Gangsters' Wives (22 page)

It always amazes me that young kids, who weren’t alive when Ronnie and Reggie Kray were sent to prison for life, are still so fascinated by the myth, still buying the T-shirts, still reading the books.

Reggie Kray proposed to me three times. It was in all the newspapers that we were going to be married. I knew him for years before he was arrested and I visited him and Ronnie all through the three decades they were in prison. I was part of that myth. And yet to me it was my reality, it was my life.

I do think I’ve led a very eventful life and a very fated life. I never regret not marrying Reggie Kray because I wasn’t in love with him. But I was always proud I helped them in any way I could because I promised their mother I would. I was sitting on Mrs Kray’s bed in the London hospital before she died. She held my hand in front of Charlie Kray and she said, ‘Flanagan, promise me you’ll carry on visiting the twins when I’m gone.’ She died twenty-four hours later. I made that promise and I always honoured that promise.

I don’t regret all those years of visiting, but I certainly don’t condone what they did. I’ve never condoned their crimes. I know they were terrifying people, the two of them, very violent. But when it comes to the Krays, I can only speak of how I was treated. I’ve met a lot of people in my life, but I’ve never been treated the way Ronnie and Reggie treated me. They treated me like a princess.

I’m not from the East End originally. I’m from Islington, although I was actually born in Hemel Hempstead because I was a war baby. In those days mums-to-be had to be evacuated to give birth. I was born in 1941 while Hitler was bombing London. My mum and I were only in Hemel Hempstead a week, then we came back to Islington to be with my father. My sister and brother came along a few years later.

I had a very good upbringing. We weren’t spoiled but we had everything we wanted. We were poor but I can never ever remember being hungry. Meals were at the table all together whether it was a cheap stew or bread and jam and Swiss roll and custard.

My dad was the most handsome man you’ve ever seen in your life. He was a stonemason from Ireland. He came over here to watch a football match and only intended to stay for a week. But he went to a party, met my mum, who was a little petite cockney from King’s Cross, and never went back. He did jobs like labouring, then he went on the railway as a porter and stayed working there until he died. He looked like a film star, did my dad. He used to walk around and tip his hat to the women and they all used to say to my mum: ‘How on earth did you get him?’

Believe it or not, I went to a convent school – Our Lady of Sion on the Holloway Road. I had a very authoritarian education and my father was very strict. By four and a half I was able to read and tell the time because my father had sat down and taught me. He had very strong ideas of right and wrong.

My dad died on my fifteenth birthday. He’d been in hospital suffering from heart trouble. I had a few friends over and my mum went up there after we’d all gone to bed, and he died. He was only forty-nine. After he died, I left school immediately to be a hairdresser at the place I’d been working on Saturdays. Again, it was in the Holloway Road. I did a three-year apprenticeship there until I was eighteen. I didn’t really have any further ambitions. Then I went to a hair exhibition where there was a photographer taking pictures of all the styles. I had this long blonde hair and he decided to take pictures of me as well as the hair models. After he’d developed them, he rang my mum and said, ‘She’s very photogenic. She should be a model.’

I was nineteen. I went to this agency who took me on immediately and almost overnight I left the hairdresser’s and became a fashion model – walking up and down catwalks, doing shows. It was an amazing experience. I went to New York with Mary Quant. I modelled in Amsterdam and Germany. Hot pants, boots, swim-suits … I modelled everything. At twenty, I got married to the local boyfriend I’d been with since I was eighteen. His name was Patrick Flanagan, and after that I became known universally as ‘Flanagan‘ or, more often, ‘Flan’.

A year later, I was in a hairdresser’s having my hair done when I got chatting to an older lady who turned out to be Violet Kray. I noticed how she was besieged with people asking her to pass on messages to her sons. They were telling her about old people having nasty things put through their letter boxes, or someone’s cat being hurt – loads of stuff. The poor woman told me she couldn’t go anywhere without being harassed like that, and it had got to the point where she dreaded going out to have her hair done. Well, I didn’t know who she was or who her sons were – I assumed they were local businessmen who happened to be really involved with their community – but I felt sorry for her. She was just lovely, a lovely woman.

I said, ‘Well, I’m trained as a hairdresser. I could come round to your house to cut your hair.’ And she was thrilled. She said, ‘You could meet my sons.’

She gave me the address: 178 Vallance Road, Bethnal Green. I didn’t even know where the East End was. I’d never been to the East End in my life. I had to have instructions to find Bethnal Green and I’d certainly never heard of the Krays.

I had a little white Mini then (all in all I had twelve different Minis over thirty years). Round I went to Vallance Road. The lovely little old lady I’d met at the hairdresser answered the door and sat me down and gave me tea. Then ten minutes later I was washing her hair and putting her rollers in when then the door opened and this gorgeously handsome, 6 ft 1 blond guy came in. She said, ‘This is my son, Charlie.’ He was gorgeous, so handsome, was Charlie Kray. I thought: Wow, he’s lovely. And he was charming and polite.

I didn’t meet Ronnie and Reggie that day. I met them when I went back again a week later. She’d obviously told them to be there. Well, I just couldn’t believe it. They were just so identical. You couldn’t turn from left to right and tell them apart. Which is why, later on, they’d been able to swap places when Ronnie was in a secure hospital in the late 1950s. Reggie went to visit and just sat down in Ronnie’s seat, and then Ronnie got up and left at the end of visiting time. You couldn’t tell them apart.

The twins were asking me all these questions about what I did. I told them I used to be a hairdresser but was now modelling. They said, ‘Well, if we can help you in any way …’ I thought: How on earth could these two local businessmen help
me
? Anyway, I didn’t need help, I’d conquered the modelling world. I got every job you could imagine. Wherever I went for an audition, if I didn’t get the job I was shocked.

It was only when I went home and was talking to my husband’s friends one night that I found out who these two polite sons of the sweet old lady really were. ‘You’ve met the Krays!’ they all said, completely awestruck. ‘You do know who they are, don’t you? They rule the East End, they’re extremely violent. Ronnie Kray has been considered insane for years.’

I couldn’t believe it. I thought they were joking. After that I used to hear the most dreadful stories of violence and then I’d remember those polite men I always met and think: This can’t be the same house I go to, they can’t be the same men.

These were two beautifully dressed men who were polite to their mother and came home to change their shirts at six o’clock every day. Do you know, that woman used to do four shirts a day? Two for the morning and two at six o’clock. Imagine that, seven times a week. That’s twenty-eight shirts a week she had to wash and iron. I said, ‘Violet, you’re mad.’ She said, ‘Oh no, they’re very particular about their shirts.’ But of course she wanted to do it because she idolised them, especially Ronnie who was her favourite.

All through the 1960s, up until they were arrested in 1968, I spent a lot of time with the Krays. I went to parties with them, they invited me round to the Grave Maurice – a pub in Whitechapel Road – and the Carpenters Arms. They’d take their mother too.

Even though I was married all through my twenties I always thought Reggie liked me. Charlie used to say I was the sister he never had. But Reggie, I always thought, liked me in a different way. But then he was married too, to his first wife, Frances. I went to the wedding. She was a lovely, pretty little thing, but very vulnerable, very fragile.

She didn’t know how to handle him and wasn’t able to stand any violence or talk of violence. He was very possessive of her. He wouldn’t let her go out. She could only go down the road shopping with Mrs Kray. The hairdresser used to come to the house, her clothes were delivered. In the end, she couldn’t stand it. She was on medication and she obviously overdosed on it in a very depressed state. It was very sad. He was terribly upset.

After Frances died, Mrs Kray was always trying to set me up with Reggie. That’s why she used to take me out with her. I’d say, ‘I can’t come round on Saturday’ and she’d say, ‘Well, make it Friday then. Do my hair and then we’ll go round and see the boys for an hour.’

I always had a lot of affection for Reggie Kray. I always had this feeling that in a different time and a different place, things could have been different. He was a very attractive man, slightly less bad-tempered than Ronnie, although I wouldn’t say he took his orders from Ronnie. He knew exactly what he was doing. But I think if he hadn’t been Ronnie’s brother, he’d have been a professional boxer. He had that killer instinct in the ring. The other one was just like a slugger, coming in to bash everybody up. Reggie was a very good boxer, he was a good businessman.

As time went on I became more aware of the differences between the twins. If I walked into the pub with Mrs Kray and Reggie was there, she’d smile and he’d wave and come over and buy her a drink. It was all friendly and normal. But the minute the other one walked in the pub, the atmosphere completely changed. It was like a hush. People who were laughing, stopped laughing, because he used to get into these black moods and think you were laughing at him. He was very volatile, very violent. He had these unbelievable, mesmerising eyes that struck fear into everyone. I never heard Ronnie Kray raise his voice. I’ve never heard that he raised his voice. He spoke in quite a soft way, almost a twang, that a lot of people thought afterwards was quite effeminate. Of course no one would ever say it in his presence. He would usually bring a young boy with him. The mother, Mrs Kray, never asked any questions, she never mentioned it.

As soon as he’d walk in she’d sigh with contentment and say, ‘Oh, Ronnie’s here’, and I used to think: Why are you happy when he looks as though he could murder someone? He’d come over and nod to his mum and nod to me. If people were crowding around the table, he’d flick his fingers at one of the gang and say, ‘Get rid of them, I don’t want them round my mother, I don’t want them round this table. She’s enjoying a night out.’

The old man, Old Charlie, was hardly ever around. He was out on the knocker, going door to door collecting gold, silver, watches to sell. He’d go all over the country. The boys didn’t get on with him very well as they got older. I think they sensed a little bit of violence had gone on between the old man and his wife, but of course after the twins were fifteen, the old man had no chance to touch her or even raise his voice. Because one look from Ronnie, even at fifteen or sixteen, would silence him. It would silence anyone.

You know what though? I was never scared of Ronnie. Never. I’ve met people in my life after that that I’d be wary of, but I was never wary of him. He was always polite and lovely to women. I never heard him swear. No swearing. He couldn’t have sworn in front of his mother.

Mrs Kray always referred to Ronnie as a businessman. ‘Ronnie’s going to open another club,’ she’d say. He had the Double R, and Esmeralda’s Barn in the West End. That’s how they met Lord Boothby, the Conservative MP. He was a West End connection. Boothby sued the
Sunday Mirror
for implying there was a homosexual connection between himself and Ronnie Kray. What rubbish! Ronnie Kray went to Boothby’s flat to procure him boys, that’s all.

Ronnie was outraged by that rumour. He said, ‘He’s fat and he’s old.’ Boothby used to dress in these horrible clothes while Ronnie was all in Italian silk. Ronnie was very particular about how people looked – he’d never have looked at Boothby.

There was one particular young boy who was with Ronnie a lot. I remember seeing him in the Blind Beggar with a Rolex on his wrist. I said to Charlie, ‘That’s a Rolex.’ He said, ‘Yeah, it cost a fortune.’ But Ronnie was never effeminate or camp. He would never touch the boy. The boy would have to sit there on his chair in the Esmeralda or the Double R. He would drink his drink and stay put. He’d be in a beautiful suit, beautiful shirt. Ronnie would buy him anything. In Broad-moor the boy was the murderer Charlie Smith.

I think Ronnie got his temper and violence from one of his mum’s sisters, Auntie Rose, because that temper certainly didn’t come from his mother or his father. As far as I know, Auntie Rose encouraged a lot of the thumbing their nose at the law. When the twins were conscripted into the army for two years, some people said it might get rid of their bad tempers, but she knew they’d be back soon enough. And they were. They had a fight with two officers and ran away. They got dishonourably discharged and Auntie Rose was happy. She used to have terrible fights in the streets with women and with men.

I think most of the legend that grew up around the twins at that time stemmed from them being twins. They were split in two, right down the middle. I’ve sat in Mrs Kray’s kitchen with Reggie, and he’s said: ‘Oh, I’ve got a terrible headache.’ Then a few minutes later, the door would open and Ronnie would walk through the door and say, ‘Mum, I’ve got a terrible headache.’ Later I’d visit one of them in prison and he’d say something and the next morning a letter would come from the other saying exactly the same thing. They were absolutely identical until Ronnie was ill and diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on the tablets and he blew up a bit. That’s why Georgie Cornell was killed, for calling him a ‘fat poof’. If he’d just called him a ‘poof’ I think that would have been all right.

In their prime they were absolutely identical and they both had terrifying tempers. Instead of fighting one man, you were fighting two. You’ve had a row with Reggie and all of a sudden Ronnie’s appeared and he wants to break your jaw. You had a row with Ronnie and Reggie’s appeared. They each had a violent temper, combined with a force of two, with each of them thinking like the other.