Kray twins
Ronald Kray and Reginald Kray were English identical twin brothers from Haggerston who were heavily involved in organised crime from the late 1950s until their arrest in 1968.
Their gang, known as the Firm, was based in Bethnal Green, where the Kray twins lived. They were involved in murder, armed robbery, arson, protection rackets, gambling and assaults. At their peak in the 1960s, they gained a certain measure of celebrity status by mixing with prominent members of London society, being photographed by David Bailey and interviewed on television.
The Krays were arrested on 8 May 1968 and convicted in 1969 as a result of the efforts of detectives led by Detective Superintendent Leonard "Nipper" Read. Each was sentenced to life imprisonment. Ronnie, upon being certified insane, was committed to Broadmoor Hospital in 1979 and remained there until his death on 17 March 1995 from a heart attack; Reggie was released from prison on compassionate grounds in August 2000, eight weeks before he died of cancer.
Early life
Ronald and Reginald Kray were born on 24 October 1933 in Haggerston, East London, to Charles David Kray and Violet Annie Lee. The Krays were thorough Eastenders – Charles from Shoreditch and Violet from Bethnal Green – and were apparently of mixed Irish, Austrian Jewish and Romanichal descent, although this has been disputed. The brothers were identical twins, with Reggie born 10 minutes before Ronnie. Their parents already had a six-year-old son, Charles James. A sister, Violet, died in infancy. The twins contracted diphtheria when they were three years old.The Kray household was dominated by their mother, who remained the brothers' most important influence during their childhood. Their father was a rag-and-bone man with a fondness for heavy drinking; his work led him to live a semi-nomadic lifestyle as he travelled all over southern England looking for junk to sell, and even when he was in London he frequented pubs more often than his home. The Kray twins first attended Wood Close School in Brick Lane and then Daniel Street School, Bethnal Green. In 1938 the family moved from Stean Street in Haggerston to 178 Vallance Road in Bethnal Green.
Violet Kray was a minor celebrity in Bethnal Green, for giving birth to and raising a healthy pair of twins at a time when the child mortality rate was high among the British working class. In the interwar period, it was normal that one of the twins born into working-class families would die before adulthood, and it was most unusual that both the Kray twins survived, making their mother the object of much admiration in Bethnal Green, perhaps contributing to her perceived inflated ego. There was a feeling within Bethnal Green that there was an almost unnatural emotional closeness between the twins and their mother, who shunned the company of others.
Ronnie later stated about his childhood: "We had our mother, and we had each other, so we never needed no one else". One of the Krays' cousins who attended school with them, Billy Wilshire, recalled: "It's hard to say exactly what it was, but they weren't like other children". The Krays' biographer, John Pearson, argued that their mother planted the seeds of the malignant narcissism that the twins would display as adults by encouraging her sons to think of themselves as being extraordinary while spoiling their every whim.
During the Second World War, Charles Kray senior deserted from the British Army, having been conscripted in September 1939. He spent the next 15 years living as a fugitive, being finally arrested in 1954. During this period, he was only irregularly involved in raising his family. Meanwhile, the twins were evacuated to East House in Hadleigh, Suffolk, with their mother and their older brother. The family remained in Hadleigh for about one year before moving back to London, as Violet Kray missed her friends and family. While they were in Hadleigh, the twins attended Bridge Street Boys' School.
In a 1989 interview, Ronnie described Hadleigh as the twins' first time in the countryside, recalling that both were attracted to the "quietness, the peacefulness of it, the fresh air, nice scenery, nice countryside – different from London. We used to go to a big 'ill called Constitution Hill and used to go sledging there in the winter-time."
The influence of their maternal grandfather, Jimmy "Cannonball" Lee, caused the brothers to take up amateur boxing, then a popular pastime for working-class boys in the East End. Sibling rivalry spurred them on, and each achieved some success. Ronnie was considered to be the more aggressive of the twins, constantly getting into street fights as a teenager. The British scholar Jonathan Raban wrote that he had a "low IQ" but that he was an avid reader who especially liked books about T. E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate, and Al Capone. Raban attributed much of Ronnie's "savage petulance" as a teenager to his rage over having to hide his bisexual tendencies. As well as this the Kray brothers hung around in the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel in East London.
Military service
The Kray twins were called up to do National Service in the British Army in March 1952. Although the pair reported to the depot of the Royal Fusiliers at the Tower of London, they attempted to leave after only a few minutes. When the corporal in charge tried to stop them, he was seriously injured by Ronnie when he punched him on the jaw. The Krays walked back to their East End home where they were arrested the next morning by police and turned over to the army.In September, while absent without leave again, the twins assaulted a police constable who tried to arrest them. They became among the last prisoners to be held at the Tower of London before being transferred to Shepton Mallet military prison in Somerset for a month to await court-martial. After they were convicted, both were sent to the Buffs' Home Counties Brigade Depot jail in Canterbury, Kent.
However, when it became clear that they would both be dishonourably discharged from the army, the Krays' behaviour worsened. They dominated the exercise areas outside their one-man cells, threw tantrums, emptied a latrine bucket over a sergeant, dumped a canteen full of hot tea on another guard, handcuffed yet another guard to their prison bars with a pair of stolen cuffs, and set their bedding on fire. Eventually they were moved to a communal cell where they assaulted their guard with a vase and escaped. After being quickly recaptured, they spent their last night in military custody in Canterbury drinking cider, eating crisps and smoking cigarillos courtesy of the young national servicemen acting as their guards. The next day the Krays were transferred to a civilian prison to serve sentences for the crimes they committed while AWOL. Raban wrote that prison psychiatrists who examined Ronnie found him to be "educationally subnormal, psychopathic, schizophrenic and insane".
Despite their brief and disastrous military career, upon release the Krays adopted an extremely militaristic style as Ronnie took to calling himself "the Colonel" while their home at 178 Vallance Road was dubbed "Fort Vallance".
Criminal careers
Nightclub owners
The Kray twins' criminal records and dishonourable discharges ended their boxing careers, and the brothers turned to crime full-time. They bought a run-down snooker club in Mile End where they started several protection rackets. By the end of the 1950s, the Krays were working for Jay Murray from Liverpool and were involved in truck hijacking, armed robbery, and arson, through which they acquired other clubs and properties. In 1960, Ronnie was imprisoned for 18 months for running a protection racket. While he was in prison, Peter Rachman, head of a landlord operation, sold Reggie a nightclub called Esmeralda's Barn to ward off threats of further extortion. The location is where the Berkeley Hotel now stands.Ownership of Esmeralda's Barn increased the Krays' influence in the West End by making them celebrities as well as criminals. The twins adopted a norm according to which anyone who failed to show due respect would be severely punished. Both brothers notoriously laundered money through dog and horse tracks as well as through businesses, which led to several others being investigated during the mid-1960s for their co-operation with the crimes. The twins were assisted by a banker named Alan Cooper who wanted protection against the Krays' South London rivals, the Richardson Gang.
Raban called Ronnie the "dimmer" of the two twins, writing that he was "a man whose grasp on reality was so slight and pathologically deranged that he was able to live out a crude, primarily coloured fiction, twisting the city into the shape of a bad thriller". Ronnie quite consciously modelled the style of "the Firm" after what he read about the Chicago underworld in Capone's time, for example having his own personal barber visit his flat to work on his hair because he read somewhere that was the normal practice with Chicago gangsters in the 1920s.
Celebrity status
In the 1960s, the Kray twins were widely seen as prosperous and charming celebrity nightclub owners and were part of the Swinging London scene. A large part of their fame was due to their non-criminal activities as popular figures on the celebrity circuit, being photographed by David Bailey on more than one occasion and socialising with lords, MPs, socialites and show business characters, including Frank Sinatra, Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Judy Garland, Diana Dors, George Raft, Sammy Davis Jr., Shirley Bassey, Liza Minnelli, Cliff Richard, Dusty Springfield, Jayne Mansfield, Richard Harris, Danny La Rue, and Barbara Windsor.Part of the Krays' newfound celebrity status was due to the widespread perception that the twins were men who had risen out of poverty into positions of great wealth and power due to their own efforts. They were seen as an example, albeit a perverse one, of the "meritocracy" that was to replace the traditional class system. Furthermore, the 1960s was a time when many social norms were being questioned, and the Krays were widely seen as "rebels" against what were perceived as sanctimonious and hypocritical traditional British values. The scholars Chris Jenks and Justin Lorentzen wrote that there was "a popular mistrust of the Establishment" in the 1960s and that as many young people "laughed Prime Minister Macmillan and President Johnson, their teachers and university lecturers and priests and moralists off the stage", the Krays were seen as folk heroes. This was a period of intense debates arising about consumerism, social mobility, sexuality, style, and social tolerance, and the Krays were involved in all of them as symbols, either bad or good, about the changes taking place in British society.
The Kray twins greatly valued their image and cultivated the media by inviting journalists to take photographs of them with other celebrities at nightclubs or in donating to charity. They went about in an obsessive way managing and promoting the image that they wanted, namely as benefactors who gave generously to charity and as men who had risen up from poverty to become rich and powerful. The sociologist Dick Hebdige wrote that the Krays had "a sophisticated awareness of the importance of public relations matched only in the image-conscious field of American politics ... As we have seen, certain of the Krays' projects, when closely examined, take on a bizarre aspect more appropriate to the theatre than to the rational pursuit of profit by crime". In 1960, gambling in clubs was legalised in the United Kingdom, which for the first time allowed 'decent' people to gamble openly outside of betting on horse racing. The Krays were the owners of four nightclubs where gambling was permitted, which not only allowed them to be seen as successful businessmen but also to socialise with 'decent' people who would have previously shunned the company of gangsters running a 'gambling den'.
The Krays made a point of promoting a "gangster chic" image as both dressed in a style that countless films had associated with gangsters, namely wearing "discreet, dark, double-breasted suits with tight-knotted ties and shoulder-padded overcoats. Combined with garish jewellery such as large gold rings, gold bracelet watches, and diamond cuff links, the Krays conveyed a redoubtable image". The British scholar Ruth Penfold-Mounce described the twins as a classic example of the social bandit, criminals who became folk heroes because of the belief that they were standing up to a corrupt Establishment while also paradoxically being seen as upholding the better part of society's values. The twins were viewed in certain quarters as "Robin Hood"-type criminals whose crimes were seen as acceptable. Penfold-Mounce noted they combined an air of menace and violence together with an image of "a romanticised air of heroic gentlemanliness, generosity, and the apparent reinforcement of traditional social order parameters of conservatism and restraint". Within this context, the Krays made a point of stressing that there were limits to the values that they were willing to violate while promoting the image of themselves as the benefactors of society. For example, they made a great point of stressing the image of being respectful towards women as they knew that the British public did not like men who were disrespectful towards women. One former member of "the Firm", Tony Lambrianou, stated that the positive image of the Krays was a "myth", maintaining that the only people the brothers ever cared about were themselves.
Jenks and Lorentzen noted the image of the Krays had little to do with who the brothers actually were, as they described the twins as considerably more vicious and selfish than the popular "folk hero" image of them would allow. Admirers of the brothers stress their supposed "Robin Hood" characteristics, with the Krays alleged to have given away much of their ill-gotten wealth to the deserving poor of the East End; their respect for women; and as a force for order who engaged in only what were considered socially acceptable crimes such as theft while punishing those who engaged in what were considered socially unacceptable crimes such as rape. The East End at the time had its own informal rules, such as a deep distrust of the Metropolitan Police as exemplified by the popular saying "thou shalt not grass", which led to police complaining of a "wall of silence". Within the East End, where "roguery" was widely admired, Jenks and Lorentzen noted "symbolic heroes are elected through excess. The most audacious thefts, the most sadistic violence and an almost philosophical quest for glory in infamy are topmost in people's minds. An elision of style and brutality can emerge, as it did in the form of the Krays".
Conversely, the Krays were seen in other quarters as symbols of moral decay and evil, with the famous photographs of the brothers taken by David Bailey being viewed as "the phrenological archetypes of proletarian villainy". Jenks and Lorentzen wrote that the twins became symbols in the public mind of British organised crime itself as the brothers were associated with "tales of excessive and gratuitous violence and to a time when London criminality appeared not only as organised as never before, but also integrated into the Establishment and the vanguard of popular culture". Jenks and Lorentzen further maintained that the Krays' close association with the East End, an area viewed as a centre of "social disorganisation and moral decay", further contributed to the negative picture of the brothers.
Some critics of the Krays made xenophobic arguments that the twins were not of English stock but were instead the products of a mixture of Ashkenazi Jewish and Romany descent. In this context, the Krays were presented as typical of the East End, which was viewed in certain quarters as an impoverished and lawless area that attracted many immigrants. There is no evidence of the Krays having any Jewish or Romany origins, a claim that seems to have been made only to associate the Krays with their supposed familial homelands in Eastern Europe and to distance them from English society. Finally, Jenks and Lorentzen argued that the rareness of identical twins made the brothers seem especially malevolent, giving them the "freak show" image as many found viewing two men who looked and sounded precisely the same to be disturbing and unnerving.
The closeness of the Krays made them seem sinister as Lambrianou recalled in 1995: "You were never, ever on solid ground with them ... They played a little game of their own. There was an unspoken language; it was what they didn't say as much as what they did say. There's a myth that the Krays took care of their own, but I never saw it. The Krays were their own." Alongside this "freak show" image were suggestions of what was viewed at the time as perverted sexuality. At a time when homosexuality was widely considered abnormal – especially in the underworld of the East End – Ronnie made a point of flaunting his relationships with men, which was considered to be quite shocking during the period. Reggie was ostensibly heterosexual, but he had only one known relationship with a woman and was only briefly married; there were also rumours that he had boyfriends as a teenager. The Krays were not asexual, but the indeterminate nature of their sexuality contributed to their popular image of being in some vague way very perverse. The fact that the twins were successful gangsters while not subscribing to the standard heteronormative "hard men" or "lovable rogue" stereotypes associated with their criminal peers, while also rejecting the popular effeminate stereotype of gay men, led to a sense there was something unnatural about them. The "sordid facts" that were presented during the Krays' trial for murder led to their "folk hero" image being eclipsed by a "folk villain" image.