The Profession of Violence (2 page)

Most of these hardly mattered, but one relationship that clearly did was that between Ronnie and the former Conservative minister and TV celebrity, Lord Boothby. Here was a scandal that had been carefully suppressed. Boothby had lied in public over the extent of his friendship with the Krays. As the result, he had earned himself £40,000, and if I was right, the resulting cover-up helped explain the twins' immunity from arrest through much of the period when they started killing people.

But at the time strenuous efforts were made to stop me publishing the truth. To this day I have no idea who raided my agent's office and my home to steal some letters I possessed from Lord Boothby to the Krays. At the same time lawyers acting for Boothby made it all too clear that I proceeded at my peril if I tried to publish all I knew.

As a result of this, only since Boothby's death in 1986 has it been possible to give the details of one of the most extraordinary episodes in the Kray twins' whole extraordinary career.

JP, 1995

In 1929 a doctor called Lange from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich created a stir among psychologists and criminologists by reviving the unfashionable theory of biological inheritance as a factor in the making of a criminal.

For several years Lange had been studying the character and history of criminal twins. He had started from the point established by Sir Francis Galton in England in the 1870s that there are two sorts of twins and that the differences between them are fundamental. The commonest twins are what are known as binovular or double-egg twins, formed when two female eggs are fertilized by separate male germ cells. The result is two babies who, although twins, have no greater chance of inherited similarities than ordinary brothers and sisters of the same parents. In rarer cases, something like three to four per thousand live births, a single fertilized egg splits within the womb to produce twins that are biological carbon-copies of each other. They have a uniform heredity and sex, look alike and are known as ‘identical' or uni-ovular twins.

By studying the records of the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, Lange discovered thirty convicted criminals with twin brothers or sisters: of these pairs thirteen were identical twins, seventeen non-identical. When Lange compared the two groups he discovered that in only two cases did a non-identical twin of a criminal have a criminal record; among the identical twins, ten out of thirteen did.

When he investigated each pair of identical twins the parallels between their lives became still more apparent.
Almost invariably Lange found that the brother of a convicted identical twin showed signs of a similar criminal tendency himself. Although out of touch for years, the twin of a professional burglar of quarrelsome disposition turned out himself to be a professional burglar with a reputation for violence. The identical twin of a man imprisoned for company fraud was discovered to have specialized in fraud and confidence tricks himself. A homosexual in trouble for exploiting older men had an identical twin doing the same thing in another part of Germany. Lange concluded in his book, which he entitled
Crime as Destiny,
that these identical twins acted as they did, not primarily because of their environment, but because of ‘inner laws' of heredity determining their tendency to crime.

Five years after Lange's book appeared in Leipzig, Charles Kray, a twenty-six-year-old second-hand clothes-dealer from Hoxton, was preparing to leave on a buying trip to the West Country. Most of the cockney dealers liked to stick to the Home Counties, but Charles Kray was a wanderer: by going farther afield he hoped to have Dorset and Somerset to himself. He had his wad of ready money, his old-clothes bag, his gold scales and was planning to catch the Monday morning express to Bristol with his partner, an Irishman named Sonny Kenny.

Charles was small and dapper, and everything about him gleamed; his greased-back hair, his sharp black shoes and his quick smile. People in Hoxton said the Krays were gipsy folk, descended from horse-dealers who had settled here in the poorest part of London. Charles had the mistrustful dark eyes of a gipsy. So had his father, Jimmy Kray. The old man had kept a barrow in Petticoat Lane, and was a wanderer too. Otherwise, father and son were very different.

Jimmy was an East End character: according to Charles, he was ‘A good-looking old boy. Bigger than me with thick grey hair. He always wore a white silk stock tied around
his neck and was proud of his appearance. In those days the men of the East End were very vain. He was a fighter and a drinker and was scared of no man living. He must have drunk with every villain who came out of Hoxton and Bethnal Green and he'd fight them too. When he fought he never cared what happened. He was called “Mad Jimmy Kray”.'

Charles was cleverer than his wild old father. His mother had been in service with a well-off family in Highgate, a careful woman who spent her time worrying about her husband and keeping the family together. In many ways Charles resembled her: he was deferential, always careful to keep out of trouble and had a taste for money. He was no fighter but a talker with an instinct for buying and selling; in his teens he had started working on his own account. By twenty he was making a good living and generally considered one of the finest ‘pesterers' around: for the door-to-door dealer, ‘pestering' is the basis of success.

His younger brother says of him, ‘He'd always be polite and never bullied but he knew what people would do for money. As soon as he found anyone with something to sell he'd keep on pestering until he got it. By rights Charles should be a stone-rich man today.' Gold buying went with old clothes buying. ‘Once I had asked the lady of the house if she had any clothes to sell, I'd say, “Excuse me, madam, but I wondered if you'd any gold or silver you've no use for.” The first time they'd say no they hadn't, and I'd say, “It doesn't matter at all, madam, but it so happens I'll be passing back this way in half an hour and call to see if you've found anything. It'll be no trouble.” A bloody lie, of course. But then you gotta tell a few lies. That's business. And when you came back you'd usually find they'd got you something.'

In the mid thirties, silver was fetching two shillings and sixpence per ounce; eighteen-carat gold seven pounds an ounce. ‘I always sold to Abe Sokolok in Black Lion Yard, off Whitechapel Road, every Sunday morning, him being
Yiddish. Most weeks I'd be making twenty or thirty pounds from the gold alone.'

This was wealth in the East End, where family income averaged seventeen shillings a week; and Charles had a life he thoroughly enjoyed. ‘I've been a free man. That's how I like it. I don't believe in working for a Guv'nor. That's a mug's game.' But at twenty-four the time had come to marry. With his looks, and his money, he had the pick of the local girls and chose a seventeen-year-old blonde with blue eyes called Violet Lee. They met in a dance-hall in Mare Street, Hackney. After the marriage they moved in with his parents over a shop in Stene Street, Hoxton. She was soon pregnant and the doctors told her to expect twins. Instead she gave birth to a single son, Charles David. She had been eighteen then. Now at twenty-one she was once again expecting.

Charles Kray was not a family man. But when the midwife told him Violet would soon be giving birth, he decided to postpone his trip to Bristol. That Monday morning he went to King's Cross to explain things to Sonny Kenny before seeing him off. The old Irishman laughed at the idea of Charles of all people sacrificing a good trip for his family; as the train steamed off, he leaned from the carriage window and shouted, ‘My love to Violet. Hope she has those twins this time. Then you'll have something to worry about, me boy.' That night, 17 October 1934, at 64 Stene Street, Hoxton, Violet Kray surprised the midwife by giving birth to two male children within an hour of one another. The first she called Reginald, the second Ronald.

Charles remembered Kenny's warning and did find the twins' arrival a financial problem. But his wife was thrilled with her two babies and that was what mattered. For Violet the arrival of the twins was the greatest event in her life. The last few years had been a struggle.

She had been one of three good-looking sisters living on the corner of Vallance Road in Bethnal Green; she was headstrong and had eloped romantically with Charles. ‘I
was just young and silly and my head was full of all the nonsense of young girls of seventeen.' When she found out more about her new life there was no point complaining. Her husband would not change. He had to have his beer and gambling and male company. Some men were like that.

So she made the best of things. She was a good wife. According to her sister May, ‘She always kept herself nice, Violet did. Never let herself go, like most women once they're married. She was a quiet one.' With the quietness went great strength of purpose; with twins she finally had something to be purposeful about. ‘I never seen no babies like the twins,' she said proudly. ‘They was so lovely when they was born, the two of them, so small and dark, just like two little black-haired dolls.'

Their brother, nearly four, was a placid, easy child, with his mother's personality and looks. The twins were different: they were demanding and brought out all their mother's deep protectiveness. They did something more: for the first time they gave Violet's life a touch of the glamour she had dreamt of when she eloped. Nobody else had twins; they were something special, and when she pushed them out in the big double pram they conferred on her the final accolade of cockney motherhood. It was a pretty sight; blonde young mother, gleaming pram and these two beautifully dressed little dolls, making their way past the pubs and stalls of the Bethnal Green Road. People would stop and look, neighbours inquired about them; her two sisters begged for a chance to take them out on their own.

‘In those days everybody loved the twins and wanted a go with them,' says Violet.

Hoxton, where the twins were born, lies just outside the City up the Hackney Road. A depressing hinterland of dead grey streets and tenements, it was famous in its day for pubs and pickpockets. One of their father's favourite
Hoxton pubs was The Eagle; for years children have been singing about it in the old nursery rhyme:

Up and down the City Road

In and out The Eagle

That's the way the money goes

Pop goes the weasel.

Hoxton's tailors often ‘popped' or pawned their ‘weasels' or flat-irons at the countless pawnbrokers along City Road to pay for beer when the money ran out, and The Eagle was one of the places where the Hoxton ‘Whizz Mob' came to drink. This was the biggest gang of pickpockets in London; from Hoxton they would work the race-tracks and the Cup Final crowds, operating as a team and often picking up hundreds of pounds at a time. But Hoxton was a lifeless place; even its pickpockets were despised by the rest of the criminal East End.

As the East End had grown from the ancient villages along the river, so much of the village atmosphere remained. Each quarter kept its name and its identity, and Bethnal Green, where Violet Kray had lived, looked down its nose at Hoxton, barely half a mile away. Certainly Bethnal Green was livelier. It ran eastwards from the old boundaries of the City at Bishopsgate, with Whitechapel and Whitechapel High Street to the south and Hackney and the Bethnal Green Road to the north. Unlike most parts of the East End, the green of Bethnal Green remained a narrow patch of grass fringed with eighteenth-century houses and although Bethnal Green had some of the worst poverty and vilest slums in the country its people kept a certain local pride.

The main employment for the men was casual labour in the London markets or the docks and in the thirties after the Depression, Bethnal Green saw brutal poverty again. In 1932 a government report estimated 60 per cent of the children of Bethnal Green suffered from malnutrition
and 85 per cent of the housing was unsatisfactory. But this part of the East End was used to poverty. This was where the ‘Rookeries' of Dickens's time had been. In Bethnal Green before the war, the most lavish events were still the funerals, day-long wakes with black, plumed horses pulling the hearse and more spent burying a man than he could earn in a year alive.

Death was a commonplace affair in Bethnal Green; most men survived by toughness or drunkenness or both, and the family was the one firm unit of defence. This was the basis of the famous East End matriarchy, with the woman of the family keeping life going against all the odds. Without the woman and the family no one in Bethnal Green had much of a chance. Violet had learned this from experience.

‘Before I ran away to marry Mr Kray we was devoted as a family. Us three sisters, Rosie, May and me, and my brother who kept a caff across the road. My dad worked in the market, but everybody used to know us. They called our bit of Vallance Road “Lee Street”. Though times was hard I'd say that we was well looked after. My mum would see to that. We always lived close as a family and helped each other every way we could.

‘The only trouble was my dad was terrible strict. Us girls had to be indoors by nine of a night. I used to like life. Always have, and I was the one who never could get home on time. That must be why I married at seventeen. That's what I put it down to, me bein' young and silly and him being so strict, I thought I'd do anything to get away. Then when I married Mr Kray, my dad disowned me. No proper wedding and he wouldn't even come to the register office in the Kingsland Road.'

Violet's father, John ‘Cannonball' Lee, stuck by what he said, and Violet remained outlawed from her family during the earliest years of marriage. But gradually she was accepted back. ‘My mum had kept an eye on me to see I
was all right. Often be poppin' round with half a pound of cheese or a bit of meat for us.' The birth of Charles David brought something of a reconciliation with her family. Her father started speaking to her again. But it was the twins who really brought the wayward daughter home to the family in Vallance Road. And she returned in style, double pram and all. ‘My dad adored the twins, thought they was wonderful. Everyone who saw 'em seemed to love 'em.' And everybody spoiled them. ‘Somehow with the twins you couldn't help it.' ‘I always dressed the twins the same. They was such pretty babies. I made 'em both white angora woolly hats and coats and they was real lovely, the two of them. Just like two little bunny rabbits.'