boxing terms, so places there were quite sought after. I think you have to go through a three-week trial period before you can join now, but in those days the fact that I’d won a few fights in Enfield by that time probably got me in.
The Repton moved premises not long after I stopped boxing. It’s now in the Gary Barker gymnasium in the old bathhouse on Cheshire Street, just east of Brick Lane. Darren Barker was a world champion whose brother, also a great fighter, was sadly killed in a car crash, so they named the new gym after him. The old place I used to go to was in Pollards Row, in the basement under the Bethnal Green Working Men’s club. It’s just a few hundred yards away. Go up Vallance Road – past the new house built on top of where the Kray brothers used to live at number 178 – do a right, then a left and you’re there. Someone told me there’s a vandalised Banksy on the wall outside now.
The first time I went to the Repton, my dad drove me. But given that I was thirteen or fourteen by then, I was soon old enough to get the train down to Bethnal Green from Lower Edmonton on my own. I used to love that journey – it really felt like going back home, and sometimes I’d be counting the hours till the time came to go. Even though it was a bit of a walk down Bethnal Green Road to the gym, through what was a rougher area in the early seventies than itis now, I never felt nervous or ill at ease about it. I didn’t feel like I was entering potentially hostile territory, I felt like I belonged there.
As a young kid, the thing about Bethnal Green was its synonymousness – is there even such a word as ‘synonymousness’? I’m writing a book now, so I feel I’ve got to stretch myself – with the Kray twins. Detective Superintendent Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read had finally got Ron and Reg banged up for the murders of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie in 1969, so even though they weren’t physically around any more, the place still kind of smelt of ’em.
Whether this was right or wrong – after all, a lot of people did get hurt – they still had that aura about them of being Robin Hood characters. Hard evidence of the Krays robbing the rich and giving to the poor might have been hard to come by, but the mythology of ‘nothing bad ever happened when the twins were about’ (except the stuff they did, obviously) was still very powerful.
Now I’m a bit older and wiser, the idea that nobody ever broke into anybody’s house in Bethnal Green in the sixties because Reg and Ronnie would sort them out is not one I really buy into any longer. But when you’re young it’s easy to get caught up in the romance of that way of thinking, and as far as people in general were concerned, I suppose another side of it was that when there’s a bit of a reign of terror going on, it’s only human nature to try to put a positive spin on it. I bet there are parts of Belfast where they’ll still tell you you could leave all your windows open when the IRA were running things, however ridiculous the evidence of innocent people kidnapped and murdered might make that suggestion look.
One of the mistakes people often make when they talk about ‘glamorising violence’ is to think that this glamour is something that’s only projected from the outside. It’s on the inside as well. Just as it’d be crazy to assume policemen never watched The Bill or The Wire (which I was going to be in originally, but I couldn’t face the idea of living in Baltimore for six months of the year), so it is easy to under-estimate how much gangsters think about their public image. The traffic between myth and reality is not one way – life copies films almost as much as films copy life. And being a successful gangster is just as much of a performance as making it big in films is.
When you think about the way their interests overlap, it’s no wonder there’s such a big crossover between showbiz stars and the criminal underworld.
The Repton moved premises not long after I stopped boxing. It’s now in the Gary Barker gymnasium in the old bathhouse on Cheshire Street, just east of Brick Lane. Darren Barker was a world champion whose brother, also a great fighter, was sadly killed in a car crash, so they named the new gym after him. The old place I used to go to was in Pollards Row, in the basement under the Bethnal Green Working Men’s club. It’s just a few hundred yards away. Go up Vallance Road – past the new house built on top of where the Kray brothers used to live at number 178 – do a right, then a left and you’re there. Someone told me there’s a vandalised Banksy on the wall outside now.
The first time I went to the Repton, my dad drove me. But given that I was thirteen or fourteen by then, I was soon old enough to get the train down to Bethnal Green from Lower Edmonton on my own. I used to love that journey – it really felt like going back home, and sometimes I’d be counting the hours till the time came to go. Even though it was a bit of a walk down Bethnal Green Road to the gym, through what was a rougher area in the early seventies than itis now, I never felt nervous or ill at ease about it. I didn’t feel like I was entering potentially hostile territory, I felt like I belonged there.
As a young kid, the thing about Bethnal Green was its synonymousness – is there even such a word as ‘synonymousness’? I’m writing a book now, so I feel I’ve got to stretch myself – with the Kray twins. Detective Superintendent Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read had finally got Ron and Reg banged up for the murders of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie in 1969, so even though they weren’t physically around any more, the place still kind of smelt of ’em.
Whether this was right or wrong – after all, a lot of people did get hurt – they still had that aura about them of being Robin Hood characters. Hard evidence of the Krays robbing the rich and giving to the poor might have been hard to come by, but the mythology of ‘nothing bad ever happened when the twins were about’ (except the stuff they did, obviously) was still very powerful.
Now I’m a bit older and wiser, the idea that nobody ever broke into anybody’s house in Bethnal Green in the sixties because Reg and Ronnie would sort them out is not one I really buy into any longer. But when you’re young it’s easy to get caught up in the romance of that way of thinking, and as far as people in general were concerned, I suppose another side of it was that when there’s a bit of a reign of terror going on, it’s only human nature to try to put a positive spin on it. I bet there are parts of Belfast where they’ll still tell you you could leave all your windows open when the IRA were running things, however ridiculous the evidence of innocent people kidnapped and murdered might make that suggestion look.
One of the mistakes people often make when they talk about ‘glamorising violence’ is to think that this glamour is something that’s only projected from the outside. It’s on the inside as well. Just as it’d be crazy to assume policemen never watched The Bill or The Wire (which I was going to be in originally, but I couldn’t face the idea of living in Baltimore for six months of the year), so it is easy to under-estimate how much gangsters think about their public image. The traffic between myth and reality is not one way – life copies films almost as much as films copy life. And being a successful gangster is just as much of a performance as making it big in films is.
When you think about the way their interests overlap, it’s no wonder there’s such a big crossover between showbiz stars and the criminal underworld.
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