head.
Ronnie Kray’s fight was with Bernie Long of Romford, and Ronnie steamrollered him. By the start of the third round, Long was badly cut around the eyes and bleeding from the mouth. The referee stopped the fight. People who saw the fights said they confirmed what everybody knew about the twins. Ronnie was game and vicious, but Reggie had a real future.
Within a week the twins were once again in trouble. It was an odd case. In the past they had always avoided a confrontation with the police, and it seemed out of character for Ronnie to insult a young policeman who told him to move on in Bethnal Green Road on a Saturday afternoon. It was even more unlike him to punch him on the jaw before a dozen witnesses outside Pellici’s Cafe. Had he wanted to land in trouble, and ensure the twins a public name for violence, he could hardly have done it better. Within an hour he had been picked up and charged with assaulting a policeman.
The incident could not end there. Reggie was with his brother when the trouble started, but it was over too quickly for him to join in. His immediate reaction was that he had failed him, with Ronnie in the cells, and the policeman already back on duty. ‘If I’d not done something, then I’d never have been able to look Ron in the eye again.’ He spent the rest of that afternoon searching for the policeman. When he found him he attacked him just as Ronnie had. He made no attempt to escape, but went off, happy now, to join his brother in the cells. When they came for trial a few days later, the twins would certainly have gone to prison but for the efforts of the respectable world which they had courted. It was Father Hetherington who went into the witness box for them to say that ‘apart from their disgusting behaviour on this occasion’, he felt there were still possibilities of the Krays making good.
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sp; The magistrate was feeling generous. The policeman was commended for his courage: the twins put on probation. All that had really suffered was Reggie’s future as a boxer. Managers dislike boxers with reputations for violence outside the ring, since a serious conviction usually costs a fighter his licence and ends his career.
On 11 December 1951 all three Kray brothers fought at the Albert Hall in a contest headed by Tommy McGovern, lightweight champion of Britain. It was their biggest chance so far. Charlie Kray lost. Ronnie was disqualified. Reggie defeated his man in three perfectly fought rounds.
Now that his attempt to discipline the twins through boxing had failed, Charles had given up hope, and usually kept away from home when he knew the twins were there. Ronnie had been fourteen when he first hit him during an argument with Violet. Now they invariably picked on him when he had had a drink or two. Sometimes they hit him hard. ‘Until a boy’s fifteen, I suppose you can do something for him,’ he said wearily. ‘After that there’s not a lot any father can do.’
They still loved their mother as devotedly as ever. Violet and the twins were now adopting the rationalizations which would permit their love to continue unimpeded over the years ahead. ‘I used to worry about the twins, of course. I wasn’t their mother for nothing. But if they was involved in any trouble I didn’t want to know. It only upset me. And as I knew that both of them was good boys at heart, I knew the things people said about them couldn’t be true anyhow. I was there one night when Ronnie came back from the police station when they’d beaten him up. An’ I was there another time when a copper told Reggie that if there was any more trouble he’d bash his face in. A mother remembers things like that. And if you have to choose between your boys and the police, what choice is that, especially if they’re all you’ve got?’
And at the time Aunt Rose would watch the twins with a knowing smile.