by John Pearson
This was the biggest break of all from Ronnie, who had always managed to keep him away from women. Bound by the ties that link a homosexual with his identical twin, Ronnie had always seen any show of interest in a girl by Reggie as rebellion – which it was – and treated it accordingly.
‘What you thinking of, goin’ with a bloody woman? You’re gettin’ soft. Don’t you know that women smell and give you diseases?’
Now things were different without Ronnie there, Reggie realized he was good-looking and that women found him attractive. Life at The Double R taught him what he had never understood before – that women are part of the good life and not to be ashamed of. Now, for the first time, Charlie Kray, the elder brother, really entered Reggie’s life. He and his blonde wife, Dolly, fitted in naturally with the new life of The Double R. Reggie got on well with him. although the relationship was different from the one he had with Ronnie. Charlie had nothing of Ronnie’s viciousness or showmanship or dreams of glory; he was an easy-going man whose wife didn’t get on with her in-laws, and so he had built a separate family life of his own with their two children in a modern flat in Stepney. He and his wife enjoyed themselves. He did well as a wardrobe-dealer. They often had a night out in the West End together. Dolly danced well, and Charlie was something of a gambler, like his father.
Now, with The Double R flourishing, Charlie Kray joined in the success. Had Ronnie been around, the money would have gone as fast as it was earned; the club would have become another battleground, and Reggie’s energy would soon have gone into fresh wars and further gang alliances. With Charlie there, things were different. Charlie was shrewd. They found another drinking club at Stratford and bought it. They began their own car-site on the empty plot beside the billiard hall. Then Charlie heard of an empty house going for a nominal rent next to the car park of Bow Police Station. It was typical of Reggie to decide that this would be an ideal place for an illicit gambling club. Despite their neighbours, the Wellington Way Club, which they opened in the spring of 1957, became their biggest money-spinner so far. Blackjack, rummy and faro were bringing in a minimum of £50 a night in house money. The profits doubled when Reggie installed an illegal book-making business on the premises.
Despite the close proximity of Bow Police Station the only threat to the gathering enrichment of Reggie and Charlie Kray was not the Law but the prisoner in Wandsworth Gaol, who was just entering the fifteenth month of his sentence.
Ronnie Kray seemed fine. Now he had his small world under his control he was quite happily sitting out his sentence and hoping for remission for good conduct. He was no trouble. He read a lot. Boy’s Town was still his favourite book. ‘It’s a lovely story. I used to dream of doing something like that for homeless boys when I came out. Not just because I like boys either. I wanted to do some good. Something that I could be remembered for.’ He kept to himself, apart from his ‘pensioners’ and a few close friends. The warders treated him warily. Reggie and the family wrote regularly. And he made a new friend, a good-looking giant of a man called Frank Mitchell. Ronnie had been reading Of Mice and Men. Mitchell reminded him of Lennie. He was a gentle psychopath, immensely strong, childlike with those he trusted, violent against authority. Warders kept clear of him, and although he had spent most of his life in institutions he was proud of taking any punishment he got. Ronnie admired this. He admired his body and his looks. He also liked to feel that he could care for him. He would try to cheer him up during recreation; when Frank was depressed Ronnie would send him presents of food and tobacco. Few people visited him, so Ronnie arranged with Reggie to get members of the Firm to come to see him. When they talked, Ronnie always promised Mitchell that he and his brother would look after him in the years ahead.
Then Ronnie Kray’s routine was broken. Without intending it, his good behaviour had made him eligible for the easier life of a first offenders’ prison and he found himself aboard the Solent ferry, bound for the Isle of Wight. The prison at Camp Hill was more humane than Wandsworth. There was a liberal-minded governor, prisoners mixed freely most of the day, and the whole prison staff made an attempt to teach these first offenders trades and stop them turning into hardened criminals. Ronnie hated it.
There were too many games, and far too many straight prisoners for his liking. In Wandsworth the old lags respected him. He had had prestige. Here he was nothing. The Wandsworth tobacco circuit didn’t operate. Instead of prisoners needing his help, most of these new ones kept clear of someone smelling so patently of trouble. He was still shy, still vulnerable, and found it hard to start a normal friendship. All his relationships beyond the family had been with the weird, the cowed or the small group of Bethnal Greeners he had grown up with. New friends appeared impossible.
He was entirely alone here: his family and followers were a continent away across the Solent. He had no aptitude to learn a trade. And for the first time he sensed that he was losing touch with the one being who had always been his firm link with reality. Reggie’s success started to obsess him.
Gradually he withdrew into himself. He gave up the effort of talking to people. He stopped writing letters and seemed to lose the power to read. All he could do was watch, and he gradually became convinced that everyone was hostile to him. In the past he had controlled events; now he was helpless. People had feared him; now they were getting their revenge. During the night he would lie awake for hours, brooding on what he’d seen, trying to work out what had happened to turn everyone against him.
‘If Reggie’d been there, I’d have been all right. But there was no one. I started thinking there was someone there all set to do me in.’
The worst thing was not knowing what he had done.
‘Then I worked out what was behind it all. I was a bit barmy now. But I thought everyone was thinking I had grassed.’
This explained everything – the silences, the lack of friends, the sudden isolation. But it was terrible. Ronnie had spent his life loathing the Law: an informer was the lowest of the low. No one could seriously believe this of him. The suspicion turned to certainty. What other reason would a group of prisoners have for making him an outcast? He tried to face it calmly. If people thought like that, so what? He knew the truth. He had less than a year to serve now; then he’d be back among people who loved him and respected him. The year soon proved too long.
‘I don’t know what it was set me off, but I thought there was agents everywhere working a big plot to torture me.’
His only hope was vigilance – never trust a soul or give himself away. Somehow at night he had to keep himself awake. His survival depended on it now. He talked to no one, did nothing except concentrate on his battle to stay alive. People ignored him, but he knew that they were watching.
Then came the thought that finished him. Just suppose all his enemies were right – suppose he had been an informer without knowing it? How could he prove he wasn’t? If only Reggie had been there, he would have known, but on his own like this how could he be sure of anything? Perhaps there was someone else inside him forcing him to do things he never knew. How could he know that he was Ronnie Kray at all?
Hardly sleeping now, barely eating for fear that someone might have poisoned his food, Ronnie spent most of each day huddled in his cell facing the door. The warders, worried that he might kill himself, kept him under observation, making him more nervous still. They noticed that the only time he moved was to go to the mirror. He spent hours on end watching himself. They thought it vanity. It wasn’t. He was attempting to keep sane with the sight of the one familiar thing remaining – his own face. Even that was changing: there was a puffiness around the eyes, a faint thickening along the jaw-line.
This was the point at which he broke. The watching game could last no longer. If they were all against him, he would face them and get it over with. That evening, instead of staying in his cell he walked down to the recreation room. He stood apart from all the others, watching for a while. There were all enemies – he could see that now. T
hey were pretending to ignore him with their silly games, but he had had enough.
He began breathing deeply as he had done between rounds as a boxer to gain strength. He screamed, then charged, arms flailing, punching at everyone he could. He tipped a table over and hurt several prisoners before he was safely put into a straitjacket.
Later that night he thought he saw the man who had been plotting everything against him from the start. The governor of Camp Hill Prison had heard of the trouble at recreation and called into the sick bay to see if prisoner Kray were feeling any better.
‘Filthy old bastard,’ screamed Ronnie, and spat at him. He felt better then.
Ronnie was moved to the psychiatric wing of Winchester Gaol for observation. The medical officer diagnosed an attack of ‘prison psychosis’ – a term covering almost any form of violent mental disorder brought on by confinement – and had him heavily sedated. For a while he seemed to recover. He answered questions coherently, was pleased with news of the family and began eating again. Then came the news about Aunt Rose. The family had known that she had leukaemia for nearly two years, but had kept it from Ronnie for fear of upsetting him. Wild Aunt Rose who once beat two women in a straight fight in Vallance Road fought death as she had fought everything. Twice she dragged herself home when the doctors had given her less than a year to live. When she was too weak to stand, the family refused to let her back into hospital.
Violet insisted, ‘It wasn’t right to allow our Rose to die in a place like that. So we took turns, sitting up with her every night. She was in the big bed in the front room where our mum and dad sleep now. The doctors warned us that her end would come with a haemorrhage and that it wouldn’t be nice to see. Her feet swelled up and the rest of her went thin as a rake. Then on Christmas Eve the bleeding started. She went on Christmas Day.’
Two days later, in the psychiatric wing of Winchester Gaol, Ronnie received the letter from Reggie telling him ‘Aunt Rawse’ was dead. By evening he was incoherent and had to be placed in the straitjacket again for his own safety.
Reggie had nightmares all that night. So did Violet Kray. She dreamt that two men in white coats were dragging Ronnie across a courtyard to a building without windows. The following morning she received an official telegram from the governor of Winchester Gaol:
‘Your son Ronald Kray certified insane.’
SEVEN
Flight from Long Grove
According to the board by the gate the place is simply Long Grove Hospital, a peaceful spot within the Surrey countryside. By the main entrance is a marmalade-pot lodge, lace curtains at the windows. Forsythia flanks the drive; no one is about. Epsom lies a mile and a half away across the fields but all the forsythia in the world will never alter the outline of the old lunatic asylums built to an identical pattern round London at the turn of the century. All have the same red, Aldershot-style wards and office blocks, the same high water-tower that peers like an enormous head across the country. And Long Grove still receives most of its patients from the same part of London as when the London County Council erected it in 1907 to cope with the growing number of the mentally disordered from the slums of Hackney and Bethnal Green. Ronnie was driven here from Winchester Prison on 20 February 1958. He was never to forget the terror of those first few days. He was placed in Napier Ward, a locked ward; trained nurses kept each patient under day and night supervision.
‘I wouldn’t move, but sat all day huddled round the radiator. I wasn’t quite sure who I was. The radiator seemed the only friend I had because it was warm. I was completely on my own, and funny things used to come and go in my mind. I thought the man opposite me was a dog, and if I got his name right he’d come and jump in my lap. I’d have a friend then, but I never got his name. I didn’t recognize anyone, although Reggie and my mother visited me. Sometimes I thought I’d kill myself to stop someone else doing it first.’
According to his medical report he had ‘put his hand through a glass window’ and showed signs of ‘verbigeration and marked thought blocking’. He was ‘unstable and in fear of bodily change’. He believed people were still plotting against him, tampering with his letters and censoring them for sinister purposes. No intelligence test was carried out, and there was nothing on his report about his criminal case history. But the doctor had wide experience of the mentally sick and seems to have had no difficulty summing up the patient’s character: ‘A simple man of low intelligence, poorly in touch with the outside world.’
For the Long Grove doctors, this was all he was – a simple man, a fairly simple case of schizophrenic breakdown. He would never be entirely cured, but could be helped over the breakdown and then stabilized on regular doses of the new tranquillizers that were revolutionizing the treatment of the mentally sick. At Long Grove they were performing these miracles every day and the doctors set to work on Ronnie, placing him on Stematol – a drug which damps down neurotic symptoms without doping the patient completely.
Out of the eighteen hundred patients at the time, six were from prisons, and the hospital made a point of insisting to the Home Office that they would be treated exactly like ordinary patients. So Ronnie Kray became a routine case – nothing to make a fuss about. His family agreed, although for slightly different reasons. They knew their Ronnie: he was simply ‘acting up a bit to kid the authorities into giving him a change of scene’. Reggie had seen him ‘acting barmy’ once already in the army and knew the lengths he’d go. If the medical officer at Winchester Gaol had been taken in and sent him to this comfortable little hospital near London, that just showed what a good actor Ronnie was. Within a week the treatment had begun to take effect. Ronnie had left his radiator and there was no longer a dog in the bed opposite. He began to read again, to recognize his family. The doctors were so pleased with his progress that by the end of March they had him moved from Napier Ward to MI Block. The doors were left unlocked there.
Although schizophrenics form by far the largest single group in Britain’s mental hospitals the disease remains something of a mystery. Kraepelin described it in the 1890s under the name dementia praecox but medical research is still scratching at its origins and true nature. It can take many forms, although the disease usually develops over a long period and is sparked off by a final crisis. There is no known ‘cure’ as such, but sufferers can be helped over the ‘florid’ state of a schizophrenic breakdown by various modern drugs; after-effects vary enormously.
In Ronnie’s case the medical reports show considerable vagueness over the form of his disease. He was in Long Grove to be treated, and here he was responding rather more quickly than most. But had the Long Grove doctors taken the trouble to find out a little of his history of violence and delusion, it is hard to believe that they would have moved him quite so promptly out of Napier Ward. The hospital’s policy of treating mentally sick criminals like ordinary patients was a worthy one as far as it went; but it was patently absurd if it led doctors to ignore the fact that a man like Ronnie was a criminal.
For Ronnie was no ordinary schizophrenic whose problems could be tidied up with three capsules of Stematol a day. Crime formed an important part of his disease, and had his doctors had the time to study his history they could not have failed to recognize him for what he really was and treated him accordingly. Among the different types of schizophrenics there is a small group who are potentially dangerous and the most difficult to spot – the paranoid schizophrenics. Most schizophrenics find it hard to face the world and finally collapse through inability to reconcile their delusions with the world outside. The paranoid schizophrenic is different. Even if he has a breakdown, his obsessions can persist despite it. He has the strange power to direct all his mental faculties to the protection of his distorted world. This means that outwardly he can often appear completely logical and normal; inwardly he is ruled by his obsession as he ‘continues in his vicious circle of ill-advised aggressiveness, self-protection, misinterpretation, spread of delusional ideas and increasing watchfulness’.
Qualities like these appear in many of history’s great religious leaders – also in its most notorious criminals. Jack the Ripper, Al Capone and the Boston Strangler are textbook cases of the violent paranoid schizophrenic. So, as the Long Grove doctors might have discovered, was Ronnie Kray.
But he was recovering so fast that no one did. Stematol was working. Ronnie appeared quite normal, reading, joking, writing letters home. The doctors thought that they had done their job. By the beginning of May, Ronnie appeared so well that he applied to be discharged from hospital and allowed to return to prison.
This request was not as strange as it may seem. Ronnie was haunted by the fate of his Wandsworth friend, Frank Mitchell, who was considered such a public menace that the authorities had refused him a definite release date. Mitchell saw year follow year in prison, never quite knowing when it would all end. Officially certified insane, Ronnie could end up in the same position.