Bringing Down the Krays by Bobby Teale Read Free Book Online Page B

never gave them any money. Once they complained about the lack of pay and Ronnie said: ‘Here, give them a fiver for their cab fare home.’
    But the club did come good one time. The premiere of the film Sparrers Can’t Sing was held at the Empire in Bow Road, on 27 February 1963. The whole Firm was told to attend, including their wives. Alfie and David were there too, of course. Princess Margaret was meant to be present, but Lord Snowdon turned up without her. People were told she had flu. Maybe her bodyguards wouldn’t let her go down the East End.
    There were jellied eels and mash at Queen Mary College over the road, then it was all back to the Kentucky Club so everyone could have their photos taken with the twins. Not Lord Snowdon, sadly. Perhaps he’d been warned off. All the women, including the film’s star, Barbara Windsor, were doneup in furs and diamonds. She wasn’t that famous then but soon would be. My brothers told me she was laughing that dirty laugh of hers and trying hard not to swear too much.
    Frances Shea was there with Reggie along with James Booth and George Sewell, the male stars of the film. Alfie had persuaded Victor Spinetti, the actor, to come. The singer Lenny Peters out of Peters and Lee was there, but there weren’t the really big stars that Ronnie wanted. I don’t know who he was expecting. Did he really think Elizabeth Taylor was on her way to join him and Reggie for a brown ale?
    Ronnie went mad. It was his big night. It just wasn’t big enough. They went back to Esmeralda’s Barn in Knightsbridge for even more drinking.
    In any case, the Kentucky did not last long after its turn in the spotlight. Just like the Double R, the police objected to the renewal of the club’s licence. The Kentucky closed. But pretty soon Ron took the 66 Club off our mother. He promised to buy it: ‘I’ll sort the money out later,’ he said. But of course he never did.
    Dad was too old to make much of a fight of it. Mum was heartbroken. She loved the business and she wasn’t yet forty. It was the family’s living and there were still loads of young ones to support. It would have been a nice little earner, just at the time the London club scene was booming. But now it was lost to us. And because my brothers and I were off doing our own stuff, making our own way in the world, we couldn’t badmouth the Krays too much, despite our private reservations about what had happened.
    By this time the Double R, the club in the Mile End Road, was long over (the licence was not renewed by the local authorities), but Ronnie still had the Green Dragon in Stepney and Esmeralda’s Barn in Knightsbridge. And now he had the 66. He felt safe round our mother’s and he was on the plot, in the area that he wanted, on the way towards the West End.
    Alfie told me what Ronnie used to say about Mum’s club. ‘This is perfect for us,’ he would smile. ‘A nice straight, clean little club, the ideal place to make a meet.’ His enemies didn’t know about it – it was a place no one would dream of looking for him.
    Meanwhile Alfie had got into the club scene himself as a partner in a place called the Two Decks in Rupert Court, on the south side of Shaftesbury Avenue in Soho. I never saw it, but I know he’d fitted out the place like a ship, with portholes, brass lamps, that sort of thing. And I was the one who liked boats. He got some big names in there, he told me: Danny La Rue, Frankie Howerd, Victor Spinetti, Shirley Bassey, Brian Epstein. He did well with it.
    Alfie confessed to me how much of the time he’d spend drinking away the profits in company with some serious Soho drinkers – like the painter Francis Bacon, the actor John Hurt and the composer Lionel Bart. He told me he’d never let Ronnie near the Two Decks. If he had found out about it, he would have moved in, just as he and Reggie always did. To make the point, Alfie told me the story about what happened with his tailor friend, Paul of Berwick