Kray Twins associate Micky Fawcett explains how ‘The Corner’ con worked

(Left-Right) Reggie Kray, Micky Fawcett, singer Lita Roza, Ronnie Kray, actress Barbara Windsor & actor Ronald Fraser

So I was talking to Micky Fawcett. In the 1960s, he used to work with London gangsters the Kray Twins – Ronnie & Reggie.

Micky wrote what I think is the definitive book about what life with the Krays was like – Krayzy Days – but it is wider than that, putting it in the context of 1950s Soho, the Unione Corse and much more. All first-hand tales.

“You used to run long firms,” I said to Micky.

“Long firms came later,” he told me. “It was The Corner before that.”

“The Corner?” I asked.

“You target fences,” Micky told me. “The ideal ones are fences who are too greedy. You get an intro from someone who they preferably can’t contact. You say: Listen, you know So-and-So, don’t you? – Just a name you know he knows – We was going to do a bit of business with him and he said he’ll buy our stuff from us and sell it on to you. But we can cut him out, if you want to. We don’t need to give him his whack.

“So the guy says: OK, then.

“But don’t mention it to him, we say. And we tell him what we’ve supposedly got – in them days, it would be cigarettes or drink. We tell him how much we’ve got and what we want for it. The basics. Like in any deal.

“You might say: We got ‘em stored in a yard in a warehouse. You can pick ‘em up when you want. When do you want ‘em? How you gonna pay us? You’ll bring the money with you, will you, when you take ‘em? It’s the only way to do it.

“So you get that sorted out. You arrange to meet in a caff in Commercial Road opposite the Rotherhithe Tunnel and say: Listen, you’d better bring a mate with you, because sometimes you have to push another motor out of the way. Or whatever. Some excuse. Bring one of your mates with you. You might need him and we don’t wanna really be involved once we give you the keys. Alright?

“Then you meet up at the caff. Everything alright? There’s been no sniff of anything much. The Old Bill do get a bit busy round here, though. So we don’t really want any dough on show round the yard. Who’s got the money?

The Rotherhithe Tunnel under the River Thames in London

“You see the money, then you say: Give it to your mate. My brother’s turned up and we don’t want too many people to be seen in the yard, cos the Old Bill are fuckin’ murder round here. Let your mate wait here and we’ll go round to the yard now. I’ll show you where it all is.

“So you leave your mate with his mate and you take him to the yard and you say: Oh, it’s shut! Hang on, I’ll get the key. Don’t worry. Come with me. I hope me old woman ain’t there. She don’t stop fuckin’ talking and I don’t want her to know what’s going on but, once we got the keys, we’ll come back and do this. You’re not in a rush?

So you drive through the Rotherhithe Tunnel and, when you get to the other end, you get out to supposedly go get the key but you’d leave him roasting there.

“So what has happened is I have left my mate in the caff at the other end of the tunnel with the guy’s mate and my mate says: Oh! They been a long while, ain’t they? Shall we go round to the yard? They’ll be loaded-up by now. You’ll just jump up in the motor and away you’ll go.

“Then he says: You got that dough on ya? Give us it. And he goes round to the yard with the guy but leaves him roasting and neither of them know where the other one is. You couldn’t do it now.”

“Why?” I asked.

Krayzy Days – Micky’s definitive book

“Mobile phones,” said Micky. “Reggie used to find us loads of customers. He loved it, did Reggie. He would have loved to have been a con man. He mentioned it in his book. But it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it. I told you about when Billy Hill conned him… with the Unione Corse. Reggie mentions that in his book, but he gets it wrong – he never woke up to it.

“Anyway, so there was that – The Corner – and there was The Jars.”

“The Jars?’ I asked.

“You’re very innocent.” said Micky. “If you ever wanna buy anything, give me a ring.”

The god-like comedian Ken Dodd is more mugger than con man + he got a standing ovation in Bournemouth

Morecambe and Wise were not famous.

Yes, they were justifiably famous in the UK. But go to some village in western China and ask them who Morecambe and Wise were.

M&W are and always were total unknowns except in the British Isles.

Fame is relative and mostly regional.

To save my life, I could not tell you who the world water ski champion is. But presumably he or she is a Big Name if you follow water skiing.

The world is full of champions, each famous in their own little world.

I see quite a lot of club comedy and what is still called alternative comedy. Some of the acts are called comedy stars; some may even think they are stars. Audiences even flock to and fill large venues to see some of these people who have appeared in TV panel shows.

But they are not big stars even in the UK. They are minor and transient cults with a few disciples. Admittedly they have more disciples than Jesus did when he started but, just because you can get more than twelve people to listen to you in a room above a pub in Camden Town, don’t start thinking you are more famous than the Son of God.

Unless you are known and regarded in awe by a random 50-year-old housewife in a bus queue in Leamington Spa, you are not famous in UK terms. If you can fill a big venue at the Edinburgh Fringe with 23 year old fans for 27 nights, you are not famous. You are a very minor cult.

Last night, I saw Ken Dodd’s show Happiness at The Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth. Ken Dodd is unquestionably famous in the UK and the venue was filled with a well-heeled middle-of-the-road, middle class Middle England audience of the type TV commissioners mystifyingly ignore. This audience was the great TV-viewing audience en masse on a rare trip out to see a live show.

Upcoming shows at The Pavilion include The Gazza and Greavsie Show, Roy Chubby Brown, Joe Pasquale, Jethro and Jim Davidson. Never, never, never underestimate the Daily Mail. Their readers are the mass audience. Admittedly Dylan Moran and Russell Kane also have upcoming shows at The Pavilion, but the phrases “sore thumbs” and “stand out” spring to mind.

London-based American comedian Lewis Schaffer has a routine in which he says his ex-manager told him he will never become famous unless, like a currently ‘famous’ alternative comedian, he can be a true professional and tell the same jokes in every show and repeat each show exactly.

Last night, the first half of Ken Dodd’s 5-hour show proved the danger of being too experienced and too professional a performer if you are on a long tour.

There was an audibility problem.

This was partly because the sound system at The Pavilion was occasionally indistinct – certainly where I was sitting, centre right in the audience – and partly because Ken Dodd, after 55 years in showbiz and on his seemingly endless UK tour, has been doing the same routines and telling the same stories for too long. He came on stage and spoke what, for the first part of the show seemed to be a script which he had got so used to he didn’t actually perform it: he just threw the words out. He galloped and gabbled through the words and syllables with the result perhaps a quarter of what he was saying was indecipherable.

And this was an audience with possible inbuilt hearing problems where I half expected the colostomy bags to break during the show to create a tsunami that could have washed the entire population of Bournemouth into the English Channel.

When an established act, instead of saying “Ladies and gentlemen” says “lay-ge-me” and all the other words and phrases are gabbled and elided indistinctly in much the same way, he is not performing an act, he is going through the motions on autopilot. He has heard the jokes 1,000 times; the audience has not (well, not most of them).

His saving grace was an astonishing gag rate of perhaps one potential laugh every ten seconds. And the material is gold. You couldn’t go wrong with that material. But Doddy was getting laughs because the jokes (when heard) were good, not because of any technical skill in the delivery.

There are very few successful gag tellers in modern alternative comedy – Jimmy Carr, Milton Jones and Tim Vine are exceptions not the rule. Most successful alternative comedians nowadays tell stories: not necessarily funny stories, but stories told funny.

Ken Dodd mostly told gags in the first half and funny stories in the second half (in which he found his feet more). But it struck me that his slightly more old-fashioned (or let’s say traditional) approach was very similar to inexperienced circuit comics today.

He told stories as if they were gags, with token links between each story, but with no over-all arc. If he told ten stories, the first and second might have a token link and the seventh and eighth might have a token link, but there was no over-all progression, no shape, no thread to the stories. So the over-all effect was like getting beaten round the head with gags by a mugger for five hours, not drawn into a personal fantasy world by a con man, which is what a stand-up comedian is.

It struck me Doddy’s unlinked gag structure was very like comics new to the current comedy circuit who have some material but can’t stitch it into a unitary act. They can do 10 or 15 or 20 minutes but are not yet capable of putting on a 60 minute Edinburgh Fringe show.

I suppose the transition from beating people into submission with barrages of gags rather than bringing them into your own personal world with smoothly-linked stories is a relatively recent development which Doddy has no need to embrace because he has so many gags and stories which he can throw at the audience from his years of experience.

Because he is so experienced and so good, I could not tell how much of the second half was scripted and how much he was just plucking and throwing in gags and stories from a mental storehouse.

One ad-lib which surely must have been planned and, indeed, ‘planted’ was a piece of banter with the audience in which Dodd asked a woman “How many children do you have?”

“Eight!” came the unexpected reply.

Dodd professed bewilderment at this and meandered for a couple of sentences about her husband, then asked:

“Have you sewn up the gap in his pyjamas yet?…. (pause)… You know what they say… A stitch in time saves…” (Immediate audience laughter – though strangely not as much as it deserved)

This cannot possibly have been an ad-lib. It had to have been planted in the audience because he feigned bewilderment at the initial reply of “Eight,” which he would not have done in the way that he did if it were not a lead-up to the punchline.

There were also glimpses of an unexpected (to me) Ken Dodd – a ventriloquist act with a Diddy Man doll that almost verged on being post-modernist and a sequence in which he was doing a series of very passable regional accents and which went into a whole non-Ken-Dodd realm.

Small numbers of the audience left during the single interval – including the friend I went with, who had been exhausted by the first two and a half hours – she went paddling in the sea by the pier and then found a strange Greek Orthodox priest intoning his way through a Paschal Celebration in a small chapel watching by an old woman with a bell and an old man in a shabby grey suit. He had started at 10.00pm – about halfway through Doddy’s show – and was still intoning, watched by his two fans, at 15 minutes past midnight after Doddy’s show had ended and we went to see if he was still going strong.

Whether Christianity or Ken Dodd’s shows will last longer is a moot point, but they probably have the same fans.

At the end of Ken Dodd’s Happiness show, people rose from their seats to leave while still clapping and, partially blocked from leaving by other people possibly with mobility problems, this turned into a standing ovation and a sudden flutter of flashes as people with mobile phones snatched quick photos of the god-like Doddy on stage.

The standing ovation in both the stalls and the balcony was warm and heartfelt and passionate but perhaps was more for being a national institution than for the show itself.

It was an event as much as a show.

Much like Jesus preaching to the converted, in retrospect, it will be loved, treasured and much talked about and the Master’s fame will spread, though perhaps neither further nor wider nor to western China.