One of the Family

40 YEARS WITH THE KRAYS is the untold, intimate history of the twins and the woman who raised them. Told with humour and insight, it looks back across the decades at the life of this close knit, notorious East End family.

Maureen Flanagan, a then 20 year old hairdresser started visiting the Kray family home in Vallance Road each week to give the twins’ mother, Violet, her weekly shampoo and set. Over the cups of tea and the rollers and hairpins, Violet began to confide in ‘Flan’ about her life, her incredible pride in her twins, the celebrities who visited her at their humble East End home - and her troubled relationship with her husband.

MAUREEN FLANAGAN, best known by her professional name, Flanagan, is a former actress and model. In her twenties, Maureen was known as the most photographed model in Britain. Her early BBC TV appearances included roles in The Benny Hill Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Dave Allen Show and Only Fools & Horses. Flanagan shot to fame in the Seventies when she became one of theSun newspaper's earliest Page Three girls. The Sun's editorial told readers Flanagan was 21 years old: in fact, she was 30! With a modelling career that continued well into her fifties, Maureen then became established as a celebrity fund raiser and after dinner speaker. She is an expert on London's East End and the history of the Kray twins, whose family she knew well over many decades. She lives in Hackney, in the heart of the East End, and has one son, JJ, and four grandchildren.