Frances: The Tragic Bride Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter 1: WAR BABIES

  Chapter 2: A SCHOOLGIRL READING TENNYSON

  Chapter 3: THE MAN ON THE DOORSTEP

  Chapter 4: COURTSHIP

  Chapter 5: THE GILDED CAGE

  Chapter 6: PRELUDE TO A MARRIAGE

  Chapter 7: THE WEDDING OF THE YEAR

  Chapter 8: SPIRAL

  Chapter 9: THE GIRL IN THE RED JACKET

  Chapter 10: GRIEF

  Chapter 11: AFTERWARDS

  Chapter 12: THE LAST LETTER

  Chapter 13: AN ENDING

  Plates

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  She was beautiful, intelligent and innocent. Yet while growing up in the fifties in London’s East End, neither she nor Frances Shea’s family could ever have imagined that her entire life would be tragically destroyed because she caught Reggie Kray’s eye when she was just a teenager…

  At the time, the Kray twins were already notorious around the East End, poised to kill men and laugh in the face of the law for years to come. The ‘Two Ones’ wanted fame, celebrity above all else and, in the end, they got it, twin souls locked into an obsessive and eerie relationship with each other. Cockney gangsters from London’s East End, with all its traditional associations with crime, poverty, dark deeds and extreme violence, they garnered a huge reputation as crime lords of their era – the iconic fifties and sixties.

  Reggie Kray died, in a blaze of ghoulish publicity, his second wife Roberta at his side, in the year 2000. His twin, Ronnie, died in Broadmoor hospital, a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane, in 1995.

  Yet their mythical status is, if anything, more powerful than it ever was when they were alive.

  A huge part of that myth is the imagery that lives on, the photos they gleefully commissioned, posed for, used as tools in their thirst for fame. Criminals were supposed to live in the shadows, weren’t they? Not the twins. They used extreme violence to intimidate and extort, stuck two fingers up at authority – and turned it all into celebrity gangster dollars.

  There they were, glamour boys, dripping cashmere and gold, at a time when most Brits could just about afford the hire-purchase repayment on a telly, rubbing shoulders with sleek, good-looking movie stars, wayward politicians, sporting heroes of the time. Big fluffy hairdos. Nightclubs. Movie premieres. Slick, beautifully cut suits. And, of course, very public good deeds, craftily engineered into the pages of the newspapers, all geared towards showing their warmly philanthropic side. Generous, big-hearted East Enders – who happened to kill people, too – but only ‘their own’. It was a compelling story. Yet it was a pack of lies. The reality, as Frances Shea discovered, was quite different – and unbelievably terrifying.

  Back in 2013, while pondering some of those iconic images taken so long ago, one big question struck me: Why, with so much already said, written, scripted, documented and delivered to the public gaze about the Kray twins, had so little been told or revealed about Frances Shea, briefly at the centre of it all, the beautiful young girl whose image literally shimmers off the page or screen in the midst of this oft-repeated history?

  In 1965, Frances had married Reggie Kray in a blaze of tabloid publicity, left him after a matter of weeks – and killed herself just over two years after the marriage.

  Even close to half a century on from her suicide at the age of twenty-three, total strangers flock to her grave, place flowers and ponder the power of her beauty. Mostly, though, they wonder about the tragedy of her short existence.

  Who was Frances Shea and why did she die? This became, for me, a compelling question. Many theories abounded, naturally, because this story was about the Kray twins and the tales told about them are legion, especially those concerning the crimes they are rumoured to have committed yet never stood trial for.

  Many of the people in their story are no longer around, of course. Both sets of parents, the Krays and the Sheas, are long gone. Yet it seemed to me that despite the complexities of revisiting the past, going back over Frances Shea’s brief lifetime, here was a significant story. Her acknowledged status, as ‘arm candy’ for Reggie in his bid for gangster power, wasn’t really good enough. There had to be more.

  I had one very small, personal advantage, in that the more I researched her story, the more I understood that my own world, growing up in the murky, battered streets of fifties Dalston within two miles of the Hoxton home of Frances and her family, might, superficially at least, offer an insider’s perspective. Her father, Frank, worked for a time as a street bookie after World War Two, when street betting was illegal. So did my dad, Ginger. I’m younger than Frances but she grew up surrounded by the scars of the war in London’s East End, as I did.

  However, there were big disparities in our respective day-to-day lives and I was not personally familiar with the world she was to briefly inhabit as Reggie Kray’s girlfriend and wife. This was mostly because even though, during the 1960s, I ventured forth into the West End of London and a life beyond the East End as soon as I could, that life had been virtually handed to me in my teens, through working each day as an office girl in the centre of Swinging London.

  Frances Shea also started out that way, having an office job as a bookkeeper in London’s legal district, the Strand, months before her sixteenth birthday. But beyond that, she never really had much of a working life, thanks to Reggie Kray’s intense possessiveness: he couldn’t tolerate the idea of Frances being exposed to any other influence, especially that of the opposite sex. And while I was certainly aware of the associations with crime in my dad’s East-End betting world, I was an overprotected only child in a somewhat solitary world. Few people visited our home. I never witnessed or met anyone from my father’s shady working environment; I just heard the stories.

  At this point, I must say that despite this childhood, and even having written about it in an earlier book, Bombsites & Lollipops (2011), I am not especially sentimental about the old East End and its traditions in the way that history often portrays the area. The wave of nostalgia that has swamped the twentieth-century history of London’s East End, the tales of the Cockney survivors, triumphant amidst the dust and heartache, has now emerged as a permanent part of the city’s World War Two history.

  There is truth in some of this, certainly. But I hope the reader will forgive me if I find it impossible to share the belief in that misty, rose-coloured glow that has somehow taken precedence over reality. As a child, I saw the post-war East End as a dark, dirty and immensely scary place.

  Yet the link to the Kray twins in my childhood is worth recording, though many former East Enders of the time are likely to offer a similar story, such was the Kray legend as we all grew up.

  My dad, Ginger, was born and bred in Petticoat Lane: only when war and the call-up intervened did he take his place overseas with millions of others in the services. Post WWII he returned to ‘the Lane’ to work with his father Jack, a well-known local bookmaker, known as a ‘commission agent’. In the thirties, Ginger had briefly left home and worked ‘on the knocker’ with Charlie Kray, the twins’ father, travelling around the south of England, knocking on doors, buying and selling old clothes, furniture and, if they could get it, gold and jewellery. This bond – and the mutual bonding place of the Bishopsgate pub – led to my dad spending drinking hours with Charlie in those post-war years. As a consequence, sports-mad Ginger knew the twins as teenagers – ‘good little boxers’ – and, like so many in those mean streets, briefly got caught up in their endeavours.

  Up in court for one of their juvenile crimes, the Kray brothers petitioned my dad, climbing the narrow stairs to
my grandfather Jack’s tiny office off Middlesex Street, home to his respectable front as a legal ‘commission agent’ for his mostly illegal street-betting activity. ‘Can you write us a letter, for the court, Ginger?’ they asked. My dad had a reputation around ‘the Lane’ for being clever with the pen. He obliged, of course, lying through his teeth in his neat handwriting, pointing to their good behaviour and respectability.

  And that could have been the end of it. But because the twins had phenomenal memories, much later, as they prospered, they suggested Ginger join them on their payroll. Good money. They’d keep an eye out for the missus and the little ’un. What did Ginger think?

  My dad had his faults. But he was smart enough to decline – he knew all too well what lay underneath all their manipulative guile: he wasn’t interested in making a living from violence or the threat of it. He worked for his dad. Jack wouldn’t be happy if he left the business, he explained.

  This, thankfully, was good enough for the twins. Family first. Yet my dad was on their list, as it were. So when the good times came, and the late fifties/early sixties parties celebrating their various club openings or successful tussles with the law came about, off they’d go, my mum and dad, all dolled up to the nines, my mum reeking of Chanel No 5, to the lavish Kray parties.

  Nowadays, of course, it’s understood that these well-known parties were all part and parcel of the Kray PR machine. The bigger the bash, the more well-known they became, mixing locals like my parents with big fish, such as celebrities, lawyers, bent coppers as well as assorted lowlife. In that, at least, they were egalitarian icons, way ahead of their time: instinctively they understood that image was all. Or rather, the status the twins thirsted for was all in the perception. Underneath it all lay a grim, sordid reality no law-abiding person would even wish to contemplate. But those stories told in our living room about the fabulous, access-all-areas parties became part of my own small family history.

  Curiously, though, I didn’t really follow their story very much when I left home and started the long, slow climb into journalism. Probably because I was very keen to shake off the grime of the East End with all its less-attractive associations, I more or less forgot about them at first.

  Back in the seventies I’d read The Profession of Violence, John Pearson’s detailed and amazing history of his time with the twins just before they were imprisoned for life at the end of the sixties, and had been mightily impressed with what he’d revealed.

  Pearson’s eye was forensic. He was the fly-on-the-wall observer of the Krays, the outsider scribe given a unique peek into their world in the late sixties, just months before they were sent down for good. Already a successful journalist and author, he analysed not just their propensity for violence, their twinship, their guile, but also their talent in manipulation. He also hinted at what might have been. To me, on reading it, it was a revelation that Reggie Kray had first-class skills that could have made him a highly successful businessman.

  Of course, what no one could have truly predicted then was the twins’ success at reinforcing their image throughout the thirty-odd years of their incarceration. That in itself was a marvel of media manipulation and gave them the fame they craved way beyond the senseless murders and Ronnie’s mental illness. They gave the interviews. They sold the stories. They married while serving 30-year prison sentences. A feature-length movie was made while they were still around. The media attention just went on and on. Yet even now, nearly two decades after their demise, with a new, big-budget movie about them on its way, the fascination with them still remains.

  For me, the Frances question around her relationship with Reggie seemed, somehow, to be at the very core of the Kray history, despite her premature death. Buried at Reggie’s insistence at Chingford Mount Cemetery, just outside London, alongside the entire Kray clan, she remains permanently linked to their myth, way beyond her own and her family’s imaginings or wishes.

  This, in itself, was a terrible injustice. And what I found, slowly, as I examined her short history, revealed a strange, tangled and tragic tale of one man’s desire for total possession and a young woman’s rapid descent into unending despair.

  It is also a story of an ordinary East End family finding themselves trapped fast, helpless and without the power or means to escape the consequences of their involvement with two local crime lords. Both Frances’s father, Frank, and her brother Frankie worked briefly for the Krays around the time that Reggie’s fascination with Frances started to impact on their lives.

  Aware of the Krays as local post-war ‘employers’ via my dad’s association with them, I knew this was commonplace. If, like most people living around the area, you came from a household where money was always in short supply, you’d be hard pushed to refuse the offer of Kray cash to drive them around or work in one of their clubs. This was so even if you’d already heard the stories about the terrible things they did to people who crossed them. The mantra was: keep in with them, take the money, stay shtoom. That threat of what the twins could do was there all the time. It didn’t even diminish once they were locked up.

  Fortunately, people like my father didn’t need their cash, in his case because he had his own business on his dad’s ticket. The Shea men, father and son, weren’t quite so lucky. Money, in a world of betting, boozing, ducking and diving, where you picked up cash wherever you could, ignoring the law, was, in a sense, the trigger for what was to eventually happen to Frances Shea.

  Even before Frances died, her family’s lives were already blighted by guilt and blame. The guilt and the blame were to overshadow everything afterwards, while the publicity the Krays garnered for three decades continued to heap attention on the twins, attention they relished and encouraged all the time.

  How it must have hurt the Sheas to have to relive their pain and loss year in, year out, through the newspaper pages read by millions. In discovering their story, it became obvious that Frances’s loved ones suffered a great deal. In silence. It was a haunting too far.

  Today, bereaved or stricken families can, if they wish, be a focus of media attention following a bitter injustice to a loved one. It was so different back then. The Sheas, of course, were not the only family to suffer as a result of the Krays’ attentions. Yet how much consideration was given back then to the grief or feelings of the families of the two men whose murders the twins were convicted for, George Cornell and Jack McVitie? Cornell’s wife suffered openly: she smashed windows at the Kray home in bitter frustration. McVitie’s wife was the first witness in court when the Krays were eventually brought to trial for her husband’s murder. She told the court how McVitie had told her he was meeting the twins for a drink but never returned. Then, without warning, she let rip at the twins, broke down in tears calling them ‘murdering bastards’.

  It was a sensational outburst at the time. The family of Frank Mitchell, whose killing was ordered by the Krays, surfaced too many years afterwards. But essentially, the families of Kray victims had limited visibility at the time the Krays were convicted. Back then, people remained fearful, in the shadows. This fear of Kray retribution around the East End went on for decades. Even recently, in my research, I heard, more than once: ‘Nah, luv. Best not to talk about it. Don’ wanna dig up all that stuff.’

  As for Reggie Kray, did he carry any long-term remorse for Frances’s demise to his own grave? This, I discovered, was not a straightforward question. In prison he remained, as he was when younger, a complex individual with a personal charisma that never quite left him. Both sexes fell for him. Even as he died his wife and his long-term former boyfriend sat on either side of the bed.

  Yet even after concluding this book, I struggled to believe that he truly loved Frances.

  He certainly believed he loved her. That idealised love became an important part of his image, his myth. But the love between man and woman and obsession – or an overwhelming need for possession – are not the same thing. And Reggie made sure that even in death, Frances was his possession, so d
etermined was he to own her, body and soul.

  Photos of him kissing Frances’s headstone at the funeral of his twin in 1995 seemed staged, yet another good photo opportunity. They perpetuated the myth of the caring, bereaved beloved husband. And as for the legendary and persistent Kray myth, that the Krays only harmed ‘their own’– that is, other criminals from their fraternity – Frances’s story clearly refutes this.

  Frances Shea was no criminal. She wasn’t a cynical gangster’s moll with one eye on the main chance, drawn in by the easy money, the flash nightclubs and the sparkle of celebrity. She was a beautiful innocent, which was precisely why Reggie was so drawn to her.

  Late in life he admitted to his second wife, Roberta, that ‘her memory and how she had died was like a weight that he always carried’. Yet if he regretted the shocking way he treated her family in the aftermath of her death, I could not find any record of this.

  One word sums up Frances’s emotional state during much of her relationship with Reggie: fear. Fear was the tool the Kray twins used in creating their myth, propelling them beyond the post-war wreckage of the East End to the upmarket worlds of Mayfair and Knightsbridge, to the USA – and the respect of the Mafia. Fear of their violence, of what they were capable of as a fighting, slashing, murderous duo was the dominant propellant in the explosive mixture of blackmail, manipulation and street cunning they deployed during their days of freedom. That they succeeded in maintaining this fear of their legendary violence throughout their lives gives you some sense of the utter powerlessness that Frances Shea must have experienced: one woman, caught up against all that, via sheer circumstance.

  Possessive, violent men remain, to this day, a terrible threat to any woman involved with them. Reggie Kray was both. And when he was blind drunk, as he was frequently, he was emotionally abusive in the extreme. But of course, it wasn’t just Reggie’s behaviour that was creating the complicated and scary situation that Frances found herself in.