The crime buster who took down the Kray Twins

This is a tale of one of Kent's greatest crime busters.

A man who had a major impact on law and order in London and the entire county.

As a senior detective in the Metropolitan Police, Ernest Millen CBE from Thanet helped bring to justice infamous criminals like the Krays, the Richardson Gang and the Great Train Robbers.

Author and historian Nick Evans told BBC Secret Kent that Millen joined the police after his own brush with the law.

Working as a teenager at a Boots in Cliftonville in 1929, Millen sold a man a measure of arsenic for his mother.

According to Evans, ladies in those days would take very small amounts of the highly toxic chemical to improve their complexion.

"It was a hangover from the Victorian period," he told BBC Secret Kent.

Millen thought nothing of it, but things took a turn for the worst when days later the Hotel Metropole on Margate seafront burnt down, killing one woman.

The prime suspect? Her son Sydney Fox - the same man who had brought the arsenic from Millen.

Fox blamed his mother's death on the poisonous chemical and said the fire was entirely incidental, according to historian Evans.

But police had other thoughts, and he was eventually charged with her murder and hanged in 1930.

This sparked off something in the young Millen, said Evans.

After he himself was cleared of any wrongdoing over Ms Fox's murder, he joined the Met as a trainee copper and later became a fully-fledged detective.

On the beat in London's East End immediately after the Second World War, Millen got to "see all sides of life", Evans explained.

"They were very good times to learn to become a detective," he told BBC Secret Kent.

Climbing up the ranks, Millen studied accountancy, which enabled him to start investigating fraud cases.

He even rumbled a very complex embezzlement case where a South London vicar embezzled 100,000 pounds from his parishioners, laundering it through nearly 100 different bank accounts.

"That really set him on the course for stardom," said Evans.

Still, it was not until the 1960s that he started taking on the "biggest names" and became the "gangbuster of his day", he added.

Millen led the operation to take down the notorious East End gangsters Reggie and Ronnie Kray.

He then headed efforts to arrest many of the Great Train Robbers in 1963 and was instrumental in breaking up the Richardson gang, which had terrorised South London for several years, according to Evans.

"He wasn't very complimentary about the villains that he came up against," said the historian and author.

Evans said Millen wrote that when it came to the crunch the Kray twins were hopelessly incompetent, even as murderers.

When Reggie Kray tried to shoot Jack the Hat McVitie, he found his gun did not work and he had to stab him to death instead, he continued.

"It would be comical if it wasn't so messy or bloody," said Evans.

Despite the seeming dangers of his job, Evans said Millen never once wrote or spoke about threats to his life.

"Perhaps the criminal underworld was very different in those days," he said.

Millen died in Birchington in 1988, aged 77.

"He was quite happy [to retire] growing roses in his front garden", added Evans.

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