The Profession of Violence by John Pearson

the truth – not just because of what he could get up to, but because of what he knew. He had a funny way of looking at you and yet not looking at you that always made you think he was reading your mind.’
    Sometimes he spent the evening brooding in his chair and left early. At other times he decided he was drinking and picked a dozen hangers-on to go with him. ‘It was always a bit of an event going to a pub with the twins. They used to like a crowded pub with a good singer and a lot of talent and perhaps the chance of trouble. When you went in with them people would stop talking and make room for you at the bar. We used to like that.’ And sometimes at the billiard hall Ronnie would make his favourite announcement – ‘Well, we’ve decided on a little row with so-and-so tonight. Who’s for and who’s against?’
    It would be like a raiding-party with everyone bringing out his favourite weapon and piling into ancient battered cars outside the hall. The twins were always in the lead and would usually keep the destination secret. ‘It was really all a bit of a lark. Sort of an outing. But it was a funny thing – wherever we went, to a pub or dance hall or another club, there was always trouble.’ As for the fighting, friends of the twins insist that this was always deadly serious. ‘They were a wicked couple really. They were frightened of no one and loved every minute of it. Something gotinto them once a fight started, and you could see they enjoyed their bit of violence, really enjoyed it. If I was cutting somebody or putting the boot in, I’d usually hold back a bit – never the twins though. If you watched their faces while they did it, you’d see real hate. They always went the limit.’
    At this stage there was no clear purpose to those nightly gatherings. But gradually, behind the fooling, boozing and aimless brawling of this one small cockney gang, the outlines of something bigger started to appear. The gang began to change.
    The key to this change lay in the twins and their power as fighters. They were not particularly big men. Ronnie was 5 feet 10 inches, Reggie half an inch shorter. Reggie tipped the scales at eleven stone, Ronnie at twelve and a half. Many of their fights were with much larger men, yet in the several hundred bar brawls, woundings, shootings, and punch-ups they were involved in, they never once appear to have come off second best. Neither was shot or cut or damaged seriously.
    Both were abnormally tough; their teenage boxing training had left them strong in the arms and shoulders, and taught them both the precise use of their fists. They needed little sleep. Ronnie is reputed to have drunk fifty-five brown ales in one night at the billiard hall and carried on next day as usual. From the start they made it clear that they intended to become professionals of violence. They had their fantasies, their jokes, but behind the fooling there was one thing they took seriously – fighting. Here they knew their job, took no unnecessary risks and carefully refused to hamper themselves by effete conventions of fair play. These were for amateurs. If it was necessary to hit someone, they hit first and hardest and put the boot in afterwards. If they were cutting someone’s face or backside, they used a knife or sharpened cutlass. ‘Razors,’ Ronnie used to say, ‘are old-fashioned and strike us as babyish. You can’t put any real power behind a razor.’
    Reggie developed what was known as his ‘cigarette punch’. With his right hand he would offer somebody a cigarette and as the man opened his mouth to take it, would hit him on the side of the jaw with a swift left. It required timing and you needed to know the exact spot to hit. Reggie practised it for hours on a punch-bag and the cigarette punch broke many jaws. An open jaw will fracture easily.
    Similarly, the ‘little wars’ that everyone enjoyed