by Bobby Teale
I was thousands of miles away from the city where I had been born. All I’d kept of my old life was my name. Robert Frank Teale. Friends at home in Utah call me ‘Bobby’.
I’d never gone back, never made contact with the people I’d left behind – my parents, my brothers and sisters, my first wife, my daughter, the two brothers closest to me in age. How could I have done that? I’d often asked myself this question, usually at around four in the morning on those nights when sleep just wouldn’t come.
The ache to know what had become of them had eased a bit with time – but it had never gone away.
Were they even still alive? My beautiful mother – I remember the way she used to look when I was young, dressed in furs and diamonds when Dad had money, but always glamorous even when we barely had enough to eat. The smell of her perfume, bending over to kiss me goodnight, the warmth of her arms around me, I hadn’t ever forgotten. But a tightening in my chest always warned me when I was getting over-emotional.
The kids were by my second wife, Eileen. We had married in January 1970 and over the next few years we had three children, a girl and two boys. There had been good times and there had been bad times. Eileen and I had lived in Canada, first in Edmonton, Alberta, and then in British Columbia. I had started to hit the booze hard and was doing two packs of Rothmans a day. It would be too easy to blame what had happened to me in London for my drinking. Perhaps it was just me.
Almost from the beginning, I would tell Eileen that I was somehow going to see my family again. I would get back to England when the time was right. It was never right. When I had money, it seemed just a question of getting on a plane. Then I had no money. ‘Wait until the kids are older,’ she said. Then it was ‘Wait until they are out of school.’ Ten years turned into twenty and then thirty and I began to think I might die without ever seeing my family again.
But it wasn’t really Eileen who was stopping me. I think it was me all along who just could not go through with it. It was fear. And fear of facing my brothers, Alfie and David, who I thought would blame me. As each year passed, I felt an ever-deeper need to tell the truth before I died.
Eileen and I drifted apart. Sometimes I wondered whether something had happened to my heart. That having blocked off my emotions for so long, I no longer knew what I really felt. Anyhow, there were no storms, just a gradual acceptance that our marriage no longer worked. We stayed friendly. Thank God, the kids didn’t give up on me. I’d lost enough family already.
When the kids were old enough, I told them a bit of the story too. There’d been that time a few Christmases back when I’d seen that photograph of Reggie Kray’s funeral and got, shall we say, a bit emotional about it. Gradually I filled in the gaps in their knowledge. I told them how, as a young man, I’d been involved with some very dangerous people. How I had got away, left England, and how I was the cause of my two brothers going to prison. How I felt guilt and shame and anger – and yet felt a sense of pride in what I had done, the very thing that meant I had to leave my old life behind.
There had been a moment when with all the new power of the internet I had searched the London phone book looking for my brother Alfie’s number. (The A. Teale at the top of the list turned out later to be the right one.) But I was too scared to try and contact him.
Then I’d found Dawne – on the internet – and we spent one hundred and fifty hours e-mailing and talking on the phone getting to know each other before we actually met. That was five years ago and we’ve been married for four. We live in the state of Utah in the USA and I am classified as a permanent resident.
Dawne is an American citizen and she’s worked as a member of the Peace Corps all over the world. For two people from such different backgrounds we hit it off really well. It seems to be working out just fine – Dawne being highly academic and me being, well, just a carpenter. Just a carpenter. Dawne was always too smart to know that wasn’t the whole story. But then I was never too good at hiding the truth. That is what had got me here in the first place.
And here’s the other thing. As far as I was concerned, I never wanted the story of what had happened to me to come out.
But risky as it might have seemed when everything else was being re-invented all those years ago, I had kept my name. No one had told me not to. And after all, it was all I had left of my former self.
Then, five years ago, I did something crazy. I as good as put up a sign saying ‘Here I am’.
When I got a brand new MacBook in 2007, I opened a Facebook account in the name Robert Frank Teale. That’s what the social network is for, isn’t it, so old friends can find you, so the whole world can find you? And after so many years of hiding from the world, that is just what I wanted. At least I thought I did.
On this beautiful early summer morning with the sun getting up in the sky, I turned on my laptop and checked my e-mail.
When I opened the message I felt a rush of emotion just like a sixteen-year-old. Someone wanted to be my friend on Facebook. ‘David Teale: Looking for Bobby.’
My heart was pounding. I had to get more breath into my lungs. I was shaking, sobbing, overwhelmed with emotion. It couldn’t be him, it must be some nut-job. But I knew. I suppose I always knew that this moment would come.
I e-mailed back. ‘What’s your middle name? Where were you born?’
He came back straight away: ‘Shut up. I’m your brother.’
No one but David could have responded like that. It really was him.
My son Jason was up and around. He found me sobbing like a kid. What could I tell him? How could I explain? I mumbled something about my brothers David and Alfie – people they’d never heard of. People I’d tried for so long to forget but couldn’t. I said something about having to go back to London, something about detectives from Scotland Yard meeting me at Heathrow if I went through passport control and picking up where we left off in 1969. He looked at me as if I was crazy.
‘That’s not going to happen, Dad,’ he said. What did he know? What did any of my children know about who I really was? But David Teale knew. And now he’d found me.
Now I’m in tears. Connections start to take place. I get an account going on Skype, and I start phoning every Sunday. I hear their voices, still strong, still with that London accent from the fifties I only get to hear (badly done) in movies. Mine, I guess, is some mid-Atlantic mash-up. We can all get over that.
David later told me what had led him to sending that ‘looking for Bobby’ message. In 2008 he had started helping people with drug problems. He was working with a female teacher named Lali who quickly became a friend. David told her about his childhood, and his association with some people called the Krays. Lali was amazed, and told him, ‘Dave, you have got to write a book.’ It was then that he confided to her that he could neither read nor write.
She told him to get a laptop, and where to go to attend an adult literacy class. She also asked him where I might be. David said they’d been told I was dead, although he had never really accepted that this was true.
David started going to classes twice a week. Lali also told him to start going to the library where he learned how to use the laptop. She also advised him to start looking for me via Facebook. She suggested he just put a note up: ‘Looking for Bobby,’ giving his own name but not much else.
In the meantime Alfie had suddenly been taken into hospital with a shadow on the lung that was suspected of being cancer. Alfie assumed the worst. He had an exploratory operation. He was clear. That’s when David walked in to the hospital and said to Alfie that they were going to do this – that they were going to find their missing brother and write a book. And that’s exactly what they did.
After that first amazing connection, we three brothers really let rip. We Skyped and we e-mailed, telling each other our stories with the Atlantic Ocean in the middle. We’d been so close when we were kids, yet circumstances had pulled us apart as young men. Then they had spun me out of Alfie and David’s orbit completely.
&n
bsp; How is everyone, I asked, how’s Mum and Dad? I somehow thought everything would be the same as it was when I had left, just frozen in time. I realise now that was so dumb. Of course, my parents had both been dead for years now.
I remembered now that back in 1968 when I was in Maidstone Jail, I’d said to David that I didn’t think I’d make it to Mum or Dad’s funeral. David had looked surprised and asked ‘Why?’ and I told him I didn’t know, just an instinct I had – which had now turned out to be right. The thought that I had missed Mum’s death hurt most of all.
Now I knew I had to come back to England. Alfie meanwhile had told our oldest sister, Eileen, that they had managed to trace me. Eileen’s response was: ‘Oh my God, you haven’t!’
Eileen then contacted my daughter, Tracy. She still lived on the Isle of Wight. I hadn’t seen her for forty-five years. Tracy lovingly demanded that it was she who picked me up at the airport should I finally come over. Nothing was going to stop me now.
I arrived at Heathrow. I looked around expecting one person to be meeting me. I think I told her I’d be wearing a hat. Then I spotted Tracy looking over in my direction. She was very shy when I first walked up to her and I got extremely tearful. Tracy was with her own daughter, my granddaughter, Georgia. I felt incredibly emotional, not knowing who to hug or turn to first. The last time I had seen my Tracy she was a little baby in her pram with her mother on the high street in Ryde in 1965. There she was. There I was.
All I wanted to do was to look at the daughter I hadn’t seen for so long, and the grandchildren I’d never met. As Tracy drove us away from the airport she kept saying: ‘Don’t look at me!’ as she caught me staring at her. The strongest resemblance I could see was to her grandfather on her mother’s side. And to my mother, her grandmother.
I remembered getting a visit when I was in prison from a solicitor, asking me to sign a paper to say that if I would guarantee never to see Tracy ever again, she would be looked after like a princess. It came from her mother’s family, the Readers, who had been working for this really from the time they’d become aware of my existence. Between them and the Krays, my marriage to Pat was never going to last.
If I didn’t sign, they would have disowned Tracy altogether. So I signed. I had lost my liberty and now I had lost my daughter. It was the most devastating time in my life and I’d tried to forget all of it. Now it was if it had happened yesterday.
Where should Alfie, David and I have the big meet? It would have to be London – the Holiday Inn in Holborn. Nice and anonymous. I was waiting in the restaurant and they were in the coffee shop, so even at the eleventh hour we were still missing each other. Then I saw them. No doubt about it. They were my long-lost brothers. Tears ran down our faces as we hugged one another.
What did I feel? It was all happening at once. Overwhelming love for my brothers for certain. But had I done the right thing in returning? For years I’d kept away, frightened of having to confront my past again. Easier, I’d believed, to force it down each time it briefly surfaced, along with the faces of those now long dead. But it wouldn’t leave me alone, and even without my brother’s message I sensed the truth would have finally sought me out.
We spent a long while simply being overjoyed at finding one another again. Then we began to open up even more to reveal the deepest secrets from long ago. It was not easy.
The big hurt was how I had vanished off the face of the earth and let everyone think I was dead. David explained the irony of it all – the deal they’d made with Ronnie just as I was getting ready to run, how much they trusted the intermediary, Patsy O’Mara, and were sure that it would stick.
And I didn’t know. David then told me about taking our mum down to New Scotland Yard in the early seventies, going in to report me as a missing person. It broke my heart.
He told me they spoke to the officer on the desk first, and asked to see the inspector. They had to fill out some forms, and the police asked them if they had any idea what might have happened to me. They said they didn’t and the officer promised to look into the matter and get back to them. No one ever did. So a few months later David took Mum back and they went through the whole thing again. They did this four or five times in the end.
David and Mum knew they were just being fobbed off and were getting very frustrated. The last time they went up there the police kept them waiting for over three hours. Each time they’d tell them: ‘We understand your position’, or ‘We’ll get back to you soon’, but in the end our mother died without knowing what had happened to me.
The questions kept coming. Why did that happen? What did you do that for? In fact when the bad things were happening, we were kept forcibly apart (I was in prison, and after that I was under armed police guard) so we deliberately couldn’t know what the others knew. Some of what the police and government were doing back then is still secret.
I was stunned to hear from David and Alfie how the Krays had been idolised, turned into heroes, and about the mythology that surrounded them. I still find it hard to comprehend. In fact I find it offensive. I felt that unless I could get the truth out about what happened, all that I had gone through at such a price, it was a life wasted. For all those years I didn’t want to hear what had happened to the Krays – any of them. I shut it out. Now I wanted to know every detail.
So what was that crazy thing about our mother being arrested? Alfie reminded me that Ronnie Kray himself had stood up in open court at the Old Bailey and said the only reason we, the Teale brothers, were saying all this was to get our mother off the burglary charge.
Alfie told me that over the years he’s sort of worked it out. Mum’s arrest came out of the blue as far as we were concerned. It’s just too far-fetched to think it was simply a coincidence. But Alfie said he can’t help but think – and I have to agree with him – that it was the Krays who set our mother up deliberately, not the police. It doesn’t fit with the rest of what Nipper was up to.
Ronnie was very clever in some things. If it looked like we were simply giving evidence for the prosecution to stop our mum going to prison, he’d be able to use this in his favour. It was Charlie Kray who was behind the burglary back in February 1968, but it might have been to do with the fact that the Krays knew we were due for release later that year, and wanted to have a hold over us when we came out. Anything we said after that would be tainted. It would look like a police fit-up. In fact it was a Kray-Boothby fit-up. It was still going on four years after all that madness at Cedra Court. And who had lived there then? Reggie and Ronnie, our mum and dad and the guy who did the burglary, Leslie Holt.
Then I heard from David what Ronnie did to him at Vallance Road.
And I was able to tell him he’d done the same thing to me.
Ronnie Kray raped me too.
It happened in Ryde on the Isle of Wight and still haunts me whenever I am there, anywhere, even today. We were all at a packed dance-hall when Albert Donoghue came to me and said Ronnie wanted us to have a party upstairs. We went up a narrow set of stairs, the Colonel in front of me, and two of the Firm behind me. When we reached the top of the stairs there was just a room with a bed and two chairs in it. The two sat down in the chairs and went to sleep, while Ronnie told me to take off my clothes and get into bed. I was about twenty-two years old and terrified. Then Ronnie raped me. Afterwards he kicked me so that I fell on the floor. I don’t think telling David after all these years helped either of us. And nor could either of us explain, certainly not me, how we’d gone on doing their bidding after we’d been abused like that. When, after my marriage broke up and I left the island to go to London and be what I thought for a while was a proper gangster, it was Reggie who was my friend. It was Ronnie who wanted me dead. And he wanted Reggie to do the killing. Maybe it was an extension of rape. That’s how crazy he was.
So these talks went on, with us comparing notes, filling in gaps. Remember that Alfie and David didn’t really know what I was up to that summer after the Cornell killing. All they knew was th
at I was hanging out with Reggie, there’d been a police raid and the identity parade that followed had collapsed.
The Krays boasting about getting away with it was in all the papers on 6 August 1966, along with big, grinning photographs taken round their mum’s. The next day, Alfie and David were both invited by me to this old guy’s party where we stayed the night. He ‘left by the rubbish chute’ and turned up with a load of police on his own doorstep early the next morning. We were all arrested, didn’t get bail – and ended up being charged with blackmail and going to prison, sentenced to three years. And I couldn’t tell them why.
So all these years later, we worked it out between us. David was like a terrier at the British National Archives where the police and prosecution records had been released over the years.
He found all our original statements to Read and Mooney in July 1968, what we’d said at the committal and at the big Old Bailey trial. He found what Pogue had said. He found the Butler file that Read said in his book didn’t exist (and may not have known existed), revealing that Butler gave up the pursuit of Ronnie and Reggie after the Lea Bridge Road raid and the Director of Public Prosecutions walked away – the week we were all arrested.
But a lot of it was still secret – and the dates on them for when they’re allowed to be opened to the public are for after we’ll all be long dead. The closed files include all the papers about our Old Bailey trial for blackmail. And why is that?
There are also boxes of evidence put together after the Cornell murder which still no one’s allowed to see. Where are the pictures that we saw of us in Tintagel House? Where is the photograph I got of Scotch Ian? Where are the pictures of David’s family with the Krays at Steeple Bay, the ones that the police took from Christine? Where are the surveillance photographs we saw of ourselves around Moresby Road? It’s as if we never existed.