by James Morton
The general consensus is that the Twins were practically innumerate, illiterate and not particularly intelligent. And worse, they were deaf to sound advice. The old-time villain Bert Rossi, who died in 2017, wrote:
‘If I were Tony Mella [the Soho club owner], with the way he mangled up words, I’d say I think they were ‘unmentorable’, if there is such a word. Goodness knows I and others tried hard enough. They had good people around them as well, people who knew what they were doing. People like Leslie Payne and Freddie Gore who were two of the best Long Firm fraudsmen of the time. But did the Twins learn how it should be done? No, of course they didn’t. Would they even listen? No, of course they wouldn’t.’147
Respect is a crucial word in the vocabulary of the villain, and the Krays put themselves out to create an image, even if it was a very different one from reality. This doubtless contributed both to their fall and subsequent phoenix-like rise. They were keen to portray themselves as charity workers, presenting prizes at amateur boxing events, promoting wrestling tournaments and raffling useless racehorses. A trawl through the East London Advertiser over the period produces numerous references to them as local and successful businessmen, but a really sensible criminal would remain unknown to the public. Before the era of Billy Hill and Jack Spot in the late 1940s and early 1950s, traditional criminals did not try to rise above their primordial station and mix with their betters. Spot and Hill were good copy for rival newspapers. Later Spot would attribute his downfall to his craving for publicity. The same could be said for the Twins. They simply got above themselves.148
The interest and debate about their sex lives explains some of the fascination surrounding the Twins. Were they heterosexual, bisexual or gay? Is there any truth in the suggestion the Twins had incestuous sex together? According to author John Pearson, Ronnie confessed that for some time, fearful of outsiders discovering their sexuality, this was the case. Whether this involved anything more than teenage mutual masturbation, who can actually say?149
Ronnie’s predilection for good-looking young men is well documented. And a boy had to be careful if he turned him down. It has been claimed he was turned off women after he once woke to find the girl he had slept with had started to menstruate.150 Other rumours suggest he deflowered the daughter of a woman who had worked in Esmeralda’s Barn on her 16th birthday, and then regularly had sex with both her and her mother. There are other stories that he said women ‘smelled and gave diseases’.
Reggie’s sexuality appears much more complex. He clearly liked having women about him, but whether he had sex with them is another matter. Reg claimed he only became bisexual after many years in prison, but there were persistent suggestions his marriage to Frances was never consummated. His one-time friend Micky Fawcett recalled how he was invited by Reggie to a threesome with a gorgeous girl, but they all lay like logs throughout the night.151
Certainly in 1965 a waitress from Poplar brought a paternity suit against Reggie, claiming he was the father of her baby girl. Her claim was dismissed for lack of corroboration, ‘as I knew it would be,’ said Kray. But there have been suggestions Reggie paid the girls to bring these suits against him, thereby confirming his heterosexuality.
In March 2001 a woman claimed she was the result of a fling between Reggie and a cabaret dancer at the Double R club in 1958. She went on to say that her son was the spitting image of Reggie.152 Kray would later use the claim as evidence that his marriage to Frances had been consummated.
Does it matter? Perhaps not as much in these more liberal times, as much as in the days when they were kings of a section of the East End. For a start, homosexual acts short of buggery, whether in private or in public, were punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, and they were regularly handed out. The sentence for homosexual buggery itself until 1860 was the death penalty, and still carried life imprisonment. In the 1960s in the milieu in which they flourished it mattered a great deal, as to a lessening extent it does in sport today. To admit to being gay meant peer derision and with it the loss of face.
On 12 February 1988 an unkind doggerel was felt-tipped onto Frances’ grave:
‘There once was two brothers named Kray
Who were both mad, perverted and gay
Ron was a rascal who loved a young arsehole
From 16 to 60, they say.’
Were they really as powerful as has been made out since their imprisonment and deaths? On a personal note, by the time of their arrests I had established a practice dealing with serious criminal cases in North London, but because of the insularity of the various suburbs, I had actually never heard of them. They were obviously known to East Enders but west of Aldgate, they would have been unrecognised by the general public. However, the appalling details of the McVitie and Cornell murders appealed to an audience devoted to the News of the World. George Orwell had written of The Decline of the English Murder but here was proof that it was alive and well. With those lurid details, and the swingeing sentences they received, they began to be noticed by a much wider public.
After their imprisonment Bert Wickstead cleared up the Dixon brothers, who were running a small protection gang, and with that there was no comparable gang in London for the next seven years. Then other families sprang up in South London and over the years they became much more organised and much more violent.
The Twins were not bright, they were impatient, they had no foresight and they craved recognition and adulation. Sensible gangsters swimming in the relatively small pool of East End crime do not go about squiring fading Hollywood stars and over-the-hill boxers in a blaze of publicity. Their other big mistake was committing murder for personal rather than business reasons. The Krays were never even in the class of the Richardsons, and they would not have survived 24 hours among today’s gangs.
Now, some 60 years after they began their rule of the East End, there are two very different schools of thought about them. There is the idea of the Twins acting as modern-day Robin Hoods, making the streets safe for women and children and only stealing from fellow criminals or from those who had acquired their wealth under dubious circumstances. As for the deaths, well, they had merely exterminated parasites such as Cornell and McVitie. Even a man whom they had ruined and left penniless thought well of them, saying to Nipper Read, ‘They’re such nice fellas.’ Ronnie’s counsel Platt-Mills thought him ‘a kindly and most thoughtful client’.
On the other hand, Gerry Parker, the old time Spot man, thought:
‘What the Twins did was out of order; fucking outrageous. They were bullies leaning on small shopkeepers, people struggling to make a living. No question of that.’153
And set alongside that are the opinions of the bank robbers of the time, who despised them, seeing them as nothing more than thieves’ ponces and bullies. One bank robber said:
‘There really is a load of shit talked about them. They ran the East End but they never ran the West End. If they’d come near us they’d have been seen to. Of course they protected clubs. There’s a lot of weak people in this world. They never had the arsehole to rob for themselves. Are they nice people? Well, tell me if this is nice. You get a young boy come into the club with his girlfriend. He’s got a load of cigarettes to sell. They take the cigarettes, never pay him and he ends up getting shafted up the arsehole. Is that nice?’154
Take your choice. After all, ‘Those were the Krays’.
James Morton, Bert Battles Rossi, p. 91.
Dick Hebdige, Kray Twins: study of a system of closure.
John Pearson, Notorious, p. 38.
Bobby Teale, Bringing Down the Krays, p. 53.
Mickey Fawcett, Krayzee Days.
Mike Hamilton, ‘I’m Reggie Kray’s “secret daughter”’, Sunday Mirror, 11 March 2001.
Conversation with JM, 23 March 2017.
Conversation with JM, 6 June 1991.
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due first to Do
ck Bateson without whose support this book would never have been completed. Then in strictly alphabetical order thanks are due to the following, as well as to those who have asked not to be named.
The late Mickey Bailey, the late J.P. Bean, Michael Bekman, Keith Bottomley, Duncan Campbell, the late Clive Coleman, Jonathan Davies, the late Stan Davis, Carrie de Silva, the late Ronnie Diamond, Micky Fawcett, the late Frank Fraser, Adrian Gatton, Jeffrey Gordon, the late Ralph Haeems, Michael Hallinan, Ron Historyo, Sir Ivan Lawrence Wayne Lear, Barbara Levy, Cal McCrystal, the late Henry Mooney, Gerry Parker, John Pearson, Lilian Pizzichini, William Powell, Pam Randall, Nipper and Pat Read, Jamie Reid, the late John Rigbey, the late Norbert Rondel, Mark Roodhouse, the late Bert Rossi, Charles Taylor and Ajda Vucicevic. In addition, my thanks go to the staff of the British Library, the Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, and the National Archives at Kew.
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