Krays of Old London: The Full Story of the Twins Who Owned the Night

Some names don't need a surname.

Ronnie and Reggie. Say those two names in East London and people still know exactly who you mean, more than half a century after the twins were locked away. The Kray brothers weren't just gangsters. They were a mythology — dark, glamorous, violent, contradictory, and woven so deep into the fabric of London that the city has never quite shaken them loose.

This is the full picture: where they came from, what they built, who they surrounded themselves with, and why a blues track named Krays of Old London feels like the only honest way to honour the shadow they left behind.

The Beginning: Bethnal Green, 1933

Reginald Kray and Ronald Kray were born on 24 October 1933 in Hoxton, East London, the youngest children of Charles and Violet Kray. The family soon moved to Bethnal Green — then, as now, one of the defining streets of the working-class East End. The world they grew up in was bomb-scarred, close-knit, and governed by codes of loyalty and violence that no formal institution ever taught.

Their mother Violet was the gravitational centre of the family. Fierce, devoted, and quietly ferocious in her love for her boys, she would remain their emotional anchor for the rest of her life. Their father Charles was a travelling buyer and dealer — unreliable, often absent. The twins learned early that the only people you could count on were the people in the room.

They were inseparable from birth. Not just twins but mirror twins — Ronnie right-handed, Reggie left-handed. Even their characters split and reflected: Reggie sharp, controlled, charming; Ronnie blunter, harder, more erratic, and from a young age showing signs of the paranoid schizophrenia that would define his adult life.

The Fighters: Boxing and the First Taste of Power

Both twins took up boxing as teenagers, and both were exceptional. Reggie was the more technically gifted — fluid, composed, with a professional's instincts. He won multiple junior championships and was considered a genuine prospect. Ronnie was rawer, more aggressive, but formidable.

Boxing gave them their first understanding of something important: physical presence commands respect. The gym was their first empire — a place where the rules were clean and the outcome was simple. Win or lose. Stand or fall.

By their late teens, they had already begun expanding beyond the ring. A billiard hall on Mile End Road. A protection arrangement with local businesses. Small, at first. But the pattern was in place: find a room, make it yours, make people need you to be there.

National Service: The First Confrontation with Authority

Called up for National Service in 1952, the twins immediately and spectacularly rejected the idea of being told what to do by anyone. They went AWOL repeatedly. Assaulted a police officer. Were arrested, imprisoned, dishonourably discharged. The British Army — which had fought a world war seven years earlier — couldn't manage two boys from Bethnal Green.

The experience cemented something. The Krays didn't recognise external authority. They recognised their own authority — and from that point on, they set about building it.

The Empire: Clubs, Protection and the Firm

Through the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the Kray Firm grew into one of the most powerful criminal organisations in British history.

Their territory was originally the East End — protection rackets, clubs, illegal gambling. But what made the Krays different from other gangsters of the era was their ambition to go legitimate, or at least look it. They wanted West End influence. Celebrity. A table at the best restaurants. And they got it.

Their club portfolio grew:

The Regal, a billiard hall in Mile End — the early base
The Double R Club in Bow — named for both twins, it became a genuine East End social institution
Esmeralda's Barn in Knightsbridge — a high-end gambling club that put the Krays in rooms with aristocrats, politicians, and showbusiness royalty

Esmeralda's Barn was the hinge point. In a Knightsbridge basement, the Krays sat across green baize tables from people who would never have been seen within a mile of Bethnal Green. The East End had come to Mayfair — and Mayfair let them in.

The Celebrity World: Hollywood, Pop Stars and Titled Friends

The Krays understood something that most criminals didn't: celebrity was armour. The more famous people wanted to be photographed with you, the harder it was for the police to touch you. Glamour was a kind of legal protection.

And so the twins cultivated it obsessively.

George Raft — the Hollywood actor famous for playing gangsters in 1930s and '40s films — was brought to London to front their Colony Club in Berkeley Square. The symbolism was deliberate and not subtle: fiction's most iconic screen gangster, employed by the real thing.

Judy Garland — at a personal and professional low point in the early '60s — was a figure Ronnie Kray particularly admired. There are documented meetings and a mutual warmth that speaks to how far the Krays had inserted themselves into the entertainment world.

Diana Dors, Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe, moved in the same circles. So did Victor Spinetti, the Welsh actor beloved by The Beatles (he appeared in A Hard Day's Night and Help!). The twins were photographed at ringside at major boxing bouts alongside figures from film, television, and politics.

Barbara Windsor — later beloved as Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders, then one of the great Carry On actors — was a close friend of Reggie's for decades. She was part of the same East End fabric, and the connection was genuine rather than transactional. Barbara spoke warmly of Reggie throughout her life, even as she was honest about who he was and what he had done.

The political connections were darker. Lord Boothby, a prominent Conservative life peer and television personality, had a long and well-documented personal relationship with Ronnie Kray — one that reached all the way to Downing Street concern about a potential scandal. Tom Driberg, the Labour MP, was another establishment figure with close Kray connections. Both relationships pointed to something deeply uncomfortable: the Krays had friends in the highest rooms in Britain.

The Swinging Sixties were at full pitch around them. The same city that housed the Krays also housed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Carnaby Street, and the explosion of mod culture that would define a decade. The twins were not of that world, but they orbited it — the dark side of the same glamorous moon. They wore the same Savile Row suits. They sat in the same Soho clubs. They understood that image was everything, which is why they spent a great deal of time and money managing theirs.

David Bailey — the photographer who documented the Swinging Sixties like no one else — photographed the Krays. The images are extraordinary: two men in immaculate suits, composed, controlled, utterly comfortable in front of the lens. They look like film stars. They knew it. That was the point.

The Violence: What Lay Beneath the Glamour

Underneath all of it — the clubs, the celebrities, the Savile Row tailoring — the Firm ran on violence. The Krays were genuinely, casually brutal, and the crimes that would end their freedom were murders committed without meaningful concealment.

9 March 1966. Ronnie Kray walked into The Blind Beggar pub on Whitechapel Road and shot George Cornell in the head at point-blank range. Cornell, a member of the rival Richardson gang from South London, had made the mistake of calling Ronnie "a fat poof." The pub was full. Nobody saw anything — not officially. The code of the East End held, for years.

October 1967. Reggie murdered Jack "The Hat" McVitie — a minor villain who had taken money from the Firm for a contract killing and failed to deliver it. McVitie was stabbed multiple times at a flat in Stoke Newington. Again, the room was full. Again, nobody saw anything.

Both killings were open secrets. Scotland Yard knew. The problem was witnesses — nobody in the East End was going to testify against the Krays and expect to survive the experience.

The breakthrough came from Detective Superintendent Leonard "Nipper" Read, who spent years methodically building a case, cultivating witnesses, and working around the wall of silence that the Firm had constructed. On 8 May 1968, Read's team arrested both twins and dismantled the Firm in a single coordinated operation.

The Trial: Old Bailey, 1969

The trial at the Old Bailey was one of the longest and most high-profile criminal proceedings in British legal history. Both twins were convicted of murder. The judge, Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, recommended they serve a minimum of thirty years — an almost unprecedented tariff for the time.

"I am not going to waste words on you," he told them. "In my view, society has earned a rest from your activities."

The twins were led down. The Firm was over.

Prison, Broadmoor, and the Long Years

Ronnie Kray was certified criminally insane in 1979 and transferred to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he would spend the rest of his life. He married twice while there — first Elaine Mildener, then Kate Kray, who became a prominent voice in the ongoing public fascination with the twins. He held court in Broadmoor with remarkable dignity given the circumstances, receiving visitors, maintaining correspondence, and continuing to function as a kind of celebrity — the most famous resident of the most famous high-security psychiatric institution in Britain.

Ronnie Kray died of a heart attack on 17 March 1995, aged 61. His funeral in Bethnal Green drew thousands of mourners and scenes of East End ceremony that no official state occasion could have manufactured.

Reggie remained in conventional prison — Parkhurst, Maidstone, Wayland. He spent decades attempting to secure parole and was repeatedly denied. He wrote books. He painted. He remarried in prison, wedding Roberta Jones in 1997. Eventually, diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, he was released on compassionate grounds on 26 August 2000 — serving his time to the very end.

Reggie Kray died on 1 October 2000, nine weeks after his release. He was 66 years old and had spent thirty-two years in prison.

The Legacy: Myth, Music and the East End

What the Krays left behind is genuinely difficult to categorise.

They were violent criminals responsible for murders, torture, extortion and fear. This is not in dispute and should not be minimised. The communities they "protected" were communities they terrorised.

But they also became — and remain — a central myth of British working-class culture. Symbols of a particular kind of East End defiance: the idea that two boys from a bombed-out terrace in Bethnal Green could walk into rooms that should have been forever closed to them, and not just survive there but dominate.

The films came: The Krays (1990), directed by Peter Medak, with Martin and Gary Kemp — the brothers who fronted Spandau Ballet — cast perfectly as the twins. Legend (2015), in which Tom Hardy played both Ronnie and Reggie simultaneously, delivering one of the most technically extraordinary performances in British cinema. The documentaries, the books, the plays, the podcasts. John Pearson's The Profession of Violence remains one of the great criminal biographies in the language.

Musicians have always been drawn to the Kray story — the darkness, the glamour, the blues of it. Blues and rock especially: a tradition built on shadow figures, on power and tragedy, on the knowledge that the most interesting stories are the ones that end badly. There's a 12-bar logic to the Kray narrative. The rise. The apex. The inevitable fall. The long, slow coda in a cell.