Frances: The Tragic Bride (17 page)

‘She was in a situation she couldn’t handle,’ recalled Freddie Foreman, the ‘Godfather’ of crime who served ten years in prison for his role in the disposal of the body of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, and who met Frances many times in the clubland setting.

‘She was out of her depth. She used to sit there like a pretty little thing. She could not talk or converse with anyone, it was a different world to what she was used to.’

Foreman too claimed that Reggie was homosexual and thought it unlikely the marriage was consummated.

‘He did make the effort to keep her happy. But she was like a trophy to him, someone to have on your arm. I don’t think there was any true love there.’

Pampered Frances was, beyond reason. He’d buy her anything she wanted. But she was a prisoner. Sure, she could go shopping whenever she fancied, buy what she liked – as long as someone from the Firm accompanied her.

At the flat in Cedra Court, Reggie made considerable efforts to provide a comfortable home with new furniture and plush carpeting – ‘it was beautiful,’ Rita Smith remembered when she visited with little Kimmie.

Yet none of this could compensate for the living hell Frances was descending into, the twins’ erratic, booze-soaked, criminal way of life.

On the nights when they stayed home at Cedra Court, Reggie would down his first gin of the evening, leave Frances to the telly and climb the stairs to Ronnie’s flat where he’d remain until the wee small hours.

Once in bed, it would be impossible for Frances to sleep without a sleeping pill: the noise from the flat above where Ronnie constantly partied and entertained his friends was unbearable.

Attempting to question or remonstrate with her drunken husband when he finally returned made everything much worse. The rows between them became hideously abusive. What was he doing up there, why was he leaving her all the time? Frances would cry. The answer was always the same: it was her own bloody fault if she was unhappy, she was to blame for everything – her and that mother who hated him, wanted them to be miserable. On and on he’d go, ranting and raving, swearing and shouting, threatening to hurt her, kill her family, until, finally, the taunts would stop and he’d lie down and pass out.

In the past, the rows between them would end with her retreating to her room in Ormsby Street. Now there was nowhere to run.

One night, knowing she hated the sight of blood, Reggie deliberately cut his hand and tormented her by letting the blood drip onto her. It was terrifying emotional abuse for an already nervous and edgy girl.

Reggie must have known, by then, he couldn’t have that ‘normal’ life he so dreamed of, away from Ronnie, as the successful legitimate businessman living in the ’burbs. He couldn’t make love to his beautiful young wife for reasons he didn’t care to examine, but he still wanted her as his possession, his object of worship, symbol of his success.

The alcohol too played a big part in the equation. It turned Reggie into a monstrous human being, a mass of emotional frustration that could only be expressed in one way – through sadistic, furious, violent rage.

Reggie was one of those people who could drink themselves senseless, yet never wake up the next day with a hangover. No matter how drunk he’d been, how badly he’d scared her with words and threats of violence, in the mornings the demon Reg had vanished. Until the next night…

The late Billy Exley was Ron’s bodyguard, a man who also gave evidence against the twins at their trial in 1969. He knew much about the twins and their crimes; he was also at Ron’s side at Cedra Court during those weeks when Frances lived there with Reggie.

Exley’s friend, Lenny Hamilton, had no reason to be enamoured of the twins: he’d been branded with a red-hot poker by Ronnie Kray in 1962.

Not long after Reggie Kray died in October 2000, the following story appeared in the
East London Advertiser
, 19 October issue:

REG KRAY HAD SEX WITH PROSTITUTE WHILE IN BED WITH HIS FIRST WIFE

An East End victim of the Kray twins is about to spill the beans on how he says Reggie Kray mistreated his first wife Frances.

Lenny Hamilton, savagely branded with a red hot poker by Ronnie Kray in 1962, claimed Billy Exley, who worked for the Krays, told him of a night out on the town which ended in the bizarre three-in-a-bed episode.

Said Lenny, writing in a new book,
I Was Branded by Ronnie Kray
, ‘Reggie and Ronnie returned to the flat in the early hours of the morning. He had left poor Billy Exley behind to make sure that Frances didn’t get out of the bedroom and leave the flat.

‘Ronnie and his young man retired to Ronnie’s bedroom and Reggie, together with a hostess, retired to his bedroom where Frances was lying in bed, out cold from the sleeping tablets they had made her take before they went up West.

‘Frances woke up in the morning, unaware of what had been going on in her own bed, horrified at what she was witnessing.’

Lenny went on to tell how she tried to get out of the room to find the door locked.

When she finally did get out Lenny says Billy Exley was forced to watch as Reggie slapped her to calm her down. Eventually Ron came into the room and grabbed Frances as she made a dash for the door.

Billy told Lenny how the twins had got her back into the bedroom and he could hear Ron telling Reg to stuff pills down her throat to keep her quiet, but Billy was in no position to stop the pair, fearing for his own safety.

The shocking incident in this newspaper account, later repeated in
Getting Away with Murder
, a book by Lenny Hamilton and Craig Cabell that recounts stories of several crimes the Krays may have committed but were never convicted for, could have been the trigger that made Frances pack her bags and return to her family at Ormsby Street that summer, but the chronology of events after the wedding is not detailed enough to say for sure.

Once safely back with her family, Frances recounted some of what had been going on. Her husband, she told her mother, was perverted, didn’t make love to her at all. On one occasion he’d attempted to take her from behind, as if she were a boy. She felt ashamed, soiled, degraded. She told Elsie she didn’t believe any other man would want her now.

This knowledge of the twins’ violent inner world, so carefully concealed behind their public façade, propelled Frances into a spiral of shame and fear, not just for her own life, but for those closest to her. It is fair to say that she never really recovered from the shock of what she discovered about her husband and his twin in those brief weeks of married life. Is it really any wonder that, by then, she was more or less dependent on taking pills to help her cope with what she was living through?

CHAPTER 8

SPIRAL

S
unshine and blue skies weren’t a panacea for what Frances was going through emotionally. But at least they did briefly remove her from the ugly truth of her marriage. From early June to mid-August 1965 Frances was abroad, first on the Spanish island of Ibiza, then on Spain’s southern mainland in the holiday resort of Torremolinos.

These dates are recorded in her diary, though there is no detailed account of her time abroad. She wrote that Reggie accompanied her to the airport before the Ibiza trip, which started on 4 June – and noted that she stayed alone there in hotels for long periods. One can only imagine her terrified state of mind at that time, knowing that at some point she had to return.

The timeline for the events written down in her diary is not chronological, but much of it seems to relate to the immediate post-honeymoon period, the months before Frances decided she couldn’t stand living with her new husband and went back to the comparative safety of her family home. After the Spanish trip she briefly tried living with him again, but ran back to her family soon after.

Here is the content of what she wrote in the diary. Exactly when it was written is not clear, though it is most likely to have been penned in 1966, the last full year of Frances’s life.

If it is somewhat confusing to read, it still gives painful insights into what went on between the couple and Reggie’s tragically abusive behaviour in that brief time when they lived together.

It also shows that Frances did briefly date other men before the marriage – and highlights much of the tension within the Kray family during Frances’s times at Vallance Road. What is very clear from the diary is that what Frances wanted most of all was a divorce, a legal end to the marriage.

Where she mentions ‘offence regarding s’ this presumably refers to sex – and the incident she told Elsie about, when Reggie attempted anal sex. The word ‘offence’ was used because she would have seen it in that way, as a shocking act: in those days, anal sex, even between a married couple, was viewed quite differently to the way it is perceived nowadays. (Until the late 1800s in England anal sex or buggery was an offence punishable by hanging.)

DIARY OF DESPAIR

Frances wrote that she had been staying in a dark room with hardly any furniture. Reggie’s suits were hanging round the wall. She’d had to take household and kitchen utensils there herself. He had left her there until 4 or 5 a.m. when he would come in drunk from El Morocco. He’d keep a flick knife under his pillow: ‘as if something was going to happen’. She was petrified. He was frequently shouting and swearing at her, leaving her there alone. She couldn’t stand it any more. So she went away. (Presumably this means to Spain, weeks after the honeymoon).

Reggie had suggested she see a psychiatrist when she came back from Torremolinos in August because her nerves were ‘terrible’.

Reggie, she wrote, talked to her ‘like a pig’ in front of people. He was always arguing with her in front of his family at Vallance Road.

He repeatedly threatened her family, especially Frank and his girlfriend Bubbles. ‘It will come back on them,’ he told her.

Frances wrote that she had told a doctor she would get a divorce for mental cruelty.

She noted ‘honeymoon sex about 3’, and before she went to Ibiza ‘about 2’. Reggie, she wrote, was frequently saying things to deliberately upset her. When they were at the airport, before she flew to Ibiza, he told her she should stay as long as she liked – he didn’t care if she stayed there for six weeks.

After she had left him, she wrote that a doctor suggested she go to a solicitor and pretend she’d hired a detective to follow Reggie, and say that there were photos of Reggie in a hotel with a girl, which would thus enable Frances to obtain a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Frances responded by saying she’d tell the truth. The doctor’s response, she wrote, was: ‘They won’t like it if you mention guns and knives’ and ‘Aren’t you frightened?’

Reggie had told her ‘there may have been hostesses’ at the clubs he visited and now she would have to put up with it. This, he said, was because when she’d broken off with him before the marriage and he visited her at Ormsby Street she had talked to him ‘like a friend’ telling him she’d been ‘out with a boy’. Now, he’d told her, she would have to suffer and listen to him talking about girls. (This was typical Kray twin behaviour, storing up the memory of an insult or an affront, waiting for the right moment to pounce in revenge or recrimination.)

Frances spent one week in a private hospital in October 1965. After she came out she wrote in the diary that Reggie started talking about the clubs he had been to while she was in there, deliberately mentioning this in front of his family, just to provoke her.

Again, after she came out of hospital and they were watching television at Vallance Road, Frances laughed at something funny on television (she thought her laughter seemed very nervy and shaky). Ronnie had looked at her and burst out laughing, saying, ‘And Jesus wept’, being funny, she said.

On another occasion, after Frances had been sitting in the Vallance Road front room after being in hospital, a friend came to see Reggie, so Frances went in the kitchen. And this was where Ronnie started talking about girls writing the twins letters, and how they were going to take them out, a speech aimed at tormenting her.

One night Violet made a sandwich and Frances left the crusts. When she got in the car to go back to the flat with Reggie, Violet threw the crusts out in the street in front of the car.

On another occasion, Ronnie brandished a sword knife (stick) at her, saying, ‘I’ll put this through you’, then started laughing, turning it all into a joke.

Then the diary becomes a list; presumably these descriptions were the grounds Frances hoped would enable her to divorce Reggie:

‘Mental cruelty – never speaking, shouting, swearing, aggravating, provoking. Threats. Habitual drunkenness. Knives and guns. Offence regarding s’ (‘s’ is underlined).

He’d kept all his clothes at his mother’s, had all his food there. Frances was living under extreme strain, she wrote.

Every night at the Marble Arch flat Reggie came back drunk at 2, 3, 4 a.m. Then he’d leave her alone there all day, returning again at 3 a.m. He’d swear and fall all over the place. He’d kept a photograph of a hostess in L’Hirondelle club, which he showed to Frances when she came back from Torremolinos. They went to the club. ‘Barely spoke to me – only to her.’

He had left her to stay in hotels alone after her trips to Ibiza and Torremolinos.

At Vallance Road he was swearing or abusing her verbally, frequently making comments like ‘shut your mouth’.

Reggie frequently threatened Frances about her brother Frank and the £1,000 Reggie owed him. He also kept telling her ‘the same thing will happen to you as will happen to Hannah.’

These last two notes need some clarification.

The £1,000 debt was cash Frank Shea Junior had lent to Reggie who had told him he needed the money for ‘legal expenses’. Reggie never returned the money, despite Frankie’s many efforts to retrieve it. Reggie told Frances that in asking for the return of the money, Frankie had ‘fucked this marriage up over £1,000’.