Kate Beal Blyth

The stories you hear about Violet is how she would walk around with her pram, proud as punch of having these beautiful boys.

And the fact that people would stop her in the street, it makes you special, doesn't it?

It gives you a sort of significance.

Home life in the East End in the 40s and early 50s was brutal.

They were being bombed by the Germans.

They were having to rebuild once the war was over.

There was poverty, extreme poverty, and they were fighting for survival in so many ways.

There's a whole generation of men of that era who had to work out how to survive and how to live after such a devastating consequence of the war.

So not only did they not have brilliant father figures, the twins themselves clearly didn't have a great father figure, but a lot of the men of their father's generation were either dead in the war or having to survive somehow in the East End.

So their childhood was uncertain and unpredictable.

They took up boxing and that was a very good way for them to channel their aggression and that was a very, very popular and still is a really good way of getting kids off the streets and formalizing their need to fight or their need to be angry and channeling it into a positive sporting action and they were very good at that.

After the war, all people of a certain age was conscripted into service of some sort.

And the Krays were conscripted into the army and they did run away.

And it resulted in them being put in the Tower of London.

And there is the rumour, I'm not convinced it's 100% fact, that they were the last prisoners of the Tower of London.

It is the story that we all like to tell.

But actually, I'm not convinced they really were.

I think they were in the last set of prisoners of the Tower of London.

But it does show that they spent their time in prison from an early age.

A protection racket is simply the understanding that nothing will happen to your business if you pay a certain fee.