Free Frances: The Tragic Bride by Jacky Hyams

Howard, disposed of it in Norfolk. Howard was employed to pay the owner of the house for the damage caused by a “wild party” at a mistaken address and to persuade him not to complain.’
    It’s an ugly story and one of many of the twins’ ‘crimes’ that they would never be called to account for. Yet whatever Reggie’s sexual history, when he and his genial married brother Charlie were running The Double R, while Ronnie was inside, Reggie was not only increasingly drawn to the good life. He had also started to see the appeal of a more ‘normal’ existence, involving a woman, and a nice home with marriage and children to complete the picture. Respectability, in other words, versus criminality and violence. So at that point, without his twin goading him and dominating his existence, Reggie was beginning to think outside the box: success and money, he started to reason, should also be bringing him the ‘reward’ of this other, more acceptable, outwardly stable way of life.
    Professor Dick Hobbs is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Criminology Centre at the University of Essex. He told me that this thirst for social acceptance was a hallmark of the way the Kray twins ran their lives: ‘They seem to have craved respectability, courting, getting married, one side of the coin being the traditional respectable bit, but at the same time there’s all the schemes, the scams, the pill popping, the hidden bisexuality. Yet they won’t let go of the respectability. It’s a switch from one to the other all the time.’
    This trait isn’t that unknown with serious criminals, said Hobbs. ‘I know people now who maintain that respectable side of their life – but alongside it they’re using hard drugs, making money in all kinds of morally repugnant ways, yet the respectability goes side by side with it all. These people are not one dimensional – yet the Krays are the most extreme case of this.’
    Hobbs explained that the era where the Krays flourished had a lot to do with it. ‘The sixties are book-ended by two major changes in the law, the end of capital punishment [in 1965] and the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales [in 1967, between two men over 21 years of age]. Those two changes define the Krays. They nearly faced the death penalty, hanging. But the gay thing could never be overt at the time.’
    ‘“Oh we always knew Ron was gay,” their associates will tell you now. But did they REALLY know? They were nicknamed “Gert and Daisy” (after a well-known female radio double act of the forties, Elsie and Doris Waters) maybe because of their voices, which were lisping and quite high pitched, not those of gruff cockney stereotypes.
    ‘But were people really sure of this ambiguous sexuality? It was covered up very well at the time. There was nothing effeminate or even fashionable about the way they looked. In many ways they were throwbacks to another age, old school, local hard men from the thirties East End. But visually? Warner Brothers gangsters.’
    Status. Looking the part. Playing a Hollywood role. Moviemaking always needs the right props to showcase the stars, underline their affluence. And high on Reggie’s list of essential props was the car, that most potent status symbol.
    An expensive car remains a marker of worldly success – and the owner’s desire to impress. Back in the 1950s, it was a thousand times more potent as a power trip extraordinaire since expensive cars were a rare sight on London’s streets. Less than 2 per cent of Britain’s total population even owned a car. And that was likely to be an Austin 7 or a Morris Minor, inexpensive and ordinary family cars.
    A young man drawing up outside a humble East End two-up, two-down in an American Ford Galaxy (one of Reggie’s favourite toys in The Double R days) or, later, a dazzling green Mercedes Benz 220SE two-door saloon, would have been an astonishing sight around those still-battered post-war streets.
    Reggie,