by John Pearson
Like most gangland feuds, this one appeared a fuss about nothing, but had its roots in deep resentment from the past. The Watney Streeters were no real threat to the Krays. Most of them were Irish dockers. The twins called them ‘weekend gangsters’. They were young toughs who had grown up together, worked and drank together and operated various small rackets around the docks. They enjoyed a good Saturday night brawl when they had been on the beer. But they were descendants of the old-time Watney Street gang which had always been the enemy of the ancient villains of Bethnal Green. That summer Ronnie decided to shoot one of them, a boy called Charlie. Charlie was smart, and had devised a foolproof little racket with a number of local post office drivers, who relabelled parcels for him, sending them on to addresses where he could pick them up. Ronnie heard about it and, as usual, demanded fifty per cent of the profits. Charlie agreed, but there was constant trouble over payments; Charlie went on the list.
In the middle of 1956, the twins seemed to have achieved what they had always really wanted – a foothold in the West End at last. A man called Billie Jones, who worked in the docks, had taken over a West End drinking club off Cambridge Circus called The Stragglers. It was a good club, but also a popular place for fights. These were expensive and they upset the Law. To stop them Jones’s associate, the boxer Bobby Ramsey, suggested calling in the twins as informal partners. Ramsey had known them both for years. They were delighted, and Reggie Kray’s cigarette punch soon put an end to trouble. The Stragglers started to make money. Then there was suddenly a war.
Jones had a fight with Charlie in the docks and was beaten up. The following night Ramsey drove down to Limehouse in his large Buick and beat up Charlie. Two nights later, Charlie and a full gathering of Watney Streeters cornered Ramsey in an East End pub called The Artichoke, dragged him outside, kicked and punched him unconscious and hit him over the head with an iron bar.
Ramsey recovered, but Ronnie felt that he was personally involved. Jones and Ramsey were both known to be friends of the twins. Charlie was taking an extreme ‘liberty’ attacking them after the trouble there had already been over the mail business. The Kray name was in jeopardy. Ronnie wanted another shooting, but Jones and Ramsey lacked the Colonel’s single-mindedness. Finally they agreed to make an example of Charlie and the Watney Streeters with the biggest straightforward beating one gang had inflicted on another in living memory. The twins did the planning together.
Ronnie’s secret service of small boys kept Charlie under constant watch. The Colonel could not resist choosing a gun for himself, just in case things went wrong – a ‘Young America’ revolver with dum-dum bullets. According to reports, the Watney Streeters would be drinking at a pub called The Britannia the following Saturday. Cars were laid on from Eric Street for 9 P.M.
That night Ronnie was very much the Colonel – calm, all-powerful, full of the excitement of knowing that he would soon be going into action. He would become a soldier glorying in the fray. He was invulnerable. He was the leader, a great man joining the ranks of other great men of history. He had chosen his raiding-party from his dozen best men. Ramsey and Jones joined them. They set off, but just for once the Colonel’s secret service failed him; or Charlie was smarter than they knew. As the large cars drew up in front of The Britannia he and his friends escaped by the back entrance, leaving their drinks on the bar – when the Colonel entered the only person to be seen was a boy called Terry Martin who had rashly stayed behind to finish a hand of gin rummy with three friends.
For the man of action one thing is worse than a defeat – fiasco. After all the preparations, the Krays had been made fools of by a bunch of Irish dockers. Still, they had someone. Ramsey believed that Martin had been there when he was beaten up. He would do, and was dragged out into the street.
According to police evidence, Ramsey took over then. Gangland protocol demanded it. He had the right to his revenge. The others stood by as he slashed Martin twice over the back of the head with a bayonet and stabbed him in the shoulder. Then they closed in to kick him unconscious. It might easily have been murder. According to medical evidence given in court, ‘it was only by luck that he survived’.
When Reggie called off the gang they drove away, leaving Martin in the gutter. Someone bolted the front door of The Britannia and peered out.
‘It’s all right. They’ve gone.’
The three men who were playing cards with Terry Martin trooped out and picked him up and drove him to the London Hospital.
The Colonel behaved very much in character. Anyone at all concerned with safety would have disappeared and concentrated on an alibi for the evening. But Ronnie was beginning his revenge. Blood had been shed and the excitement was only starting. He had to find the whole of Watney Street. Ramsey was driving his black Buick, Ronnie beside him directing operations, and the hunt went on round Stepney until the car was stopped by a police patrol soon after midnight.
At first the Colonel seemed to trust in his invulnerability. When the police found his ‘Young America’ revolver he said, ‘Careful with it. Can’t you see it’s loaded?’ When they brought in the crowbar and machete from the car and pointed to the bloodstains on his shirt, Ronnie shrugged. ‘I ’ad a nose-bleed.’
The twins had both escaped the Law so many times. It must be possible again. Ronnie was not worried. Red-face would fix things as before.
But Terry Martin was not willing to be fixed. For once the East End’s code of silence was not working. At the Old Bailey he would be the leading witness for the prosecution. Against this there was not much to be done, and the most the defence could manage for the twins was to play the old game of tripping up witnesses over their identities. Reggie, who had been arrested with a bloodstained jacket, offered to take the blame, exonerating Ronnie. Ronnie pointed out that he had been found with a gun, and so had better take the whole rap. Reggie could keep things going while he was away. In the end a clever defence counsel managed to create so much uncertainty over identifying the twins that the judge had no alternative to accepting Reggie’s story that the bloodstains on his jacket ‘might have come from watching sparring between boxers at the billiard hall, where he was employed’ and dismissing him from the case.
For the Colonel there was no escape. On 5 November, Guy Fawkes’s Day, the majesty of the law descended upon Ronald Kray, and the recorder, Sir Gerald Dodson, sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment for causing grievous bodily harm to Terence Martin of Chapman Street, Stepney.
SIX
Twins Apart
Two pairs of grey denim trousers, three blue-and-white-striped shirts, a grey flannel prison jacket, prison-issue woollen socks, boots and cotton underwear, communal bath once a week with yellow soap and a regulation short back and sides. A day that began at 6.30 A.M. with the bell clanging on the landing and ended when lights went out at 9.30 P.M.
From 5 November 1956, a wet Friday, when the gates of Wandsworth Gaol closed behind the black Maria bringing the latest batch of prisoners down from the Central Criminal Court, this became the new life of Ronnie Kray. Nothing could have been further from the old life of drink and fights and easy money than the dingy monastery of Wandsworth Gaol; nothing more at odds with the dream world the Colonel had built round the Eric Street billiard hall and Fort Vallance. Yet he took to it surprisingly well. His mother worried that it would be terrible for him to be parted from his Reggie, but Reggie came in to see him on visits, and neither twin seemed unduly concerned at being parted. After the first days’ gloom of settling in, the Colonel appeared very much his old self.
This was partly because he had so many friends in prison that Wandsworth was something of a home from home, and although he was locked in a single cell on the ground floor of the main prison block after lights out, he had plenty of opportunity for renewing old acquaintances during the remainder of the day. Next to him in the workshop, where he sat five hours supposedly making brushes, was his one-time cell-mate and comrade-in-arms, ex-Fusilier Dickie Morgan, currently se
rving a four-year sentence for hijacking a lorry-load of meat. The same day at exercise he met his boyhood friend Checker Berry, son of old Teddy ‘Kid’ Berry who gave him his first professional boxing lessons.
The ordinary man who finds himself in prison gets his worst shock from the sudden contact with a gaol world alien to life outside. For the professional criminal this is not the case: his society is one that stretches both sides of the prison wall. There is liberty one side, restriction the other, but the gossip and friendships are there in common, and Ronnie Kray had much the same status among the small core of professional criminals in Wandsworth Gaol that he had enjoyed in the billiard hall and Bethnal Green. The great majority of prisoners were beneath his contempt and unworthy of his attention. They were essentially straight people who had come unstuck, as Ronnie said, by ‘pinching somebody’s bicycle or fiddling the books at the local fish-shop’. He wasn’t interested in such riff-raff and they took good care not to get involved with him.
But there were a few professionals in Wandsworth who regarded their spell away as an interlude in their normal way of life. These men had heard about the Colonel and his private ‘Returned Prisoners’ Aid Society’. They knew he had a brother outside who commanded considerable power. And when their spell inside was over they knew how useful the friendship of a gang like the Krays’ could be. Soon Ronnie’s life in Wandsworth Gaol was cosily buttoned up.
Reggie helped: he had never shown himself more practical and efficient than when he set about organizing the well-being of his twin brother inside Wandsworth Gaol. In theory all prisoners are equal, apart from the privileges they earn by hard work and good behaviour. No extra food or comforts can be sent in and what money they earn by prison work goes into an account at the canteen to be spent on sweets or extra tobacco. But no society is able to survive without a currency, even if a forbidden one. Once there is a currency it can be manipulated to acquire privilege and power.
The unofficial currency of every gaol is tobacco, and Reggie Kray saw to it that his brother was tobacco rich from the day his sentence started. This was simple, but required organizing. The first move was for Ronnie to find a number of non-smoking married men serving their sentence with him who had families somewhere in London – then to suggest a deal. If they would supply him with their spare tobacco, he’d arrange for their wives to be put on the Kray pension scheme. An ounce of tobacco would rate a £1 note for the wife outside. Reggie made certain that the money was paid regularly each week.
Once Ronnie had all the tobacco he needed he began using it to build himself a life apart from the rest of prison society. In his own eyes he remained someone exceptional. Even in prison he could adopt a lordly attitude towards the petty chores of servitude. There was the question of work. Canteen earnings were geared to the number of brushes turned out each day and a straight prisoner soon learned the knack of managing the pitch and bristles and earning a reasonable wage. Ronnie never bothered. Straight work was even more contemptible within prison than without, and he would buy brushes off other men in the brush workshop to fill in his minimum quota by the end of the day.
Similarly with food: whenever he considered the food below standard – particularly the fish, which is universally loathed in prison – Ronnie would just refuse it, filling up instead with cakes and biscuits bought from the canteen by one of his paid followers.
So Ronnie kept his private dream alive during these first months in Wandsworth by turning prison life into a replica of life outside. A fantasy can be lived anywhere. He had his batman and his servants to look after him. He had his group of followers who endlessly discussed the villainy they’d start when they were free. He had his silences, his moods, his periods when people whispered that the Colonel was thinking and had best not be disturbed.
Reggie survived the separation too. He missed Ronnie: Vallance Road was a lonely place without him, and nobody could take his place within the Firm. ‘There didn’t seem much point in doing things without the Colonel there.’ Reggie was no substitute for his brother and didn’t try. Ronnie’s dream world vanished with him: no more vendettas, sudden shootings, wars to the death. Without the daily contact of his twin, Reggie calmed down. Suddenly he was free from the suspicions and fears he had always shared with Ronnie. Gradually he relaxed, became more confident, and the old charm, which had been wearing thin, started to reappear. Now he was head of the Firm he came into his own as leader and chief ‘money-getter’.
‘Reg was the live wire and Ron was the lazy bastard. All that Ron wanted was the glory, but Reg was after anything that spelled money.’
He had an idea how to get it now. ‘I’d always felt that what the East End needed was a decent, properly run club of its own so that the East End people could come and listen to some music and buy their women a drink without having to worry about some hooligan making trouble.’
Reggie had dreamt of this for years. The billiard hall and then The Stragglers had given him a taste for playing host and meeting people. As long as Ronnie was around, any club of the twins’ would be restricted to a hardened clientele. With him away, Reggie had his chance. He took considerable trouble finding the right place before deciding on an empty shop along the Bow Road. It was completely derelict but it was central and the rent was cheap. Reggie and two of the Firm did the redecorating themselves, building a stage and putting up red flock wallpaper in the bar. All the ideas were Reggie’s; he had never been happier than he was now, making this place entirely his own. A few months after Ronnie began his three-year sentence Reggie was putting on his brand-new smoking jacket for the opening of ‘the finest drinking club the East End’s ever known’.
It was a success from the start. Reggie had a flair for knowing what cockneys wanted and was smart enough to see that the new affluent East End needed a West-End-style club of its own. He soon showed real talent for club life. He said ‘no hooligans’ and meant it; the few who came were quickly dealt with. He said he wanted men to be able to bring their girl-friends; they did. Soon he had regulars who came because of him and suddenly the club was getting known as one of the ‘in’ places on the East End circuit for people from the west. The first few lesser-known celebrities started to arrive in the Bow Road – a playboy or two, an up-and-coming starlet, journalists, an occasional film man in search of new locations. For them, this was the authentic East End they were looking for. For Reggie they were ambassadors of the good life, and started him on a love affair with the famous which the twins would share in the years ahead. The success was Reggie’s, but Ronnie was not forgotten. The club combined their joint initials. Reggie christened it The Double R.
Unlike his brother, Reggie Kray had the makings of a first-rate businessman-gangster of the old school. Without his brother, he would have made a definite success of crime and almost certainly have been a rich man and a free one to this day. During his period of freedom from his twin Reggie took few risks, did nothing for the hell of it and shrewdly chose to work with just a few rich, semi-honest clients who needed him. He also showed that, without Ronnie there, he could hold on to his money.
During this period with The Double R, as Reggie got established as a character and showed that he was thoroughly at home in the limbo-land of crime and club life, he rationalized his criminal affairs. There was no need to grab at anything to bring in £50. Crime and the club life went together. He could confine himself to working with a few men at a time who could be thoroughly exploited; he found he had a talent for spotting them. They were the men with money and with something else – greed, boredom with the straight world, a weakness for dishonesty. According to Reggie, ‘It’s odd how you can pick ’em out at once. There’s some rich people can’t resist the idea of crime. You see them getting all worked up when they think they’re with criminals. I s’pose it’s because they’ve always longed to do something forbidden. But they seem to get a kick like sex out of the idea of crime.’
The way it was developing, The Double R was the ideal place for meeting
men like this. The corrupt moneyed world could mingle easily with the criminal one; Reggie began exploiting both.
He could be vicious still – when necessary. On the few occasions when there were fights at The Double R he was as lethal as before. He was still cunning, too, and not the man to forget a grudge. Ronnie had to be avenged. A few months after Terry Martin went into the witness-box at the Old Bailey, fire swept through the drinking club owned by the Martin family in Poplar. At the time it happened, Reggie was fishing with a policeman friend in Suffolk. He had always been good with alibis; and he was clever about the threats that sometimes came his way. These usually came from people he had tricked out of money. One day he heard that someone who had threatened him was trying to buy a gun from one of the East End’s illicit arms dealers. He spoke to the dealer, who sold the man the gun he wanted, but it was a special one – so special that when the man waited outside The Double R and took a shot at Reggie as he left, it exploded in his hand. He was in hospital a month, and nearly lost his hand.
Photographs of this period show Reggie smiling: the wariness has left his face. Despite the hours he was keeping, he looked fit and well. He kept himself in trim, drank moderately and lived a very normal life. He liked young children, enjoyed the country, began riding at weekends.
Before long The Double R was bringing in a steady income and it was clear that he had hit on the formula for success – the orderly raucousness, the sentimental cockney songs of Queenie Watts, the villains mixing with celebrities and the regular presence of several large but well-behaved old boxers like handsome Tommy Brown, the ‘Bear of Tottenham’, and ‘Big Pat’ Connolly, the Glasgow doorman, who weighed twenty-one stone in his prime. Sometimes the gipsies came, and Reggie, remembering his own Romany blood, stood them drinks and told them they could stay. He now had real celebrities among The Double R’s visitors – Jackie Collins, Sybil Burton, Barbara Windsor: he called them by their first names and drew a certain glamour from their presence. He looked like turning into something of a playboy, dressing well, enjoying an evening in a West End nightclub and, for the first time in his life, taking an interest in women.