Lenny McLean: the Guv'nor

Bouncer, bare-knuckle fighter and self-styled hardest man in Britain — a figure from the old East End who outlived the world that made him.

Leonard John McLean grew up in Hoxton, in the old East End of London, in a world where a man's reputation was his currency. He worked the doors of nightclubs in the 1960s and 70s, when bouncers settled disputes with their fists and the police rarely interfered.

McLean's reputation was built in the unlicensed boxing ring — fights with no rules, no referees and no stopping the clock until one man could not continue. Over more than a decade he fought dozens of these bouts, losing only one, and became known across London as 'the Guv'nor'.

His most famous rivalry was with Roy 'Pretty Boy' Shaw, another East End hard man, who in the late 1970s challenged McLean to a series of unlicensed fights. The bouts were huge events in the underworld, with thousands of pounds changing hands on the results. McLean won the first contest, and their feud became part of London legend.

In 1996, McLean was accused of murdering a man during a fight at a pub in Kentish Town. He spent eight months in prison awaiting trial before being acquitted, the jury accepting that he had acted in self-defence. The case made him a national figure, and his autobiography, 'The Guv'nor', became a bestseller.

The book turned him into an unlikely celebrity in the last years of his life. He appeared in Guy Ritchie's 1998 film 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels', playing a character drawn from his own legend, and died of lung cancer in July 1998, two months before the film's release.

McLean's story is often told as a cautionary tale about the old East End — a world of door work, unlicensed boxing and reputation, that was already disappearing when he left it. Whether he was truly the hardest man in Britain is still argued; that he was the last of his kind is harder to dispute.