Frances: The Tragic Bride (8 page)

‘But were people really sure of this ambiguous sexuality? It was covered up very well at the time. There was nothing effeminate or even fashionable about the way they looked. In many ways they were throwbacks to another age, old school, local hard men from the thirties East End. But visually? Warner Brothers gangsters.’

Status. Looking the part. Playing a Hollywood role. Moviemaking always needs the right props to showcase the stars, underline their affluence. And high on Reggie’s list of essential props was the car, that most potent status symbol.

An expensive car remains a marker of worldly success – and the owner’s desire to impress. Back in the 1950s, it was a thousand times more potent as a power trip extraordinaire since expensive cars were a rare sight on London’s streets. Less than 2 per cent of Britain’s total population even owned a car. And that was likely to be an Austin 7 or a Morris Minor, inexpensive and ordinary family cars.

A young man drawing up outside a humble East End two-up, two-down in an American Ford Galaxy (one of Reggie’s favourite toys in The Double R days) or, later, a dazzling green Mercedes Benz 220SE two-door saloon, would have been an astonishing sight around those still-battered post-war streets.

Reggie, though mad about new cars, was a lousy driver. Ronnie didn’t even bother to get a licence. And so, as they established themselves as crime lords, the twins started to hire young, pretty men to drive them around in the flash expensive cars they never paid for. Chauffeurs too were status symbols, right? In the early days of the Regal billiard hall, second-hand cars could also be bought and sold from the forecourt in the front, yet another ‘nice little earner’ for the twins.

Whether it was through a chance meeting with the twins at the Regal – new faces, especially good-looking young men, tended to find themselves receiving drinks sent over by the twins with increasing regularity – or, as Reggie Kray preferred to tell it, via a friendship that started because he wanted a new car, it was Reggie’s association with Frankie Shea Junior that was the link that drew Reggie into Frances’s life.

Already a car-crazy teenager and with a growing reputation for being ‘a wheel man’ around Hoxton, Frankie Shea was ‘about eighteen’ and already establishing himself as a car dealer when Reggie claimed he first met him. Other accounts differ: some say that Frankie knew both twins from the billiard hall when Frankie was younger, maybe seventeen.

Reggie recalled that ‘first’ meeting in his book,
Reggie
Kray’s East End Stories
– and how he had recruited Frankie Shea to work for him: ‘I decided to look for a different car from the Vanguard I was driving at the time. He had a car lot in north London and although he had nothing that suited me, we struck up a friendship that led to him becoming my driver.

‘He was a good-looking kid with brown eyes, dark hair and an olive complexion. As a driver he was the best I had come across, while his personality made him exceptional company.’

Frankie Shea reached his eighteenth birthday in October 1957. From correspondence (previously mentioned in Chapter 2) written to his family in August 1959, it is clear that by then, he already knew Reggie quite well. That letter from the young offenders’ institution also made brief reference to Frankie Junior writing to Reggie, asking his parents to ‘please post letters to Reggie and Babs [presumably a girlfriend] as soon as you can’.

At that point, judging by other correspondence from Reggie while in prison in July 1959 – he wrote to Frank Shea Senior, saying he was writing to both Frankie Junior and Frances – it is apparent that by then Reggie was already closely involved with the Shea family, and that he had recently started seeing Frances. She was then still fifteen.

So Reggie’s subsequent ‘official’ recall of events in books – that he had met Frances while visiting Frankie at the Shea house when she was sixteen, that is after September 1959, her sixteenth birthday – does not give the true picture.

She was younger, still a schoolgirl when they first met. Indeed, in later prison correspondence to Frances in April 1961, Reggie himself recalled this, saying:

‘I’ve known you since you were fifteen years old and have never stopped loving you all the time.’

Reggie’s cousin, Rita Smith, still lives in the East End. Rita’s mother, May, was one of Violet Kray’s sisters. An attractive, immaculately groomed seventy-something blonde woman, just three years younger than the twins, Rita grew up next-door-but-one to them in Vallance Road. They’d pop in and out of each other’s houses all the time. In many ways, she saw herself as a sister to them, more than anything else. Biased she may be, but family is family and there is no doubting the sincerity of her affection for Reggie as they grew up together.

‘Reggie was so nice when he was young; he had Violet’s nice ways. Charlie too was totally charming. Ron was more like his dad. But the whole family thought they were special,’ she recalled.

Rita vividly remembered Reggie, then in his mid-twenties, telling her how he’d first met and fallen for Frances whilst she was still at school. ‘He used to go round to the Shea house to see Frank,’ she remembered. ‘That’s when she would come in from school. And one day Reggie came to see me and said, “I wanna ask you something. Frankie Shea’s got a sister. Oh, he’s got a lovely sister. She’s so nice. I do like her. But… I think she’s too young for me. She’s still at school.”

‘I said, when she leaves school, ask her out with you. And he kept on about her.

Reggie said, “She’s got lovely eyes. Don’t you think I’m a bit too old?”

‘I’d say, “Not really. If she wants to go out with you, what’s the difference?”’

Reggie’s relationship with Rita was, without doubt, a very strong one: he’d confide in her frequently. She recalled her surprise when he first mentioned Frances. This, she told me, wasn’t really the Reggie Kray she knew: ‘I’d never seen him like that before. Women? He could take them or leave them before he met her. He’d go out with these girls and they’d stay the night with him at Violet’s.

‘Then he’d drop them off in my mum’s house next door. And they’d wait for him to come back. Well, he wasn’t coming back, was he? And he always picked good-looking girls.’

That day, on the doorstep of the Shea house, when Reggie knocked on their front door to be greeted for the first time by schoolgirl Frances, was certainly a moment in time Reggie would never forget.

Wherever his sexual tastes lay up to that point, whatever the complexity of his relationship with Ronnie or his crimes, there seems little doubt that the minute he saw the pretty auburn-haired teenager with the big eyes, he experienced something of a shock. It is what the French call ‘le coup de foudre’, a bolt of lightning – which some describe as love at first sight.

He recalled that moment in correspondence to Frances in May 1961. In his letter, Reggie told her he’d been thinking about the first time he saw her. He’d knocked on the door to see Frankie and she had opened it. ‘You looked at me with a curious look in your big dark eyes and made me feel a little awkward. I never thought at the time I would depend on you so much, just goes to show you never can tell.’

Reggie’s letter then told her that ‘falling in love with you was the best thing that ever happened to me. Any time you want to put me in my place, just give me a look with your big dark eyes.’

The letter goes on to recall how he’d even conveyed the significance of that first doorstep impression to her brother. ‘I said, “Your sister gave me a look and weighed me up and down and made me feel awkward…”’

Frank had quipped back and said that was nothing: ‘You should talk to her.’

‘I said, “She looks saucy”.’

Since that moment, Reggie recalled, he knew Frances was saucy, curious, mischievous, better looking than ever, everything he dreamed a girl should be. He went on to say he had never regretted knocking at her door ‘because I’ve been in love with you ever since and always will be.’

Whether it was Reggie’s arrival in her life that led to Frances leaving school before her sixteenth birthday in 1959 or whether the decision had nothing to do with it is not known.

But the fact remains that Reggie, on that memorable day, fell so in love with a pretty schoolgirl, he could only dare discuss his romantic feelings with a woman he’d trusted since childhood. He would never have dared confide all this to his twin. He knew all too well what the response would be.

It looks like he simply took Rita’s advice and waited until Frances was working. There were, indeed, other serious preoccupations for Reggie in those years from 1957–60.

His brother, for one. Once certified insane at Long Grove, and prescribed a new type of drug called Stemetil, which seemed to curb his suicidal impulses and calm him down, Ronnie started to realise, on Reggie’s visits, how successful his twin was without him – and soon insisted he was ‘cured’ and could go back to prison, to finish his sentence.

The doctors said no. He had to wait. But that wasn’t likely to mean much to the twins because what followed was the Kray twins’ legendary ‘switch’ one day at Long Grove when Reggie came to visit.

Both were dressed identically – and, at the time, it was very difficult to tell them apart. As a consequence of a cunningly hatched plan to fool the authorities and switch places, Reggie, of course, could not be detained once Ronnie had walked out and Reggie identified himself with his driving licence. No crime had been committed. Ronnie had simply walked out of the mental hospital and into a waiting car. He was free. Then he was driven to a hideaway, a caravan in Suffolk. Without his medication. Men from ‘the firm’ were enlisted to look after him as best they could. But without the pills he really needed, Ronnie’s madness, his paranoia, started to manifest itself again.

In the end, Reggie took his twin back to London, found a trusted doctor (normally useful for repairing slashed faces) and managed to get the drugs Ronnie needed so badly to calm him down. Then the pair enlisted the help of a compliant Harley Street doctor who saw Ronnie and wrote a letter saying he was perfectly sane – and could therefore be sent back to prison to complete his sentence. Which he did.

In the spring of 1959, Ronnie finally came out of prison. He managed to get the drugs he needed and, despite frequently drinking copious amounts of alcohol, potentially causing very dangerous situations when combined with powerful drugs like Stemetil, he was back with Reggie, both of them living at Vallance Road with their mum.

Yet Ronnie, schizophrenic, drug dependent and scarily crazy, no longer looked the same as his once-identical twin. At twenty-six he looked monstrous: fleshy and coarse featured, he was a very different man from his good-looking twin. And, of course, once he divined that Frances had caught Reggie’s eye, he went into action, taunting, sneering, goading his brother, the way he always did.

Ronnie could be in love, he could be sentimental, even romantic about his affairs with his boyfriends. But as for his twin forming a romantic attachment to a dirty woman? What had gone wrong with him? Had Reggie gone soft?

All Reggie’s ideas for the future of the business, carefully crafted with his more law-abiding brother Charlie, the months of avoiding trouble, making businesslike liaisons with useful allies, drawing up serious plans to get involved in the new West End casinos (gambling was due to be made legal very soon) were in danger of crumbling now that Ronnie was back. Ronnie seemed determined to destroy it all with more scheming, aggression, bloodshed and gang warfare. Reggie’s plans for a more legitimate front for their activities were at risk of going down the drain.

All Reggie could hope for now was business as usual, continuing to give his all to clear up any mess Ronnie left in his wake, as he’d always done. The madman and the mopper-up. His twin was sick, no question. But he had to be there for him. No matter what went down. He wasn’t about to abandon his other half.

Yet as difficult as it all was, stretching Reggie to breaking point at times, the sane brother still persisted with his fantasy of a different, respectable life with a beautiful young woman beside him to share his dreams.

He’d found Frances. She was young, beautiful and he was utterly captivated by her looks. She was bright, lively and, most importantly, virginal, untouched. And he was a young man, still in his twenties with a future before him. Whatever had happened before that moment on the Sheas’ doorstep, nothing was going to keep him away from her, his dream girl, whom he vowed to convince of his love.

Yes, he had gone soft. To the world he was a tough hard nut, a criminal with a mad twin. But now he was bewitched by a teenage girl. He was crazy about Frances Shea. And he had a big advantage over other men, because he had everything a guy needed to tempt her: money, cars, travel, nightclubs. What girl wouldn’t want to be treated like that? So he embarked on the pursuit of Frances.

Why did she agree so readily to go out with him at all? He was ten years older. He already had a reputation for violence. The truth was it was a time of imminent big social changes, and very few ordinary, innocent young girls would have been able to resist the lure of a good-looking, beautifully dressed older man inviting them out in his expensive car, taking them places and showing them a good time.

A local young admirer, even a law-abiding guy working in a steady job, couldn’t compete with all that. As Dick Hobbs told me, Frances may have been bright and intelligent, but as far as her environment was concerned, typical of so many young working-class women in the fifties, her life options were limited.

‘What could a young woman do with their life then?’ said Hobbs.

When you consider the fifties landscape for ordinary women, you see exactly what he means.

Like her mother, Frances’s expectations were a low-level job, followed by courtship with someone from a similar background, then marriage and kids. No travel, no career and ultimately, no financial independence once the children arrived.

Women couldn’t get a mortgage, buy a car or even rent a TV unless their husband or father countersigned. Abortion was illegal. The contraceptive pill was still in the future. And as far as society was concerned, the only sex was within marriage. Divorce was out of reach too, as it was difficult, costly and usually disastrous for a woman’s reputation.