Krayology by John Bennett

Author:John Bennett [Bennett, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mango Books
Published: 2016-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

“LOOK WHO’S HERE...”

Author’s note: To avoid repetitive citations, all statements, timings, reports, names and other associated information in this chapter are drawn from MEPO 2/11406, MEPO 2/10922, MEPO 2/10923 (the Metropolitan Police files referring to the Cornell murder -1966 and 1968 - held at the National Archives) unless otherwise stated. Only specific quotes from these reports are individually referenced.

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The murder of George Cornell by Ronnie Kray, in the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel on the night of 9 March 1966 has surely gone down in history as one of the most notorious British gangland executions of all time. Every book on the subject of the Krays has to mention it; many books on British crime give it page space; and people still visit the pub today as a minor East End tourist attraction. Bar staff are often asked about an alleged bullet hole that is supposedly concealed by a strategically placed picture, and it is often the first port of call for East End gangster tours.[487] But what is interesting to note is that there have been few first-hand accounts of what actually happened inside the pub that evening. Apart from newspaper reports from the Kray trial and fleeting accounts by Ronnie Kray and the barmaid who witnessed the shooting, little is known about how a quiet Wednesday night turned into a night of very public murder.

Reggie’s later killing of Jack McVitie and the fate of Frank ‘The Mad Axeman’ Mitchell have been well covered in the media: in these two cases, there were multiple witnesses, mainly from the Firm, who publicly gave their accounts in memoirs, interviews and in court; and, as we shall see, it is not too difficult to assemble a rounded portrayal of those events.[488] But the real story of the Cornell murder – from the moment the Blind Beggar opened that evening, through the untimely death of Cornell in West London later that night, to the subsequent police investigation – has sat hidden in the files of the Metropolitan Police since 1966. The statements of the people present at the time of the shooting, the medical teams and police officers who responded, Cornell’s friends and family… all of these reveal, harrowingly, what really happens when somebody is murdered by gunshot, and the repercussions which follow. Those police files on the Cornell shooting, lodged between 1966 and 1968 and only opened to the public by the National Archives at the beginning of this century, have never really been mined effectively: Craig Cabell[489] has used their content and, even so, his account of the death of Cornell is incomplete. Cabell made a number of deductions based on the information available, and drew conclusions with which, with due respect, this author cannot agree. James Morton, in a book specifically written for the National Archives,[490] could only give them so much space, likewise Martin Fido.[491] By looking more closely at these files and contemporary newspaper reports, and by drawing upon the memoirs of the key players (Ronnie Kray, the

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