The Profession of Violence (7 page)

At Vallance Road the twins' actual home-life had been curiously sheltered, and Violet and her parents were an influence against dishonesty. The Lees were ‘respectable'. Here it was different, and at Clinton Road the twins found what they had always wanted – lawlessness and adventure. And as fellow deserters and friends of a youthful old lag like Richard Morgan, they had a guide to the exclusive and caste-ridden maquis of petty East London criminals.

Previously as dedicated young professional boxers they had been ascetic to a degree – non-smoking and -drinking
and continuing to get up at six each morning for their training runs almost until the day they entered the army. Overnight this went. For the first time in their lives they smoked and drank. Instead of training spins and early nights they adopted thieves' hours, out most of the night and cat-napping during the day. And they made their first actual money out of crime – a few pounds which was their share from a raid on a Clerkenwell dress wholesaler when they joined forces with an old-time thief from Mile End and got away with seven rolls of cloth.

And just as Morgan introduced them to the criminals of Mile End, so they enjoyed taking him surreptitiously to the places where they were known. The fantasy of being wanted criminals on the run gripped them all, particularly Ronnie, who was to play the same game with spectacular variations in years to come.

Now that the police were after them in earnest, they could play out this fantasy for all it was worth; the two of them, alone, uncaring, wanted by a society they despised yet always able to survive, fight back, and vanish like the Scarlet Pimpernel himself.

They always had been natural actors – particularly Ronnie, who had inherited his showman's instincts from Grandfather Lee, and the first night they took Dickie to the Royal Ballroom at Tottenham they had the role they wanted.

The Royal is still one place in the East End where the young can meet, pick each other up and show off with impunity. A great barn of a place off the Kingsland Road, with brass and mahogany swing doors, and a facade that looks like mouldy marzipan, it usually boasts two separate bands, and the noise inside is deafening. In early evening it is a ballroom pure and simple, but when the pubs close it becomes something more. The noise increases, coloured spotlights flicker high above the crowd, and on hot, early summer nights, the Royal becomes a living showcase of
the East End. In the days when the Kray twins were there, it was also a good place for fights.

The girls and the dancing were unimportant, except for background and the sense of occasion they gave the place. The crowd was the sort of audience the twins enjoyed, and the real attraction of the Royal was as a place where the local tearaways could come ‘on show'. It was the tribal proving ground, where the self-appointed ‘rulers' of the neighbourhood would make their ritual appearance like the young bloods of some primitive society. And just as in a primitive society, the entry of someone from another territory into the group of sharp-eyed youths around the bar carried inevitable overtones of challenge.

But the night the twins took Dickie there, none of the wild young men of Tottenham was in the mood to pick a fight.

Three brothers – all good amateur boxers – led the reigning local gang of Tottenham, and were in the bar. They knew the twins and understood that their appearance was a challenge – particularly when everybody knew they were absent from the army. There were a tense few minutes as the twins and the Tottenham gang sized each other up. Then the local gang quietly surrendered. One of the boxers offered the twins a drink, asked how they were doing, and offered to lend them a fiver – which Ronnie grudgingly accepted. Dickie was impressed. He and the twins remained for half an hour, drinking at the Tottenham gang's expense, then caught a bus to Clinton Road, feeling they had won a useful victory – and that their great adventure was progressing.

It continued for the next fortnight. A fourth member joined their team of young escapers – a wild boy on the run from Rochester Borstal. The twins already had a knack of gathering people round them in the most unlikely situations, and at the boy's suggestion they decided it was time for a little expedition. Unlike Dickie and the twins, the boy
could drive, so they stole a car, and drove to Southend for a holiday. For a few hours they enjoyed themselves and took a lot of trouble choosing a rude postcard which they posted to their CO at the Tower, saying, ‘Having a good time. Best of luck. Ron, Reg and Dick.'

The twins were always rather proud of this and Reggie insisted, ‘The CO had a sense of humour and put the card on the board in the officers' mess.' But once they had made their little gesture, what else was there to do in Southend? Drink. Visit the cinema. Walk along the pier. With Southend full of ordinary straight people having their boring summer holidays it was no place for the twins, so they slept the night in the car then drove back to the one place where they could be happy and where they were certain to be picked up in the end – Bethnal Green. They were getting bored – and for the twins, boredom was worse than the army or the Law or any rival gang.

A few more visits to the Royal, one of which ended with a brawl in which the twins gave Morgan an exhibition of bar-fighting he was never to forget. A couple of attempts, neither successful, to steal from lorries parked up for the night on the bomb-sites along the Commercial Road. But petty thieving wasn't the twins' style at all, and their hearts weren't in it. All that really mattered was the next round in their running battle with the Fusiliers. They were ready for the fray. So when a keen young constable called Fisher recognized them in a Mile End caff, they came along without a murmur. It was a relief to have something to fight against once more.

Back in the Tower the detention cells in the Waterloo Building almost seemed like home. The Commanding Officer gave them a stiffer sentence and a stronger warning. It was boring for him and boring for the twins, but until they decided to settle down and soldier, this absurd cat-and-mouse game would continue.

For the rest of early summer, the pattern of escape, recapture and imprisonment continued. And just occasionally it looked as if the twins would settle down and soldier. Once they got as far as the .303 range at Purfleet where both proved unusually bad shots. When they beat up a sergeant who had tried teaching them a lesson on his own account, the CO decided to separate the twins. Reggie was sent to the punishment cells at Purfleet and Ronnie to the tender mercies of Wellington Guards Barracks.

It did no good. They were worse parted than together. At Purfleet Reggie spent his time perfecting his left hook on a stream of obligingly aggressive NCOs until he was left alone. Ronnie among the Guards found fewer opportunities for self-expression, weeded the barrack square and resorted to his earliest form of protest – refusing to shave or wear a uniform.

The month they spent together after this at Colchester military detention barracks marked the turning point of their military career. Until then, with an optimism that does them credit, the Fusiliers had clung to the belief that the twins were redeemable private soldier material. Now it was plain they never wouid be, and this month at Colchester was to bring them face to face with some of the toughest delinquents in the army and strengthened their resolve to get out of the army the hard way. It was now too that they began forming rather more precise ideas about their own future when they were discharged. Reggie said:

‘I can remember discussing armed robbery seriously with someone for the first time at Colchester. You see, by then, Ron and I had decided that when we came out we wanted the good life and that there was only one way to get it.'

‘The Good Life' – but where was it? When they had served their month at Colchester, they were back together at the Tower, and nothing was easier than to forget about the army, change into a jacket and an old pair of trousers
and slip out through the Shrewsbury Gate among the tourists any afternoon. Which, very soon, they did and faithful grey-faced Dickie Morgan followed them.

From Tower Hill you can turn right into Cable Street, left up Backchurch Lane and you find yourself in Whitechapel. It was tempting, but this time the twins had no wish to be caught, and instead of turning right at the top of Tower Hill, they went left, down through the City and into the West End where their friends from Colchester had told them ‘the Good Life' was waiting for them. They had been told that, in the West, anyone prepared to fight could make himself an easy living. There were mugs there to be conned, ponces to be preyed on, gambling clubs waiting to be tapped, armed robberies to be executed. Provided you weren't fussy there were no limits in this villains' Eldorado – and the twins were not feeling particularly fussy now.

Their only problem was that this particular Eldorado was already occupied. In the 1950s the whole West End had been neatly tied up by that pair of self-styled ‘Kings of the Underworld', Mr Jack ‘Spot' Comer, and Mr Billy Hill. Very little happened here without their knowledge and assent and the primary interest of this double monarchy lay in the prevention of the sort of high Chicago-style villainy the twins had set their hearts on. As they soon found out, this tattered pair of eighteen-year-old army absentees had as much chance of horning in on the rich pastures of West End crime as of joining the Stock Exchange.

This hardly seemed to matter at the time. Confident of their talents and modest enough to know they had a lot to learn, the Kray twins understood that time was on their side and they were prepared to wait. In the meantime they soon found themselves one part of the West End where they were accepted and appreciated and
could
make their presence undeniably felt.

* * *

In the early fifties a large hotel off Piccadilly Circus was leading one of the strangest double lives of any eating place in London.

During the day the tea-rooms and the downstairs restaurants with their Odeon-style décor and absolute respectability were a great place for children's teas and maiden-ladies' outings with the most reliable poached egg in Central London.

But around midnight with the aunts and school children safely in their beds, their places in the Lloyd-Loom chairs would be taken by a very different clientele. And by one o'clock the downstairs tea-room, which stayed open through the night, was transformed into an informal club – part sanctuary, part labour exchange – for half the petty thieves and criminals in London.

‘A regular den of thieves,' is how one of the regulars remembers it. It was certainly convenient, and cheap – and close to all the places where criminals could work.

It was not the place for the upper echelons of crime. They had more exclusive social territory. But in the old days, after midnight in the big downstairs lounge of the hotel, one saw the social side of West End crime – the small-time fences and ponces, the informers and thieves and pickpockets, the villains and the bouncers who required work or a chat and the society of their own kind. This was where the twins were brought by Dickie Morgan, and they soon began to make their mark on this nocturnal criminal society.

Almost everyone who met them now agrees there was a strange air of innocence about them which marked them out from other villains round about them. Some thought them shy. They were extraordinarily polite to anyone older who took the trouble to talk to them. They never bragged, were never loud-mouthed, never seemed to swear. Among a race of almost universal gamblers they never gambled. Among womanizers and ponces they showed no interest in women. Among hard-drinkers they were never drunk.

Most of the time they would just sit – slightly apart from everybody else – usually silent and impassive, watching and listening to what went on. Several who knew them now remark upon their eyes. ‘There was something about them that bored right through you, especially if you were lying to them. You always felt they knew.'

They also had an air of weirdness and danger, which everybody noticed from the start. Some say they cultivated this quite consciously. Certainly they did so later. Natural actors that they were, they picked up all the tricks of instilling fear with an economy of effort and projecting their presence to maximum effect. But what distinguished them even now from all the other violent characters around them, is that they had an extraordinary presence to project.

It remains something of a mystery. Part of it was due to their behaviour as identical twins. With their telepathy and uncanny similarity their effect was literally double that of a normal individual, and this certainly explains much of their effectiveness. So does their imperviousness to pain and danger. They were so fit and vicious that they had already perfected a technique of synchronized and ruthless combat which rendered them invulnerable as long as they stayed together.

But there was something else. ‘They were,' says one old villain who came up against them shortly afterwards, ‘a thoroughly evil pair of bastards.' And from now on in their story, the idea continually recurs that they were uniquely and positively ‘evil'.

Largely because of this the twins were accepted as true villains from the start. Without knowing exactly why, older and more experienced thugs were wary of them. One or two who weren't were dealt with efficiently and unemotionally, but these were ‘unimportant nobodies' – ‘liberty-takers' who hadn't the good sense to understand the twins for what they were. There was an old wrestler, working as a doorman at a club in Berwick Street, who had the stupidity to refer to the twins as ‘boys' and whose
jaw was nearly broken by a punch that sent all sixteen stone of him down the stairs to the men's room.

People who befriended them were shrewder. ‘You never knew who you'd be needing next time. You weren't getting any tougher or any younger and it was common sense to keep on the right side of a pair of up-and-coming youngsters like the twins.'

One of the first freelance villains to befriend the twins during their Piccadilly days was Tommy Smithson from Hackney – gambler, tearaway and non-caring fighting man, he remained one of the twins' extremely few real-life heroes. Smithson was the supreme non-carer of the London gang-world. A loner, too independent and irresponsible to accept the authority of the Spot-Hill kingship, he went through life with a masochistic desperation never to give in to anyone. A smallish man and an indifferent fighter, he could be rash to the point of lunacy. His lean, dark face cut to ribbons, he would fight and lose and go on fighting. He was free with his money, off-hand with his women, game to the last and unimpressed by anything the ‘straight' world values.