Karen Kilgariff
speaker
3,962 appearances
39 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 8 Jun
Karen Kilgariff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark · 467 - Nipper & The Hat · 13 Feb 2025
podcast
Even in the most desperate times, as London is bombed and the family is evacuated and money runs low, she somehow shields her children from the serious difficulties of everyday life. During World War II.
Reggie will later say, quote, Hmm. And the Cray twins are right little bastards from the start. So this is a quote from the Cray's walking tour information page on the website London Walks, which is walks.com. They nailed that one. They must have got it early. Quote,
Quote within quote, if you came from the East End and you wanted out, there were only three things you could become a boxer, a car thief or maybe a musician. Wow. End quote. To give you a little perspective of what it was like there. Luckily, Reggie and Ronnie got into a lot of fights with neighborhood kids. And so as expected, as they enter their late teens, they also get into boxing.
Both their father and grandfather were boxers. And their older brother, Charles Jr., is the one who actually teaches them the ropes. So he is, too. For a while, boxing seems like a promising career path for them both, especially Reggie, who was said to be an exceptional athlete and very meticulous and thoughtful in the ring. Ronnie, on the other hand, is more brutal and unpredictable.
And these two boxing styles actually end up mirroring how people will describe the Kray's personalities, Reggie being the brains, Ronnie being the muscle. Yeah. So that said, both brothers are talented enough to participate in local youth championships, and their fights even get some press attention in the London newspapers. They actually even fight each other a couple times.
Ooh, that's kind of a... Twins boxing each other.
Yeah, like a... Come fucking see these guys who look exactly the same. Yeah, fun little human interest moment. Beat the shit out of each other. They do it anyway at home. Then in 1952, the Krays get drafted into the army, but things spiral almost immediately. When they show up at the reporting station, they refuse to cooperate, punch a corporal, and end up fleeing. You can't do that.
No, you can't. No. So just as her father had done throughout their childhoods, the brothers spend much of the next two years AWOL from the army or getting arrested and serving short stints in military prisons. As they do, they meet countless other men with criminal records, and these relationships spark the twins' interest in criminal activities and the promise of easy money.
In 1954, when both boys are 21, they finally serve all their time and are dishonorably discharged from the military. At this point, Ronnie and Reggie's lives have completely changed. Their criminal records effectively bar them from the legitimate boxing world, so their one career path is now entirely cut off. And it's around this time Ronnie starts to struggle with his mental health.
This is a big part of the movie, the legend movie, which is that these weren't just like kind of bloodthirsty, you know, sociopathic gangsters. Reggie was kind of a businessman. He was very strategic about what they were trying to do. Ronnie was schizophrenic. He was a paranoid schizophrenic. Oh, wow. He didn't know it, and he was dealing with the kind of effects of that.
It was basically, at that age, the onset of paranoid schizophrenia.
He will later remember it by saying, quote, Wow. Yeah. Scary. Which also must be hard if you are starting to be a bit of a criminal or thinking of it. Right.
Yeah. And it's going to kind of escalate things where it's. Yeah. So that's the kind of context playing out in the background. As the twins head back to Bethnal Green and soon pursue some legitimate business, there's an East End billiard hall called the Regal, and it's just kind of past its prime.
The paint is chipping, the interiors are dingy, and it basically has a seedy enough reputation that, like insurers, won't insure it. But the Krays see it as a perfect investment. So they stop by one day and then the next. And then suddenly there's a strange uptick in violent activity at the Regal. Unruly guests start infiltrating the place.
They destroy the furniture, smash glasses, threaten to burn the building to the ground. And although the Krays deny having anything to do with this sudden influx of bad business at the Regal... It all suspiciously works in their favor. They offer the billiard hall's beleaguered owner five pounds a week to take over the business, which would be around... Five pounds in 1940.
Now it's 50... Nothing fucking matters.
Because you also made the switch from dollars to pounds. So great job. That's why. Thank you. That's why it was so hard. According to writer John Pearson, quote, the day their offer was accepted, the violence stopped as mysteriously as it had started. Can you imagine that? Yeah. So the Krays give the Regal a long overdue makeover. They repaint and redecorate it.
And soon it starts drawing a new crowd of patrons for the first time in years. Unfortunately, though, this includes members of a local gang who waltz into the Regal and demand money from the Krays in exchange for protection.
Not to these boys. But they weren't known. So it was kind of like, oh, you think you're going to have a billiard tall? Okay. This is called a protection racket, and in Reggie's own words, this is how protection rackets work.
And he would know. A gang would offer to protect clubs, pubs, shops, and the like from other gangs in return for a fee. Which is, when I was reading this part, I was just like, oh, this is... The mob. And Peaky Blinders later days. It's just like all the same thing over and over. Peaky Blinders later days. Yeah. Oh, classic.
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