Ronald Kray (24 October 193317 March 1995) and Reginald Kray (24 October 19331 October 2000) were English identical twin brothers from Haggerston, East London, 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, the twins 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 the following year 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 in 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 (1907–1983) and Violet Annie Lee (1909–1982). The Kray parents were thorough EastendersCharles from Shoreditch and Violet from Bethnal Greenand were apparently of mixed Irish, Austrian Jewish and Romanichal descent, although this has been disputed. The brothers were identical twins, with Reggie born ten minutes before Ronnie. Their parents already had a six-year-old son, Charles James (1927–2000). A sister, Violet (born 1929), died in infancy. The twins contracted diphtheria when they were three years old.
The Kray household was dominated by the twins' mother, who remained their 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 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 the local area, 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". Billy Wilshire, a cousin of the Krays who attended school with them, 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, the Krays' father deserted from the British Army, having been conscripted in September 1939. He spent the next fifteen 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 missed her friends and family. While they were in Hadleigh, the twins attended Bridge Street Boys' School. In adulthood the twins would buy two homes in nearby Bildeston, one for themselves and another for their parents.
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, In 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 Ronnie 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 Krays 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 (AWOL) 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. At Shepton Mallet they met Charlie Richardson, another inmate, who later formed the Richardson Gang, a rival of the Krays’ Firm. After their conviction, the twins were sent to the Buffs' Home Counties Brigade jail in Canterbury, Kent.
However, when it became clear that both would 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 handcuffs and set their bedding on fire. Eventually the twins were moved to a communal cell, where they assaulted their guard with a vase and escaped. After being quickly recaptured, the Krays spent their last night in military custody drinking cider, eating crisps and smoking cigarillos courtesy of the young national servicemen acting as their guards. The next day they were transferred to a civilian prison to serve sentences for the crimes they had 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 With their boxing careers ended by their criminal records and dishonourable discharges, the Kray twins 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, they were working for Liverpool gangster Jay Murray and were involved in truck hijacking, armed robbery and arson, through which they acquired other clubs and properties. In 1960 Ronnie was imprisoned for eighteen months for running a protection racket. While Ronnie 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 was where the Berkeley Hotel now stands.
Ownership of Esmeralda's Barn increased the Krays' influence in London's 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, this usually consisted of excessive violence and harsh beatings. 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 part in the Krays' crimes. The twins were assisted by a banker named Alan Cooper, who wanted protection against the Krays' South London rivals, the aforementioned 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 on what he read about the Chicago underworld in Capone's time, for example getting his own personal barber to visit his flat to work on his hair because he had 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 by 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 about consumerism, social mobility, sexuality, style and social tolerance, and the Krays were involved in all of them as symbols, either bad or good, of the changes taking place in British society.