Letters from Ronnie Kray
Part one of a two-parter
“You take that bloody box of letters out of my house and don’t ever mention his name again,” barked my father, surprisingly angry about what was essentially a shoebox of scrawl from Ronnie Kray, the infamous East London gangster.
I was somewhat confused and taken aback at that moment, because this was a box of writings I thought he might be interested in, for what was written and how it was written, these almost childlike pencil scratches on prison-headed paper.
Pic: Ye Jinghan
Dad talked about London from the war years onwards a reasonable amount, so I thought at the very least my special shoebox of handwritten letters from one of the city’s most notorious gangsters might pique his interest, over this unexpected fury.
It was 1986, and the notorious Ronnie Kray, brother to Reggie, had been serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for seventeen years, two less than I’d been alive, and seven of the latter in a maximum secure hospital called Broadmoor, having been certified insane.
I should fill you in, as the Krays probably said to a few hapless victims of their violence, as to why letters ending with “from your friend Ronnie” were causing such concern for my dad. But this story, this memory, has come to mind for three reasons, really.
One of my first employees, during the short moments I’ve felt grown up enough to actually hire people, was someone called Emma. We worked together in a business called The Radio School, training tomorrow’s broadcast talent to understand the process of applying for work in an industry which leaned on large helpings of right-place-right-time luck, sprinklings of nepotism, self-confidence and a stark inability to read the words “we have nothing right now but will keep your letter on file in case the right opportunity comes along” as a terminal rendition of “thanks but no thanks.”
To me, Emma has always been known as Prim, as in prim and proper. There’s no steering the Bentley away from this, but she is, I would say, my poshest friend, always so elegantly turned out, even in dog walker scruffs, lives in that house Blur sang about, and she’s exceptionally well spoken with friends who have names like Otilie, Hugo, Clementine and Rupert.
She’s writing a novel at the moment, as it goes, and last week, on a catch-up dog walk, I was permitted to read the opening chapter, before the publisher has even turned a page.
It’s bloody good work and actually, I feel privileged to be featured in this book, based on real-ish events, as a character named Jamie. There’s a particular brevity to my appearance, a Halfway to Maybe man would have it no other way, and I’m written out by chapter two.
The storyline is mostly about the employers that come after, who are a little bit wide boy, a little bit ooh, and a little bit ahh. You need to read that in an EastEnders cockney timbre.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that they are or were a Kray kind of set-up, but the stories and colourful language of this novel could take the pearls clean off a duchess, and my friend Prim walked right into that world with a firm handshake and no idea of what “Sort it aht, Bird, or I’ll give you some Adrian” actually meant.
Secondly, I’ve been editing an in-vision interview with a photographer called John Swannell, a British portrait and fashion photographer, famous for photographing members of the royal family, including Diana, Princess of Wales and the late Queen Elizabeth II. He started out assisting at Vogue and for David Bailey before building his own client list of the rich and very famous.
We’ve arrived at the part in the edit where he recounts meeting the Krays at Bailey’s studio. I’ll save the details for the film, but in essence, John remembers escaping through a window in a building where they were working, to save himself from the advances of one Ronnie Kray.
The stars are clearly aligning, because, and this is the third reason behind the piece, my eldest Jack asked me over the weekend who the Krays were. Oddly, with all this happening, YouTube (tell me it’s not snooping in an omnipotent fashion) started serving up clips from the film Legend, which tells the story of the twin brothers Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who ran organised crime across the East End of London through the 1950s and ‘60s with a combination of charm, community loyalty, and a capacity for extreme violence that made them almost impossible to challenge.
They were celebrities as much as criminals, photographed with politicians and pop stars, welcomed into nightclubs they probably half-owned anyway, loved, loathed and feared in equal measure.
People of a particular generation would suggest they looked after London in a fashion akin to a kind of Robin Hood figure, that old people could leave their doors unlocked, that nobody nicked from their own, and that there was a code of sorts, however brutal the hands that enforced it.
Reggie was the more calculated of the two, the one who could read a room and knew when to turn the menace up or down. Ronnie was a different matter entirely. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, which his solicitors would later lean on heavily, but the clinical label doesn’t quite capture what made him so genuinely frightening. He didn’t lose his temper — that would almost have been reassuring.
No, Ronnie was cold, unpredictable in a way that had nothing to do with drink or provocation, and he seemed to enjoy the fear he generated as much as anything else.
One moment he’d be saying something quite amusing, the next he’d be caving the side of your head in with a claw hammer.
People around him never quite knew which version they were getting, and that uncertainty was, for a very long time, what kept everyone in line.
Even when the Krays were banged up, as they say, you’d have found, as I did, that mum and dad’s generation still felt awkward at the very mention of either of the brothers, as if just the mere use of their surname could somehow magic them back. They were, I suppose, the Voldemort of their time.
So, this box. A shoebox of letters from Ronnie Kray.
Aged 19, I worked as a DJ for a while at a club in Waltham Abbey, a part of London. Actually, it’s more a part of Essex, but it’s one of those places that feels like it wants to lay claim more to being allied to the smoke than a leafier part of the south east.
This was a small nightclub tucked into a corner of an estate of tower block flats. Dark red brick buildings, as I remember. Very much a part of 1960s soulless architecture, but not characterful enough to be granted brutalist status.
It was leased by a man called John, a short, dark-haired, chain-smoking man with a gruff voice and disarming demeanour, and try as I might, using all the powers of search, AI and otherwise, I have not been able to trace this club, him, or indeed the tower blocks it was part of. I suspect they’re long gone, and whilst the 1980s seem only a short time ago, I think they were possibly knocked down twenty-five-plus years ago.
The club was on the ground floor, reached by steps leading down from a snooker club. I’d answered a small 3x1 ad in a local newspaper: “Wanted: DJ for weekends, residency position. Auditions being held. Apply to 01 something something etc etc.”
Funny to think ads only had call for the space needed to contain a telephone number.
I rang, having only DJ’d with a makeshift disco unit made from a mahogany sideboard since the age of 16 or 17, for friends’ parties and a pub in Hertford that I wasn’t old enough to order a beer in.
“Come in Saturday afternoon,” said the voice on the end of the phone.
Do you remember how we used to find places before sat nav? This club was properly hidden away in the middle of a very depressed-looking area, and the only place to park was out the back in an alleyway that by day was scary enough, I could only imagine what it might be like at kicking out time when darkness enveloped the space. I arrived thirty minutes late, after searching for the place, figuring out the parking and then working a route back through the estate to the front door.
“You’re an hour late,” grumbled a man who unbolted the door to let me in.
I went to answer that it was only thirty minutes, but he turned the moment I started to talk and motioned me to follow him.
The club’s brutally harsh fluorescent lighting stripped every bit of mystery from the room. Spaces like this are almost unrecognisable from what they become after dark, all the illusion gone, just sticky carpet and the ghosts of a thousand Saturday nights.
I’d been DJing in pubs on and off for a couple of years by that point, so I knew the smell well enough: every known tobacco brand had worked itself into the soft furnishings like it had barbs, and underneath all of it something sweeter and harder to name, cheap aftershave or perfume, probably. Stale lager had soaked into the red and white striped carpet; it had lost all its bounce, and the walls looked like they’d last seen a paintbrush a decade back, easily. There were booths (another tone of red) that looked like areas prying eyes wouldn’t be able to peer into easily, and a DJ unit cloaked in that puffy, studded black leather.
Standing waiting were two men: John, the owner, and another man, similar height, a bit stockier, suit-clad with no tie, in his 50s, possibly 60s, sporting a long scar that ran from just next to his right eye down his face to his chin. It was an old scar, but I could see the depth, or at least, in some sense, feel it. When, as a photographer, I describe a face as lived-in or storied, this is what I mean. He looked like he’d been twelve rounds with life and was ready to do another twelve just for the sh*ts and giggles.
I felt like I’d walked onto a film set.
The owner greeted me first.
“I’m John, you’re late. But I still have a slot, that’s if you’re any good. This is my head of door. You might need him from time to time, that’s if you’re any good.”
I shook John’s hand. Then I shook the other man’s hand.
He squeezed mine back and held the grip uncomfortably long. He smiled, that confident, menacing smile that only a man with a long scar on his face and what looked like a cauliflower ear on the opposing side of his head could muster.
“Hello,” he said, with a deep, resonant 50-a-day London/Essex accent, the sort of tone that also suggested he ate razor blades for breakfast.
“I think you and I are gonna get on just fine.”
“If he’s good enough,” John chirped in.
“Nah, he’ll be alright. I’m gonna look after you,” he said, or threatened. I couldn’t quite work out which.
“I’m Neale,” I mumbled. “You are?”
“Scarface,” said the man. “That’s what you can call me. Scarface.”