Sharp-suited underworld icons, merciless murderers, robbers and racketeers.. Ronnie and Reggie Kray ruled the London’s East End for almost two decades.
Yet to Kim Peat, the twins were kindly cousins who spoiled her as a child and wrote to her every day from prison.
She grew up next door to them, celebrated family milestones with them, visited them in jails around the UK and took a front row seat at their funerals.
Kim, 60, says: “My nan May lived at 174 Vallance Road. Nanny Lee – the twins’ granny – was 176, and their mum Violet was 178. I lived with my mum and dad in the two rooms upstairs in 176. We were all really close, in and out of each other’s houses all the time. I loved them.”
Kim, who lives near her childhood home and the Krays’ HQ in Bethnal Green, has rarely talked about her notorious relatives. But she feels now that most of her mum’s side of her family have died she can be completely honest.
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“There were good times in our family,” she says. “But they also did bad things and I don’t want to sugar coat anything.”
The retired carer remembers pivotal moments in their lives, from Reggie’s ill-fated marriage to Frances Shea, to her suicide, to their life sentences for murder.
Her grandmother May was the sister of Ronnie and Reggie’s mum Violet, who Kim adored. But she could not bear the Krays’ father, known as Old Charlie.
“He was an awful man,” Kim says. “He was horrible to Violet – violent from day one. They married in 1926 when she was 15 but had to edit her date of birth as she was expecting her eldest son, Charlie.
“Old Charlie gave her black eyes, bloodied noses. That’s where the twins’ violent streak came from. He said if she ever left him he’d throw acid in her face and no one would look at her again.”
In 1929, while Violet was in labour, her husband refused to take her to the hospital and went to the pub instead. Violet was left to deliver her own daughter, who only lived for two hours.
She doted on her twin sons, born in 1933. Old Charlie stopped abusing Violet when Ronnie threatened his father. Kim says: “Ronnie was 16 when Old Charlie punched Violet in the nose.
“He ran downstairs, punched his dad in the nose and said, ‘If you ever touch my mother again, I will effing kill you’. Old Charlie never beat her again.”
As the twins’ criminal empire grew, they sent young Kim gifts including a rocking horse and clothes for her dolls. “My mum always laughed at the thought of Reggie shopping for Barbie outfits.”
Kim was fond of Frances Shea, who dated Reggie for eight years and married him in 1965 aged 22. “They were in our house all the time.
"There was always so much traffic in Violet’s house and they wanted to be alone. She’d have tea and watch telly with us because all the glitz and glamour wasn’t really her.”
Kim recalls Reggie and Frances’s wedding. “Frances’s mother walked in dressed entirely in black. She didn’t want her to marry Reggie. My nan said, ‘She looks like she’s going to a funeral’.
“David Bailey did the wedding photos but it was very staged and nan had a row with Ronnie, saying: ‘When are we going to eat? The kids are hungry.’
"But we had to stand there for the pictures. Nan took us home and we didn’t stay for the meal.”
Frances was close to Kim’s mum Rita, and told her she fell out of love with Reggie. “She wanted just Reggie and her, not Ronnie in the background. Ronnie wasn’t friendly to her.
"Once she was sitting down once, filing her nails. He said, ‘Get up and make a cup of tea instead of sitting there doing nothing’. He’d be spiteful. Reggie said, ‘I’ll make the tea’. Ronnie was jealous.”
Frances and Reggie had split when she killed herself in 1967.
At her funeral, Kim’s mum said Reggie had to be held back from throwing himself in to the grave.
“Reggie was in a really bad way,” says Kim. “After the funeral he was at our house staring into the fire.
"I said, ‘Do you like my new doll? I’m going to name her Frances. He held me tight and kissed me on my head. I could see he’d welled up.”
Ronnie was openly gay among his close family at a time when homosexuality was illegal.
“He told Violet, ‘I like blokes’,” says Kim. “His boyfriend Teddy Smith used to stay overnight with us.
"Our family were very broad-minded. People say Reggie had boyfriends too, but we never saw that.
"He used to leave lots of one night stands at my nan’s. She’d say, ‘I think you’d better go home love – I’m sure he will contact you’.”
The boys’ adored their mother. Ronnie and Reggie took Violet to meet Judy Garland in one of their nightclubs.
Kim says: “She and Judy got on like a house on fire. Reggie took Judy to Violet’s house. Judy sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow in the front room for Violet.”
In March 1969 the Krays were found guilty of murdering Jack McVitie and Ronnie of George Cornell’s murder.
The family could not believe a second cousin Ronnie Hart testified against them. Kim says: “We wondered if he was planted.”
Kim visited the twins in jails like Broadmoor, where Ronnie’s butler served visitors tea from a silver pot.
She says: “Me and Reggie wrote to each other every day. He sent me poems and recommended books. I could tell him anything.”
Kim became acutely aware of her relatives’ infamy at their funerals. “I’d never seen anything like it. At Ronnie’s in 1995, the streets were lined and kids climbed lampposts to get a better look.”
Kim was devastated when Reggie died of cancer in 2000. She says: “Of course I know about the twins’ violence, I can’t say I talk about them with pride. But they were my family and I loved them.
“To any young person seeing pictures of Ronnie and Reggie with film stars, thinking that’s how they’d like to be, think again.
"They were jailed, their lives effectively over at 35, and they broke their mother’s heart. One thing their stories should teach is to try to succeed using your brain, not brawn.”
- Secrets Of The Krays is available exclusively on Britbox. Visit Britbox.co.uk
