FOR SALE: THE ASTONISHING SECRETS OF RONNIE KRAY’S GILDED CAGE DOING BIRD DRAWING ON PRISON LIFE
It’s the most amazing glimpse through the keyhole ever – gangster’s
GOLD designer watches, Armani ties, bespoke suits, a clock that looks like a canary in a cage – and the bayonet he used on his victims.
Everything you see here belonged to Ronnie Kray, my husband. Now these items, and many more besides, are going up for auction. They started coming into my possession soon after I met Ron in 1988.
I married him a year later and continued to receive items until his death in March 1995, even though we’d divorced a year earlier.
I’ll always remember Ron’s friend and landlord Charlie Clarke dropping off an enormous tea chest for me. It was full of Ron’s stuff from before he went inside in 1968 – everything from dinner suits and cufflinks to books and Maria Callas records. Charlie was known as The Catman. He was killed in Dover a month or so later. I was never told why – and never asked.
I used to have other gangsters come to my door, with a box or a case, and say, ‘The Colonel’ – that is what his gang knew him as – ‘said you had to have this.’. I guess it was Ron’s way of moving in with me. He never expected to leave Broadmoor – in fact, he didn’t want to because he knew it kept him stable – but he still fantasised about a quiet life in the country with me and all his things.
Some people will say I’m cashing in on the notoriety of a violent criminal but I don’t see it that way. Like it or not, the Krays are not just part of criminal history, but London’s history and Britain’s history too.
And with this in mind I couldn’t see the point in leaving Ron’s belongings gathering dust in my garage, which is why I decided to put them up for auction and let others preserve them for posterity.
As long as the bayonet stays in its case I’ll be quite happy.
The auction will take place at JP Humberts in Towcester, Northamptonshire, on June 17.
RON told me he had this cage, left, by his bed. If you look closely you’ll see it’s a clock, but what Ron loved about it was the canary.
He’d had a real canary in his cell in Parkhurst, where he was before Broadmoor, and he doted on it. He was able to behave like Harry Grout in Porridge and have in his cell all sorts of things other prisoners would never be allowed.
And he adored art – he had been friendly with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud – but Ron tended to paint and draw only what he could see in his cell or his fantasy of life outside prison. Like this watercolour of a house in the country, with a long lane down to a river. He did this picture over and over, always with a single tree and sometimes with he and I in the garden.
He had a crucifix hanging on the wall, and he painted that, too. I got the crucifix he based this painting on. I remember him saying to me: ‘Kate, get me a new cross with that little fella on it.’