The Kray Twins Myth: Why Britain Still Romanticises Ruthless Gangsters
- Cassy Morgan
- 18 minutes ago
- 7 min read
There’s a peculiar nostalgia that hangs around the names Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Decades after their reign of terror ended, their faces still appear on mugs, posters, and T-shirts. People tell stories of them like they were loveable rogues, the kind who “looked after their own” and kept the East End safe. Yet the truth, once you strip away the glossy veneer of 1960s celebrity culture, is far uglier. The Kray twins were not charming businessmen or misunderstood icons; they were violent, manipulative thugs who ruled through fear, extortion, and brutality.
And perhaps that’s the strangest part of their legacy: how two men who terrorised their own community became folk heroes in the popular imagination.
The Making of the Kray Empire
Born in 1933 in Hoxton, East London, Ronald and Reginald Kray grew up in a tough postwar Britain where poverty and reputation often went hand in hand. Their father, Charles Kray, was a wardrobe dealer (a fancy term for a street trader), while their mother, Violet, doted on her boys to the point of worship. “They could do no wrong,” she once said, and in her eyes, they never did.
After a few scrapes with the law as teenagers, the twins found themselves in the British Army, where their violent tempers quickly landed them in military prison. It was here that they honed their sense of defiance toward authority. When they returned to civilian life in the 1950s, they opened a series of businesses in Bethnal Green and Hackney, including the now infamous Double R Club, a nightclub that became a meeting place for celebrities, politicians, and gangsters alike.
London was rebuilding itself after the war, and the East End, gritty, close-knit, and brimming with opportunists, was ripe for control. The Krays seized it. By the early 1960s, their gang, known as The Firm, had a grip on the city’s underworld through a combination of extortion, intimidation, and outright violence.
The Illusion of Respectability
The Krays were not your typical gangsters skulking in alleyways. They were sharply dressed, charming when they needed to be, and calculated in how they presented themselves. The twins wanted legitimacy, they wanted to be seen.
Reggie, the more composed of the two, handled the business dealings and made overtures toward respectability. Ronnie, on the other hand, was openly psychopathic, paranoid, and impulsive. Together, they played both sides of London’s cultural coin: brutal enforcers by day, social butterflies by night.
Their clubs attracted an extraordinary mix of people: actors, models, aristocrats, even members of Parliament. Barbara Windsor, Frank Sinatra, George Raft, and Diana Dors all moved through their orbit.
The twins’ ability to blend crime with celebrity made them uniquely magnetic. They became a fixture of “Swinging London,” that brief, dazzling era of fashion, fame, and freedom, even as they were running a reign of terror just a few streets away.
To their neighbours, they were “local boys made good.” They donated to charities, attended funerals, and made sure local families had presents at Christmas. People remembered Reggie as polite, almost shy. But behind the façade was a network of fear that reached from Soho’s nightclubs to the corridors of political power.
The Business of Fear
The Kray twins’ real business wasn’t glamour; it was protection. Shopkeepers, pub owners, and small-time traders across East London were routinely strong-armed into paying for the twins’ “protection,” which was really just a tax to avoid having their windows smashed or their families threatened.
“They came in all charm and smiles,” recalled one former business owner in Bethnal Green. “Then came the look, that cold look. You knew what they were asking without them saying it.”
Failure to pay could mean a beating, vandalism, or worse. One man who refused to cooperate was reportedly kidnapped, beaten unconscious, and dumped in a canal. Others simply disappeared.
The twins were also deeply involved in armed robbery, arson, and racketeering. Ronnie’s erratic temper made him particularly dangerous. In 1966, during a party at the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, he shot and killed George Cornell, a member of a rival gang, in front of several witnesses. Cornell’s supposed crime? He had called Ronnie a “fat poof” a few days earlier.
A year later, Reggie murdered Jack “The Hat” McVitie, a small-time criminal who had failed to carry out a contract killing. During a party, Reggie stabbed him repeatedly in the face and neck before ordering his body to be disposed of. The killing shocked even members of their own gang, many of whom began quietly cooperating with police not long after.
The Fall of the Krays
For years, fear and silence kept the Krays untouchable. But by the late 1960s, their world began to crack. Scotland Yard’s Detective Superintendent Leonard “Nipper” Read had been investigating them for years, but the problem was that nobody dared talk. It wasn’t until the twins’ increasing unpredictability began to alienate their associates that witnesses started coming forward.
In May 1968, the Krays and several members of The Firm were arrested. The trial that followed was one of the most sensational in British criminal history. Witnesses testified to a litany of assaults, threats, and murders.
When the verdict came in March 1969, both Ronnie and Reggie were sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that they serve a minimum of 30 years. It was, effectively, a death sentence for men who had once strutted down London’s streets as kings.
Ronnie was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent much of his life in Broadmoor Hospital, a secure psychiatric institution. Reggie served his time in various prisons, occasionally granting interviews and insisting that he had been “misunderstood.” He was released on compassionate grounds in 2000, suffering from cancer, and died a few months later.
Why People Still Love the Krays
So why, after all that brutality, do so many still speak of the Kray twins with a kind of reverence?
Part of it lies in the myth-making that began while they were still alive. The twins understood the power of image. They posed for photos in sharp suits, gave interviews that hinted at code and honour, and allowed their mother’s affection to soften their public image. To working-class Londoners of the 1960s, who felt alienated by the political elite, the Krays represented power from the streets, men who made it big without ever leaving the East End.
There’s also the romantic notion of the “honourable villain,” the idea that they only hurt those who “deserved it.” It’s the same logic that fuels fascination with figures like Al Capone or the Peaky Blinders. Yet the people who truly knew the Krays, the ones who paid their protection money, who lived in fear, who saw what happened when someone crossed them, tell a very different story.
John Pearson, author of The Profession of Violence, who knew the twins personally while writing their biography, summed it up neatly:
“They weren’t Robin Hoods. They were thugs. They built their legend carefully, but behind it was sheer terror.”
It’s also worth noting how the media played its part. Films like The Krays (1990) and Legend (2015), starring Tom Hardy as both twins, depict them as complex antiheroes, brutal, yes, but human, even sympathetic. It’s a portrayal that continues to blur the lines between fact and fantasy.
The Reality Beneath the Legend
The Krays’ story tells us more about British culture than about the twins themselves. It reveals our fascination with rebellion, charisma, and the thin line between fame and infamy. Their blend of charm and cruelty made them uniquely suited to the 1960s, a decade that worshipped style as much as substance.
But the truth is that behind every newspaper headline and glossy photograph, there were countless victims. There were families who lost sons to gang violence, small business owners who handed over their livelihoods out of fear, and communities that suffered under their shadow.
As one elderly shopkeeper from Bethnal Green once put it;
“They were not legends. They were the reason we couldn’t sleep with the windows open.”
A Twisted Legacy
Today, the Krays are more brand than memory. Their names appear in documentaries, books, T-shirts, even pub tours. Some visitors to London’s East End still pose outside the Blind Beggar, pint in hand, as if it were a historical landmark rather than the site of a cold-blooded murder.
And yet, the fascination persists, because the Krays, for all their evil, understood the theatre of crime. They dressed the part, played the press, and made themselves characters in a story they partly wrote. In a way, they turned their own crimes into legend.
But it’s worth remembering that legends often come at someone else’s expense. Behind every charming smile in those black-and-white photos lies the truth of who the Kray twins really were: ruthless men who built their empire not on loyalty or respect, but on the backs of terrified Londoners who had no choice but to pay up and keep quiet.
The Final Word
When we talk about the Krays today, whether in documentaries, pub chatter, or glossy biopics, we often forget that their story isn’t one of glamour. It’s a story about fear. The East End didn’t need the Krays to “keep order.” It needed protection from them.
As historian Brian McDonald wrote in Krayology:
“They were not men of principle or honour. They were predators in suits.”
So, while it’s tempting to look back through rose-tinted glasses and imagine them as part of some romantic East End folklore, the truth remains: the Kray twins weren’t heroes of London. They were its tormentors.
And their legacy, as twisted and enduring as it is, should remind us that charisma can be as dangerous as cruelty when it’s used to disguise the truth.
Sources
Pearson, John. The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins. London: HarperCollins, 1972.
McDonald, Brian. Krayology: The Complete History of the Kray Twins. Milo Books, 2015.
Booth, Martin. The Kray Files: The Untold Story of Britain's Most Infamous Gangsters. Hodder & Stoughton, 1999.
"The Kray Twins: Notorious Gangsters Who Ruled London." BBC Archives. https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive
Metropolitan Police Historical Collection, “The Fall of the Krays,” National Archives, Kew. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
The Guardian, “The Myth of the Krays: Why We Still Romanticise Violent Men,” 2015. https://www.theguardian.com
HistoryExtra, “How the Kray Twins Terrorised 1960s London,” 2020. https://www.historyextra.com
