Frances: The Tragic Bride Read online

Much of her terror came from the fear-inducing persona of Ronnie Kray, even before the marriage. The twins were intense and possessive by nature. (Their older brother Charlie, who died in 2000, was quite different and didn’t have the same criminal, violent traits.) Ronnie’s extreme possessiveness towards his twin, his jealousy of any ‘intruder’ – which matched Reggie’s possessive attitude towards Frances in its power – meant that Frances was also enmeshed in a vicious power struggle as Ronnie fought to steer his twin away from her.

  The story of Frances Shea is a tragedy in three acts: an outwardly glorious courtship, conducted in exotic locales, engineered by a boyfriend who showered her with gifts, jewels, lavish attention and introduced her to a lifestyle only the wealthy and privileged were able to experience at that time; a very brief marriage which revealed the true hidden ugliness of that same world and the overwhelming power of her husband’s twinship, both of which left her in the throes of breakdown and drugs to ease the nightmare; and finally, her sad ending and the troubled legacy of her death which continued to haunt her loved ones over the years.

  In writing this story, I wanted to bring her a little bit closer into the light. She merits that. Not just because she’s part of the Kray history. But because, as I hoped when I started to look at her story, underneath the smoke and mirrors of the Kray facade, there was a thoughtful, aware young woman, someone who looked as good as a sixties movie star but was, in fact, an ordinary girl who only hoped for the normal things: marriage, security, children, a pleasant home in a leafy suburban street.

  Reggie Kray, for his part, fantasised about achieving those things but couldn’t escape his destiny: the bond with his other half, his twin. He had caught Frances in a deadly trap. Yet he was equally trapped, too: by blood ties and violence.

  In telling this story, so as to relate Frances Shea’s story in context, it was essential to give an overview of the Kray twins’ background, rise to prominence and crimes for which they were eventually convicted in 1969.

  However, Frances Shea remains the focus of this book. The stories of all the multiple gangland feuds, the frauds, the characters who engaged with them in the time before and after they went to prison are not included. These stories have already been told on the pages of the many books written about the Krays.

  Finally, it would not have been possible to write this book without a certain amount of external support and enthusiasm for the task in hand. So I would like to give due thanks to John Pearson, whose knowledge and insight into the Kray story remains, as ever, both compelling and invaluable. Anyone new to the Kray genre will find Pearson’s trilogy of Kray books a fascinating and revealing compendium of their history.

  Thanks are also due to the helpful staff at the Hackney Archives, Tower Hamlets Archives, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives and Museum, the National Archives at Kew, Brighton’s Jubilee Library, the Edda Tasiemka Archive and my ever supportive friends Danny and Saskia at West End Lane Books, West Hampstead.

  This story is historical. Yet the lives of those who unwittingly find themselves trapped by violent, possessive partners remain under threat, all around us, every single day.

  So if there is any dedication for this book it should be to all victims of domestic abuse – and in particular to the memory of those whose lives ended in tragedy, cut short by their relationship with an unstable, violent partner.

  JACKY HYAMS

  East Sussex, July 2014

  CHAPTER 1

  WAR BABIES

  Blackout. Dim street lamps, the occasional car out on the Kingsland Road crawling along with muffled headlights. Behind the dark main road lie streets of wreckage, the inhabitants clinging to everyday life in the little two-up, two-down Victorian terrace houses that were still standing after the bombing raids, their windows blacked out with material; even the briefest chink of light will bring an ARP warden to bang noisily on the front door, and the threat of fines and penalties for anyone ignoring the strictly enforced blackout regulations. A few windows in these darkened streets are crisscrossed with sticky tape or wire net – a precaution against flying glass as a result of yet another bombing raid.

  Tonight it’s quiet. Yet no one around here can ever be too sure when it all might kick off again. If it isn’t the terrifying ‘crump crump’ sound of the bombs raining down from the planes overhead or the booming explosions, it’s the sirens wailing night and day, summoning the people to drop everything, dash to an underground shelter or stumble down the road to home and the damp garden shelter – if home itself hasn’t already been reduced to ash and rubble.

  Brutal, relentless, chaotic wartime. Throughout the land, millions of lives turned inside out, personal tragedy of the nigh unthinkable kind being a daily event. Get on with it somehow. Feed the family with whatever you can lay your hands on. Barter. Listen to the radio. Spot the telegram boy on the bike coming down your street, close your eyes and hope with all your heart, as your neighbours do, that he won’t be heading to your front door with bad news about a loved one serving in the forces. In the cinema, study the newsreel with intense concentration, crane your neck to peer at what surely looks like a familiar face: a son, a brother, a husband of just six weeks out there in the enormous jumble of massed troops. Queue for ages to swap a few coupons for a pathetically tiny bit of meat. Or sod the rationing, use the black market to glean a ‘little bit extra’ off a market stall, the extra coming from God knows where; no questions asked, a few precious coins slipped into the pocket of the stallholder’s apron.

  A combination of hope and humour kept them all going through these war years, families and neighbours looking out for each other, helping out when needed, sharing the worst, though their stoicism meant that tears were more likely to be shed alone, in snatched privacy. The ciggies helped the shattered nerves – half the women of Britain were confirmed smokers by the mid-1940s. Even with the worry, the waiting, the wanting, everyone knew they had to hang on, believed they’d get through this somehow, with their sanity – and family – intact when it all ended. The only trouble was WHEN would it end?

  This was the bewilderingly upside-down world that Frances Shea was born into at her family’s home at 57 Ormsby Street, Hoxton, in London’s East End in September 1943.

  At that point in the war, the news came through that Italy had done a volte-face and switched sides. They’d formally surrendered to the Allies, and the Allied troops were embarking on the long, bloody slog of liberation through Italy, while the German enemy began their march on Rome. Was this the beginning of the end? Public bar optimists around the shattered streets peered at the headlines, shrugged, sipped their pale ale and said well, it was good news, wasn’t it? That effing bastard Jerry was now on the run. The Yanks would make sure of that.

  But of course, not everyone blithely accepted what they were being told, the official version of events. There was too much secrecy around everything, grumbled the cynics, what with the government poking their nose into every aspect of people’s lives, telling everyone what they could and couldn’t do, saying things like: ‘Where’s your ID card?’ ‘Be like dad, keep mum.’ ‘What’s in that bag you’re carrying, missus?’

  When censorship and state control seep into everyday routine for years, it’s easier to remain blinkered, stumble on, not question anything. Yet here in London’s East End, the territory of the renegade, the petty crim and the poorest of the poor teetering on survival’s edge, authority’s sweep was never going to be accepted. War or no war.

  In the blacked-out, bombed-out streets around Hoxton, Haggerston, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney, it remained pretty much business as usual: them versus us, look out for yourself and your family, shun authority at any cost, they’re not interested in you, anyway. In this place, in one sense, it had always been war – of a different kind.

  Law-abiding citizens these East Enders might not be. But the people’s spirit of survival, born out of centuries of rough, tough living, had never been stronger than it was now, four years into the w
ar. Too many exploded bombs, lives lost overseas, homes in ruins, families wrenched apart, and kids sent off to live with total strangers, where ten shillings (50 pence in today’s terms) per child was paid to families willing to accommodate other people’s children… It had all been going on for far too long.

  Yet the default setting here is tenacity: an iron grip on survival amidst utter deprivation. By sheer instinct, they understood resilience, even now, when the only world they’d known was literally crumbling all around them. Tenacity, you see, was part of their cultural heritage, as much as crime and violence had been for a long, long time.

  Not every family in the area lived as outlaws, of course. Many people here had usually survived through working in poorly paid, often casual work – the ‘working poor’ – finding jobs whenever they could, struggling to get by on a pittance but staying relatively straight. And, of course, keeping quiet about what they knew about those living outside the law. There was always talk about what so-and-so had been up to, who’d gone inside, who was out, who’d run off and deserted. Yet if authority started stickybeaking (making enquiries), there’d be scant chance of anyone dropping their neighbour in it. Omertà (the traditional Mafia ‘code of silence’), East London style. Stick together. Social glue.

  Frances’s parents, Elsie and Frank Shea, had been married for nearly four years when they moved into the tiny terraced house in Ormsby Street, which lies just behind the long, meandering Kingsland Road, the main thoroughfare running some two and a half miles from Shoreditch Church up to the leafier surrounds of Stoke Newington. With a four-year-old son, Frank, born just a month after war had been declared and a new baby on the way, for the couple, who’d both left school at 14 to seek employment in the many thousands of factories and workshops that crowded the nearby area, it was a relief to be rehoused in the tiny, shabby little house. It had nothing much to commend it, though – other than that the bombs had missed it.

  Like many young courting couples facing the ‘will it, won’t it happen’ uncertainty of the looming threat of war with Germany, Frank and Elsie had married hastily in July 1938 at Shoreditch Register Office.

  Elsie Wynn was a twenty-one-year-old skilled seamstress and Frank Shea a woodworker aged twenty-six when they opted to join forces. Both had always lived in the locality; Frank grew up in Hoxton, the youngest of a big Irish family, headed by his dad Joseph, a shoe salesman.

  Hoxton today is one of central London’s most fashionable areas, with trendy new loft apartment blocks and smart cafes and bars. Yet for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was one of the roughest areas in Britain, overcrowded, crime ridden, its tiny streets of pubs and pickpockets virtually overwhelmed by the huge number of small factories and workshops that had been set up there in the late nineteenth century.

  Elsie’s family had lived in nearby Shoreditch, a shade closer to the heart of the city itself, and slightly less rough than the mean streets of Hoxton. Elsie’s father, Robert, was a driver. ‘Always tell people you live in Shoreditch, not Hoxton, it’s much nicer,’ Elsie would frequently remind her kids as they grew up – low-level postcode snobbery that she’d probably absorbed as a child, but which at the same time hinted at her yearning for respectability and social acceptance. Tragically, this was destined to elude her in ways she could never have imagined.

  Elsie had come from a broken home. Her father left the family for another woman, a source of much family bitterness amongst the Wynns in later years. Yet by the time she fell for Frank Shea, a quiet, good-looking young man, Elsie was a very smartly turned out, attractive dark-eyed brunette, who was a good physical match, at least, for the equally sharp-suited, slightly built Frank.

  Once married, the young couple lived briefly in Hemsworth Street, Hoxton, then found themselves on the move again to nearby Malvern Road, Hackney, after baby Frank arrived in October 1939. Then came the devastating effects of the German bombing raids of the Blitz in 1940, when London and the East End were continuously bombed for fifty-seven nights from September through to November. This ferocious attack on Londoners was followed by even more continuous bombing raids, from March until mid-May 1941, which left a pall of thick smoke hanging permanently over the city. Everywhere you went, London was burning. The fear of annihilation never stopped. It just went on and on.

  Many thousands of homes were left without gas, water or electricity after the bombings, and Malvern Road was right in the heart of the bombing of Hackney, so at around the time Elsie discovered she was pregnant for a second time, the Sheas considered themselves lucky to be rehoused in Ormsby Street.

  This was to be their family home for nearly thirty years, right up until the time when the houses in the area were finally demolished in the late 1960s as part of the major-slum clearance programme that took place in parts of East London. At that point, the Sheas were moved, along with their neighbours, to new homes nearby.

  By then, however, moving to a brand new home with all mod cons held little comfort for the Sheas. The fabric of their lives had been torn asunder by a gut-wrenching emotional wrecking ball as powerful as the worst of the Luftwaffe’s assaults on London: their only daughter’s brief life as the girlfriend, then wife of Reggie Kray was over. And the tiny Hoxton thoroughfare where she’d grown up, just less than a mile away from the Kray family’s home, ‘Fort Vallance’ in Vallance Road, Bethnal Green, had been the setting for some of the strangest, most poignant scenes in the history of Frances Shea’s troubled relationship with Reggie, the twin who was so determined to claim her as his own – in life and then beyond.

  Elsie was hardly a social climber by today’s standards. But even as a young wartime mum, she always clung to her hopes and dreams, even though she was desperately struggling to cope with rationing, bombs and looking after little Frank – a good looking child with melting chocolate brown eyes and an endearing manner – as well as having a husband away in the services (Frank Senior had signed up to join the Fleet Air Arm just after war was declared). Somehow, her dreams helped her through the worst times.

  She was aspirational, at a time when day-to-day aspiration was in very short supply. Elsie desperately wanted a better, cleaner, brighter world for her family when the war finally ended. What mother didn’t allow herself the occasional dream of better days ahead in the midst of all they were living through?

  Elsie had been lucky enough to give birth to Frank, named Frank Brian, in a proper maternity ward, at the City of London Maternity Hospital in City Road, a hospital later to be destroyed by bombing raids in 1940. As the war went on and medical/nursing resources had to be deployed elsewhere around the country for the war effort, home births became the norm, with overstretched midwives on bikes wobbling their way through the rubble-strewn smoky streets. They were shakily coping with the ever-present threat of death or injury, helping bring life into the world right in the midst of the war, sometimes to the accompaniment of gunfire, explosion or falling debris. And there were times when even the home birth became impossible – history records that some women even gave birth while sheltering in the London Underground during air raids.

  Frances arrived at Ormsby Street on 23 September 1943. There is no record of bombing in the area around Kingsland Road for that week, and by then everyone was fervently hoping that the worst of the bombing was over. In fact, the intermittent bombing of London, day and night, was far from over: the Luftwaffe dropped 30 tons of bombs over Battersea, Ilford, Hampstead and Woodford, Essex two weeks later on 7 October and the following day, killing thirty-five people and injuring many more.

  Bombs or no bombs, Elsie wanted her baby daughter baptised. With everyone living with death and destruction all around them, baptism was popular for newborns. Not only did it mean a church marriage in adulthood, it also meant burial in consecrated ground. And so the three-week-old baby, named Frances Elsie, was baptised at St Chad’s Church, Nichols Square, just round the corner from Ormsby Street on 17 October 1943 by Father Henry Wincott, who presided over St Chad’s parishione
rs throughout the war years.

  It was a happy day for the Sheas; the baby gurgled contentedly in her mum’s arms throughout the short ceremony. In fact, just forty-eight hours after she was born, Elsie noted with some satisfaction that her little girl was smiling up at her: a moment in time she’d often proudly recall in the years ahead.

  Frank’s period in the services saw him working as a veneer preparer (helping to make wooden propellers for aircraft) in the Fleet Air Arm and fortunately he didn’t wind up being sent off to serve overseas. Yet there were still periods of separation for the couple, with Frank returning briefly on forty-eight-hour leave to find his wife just about coping with the demands of a small baby and a lively four-year-old son running around.

  Money, of course, was tight: Elsie, as a mum of two small children, was not compelled to register for war work, and she could work from home as an outworker, making clothes on the kitchen table – if she could manage it. But the news in 1943 that servicemen’s wives were eligible to claim for a weekly War Service Grant of £3 a week would have been very welcome in Ormsby Street. Frank’s Fleet Air Arm pay would have been less than this, around £1–2 for a seven-day week, after deductions.

  Like the other families living in cramped housing that didn’t boast a cellar or basement area, the Sheas had to keep an Anderson air-raid shelter in their tiny backyard. Named after Sir John Anderson, Home Secretary during the first year of the war, the six-foot six-inch by four-foot six-inch shelter, which measured just six feet at the highest point of the roof, was made from curved sheets of corrugated iron, clamped together and bolted to steel rails, and then dug into the soil to a depth of four feet. Frequently, neighbours got together to help each other put up these shelters, provided free by the authorities to families of modest means (those living on less than £5 a week) to shelter in when the air-raid warnings started.