eastlondonhistory.com

The kitchen sink drama is a staple of late 1950s and early 1960s cinema, with gritty northern dramas such as ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. A new social realism was joiining the escapist, glossy movies of the mainstream, as pictures explored the realities and the hardships of working class life in Britain.

The East End was to chip in with ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ in 1962, which took the drama out of the claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, living room or bedroom onto the streets and into the pubs of the East End. The Theatre Workshop production was improbably penned by Stephen Lewis (Blakey from ‘On the Buses’), though heavily improvised like all the group’s pieces. And it used lots of location filiming, offering modern viewers a fascinating glimpse of Limehouse, Stepney and Stratford in the early sixties, as well as cameo appearances by Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

But the whole movement was anticipated a decade earlier by ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’. The film, set on one Bethnal Green sunday in 1947 was an exercise in tedium, frustration and anger at the poverty of life in post-War Britain (and not just in the financial sense). Yet it still manages to grip the viewer. Rarely has boredom been so interesting.

The story has former barmaid Rose Sandigate trapped in a joyless marriage with an older man. Life in bombed out Bethnal Green is hard, with rationing still in place, little money and less to do. Into this dull, reliable existence bursts her former lover, who has broken out of prison and begs Rose to hide him. The tough housewife softens and hides him in the air raid shelter. The strain is intolerable, with family life intruding and the police net swiftly closing. Eventually he flees, to be hunted down in railway sidings by police sergeant Fothergill.

And if it’s sometimes melodramatic (and a touch unlikely) it does evoke the East End of the later forties, not least because real East Enders are in it. Not Rose - she is played by the impeccably posh Googie Withers. Nor escaped convict Tommy Swann (played by Googie’s Australian husband John McCallum). But Jewish East Ender Sydney Tafler, who was a stalwart of British cinema in the fifties and sixties, often playing spivs and crooks, appears as Morrie Hyams. John Slater, who built much of his career on playing cheery cockneys, was another East Ender playing largely to type, as Lou Hyams. Sgt Fothergill is played by Bow’s Jack Warner (Dixon of Dock Green of course). And the character of Dicey is played by Alfie Bass, born Abraham Basalinksy in Bethnal Green.

Of course a decent actor should be able to play the part wherever he or she comes from. But the authenticity of much of the cast may well have pleased the writer. The film came from a novel written by Arthur Bern, who also wrote ‘Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square’, later adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock as the movie ‘Frenzy’. La Bern called himself ‘a gallic cockney’ having been born in the East End of French parents. He was a prolific writer, combining a career as a journalist on the Evening Standard, the Evening News (a former competitor to the Standard), the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, with a steady stream of novels. His East End roots and his job as a Fleet Street crime reporter provided plenty of material. Arthur’s books may have been page turners and were regularly adapted for the big screen (other movies included ‘Good Time Girl’, ‘Freedom To Die’ and ‘Dead Man’s Evidence’) but they ranged from gruesome to downright miserable.

‘Nightmare’ follows Roland John Raine QC, whose wife has run off with a gangster, while his daughter ministers to dossers in the East End. The barrister attempts suicide with a bottle of pills and a jug of whisky, but wakes up in a mental ward. The trouble is just beginning though, as Mrs Raine’s gang boss lover is found murdered. The prolific La Bern had a profitable sideline writing biographies of famous murderers, such as Brides in the Bath killer George Joseph Smith and Acid Bath murderer John George Haigh, so he had plenty of material to draw on.

And take ‘Frenzy’, which tracks a serial killer as he rapes and strangles his way around London. Though to be fair to La Bern he hated Hitchcock’s movie so much that he felt compelled to write a letter of protest to The Times, bemoaning not just the ‘distasteful’ content but the hatchet job Hitchcock and his writer Anthony Shaffer had done on ‘the authentic London characters I created’. He described the dialogue as ‘a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce [and] Dixon of Dock Green’. For La Bern, if you were going to do the East End you had to do it right.

A frustratingly brief piece pops up on the radar courtesy of the Press Association, saying that seven paintings by the late East End gangster Ronnie Kray are set to be auctioned. However there’s very little in the way of what, where and by who, so if anybody knows anything, please post a comment to this story.

The works, which date from the early 1970s, in the early years of Ronnie’s life sentence, will be auctioned in Sudbury, Suffolk, on 26 July. Ronnie, who died aged 61 in 1995, and his identical twin Reggie (who died a few years later, as did older brother Charlie), was a terrifyingly violent man who used his years of incarceration to explore the other side of his character, through books, writing, art and a deal of spiritual self examination. I don’t know if the paintings are any good, but they should be interesting to see.

The death of Reggie Kray on 1 October , 2000 wrote the final chapter in one of the most enduring stories in the annals of East End crime. For nearly 30 years, Kray brothers Ronnie, Reggie and Charlie had either been campaigning for release from prison, or trying to stay out of it. Now, in the course of five short years, all three of the notorious founders of The Firm have died. Just five months after attending older brother Charlie’s funeral, Reggie died of cancer at a hotel in Thorpe St Andrew, Norfolk.At his trial for the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, the judge recommended he serve no less than 30 years. An embittered Reggie Kray was still in prison 32 years later feeling, with some justification, that a man with a lesser reputation would have been freed years earlier. Reggie’s final incarceration in 1969 brought an end to a career of crime that had stretched over 20 years. The twins had grown up in Burdett Road, raised by tough matriach Violet, while their dad Charlie spent much of his time away, working around the country.

They may have had their disagreements with their dad, but one thing they inherited from him was a taste for boxing. Charlie Snr had been a successful bare knuckle street fighter and the twins, along with their father figure, Charlie Jr, soon excelled in the boxing ring. By the early fifties they were making a living in the East End protection rackets – a profitable business that was interrupted by their being called up for national service. They were hardly ideal recruits, spending as much time in the glasshouse for fighting as they did on the parade ground. Back on Civvy Street, they took over the Regal billiard hall on Mile End Road.They were soon making their name with their own spectacularly brutal brand of violence. When a Maltese gang tried to cull protection money from Ronnie, he cutlassed them. Word and fear quickly spread.

By 1957, the brothers had their own club, the Double R, in Bow Road. They protected their growing assets with a ring of fear, recruiting a band of Scottish and Cockney hardman who would feed the Kray mystique. Such was the fear they generated that, when Ronnie shot George Cornell dead in the Blind Beggar pub in 1966 (Cornell was played by East End actor Steven Berkoff in the Krays movie), the police could initially find not a single witness. It was a pointless killing and another was to be the brothers’ undoing. Jack The Hat was a petty crook who had supposedly been badmouthing the Kray family. In revenge, the twins lured him to a party in Hackney, where Reggie stabbed him to death.

The twins were sent down. Ronnie was to die in Broadmoor and Charlie was sent back to prison in 1997 for his part in a cocaine smuggling plot. Ironically, Reg was the only one of the three to die on the outside. The pair grew in fame and notoriety as the years went by. First there was a musical, then the film The Krays starring brothers Gary and Martin (EastEnders) Kemp. There were innumerable books, and celebrity ‘friends’ by the score. Prison certainly gave Reg time to reflect on his life. He spent his latter years embracing Christianity and working on his writing. He wanted to be remembered, he said, ‘first as a man, then as an author, poet and philosopher’. Most of all, he craved freedom and a home far from the East End.

But when the last in a long line of intransigent home secretaries did finally free him, it was in recognition that Kray was a dying man. Reggie had long dreamed of seeing out his declining years in a beautiful country cottage, saying recently: “I want to be able to sit out and smell the fresh air, then I will really feel free. “I might not have long left to enjoy my freedom but that will mean I can die happy. I will savour every moment.’ There weren’t too many moments to savour. Reggie enjoyed just 35 days of freedom after his 32 years in jail.

More stories on the Krays.