by James Morton
Albie Woods was apparently ‘spoken to’ by a member of the Firm. On 12 March Tebbett had also spoken to Johnny Dale, who had told him Ronnie Kray was the killer but added he would not make a statement and was scared even to leave the police station. It was also claimed Dale had been in the lavatory at the time.
Inspector James Axon was in charge of the investigation, but the barmaid did not get on with him:
‘Mr Axon didn’t know how to talk to East Enders. You don’t have to be an East Ender to do it, but you have to know how.’124
Try as the officers might, they could not get her to make a statement implicating Ronnie Kray. Until their deaths, and even after, Patricia Kelly remained terrified of the Twins. Meanwhile Ronnie put it about that Cornell had been killed by Jimmy Evans.
The identity of the man ‘Ian’ who was with Ronnie (Ian Barrie) was unknown, and for a time Glasgow gang leader Arthur Thompson was in the frame for the murder. At the time Thompson was making regular visits to London, travelling by Jaguar or flying from Renfrew airport, to see the Cantonese-speaking Frankie McGowan who owned the Blue Gardenia club in Soho and who is credited with the introduction of the Chinese into Gerrard Street. Thompson was thought to run several pitch-and-toss schools in Glasgow and one in London.
Just how friendly Thompson was with the London teams once again depends on who is telling the story. Certainly when the robber Robert ‘Andy’ Anderson got over the Wandsworth wall during the celebrated Ronnie Biggs escape on 8 July 1965 and literally turned up on the doorstep of Eddie Richardson and Frank Fraser‘s Atlantic Machines in Charlotte Street, the latter was able to turn to Thompson for help. Within forty-eight hours Thompson met Fraser and Anderson in Edinburgh and hid Anderson for months until he developed itchy feet when he was sent to Bobby McDermott, the then king of Manchester.
There is an almost certainly apocryphal story that when Thompson once heard the Krays wished to see him he walked into the Regency, produced a shotgun, made one Twin kiss the backside of the other and then, backing out of the club, said, ‘You’ll no’ forget me now’.125 Files at the National Archives show that he was regarded as a close friend of the Twins and the police thought he had possibly killed George Cornell on their behalf.
The description of ‘Ian’ was of a twenty-six or twenty-eight-year-old man, around 6ft in height, light brown hair, spiky, pale complexion and a noticeable scar on the right side of his neck and one on his right hand. The description was nothing like Thompson, and while a man named ‘Ian T’ was found in the Scottish records, he did not have a scar on the side of his face.
A letter was sent to the police suggesting that ‘Ian’s’ last conviction was in Dublin. This wasn’t far from the truth. Barrie and Scotch Jack Dickson had undertaken a spot of work while on holiday in Ireland and as a result had been imprisoned for shop breaking in Enniskillen on 7 April 1965. Dickson had received nine months and Barrie a month less.
Meanwhile the story goes that Cornell’s widow Olive, and his brother Eddie, or possibly Jimmy, had visited Vallance Road, where she threw a brick at a window. She was fined £1 by the magistrate at Thames Court the next day but, because she was a woman, the Twins generously left her alone. Other accounts suggest it was Roy Hall who fired shots at the windows and was confronted by an irate Violet Kray who told him to go away and not disturb her boys, who were asleep. And, like all good gangsters who obey their own and other people’s mothers, he rather ignominiously obeyed.126 For a time the Twins ordered Hart, Exley and Connolly to stand guard each evening in Vallance Road. While Hart was on duty Olive came round yelling, ‘I know you killed my George. He wasn’t frightened of you and neither am I.’ Aunt May confronted Olive, who then hit her with her handbag and headed off. Donoghue and other members of the Firm however were issued with small axes, bought by Ronnie, and told to chop up the offending Eddie Cornell. ‘All we did was put the word round we were looking for him and he got the message and disappeared’, says Donoghue.127
In fact, as she told the police, Olive Cornell went to Vallance Road three times. On 14 March she spoke to Charlie, asking him, as he also had two children, how he felt about the killing. His reply goes unrecorded. She went again to try to see the Twins but this time only spoke to their parents. ‘They became aggressive with me,’ she told the police, ‘but I did not accuse the Krays of anything’. She did, however, tell old Charlie and Violet that their sons were ‘puffs’. More seriously, her father had died a few months earlier and left her a cottage at Sutton Valence near Maidstone. After she was arrested over the window the cottage was badly damaged in a mysterious fire. No arrests were made. There was also talk of poisoning her, with George Osborne’s wife Jeanette to be asked to be the poisoner, but it came to nothing.
As the summer went by, Scotland Yard detectives discussed the case with David Hopkin, from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, in particular about holding an identification parade. One man had said he would definitely be able to recognise the man who had shot Cornell. Another said he saw a man who fitted the description of Kray coming out of the pub but a police report described him as ‘a well-known flight of fancy’ man. At the end of July a conference was held. Hooter Millen was against an ID parade. He was convinced Albie Woods, who had given a detailed description of the gunman, would deliberately fail to pick out Ronnie, so strengthening his claim that he was not the killer. He also believed that even if one man did make an identification, the witnesses would be got at. By now Tommy Butler was sure Barrie was the second man. However, on 29 July Hopkin advised there was no reason not to try to hold a parade.
So on 4 August Tommy Butler had the Twins arrested and put them with Tommy Cowley on an identification parade. Millen was proved right. The parade itself was something of a farce. After a friend of the Krays had pointed out the danger she was in, Patricia Kelly, the now even more terrified barmaid, point blank refused to attend it and Butler, whom she rather liked, did not force her. As Woods made a wrong identification, a second man who did co-operate was simply not certain that Ronnie was the gunman.
The trio were released and a triumphant Ronnie told reporters he had been well fed, being given sausage, beans, pie and chips. ‘Our Mum has been very worried – it’s her birthday today – she’s 56’.128
Immediately after the failed parade, a letter in August 1965 to Tommy Butler read:
‘SIR
YOU HAD THE RIGHT ONES FOR THE MURDER OF GEORGE CORNELL THE KRAY TWINS DONE IT. PEOPLE IN THE BLIND BEGGER KNOW YOU CAN EXPECT ANOTHER MURDER IN EAST END SOON THEY WILL BE THE GUILTY ONES WATCH THEM’
Another letter which arrived on 9 August 1965 advised the police:
‘Keep plugging at it. Ronnie Kray did the shooting. Try the Cypriot member of their gang. He will crack.’
But there was to be no more ‘plugging’ for the foreseeable future. Butler returned to Scotland Yard and the Krays became more and more convinced that, if not actually immortal, at the very least they were invincible.
It was time for a holiday and on 13 September 1965 the Twins arrived in Tangier in a six-seater plane from Hastings, refuelling in France. They stayed at the Hotel Resident Bahia, where they met up with Billy Hill and his girlfriend Gipsy, with whom he was now living and running a nightclub. With them were John Barrie and Reggie’s then girlfriend Christine Boyce and they all went swimming at the El Minzah, one of the city’s best hotels. There were stories circulating in London that Harry Roberts, later convicted of the 1966 murder of three policemen at Shepherds Bush, was also in the city, associating with a homosexual who ran a club under the Hotel Tangier.129 While there, Ronnie is said to have made a boy kiss his feet and fell in love with another whom he wanted to bring back to England.
At the time Billy Hill might have been a welcome visitor to Morocco but as far as the local police were concerned, the Twins were not. Ordered to leave Tangier, they returned to England on 23 September without Ronnie’s boy.
For some time, it was fashionable to order a ‘Luger and lime’ in the Beggars.
Nat. Arch. Crim 1/ 2589; The Times, 26 May 1955; ‘A sordid story of the slums’, East London Advertiser, 27 May 1955.
Reg Kray, Born Fighter, p. 95.
the gentle author, ‘Lenny Hamilton, Jewel Thief’, Spitalfields Life, 1 September 2010.
Mrs X, The Barmaid’s Tale, p. 42.
MEPO 2/10933.
For an account of the Hennessey family see J.P. Bean, Over the Wall, Ch 17.
Nat. Arch. DPP 2/4156; The Times, 25 May 1966.
In 1969 Hart’s widow Eileen married Stanley Naylor who later received 12 years for his part in the Tibbs-Nicholls families feud. Naylor’s son, Lennie, was himself shot and killed at his home in Istead Rise on 19 April 2001. In 1996 he had been cleared of a charge of attempted murder when the victim of a machete attack in Canning Town refused to give evidence. He had also served a seven-year sentence for drug dealing. See James Morton, Gangland Today.
Micky Fawcett, Krayzee Days, p. 136.
the gentle author, ‘Billy Frost, The Krays’ Driver’, Spitalfields Life, 24 February 2010. In Born Fighter Reg Kray says that when he and Ron were in Brixton awaiting trial on the Hide-A-Way club charges Cornell slightingly told a member of the Firm, ‘The King is Dead’.
Conversation with JM, 27 May 2015.
Andrews had his leg amputated following the shooting and was later fitted with a false leg. He died from cancer shortly afterwards. Henry Mooney, unpublished MS 2001.
Micky Fawcett, Krazy Days, pp. 137, 145-6.
Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/11297.
Mrs X, The Barmaid’s Tale, pp. 44-5.
Brian McConnell, The Evil Firm, p. 82. As another example of the various stories about the Twins, in his unpublished memoir Ronald Hart says that they moved into a flat in the Lea Bridge Road found for them by the ‘Cat Man’ Charlie Clarke. The early incumbents were Hart, Ronnie and Reggie, Ian Barrie and Ronnie’s boyfriend ‘Little Billy’. Later Donoghue joined them.
Mrs X, The Barmaid’s Tale, p. 54; Albert Donoghue, conversation with JM, 7 September 2012.
Paul Ferris, The Ferris Conspiracy, pp, 56-7. The Glasgow police kept more or less continuous observation on Thompson and there was a note that on 27 July 1964 Albert Dimes and Frank Fraser had been there to see him. In April 1965 Thompson had stayed a fortnight at a boarding house in Clacton run by a ‘Big Mac’ McGregor.
Charlie Richardson, My Manor, p. 182; Robert Parker, Rough Justice. Roy Hall, later convicted at the so-called Torture Trial, was sentenced to 10 years. The prosecution’s case was that he had manned a hand-cranked generator originally designed for sending out SOS signals from aircraft which was used to torture those who had displeased Charlie Richardson.
Conversation with JM, 7 September 2012.
Nat. Arch. DPP 2/4223; Daily Mirror, 6 August 1966.
In 1959 Roberts and an accomplice had posed as tax inspectors to gain entry into the home of an elderly man. Once inside the man was bound and robbed and beaten about the head with a glass decanter. When Roberts was captured and tried for the crime the judge, Mr Justice Maude, sentencing him to seven years, told him, ‘You are a brutal thug. You came very near the rope this time. It is to be hoped you do not appear before us again.’ His victim, who never recovered from his injuries, died one year and three days after the attack. Under the law at the time, had he died two days earlier, Roberts could have been tried for his murder. He was finally paroled for the murder of the police officers in 2014.
Ronnie Kray, My Story, pp. 40-42.
Chapter 10
The Killing of Frank Mitchell
Within days of Cornell’s killing, the Krays began to organise the escape from Dartmoor prison of the giant Frank Samuel Mitchell, known as ‘The Mad Axeman’, then serving a life sentence. It was something Ron Kray described as ‘The greatest coup, the most brilliant stunt, ever pulled by the Kray Twins.’131
As usual, various reasons, some more convincing that others, have been suggested for the Twins’ decision to arrange Mitchell’s escape, leading ultimately to his murder on 23 December 1966. Ronnie says their decision was totally altruistic, claiming the move was an attempt to force the Home Office’s hand in setting a release date for Mitchell. Another suggestion was that Mitchell was needed to help them eliminate Frank Fraser, Billy Stayton, Jimmy Moody and the Richardsons. This simply does not wash; by the time Mitchell escaped, Fraser and the Richardsons had been safely locked up for several months, and Stayton and Jimmy Moody had vanished. A third reason given is that Mitchell had been in prison with Ronnie and had saved him from a beating. A fourth is that he and Reggie had had a homosexual relationship. And finally it seemed the Krays were beginning to lose their popularity in the East End. More sensible associates, such as Fawcett, had distanced or were distancing themselves and some were beginning to refer to them irreverently as Gert and Daisy, after the two East End music hall and radio comediennes Gert and Daisy Waters. The escape would restore their status in the eyes of the community.
Born in 1929 Mitchell, himself an East Ender and one of seven children, had a dreadful criminal record. Two trips to Borstal in his teens were followed by three months’ imprisonment for possessing a stolen revolver. His early sentences were for theft and shop breaking and he received 21 months’ imprisonment in March 1953 and three years in December 1954. In the first two days of this sentence he attacked a warder and was flogged. In July 1955 he was certified insane and was sent to Rampton, a secure mental hospital in Nottinghamshire. In January 1957 he escaped and while on the run broke into a house and hit the owner over the head with an iron bar. He was sentenced to nine years but within three months he was again certified insane and was sent to Broadmoor.
While he was there he wrote in September 1957 to the Commissioner of Police confessing to the long-unsolved murder of 35-year-old Dorothy Edith Wallis. Known as Daisy, she lived in Wembley with her parents and ran a none-too-successful typing agency in Holborn. On 15 August 1949 she had been stabbed to death in her office. Various suggestions were advanced as a motive: a robbery gone wrong, a jealous lover, a sex attack and even that she had become involved in the post-war black market. None stood up, and of 300 sets of fingerprints taken in her office all the owners except one were eliminated, and the one remaining set belonged to a person without criminal convictions. Mitchell did, however, have convictions for office breaking but when officers were sent to interview him it seems he could have read most of what he knew in the newspapers. Until he had escaped from Rampton he had no convictions for violence and being a blond six-foot giant, he did not resemble the Italianate-looking man seen hurrying down an alleyway around the time of the murder. The general opinion was that Mitchell just wanted to get out of Broadmoor and saw his confession as a means to an end. The case remains open and there are vague suggestions it might have been a lesbian attack. In those days women usually wore gloves outside their homes, something which would account for the lack of fingerprints.132
It took Mitchell another twelve months to get out of Broadmoor but in July 1958 he escaped again. He had cut through the bars of his cell with a hacksaw and, leaving a dummy in his bed, climbed over the main wall. On the run, he broke into a private home and held a married couple hostage with an axe, ever after to be dubbed in the press as ‘The Mad Axeman’. Apparently insane when he scaled the wall, there was no question of his being insane by the time of his recapture. In October 1958 he received ten years and life imprisonment to run concurrently. Sent to Hull, he beat a warder during an attempted mass escape and in 1962 was birched fo
r slashing another officer. In the September that year he was sent to Dartmoor.
There Mitchell seems to have settled down, and was taken off the escapers’ list. In May 1964 it was recommended that he should be allowed to work outside the prison and his behaviour apparently continued to improve. He worked on model cars in his cell, continued a strict exercise routine and bred budgerigars. In September 1966, he was transferred to a loosely supervised ‘Honour Party’ working in a nearby quarry, but what he wanted above all was a release date, something which had been promised and then denied him. Instead of working on the quarry, he would go off riding the Dartmoor ponies or a motorbike he had bought from a local farmer, drinking in the Elephant’s Nest in Horndon, purchasing drink to take back into the prison and having sex with local women, all with money supplied by the Twins. He was not alone in scarpering off for sex. Jackie Bowyer, the model wife of the cat burglar Peter Scott, another long-term prisoner at the time, would bring a van down with a mattress on which they would have sex in an effort to get her pregnant.
In fact, while discipline on the Honour Party was lax, the warders were simply not physically strong enough to handle Mitchell. Since the practice of shooting attempted escapees had been discontinued, there was little they could have done with him. One officer explained to Lord Mountbatten when he was preparing his report into prison escapes: