Free Frances: The Tragic Bride by Jacky Hyams Page A

though mad about new cars, was a lousy driver. Ronnie didn’t even bother to get a licence. And so, as they established themselves as crime lords, the twins started to hire young, pretty men to drive them around in the flash expensive cars they never paid for. Chauffeurs too were status symbols, right? In the early days of the Regal billiard hall, second-hand cars could also be bought and sold from the forecourt in the front, yet another ‘nice little earner’ for the twins.
    Whether it was through a chance meeting with the twins at the Regal – new faces, especially good-looking young men, tended to find themselves receiving drinks sent over by the twins with increasing regularity – or, as Reggie Kray preferred to tell it, via a friendship that started because he wanted a new car, it was Reggie’s association with Frankie Shea Junior that was the link that drew Reggie into Frances’s life.
    Already a car-crazy teenager and with a growing reputation for being ‘a wheel man’ around Hoxton, Frankie Shea was ‘about eighteen’ and already establishing himself as a car dealer when Reggie claimed he first met him. Other accounts differ: some say that Frankie knew both twins from the billiard hall when Frankie was younger, maybe seventeen.
    Reggie recalled that ‘first’ meeting in his book, Reggie Kray’s East End Stories – and how he had recruited Frankie Shea to work for him: ‘I decided to look for a different car from the Vanguard I was driving at the time. He had a car lot in north London and although he had nothing that suited me, we struck up a friendship that led to him becoming my driver.
    ‘He was a good-looking kid with brown eyes, dark hair and an olive complexion. As a driver he was the best I had come across, while his personality made him exceptional company.’
    Frankie Shea reached his eighteenth birthday in October 1957. From correspondence (previously mentioned in Chapter 2) written to his family in August 1959, it is clear that by then, he already knew Reggie quite well. That letter from the young offenders’ institution also made brief reference to Frankie Junior writing to Reggie, asking his parents to ‘please post letters to Reggie and Babs [presumably a girlfriend] as soon as you can’.
    At that point, judging by other correspondence from Reggie while in prison in July 1959 – he wrote to Frank Shea Senior, saying he was writing to both Frankie Junior and Frances – it is apparent that by then Reggie was already closely involved with the Shea family, and that he had recently started seeing Frances. She was then still fifteen.
    So Reggie’s subsequent ‘official’ recall of events in books – that he had met Frances while visiting Frankie at the Shea house when she was sixteen, that is after September 1959, her sixteenth birthday – does not give the true picture.
    She was younger, still a schoolgirl when they first met. Indeed, in later prison correspondence to Frances in April 1961, Reggie himself recalled this, saying:
    ‘I’ve known you since you were fifteen years old and have never stopped loving you all the time.’
    Reggie’s cousin, Rita Smith, still lives in the East End. Rita’s mother, May, was one of Violet Kray’s sisters. An attractive, immaculately groomed seventy-something blonde woman, just three years younger than the twins, Rita grew up next-door-but-one to them in Vallance Road. They’d pop in and out of each other’s houses all the time. In many ways, she saw herself as a sister to them, more than anything else. Biased she may be, but family is family and there is no doubting the sincerity of her affection for Reggie as they grew up together.
    ‘Reggie was so nice when he was young; he had Violet’s nice ways. Charlie too was totally charming. Ron was more like his dad. But the whole family thought they were special,’ she recalled.
    Rita vividly remembered Reggie, then in his mid-twenties, telling her how he’d first met and fallen for Frances