Our Strange Love for Contemporary Criminals - The Observer
Sun 8 October 2000
He kept his mouth shut, loved his mum and never swore at ladies. What a gent was killer Reggie Kray
On Wednesday, Reggie Kray's corpse, in a glass-sided carriage led by six black horses, will process through the East End of London to Chingford cemetery. Chances are the streets will be lined with crowds watching his cortege pass by, just as they would for a politician or a football player. For Kray, who died on Sunday last week, as much as he was a hardened criminal, was also a celebrity.
We English have always had a soft spot for a criminal, if we can convince ourselves he's got a heart of gold: the lovable rogue, the dashing tearaway, the kid who never stood a chance. The Krays' ideology can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when highwaymen, self-proclaimed Gentlemen of the Road, sat atop the criminal hierarchy. Examples of the qualities they believed set them apart from the pick-pocketing rabble below included political opinions (generally in the modern taxi-driver mould), some sense of altruism, an eye for the ladies, a sharp suit, and personal courage.
During the Civil War, one of Charles I's most loyal adherents was the highwayman Captain Hind, who fought against Cromwell at Worcester. Regicides were his preferred prey. 'I have now as much power over you as lately you had over the king, and I should do God and my country good service, if I made the same use of it,' he told one victim, 'but live, villain, to suffer the pangs of thine own conscience, till justice shall lay her iron hand upon thee...Nevertheless, though I spare thy life as a regicide, be assured, that unless thou deliverest up thy money immediately, thou shalt die for thy obstinacy.' He was hanged in 1652 for high treason, rather than highway robbery, proclaiming that he regretted nothing but not seeing the Stuarts restored to the throne.
The housebreaker Jack Sheppard's last crime was robbing a pawn shop to steal a black silk suit, a silver sword, some diamond rings, a snuff-box, a watch, and a wig. Arrayed thus as a 'perfect gentleman' he went forth into the city with two girlfriends (one, Kate Keys, he described as a 'sober young woman of my acquaintance'; later she testified in court 'with a vulgar double entendre, that she was Jack Sheppard's washerwoman, and had many a time washed his three pieces betwixt her legs'), drinking and carousing. They drove in a carriage underneath the very gate of Newgate Prison, out of which Jack had broken three days earlier. Hours later, he was arrested, roaring drunk, in the company of a third young woman called Moll Frisky. On this, his last night of freedom, Sheppard had made a point of calling on his mother and drinking three quarterns of brandy with her.
Despite the atrocities they committed, the Krays prided themselves on never swearing in front of a lady. Honour among thieves: it is an esoteric code, which extends across centuries and continents, and holds that a good felon keeps his mouth shut, wears shades, and remembers his mother. By this standard, Reggie Kray was a hero indeed; and criminals who transgress these unwritten rules, like rapists and child abusers, are viciously excluded from the brotherhood.
Sheppard always emphasised his criminal integrity, insisting during his trial that he had never informed on an accomplice. Like his peers, Sheppard came from a poor background - destitution was, after all, what drove men like him to crime - but despite their common birth, he and his companions prided themselves on assuming noble attributes. 'Honour, the virtue of the brave...made him scorn to be a slave,' went a ballad celebrating Hind. And when poverty made the vast majority of the population slaves in all but name, who can blame the masses for admiring the few who dared risk all for a snatched moment of glory?
In modern times a young felon can look forward to a long career, but during the eighteenth century young men embarking on a life of crime knew they would swing sooner rather than later. Bravery in the face of death was therefore the ultimate test of an outlaw's mettle. Dick Turpin stamped his legs to disguise their involuntary shaking as the noose was slipped around his neck; he leapt off the platform rather than wait to be dropped. This defiant courage was what made the mob idolise their heroes; touching the dead body of a hanged bandit was the ghoulish eighteenth-century equivalent of the medieval belief in the royal touch as a cure-all, with a touch of the modern penchant for horror films thrown in.
But the truth behind these stories reveals that few hero-criminals merited this type of adulation, just as no amount of door-opening can disguise the fact that Reggie Kray was a killer. The historical Dick Turpin is a far cry from his legendary persona; that was a nineteenth-century creation of the Newgate novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, a contemporary of Dickens's, who made up the famous overnight ride to York on faithful Black Bess. There is no evidence Black Bess even existed. The real Turpin was a cattle thief who did a brief stint as a murderous highwayman, before being hanged for stealing sheep.
Criminals like the Krays have pulled off the ultimate con by convincing the British public that if they kiss babies and look after their mothers they aren't such baddies after all; but then, for centuries we have shown ourselves amenable to the allure they encapsulate. We allow ourselves to be seduced by their dangerous charm because we enjoy admiring their defiance and courage from our armchairs, far from the threat of death or jail. Were it not for Reggie and his ilk, we would not know how safe we are by our firesides; we can admire their dash because it only reminds us how lucky we really are, and salaciously recount their exploits because we know we'd never dare emulate them.
The Observer 8 October 2000