Our Story Page 14

  Frances and I loved to travel. Later we went to Barcelona. We saw a bullfight, which we hated. We went to Catalonia Square, in the middle of Barcelona, with its amazing water fountains, and we sat there for several hours, eating apples, drinking coke, and just watching. We were happy and it was great.

  When we got back from those trips she’d get a lot of stick from her parents. I once went round to try to make peace and asked Mr and Mrs Shea if I could marry Frances. It wasn’t the first time I had asked, and it wasn’t the first time they had said no. On this occasion Frances burst into tears and I left the house angrily, slamming the door behind me.

  Then I got sent to Wandsworth for six months after being found guilty of demanding money with menaces (the business with Daniel Shay, which is mentioned in chapter 2). It was a terrible time. I was on the inside and the girl I loved was on the outside. I was convinced I would lose her, that her parents would talk her round to their point of view, and that she would find someone else to love. But then she wrote to me. Her letter said: ‘I am sorry you are in prison. Don’t worry. When you come out I’ll make your favourite toast and marmalade for your breakfast. I love you. Please remember me.’ Please remember! How could I forget her? I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

  But it was the Wandsworth business, I believe, that was the final straw as far as Frances’s parents were concerned. They could see that she was in love with me and so they tried harder than ever to split us up. But I, being the mug I am, still employed her father – Frank – in one of our clubs.

  Then, in 1965, Ron and I were up at the Old Bailey, charged with demanding money with menaces – protection money – from a Soho club owner (Hew McCowan, see chapter 2) – and it seemed that the strains were going to be too much for our relationship. But the judge told the jury that if they didn’t think McCowan was a reliable witness, they should not find us guilty, and we were acquitted. It had taken a long time, but we were free men. Frances was waiting for me when I came out and at the celebration party afterwards I proposed again and she said yes – with or without her parents’ permission. Under that sort of pressure they virtually had to give in, and they did.

  We were married on 19 April – Primrose Day – in 1965 at St James the Great Church in Bethnal Green. Frances was twenty-one. She looked bloody ravishing. She wore a full-length white dress, her lovely red hair was pulled back. It was the East End’s ‘marriage of the year’. Ron was my best man and among the two hundred guests were boxers Terry Allen, Terry Spinks and Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, the Clark Brothers, and several other big stars of the time. David Bailey took the wedding photographs and we drove to the reception at the Finsbury Park Hotel in a maroon Rolls-Royce. We received dozens of telegrams, including one from Judy Garland, Billy Daniels, Barbara Windsor, Lita Roza and Lord Boothby. It was an incredible day. After that we went on honeymoon to Athens. That honeymoon was one of the happiest times of my life, but some vicious lies have been written about it. It was claimed, for instance, that I couldn’t make love. I could name one or two women to whom I had made love before I met Frances. They would have proved that I am as good a lover as the next man. But I’m not that much of a lout that I would expect any woman to stand up and admit, ‘I made love to Reggie Kray.’

  Ironically, at about the same time as all these allegations, a twenty-nine-year-old waitress by the name of Ann Zambodini, from Poplar, took me to court claiming I was the father of her daughter. The magistrate dismissed the case through lack of evidence – or, to quote him, ‘lack of corroboration of her evidence’. The magistrate was right. But clearly Miss Zambodini didn’t think I was impotent.

  It’s a funny old world, isn’t it? A family saying you haven’t made love to their daughter, and you know you have, and a woman saying that you’ve made love to her and given her a kid, and you know you haven’t. Talk about a no-win situation!

  It was later claimed by one newspaper that I’d got drunk on the first night of the honeymoon and locked Frances in our bedroom. Then I subsequently got drunk on every night of the honeymoon. Again, lies. The fact is, Frances and I had a perfectly normal honeymoon and a normal relationship after it.

  When we got home from the honeymoon the problems started again. We went to live with Mr and Mrs Shea for a few weeks while our own flat was being decorated. I had to go back to work, and that meant going out late at night to our various business enterprises. Then Frances wanted to return to her job as a secretary, but I didn’t want her to. It didn’t seem right that Reggie Kray’s wife should be working. I wanted her to live in the grand style, I wanted her to be a lady of leisure. This was a mistake on my part. Looking back, I was being a bit selfish. I should have let her go back to work – she would have been much happier working.

  We still had some good times though. I remember some very happy evenings at the Blue Angel, a very exclusive club off Berkeley Square. Noel Harrison was in cabaret there and Frances was a very big fan of his. We saw him several times and he would always come over to our table for a chat. He seemed a very nice bloke.

  But gradually the unsociable hours that I worked, plus the fact that Frances was cooped up all day, meant that cracks began to appear in our marriage. The strain of several years began to tell. Eventually, after a few months, Frances left me and went back home. It wasn’t a violent parting – we just agreed to separate for a while until we could sort things out.

  I kept going round to the Sheas’ house to see her, but her parents wouldn’t let me in. I would find myself standing in the street talking to my own wife, with her standing by the bedroom window. I would go round during the day with money for her, but her parents would say she wasn’t in. My in-laws took the money and I’d tell them to make sure that Frances got it.

  By now she was in a state of complete mental torment. She disappeared from home. Her mother told me she was staying with a friend ‘out of town’. In fact she was in Hackney hospital, suffering from acute depression. She was really ill. I finally found out where she was and went to see her.

  And that’s another thing I want to make very clear – I never, ever got Frances on barbiturates. I hate drugs – I always have. After Frances came out of hospital our relationship began again, but she simply wasn’t the same bright, vivacious girl I’d known before. The barbiturates and the mental strain were destroying her. So was her conviction that she was going to die soon. She became almost impossible to calm down. But I refused to give her barbiturates, so she left me again and returned home, where she knew she could have them. Then she was hospitalized again, this time in a nursing home in Camden Town. I kept going to see her and was alarmed at the way she was going downhill.

  On 7 June 1967 I awoke, alone, with the most awful premonition. I had dreamed that Frances was dead. I was sweating with fear. I rushed round to her parents’ home and was told by a neighbour that Frances was dead. She had died, from an overdose of barbiturates, at her brother’s house, in Wimbourne Street, Hoxton. I could not believe it. My beautiful Frances dead.

  The next days were a bloody nightmare. Frances was buried at Chingford, in Essex. It was an awful, terrible, painful day. For her funeral I had a card printed with her photograph and a poem I had written. It is called ‘If’.

  If I could climb upon a passing cloud

  That would drift your way,

  I would not ask for a more beautiful day.

  Perhaps I would pass a rainbow,

  with nature’s clouds so beautifully aglow,

  If you were there at journey’s end

  I would know,

  It was the beginning – and not the end.

  I meant every word. And yet, in my moment of grief, one national newspaper actually said that my poem and the many flowers that I sent to my own wife’s funeral were an act of ‘ostentation’. Believe me, when you are down they will kick you until you stay down. All that kept me going through those days was the memory of Frances saying, ‘If I go to Heaven there’ll be a big black horse up there waiting for me.’

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bsp; The days, the weeks, the months after Frances died were, for me, a nightmare seen through a sort of alcoholic haze. Gin was the only way for me to blot out all that had happened.

  I will never forget my little Frances. I loved her and she loved me. I had lost one of the two women I had loved in my life. The other was my mother, who was a great support to me at this time. She knew the agony I went through, the torture.

  I still think about it all so often. I would dearly like, before I die, to make my peace with Frances’s parents, but so many harsh things were said that I believe it will not be possible.

  With Frances gone, my life was never going to be the same again. Part of me died when she died and I stopped caring about things. The rest of me died when my mother passed away.

  After all that pain, everything the Home Office and the prison authorities throw at me now will not smash me – there is nothing left to smash.

  RON: ON OUR MOTHER

  I believe – and the others may hate me for saying this – but I believe it was Reg, Charlie and I who finally killed our mother. Twice a week for fourteen years she would visit Reg and me (and Charlie when he was inside), and in the end it was all too much for her. She would never admit it – she always came to see us even when she wasn’t well, and we told her not to. When we first went down, Reg was at Parkhurst and I was at Durham. So you can imagine the hundreds of miles our mother travelled every week. Yet, despite all the heartaches we gave her, she was a tower of strength.

  I had a terrible time at Durham. I missed Reggie dreadfully and I had serious mental problems, but the prison officers there were very unsympathetic. I was a real target for them and they made my life hell. Early on, I went on hunger strike in protest at the way I was being treated. I went without food for fourteen days. Another time I got fifty-six days’ solitary confinement for thumping a guard who was provoking me. The screws were always taking the piss, trying to wind me up, so I slung a pot of urine over one of them. The other guards kicked me all along the landing, but a kind old screw by the name of Chief Bunker stopped them, saying, ‘Leave him alone. He’s had enough.’ Since then I’ve always sent Chief Bunker a card every Christmas.

  My mother could see the terrible things that were happening and she could see that being away from Reg was making my problems worse. So she campaigned endlessly to get me and Reg reunited. She wrote to the papers and to the Prime Minister and finally, because of her efforts, I was moved to Parkhurst.

  That was in 1972 and my move cut down her travelling quite a bit, but it was still hard on her. All the way down to Southampton, then the ferry to the Isle of Wight, and the prison bus to Parkhurst, But she always kept coming. When I got transferred to Broadmoor, she would come to see me once a week, and Reg once a week, even when her health began to go downhill.

  She was the best mum three lads ever had and I’m crying now as I think about her. I wish that we hadn’t given her so many problems. She never deserved it. She was such a good woman – the best.

  She died in August 1982. That was a time of despair. The best thing, the best person, in our lives, was gone.

  Mum was cremated at Chingford crematorium in Essex. It was the saddest day of my life, and what made it even sadder was the fact that the police and the press turned it into a bloody carnival. The authorities did the right thing by me and Reg. They recognized the bond between us and our mum, so they agreed that we could go to her funeral. And they looked after us when we got there, with lunch and a cup of tea at Romford police station. But when we arrived at the crematorium, it was bloody chaos. There were hundreds of people there with dozens of pressmen and television people. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. It should have been a private occasion.

  The crowd nearly caused a riot when Reg and I arrived. We were handcuffed to the two biggest officers they could find in the prison service. Reg was angry, saying they did that on purpose to try to make us look like two dwarves. There were police helicopters flying around in the sky and the church was even searched for bombs. They went completely over the top on what should have been a solemn, simple, silent service.

  Among the congregation at the funeral service was Billy Hill. Both Reg and I wanted to shake him by the hand, probably for the last time, as he was then over seventy years old, but it wasn’t possible. Later Billy wrote to me and said, ‘If I could share some of your sentence, I would be willing. I doubt if we will ever meet again but always remember that my heart will be with you in spirit.’

  Joe Louis, the former heavyweight champion of the world, also wrote to us saying how sorry he was.

  Reg and I did not say a lot to each other at the funeral. After all, what was there to say? We had lost our mother, the woman who had meant the world to us, the lady who had brought us up well against all the odds, who had given us so much love and kindness. I felt I’d lost everything. My Auntie Rose had gone years before, now my mum. Poor Reg had also lost Frances.

  Our old dad was at the funeral, but he’d had the stuffing knocked out of him by then and died a year later. We weren’t allowed out for his funeral, but we’d never been as close to him as we’d been to our mum. In any case, he’d asked for a quiet funeral – especially after what he’d seen at our mother’s funeral.

  When the service was over and all the people had gone away, Reg got into his prison van to be driven back to Parkhurst and I got into the van that was to take me back to Broadmoor. I have not been out again since. And I thought about a poem I had written about our mum. I called it ‘To a Beautiful Mother’.

  When I look at the silver

  In your hair.

  How I wish you never in the world

  Had a care.

  How I wish week after week

  It was not always, Hello and Goodbye,

  You have made the weeks, months,

  And years fly by.

  You have been our rainbow

  In a dark sky.

  We hope that one day it will be

  Just, Hello.

  And never again goodbye.

  9

  REG: LIFE IN PARKHURST

  Life in Parkhurst was a living hell. It was like living in a jungle – a constant battle for sanity and survival. You never knew what horrors, unpleasantness and indignities the next day would bring. In my time there I had met and mixed with many of the notorious criminals this country has produced in the past couple of decades, and a good many from overseas as well. The cop killers Harry Roberts, John Duddy and Christopher Craig, the moors murderer Ian Brady, the spy Peter Kroger, the Great Train Robbers – I’ve seen them all. I’ve shared my time with murderers, terrorists, rapists and thieves.

  It’s because of my own attitude to prison life, because of my mental approach to my problems, because of my friends, my hobbies and my fanaticism for physical fitness that I have not been sent insane. I believe that that is what the prison authorities wanted, and what they still want – to send me mad so that they can lock me away in a madhouse for ever. I promise them, no matter how long they keep me, no matter what they do to me, they will never succeed.

  I was kept as a Category A prisoner for seventeen years – far longer than was necessary. I wasn’t a danger to anyone else. And I wasn’t an escape risk – in all my years at Parkhurst I never once attempted to escape. Finally, in a desperate attempt to get taken off Category A, I sent a proverb to the Home Secretary:

  One will never learn to swim

  Unless one goes into the water.

  And I will not be able to adapt again to society,

  Unless given a chance to do so.

  It helped to get me off Category A, even if it didn’t get me any closer to full or even part parole.

  Parkhurst itself is an ugly, grey building near Newport in the centre of the Isle of Wight. Isle of Wight? It should be called Isle of Prisons because it’s also the home of Albany prison, where a lot of the IRA terrorists are kept, and Camp Hill prison, where Ron once spent some time. I’ve seen holiday brochures advertising the beauty o
f the Isle of Wight. Maybe I’m biased but, as one of its longest-serving residents, I wouldn’t go back there if it was the last fucking place on earth that hadn’t been bombed by the Russians.

  Inside, Parkhurst is like something out of a Dickens novel, with its wooden floorboards, lumpy porridge and a single greasy sausage for breakfast. We get so used to the poor-quality food that no one really grumbles. How does one piece of toast with a layer of cheese, a layer of beans and an egg on top sound for Sunday lunch? That’s the kind of thing we get most weeks. Or we might get a slice of beef cut so thin, a couple of mouthfuls and it’s gone.

  A cell is always a depressing place, especially at Parkhurst, where the floorboards are painted blue, and a very faded, chipped blue at that. So much of Parkhurst is made of wood that if an arsonist were to ply his trade, everyone would be fried alive in a matter of minutes. I’m surprised that it’s never happened.

  My cell at Parkhurst consisted of one cupboard with six small compartments – the whole thing less than a yard square – in which to keep my clothes, a table and chair, and, of course, a bed. I was allowed to have two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, two shirts, one jumper and a pair of shoes. I also had a sweatshirt and trainers.

  You can either have a record player or a cassette player, plus a radio. The radio is very important to me – I don’t think I’ve missed ‘Friday Night Is Music Night’ once in the past twenty years.

  We lived our lives by rules and regulations, regulations like the following, which are issued to every prisoner:

  Items of property which may be handed or sent in by prisoners’ relatives and friends

  The following is the complete list of items prisoners may have handed or sent in to them. Other items will not normally be accepted and, if posted in, prisoners will not be allowed them in possession.