Maureen Flanagan - One of the Family: 40 Years with the Krays

Contents

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781473518568

www.randomhouse.co.uk

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Century
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA

Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright Maureen Flanagan and Jacky Hyams.

Maureen Flanagan and Jacky Hyams have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

www.randomhouse.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781780894027

For my four beautiful granddaughters,
Scarlett, Madison, Jade and Sapphire.

Maureen Flanagan, best known by her professional name, Flanagan, is a former actress and model.

With a modelling career that continued well into her fifties, Maureen has since become established as a celebrity fund raiser and after-dinner speaker. She is an expert on Londons East End and the history of the Kray twins, whose family she knew intimately over many decades.

She lives in Hackney, in the heart of the East End, and has one son, JJ, and four grandchildren.

They were ruthless East End killers who loved their mum.

In the early Sixties, Maureen Flanagan, started visiting Violet Kray at her family home in Vallance Road.

She became a close observer of the real world of the Kray family and their complex relationships with each other, this is the story of her life with Britains most notorious and dangerous family.

I pushed the door open and straight away it hit me: the all too familiar pong of the cramped local hairdressing salon. Mostly, you got the awful lingering, acrid whiff of the ammonia wed use for the cheap perm lotion for the older ladies, mingled with the sickly smell coming from the clouds of sticky hair lacquer. Isnt it funny how quickly you forget all the little things you hated about your job once youve moved on to something better?

Id forgotten how noisy it all was, too: Carols salon on the Bethnal Green Road was really far too small. Frequently, shed run out of chairs for her clients as they waited for their weekly hair-wash: just two tiny sinks, and five big chairs for the lucky customers who were actually being tended to by Carols two permanently busy young stylists. It was a room full of women nattering, gossiping, swapping tales of Saturday night and mens treachery as they waited and it was always a long wait to be done.

A few of Carols clients were halfway through the tortured process: trapped fast under the big ugly hood-dryers at the back of the salon, merciless humming contraptions under which the women sat for ages, flicking through magazines, impatiently clicking the heating controls if the machine got too hot, waiting for the moment when their heavily rollered, silver-gripped and hairnetted confections would finally be pronounced dry and ready to be teased or backcombed into stiff barnets. Or, for the younger ones, beehives like busby hats.

Right on cue, the junior, a bored, pimply fifteen-year-old whose mum had pushed Carol to take him and get him off the street, was listlessly pretending to sweep the salon floor that was strewn with all the hacked-off bits of hair, making a complete mess of it into the bargain. It was all exactly as Id known it, six days a week every week since Id started work in a salon as a Saturday shampoo girl, aged fourteen.

Not too long ago, this had been my world: Id been a lively young hairdresser whod finished a three-year apprenticeship in another busy little salon in North London, on the Holloway Road. Id enjoyed some things about hairdressing, I admit. I worshipped fashion, clothes, make-up and looking good I was proud of my long mane of home-bleached platinum hair and I took pleasure in making other women look their best. I had no problem with chatting to people all day long. It was fascinating how women would tell me, a comparative stranger, all sorts of personal stuff about themselves. One or two questions and away theyd go. Sometimes youd wish theyd shut up. But, of course, your job was to smile and listen to most of it while you worked away, curling the hair round the rollers, positioning it with pins, teasing the result to the heavens once it was dry.

The trouble was, the money in the Holloway Road salon wasnt anything to get too excited about for an engaged girl who was already saving hard to get married. Even with the occasional generous tip. So when I was nineteen I went up West where me and my sister Iris sold gorgeous expensive Italian shoes made of the finest leather and softest suede in Pinet, right in the heart of swanky Bond Street, earning wages plus commission for whatever we sold. No more smelly, noisy, crowded salons with impatient women shouting Im dry!, just plush carpeting and the refined elegant moneyed atmosphere of one of Londons most exclusive shopping streets.

The customers too were much more intriguing. Instead of chatting to ordinary girls like us whod grown up in a bombed-out, grey, semi-wrecked part of London, Iris and me got to meet seriously famous people. Shirley Bassey was a regular every week: wed dye her shoes to match the fabulous slinky sequinned outfits she wore each night at the London Palladium, just up the road. American singer Lena Horne came in one day. Smooth, sleek movie actors like Laurence Harvey and James Mason drifted through the doors in beautiful cashmere overcoats en route to lunch with their agents at the Ritz Hotel. The grim post-war stretch of the endless Holloway Road versus magical Bond Street: no contest whatsoever. Especially if glamour and excitement were your hearts desire.

On my twentieth birthday I married Patrick Flanagan, my teenage sweetheart, and was swiftly installed in our little one-bedroom rented flat in Camden. I still did a bit of private hairdressing work, on the side, as it were, usually on Thursdays, my day off from Pinet. Through salon work Id discovered that some of the older women liked the idea of a girl doing their hair in the comfort of their own home, without all the hanging around and without the nattering, nosy crowd.

This was the summer of 1961 and the once-weekly shampoo-and-set for Saturday night was becoming a must-have for millions of women, even in the less affluent areas of the country. The salon hairdos were rigid and stiff with the nasty, glue-like lacquer that kept it all in place: girls regularly went to bed in scarves that protected the hairdos or even with the newer red jumbo rollers pinned into place. But the end result was neat, groomed. They topped off the straight tight skirts or sheath dresses that were worn well below the knee (the miniskirt had yet to arrive) and the pointed-toe stilettos from Dolcis. There werent as many hair products as we have now. Some of the chemicals we used to mix up would have had the health-and-safety people shrieking with horror today. But some things never ever change and the desire to look good at the dance hall or in the pub was just as much a feminine preoccupation then as it is today.