Many things
Roy Shaw was many things. Armed robber, villain, boxer and hard man. Many class him as the toughest prisoner ever to fight the system, and in the unlicensed fight game he was Lenny McLean's mortal enemy. He is rated on a par with Lenny, Bill the Bomb Williams and Jimmy Brand. By his own account, he was also a killer.
He was rougher than the polished nightclub faces like the Krays. He did not need a crew behind him to be dangerous, and by the early 1960s the violence in him was getting harder to control.
The ring and the licence
For a while boxing looked like it might give Shaw a legal life. He fought as a professional under the name Roy West. The trouble was that he had been on the run from borstal when he did it. When the authorities found out he had fought under a false name, his professional licence was taken away. That hit him hard, because it closed the one door that might have kept his violence contained. Instead of the ring, he drifted into the clubs, the drinking dens and the protection money.
He came back to fighting in the unlicensed game, and his clash with Lenny McLean became legend. Nosher Powell, who had sparred with Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali, trained him for it. Shaw beat Lenny once in the ring, one of the few proper boxers who could soak up the big man's onslaught and wear him down. Micky Gluckstead, who describes his own fight with Shaw in the ring in his book, put his finger on the difference. Shaw had boxed professionally, and Lenny's technique was all over the place.
The Limbo Club
The Limbo Club stood in Wardour Mews in the West End, a late-night drinking den owned by a Maltese businessman, and Shaw looked after it. It became one of the key places in his early clubland story. He had trouble there twice, and both times it ended in serious violence.
The first time, he went with his wife Carolina, dressed up in an expensive cashmere overcoat. Two men asked Carolina to dance, and Shaw took it as a liberty in front of the whole room. One of them smashed a bottle, the doorman threw Shaw a cosh, and he went through both men. When a big Irishman stepped in, Shaw put him down too. The Irishman was taken to Charing Cross Hospital. Shaw got in a taxi with the cosh still in his hand, followed him there and attacked him again while he was being treated.
The second time was over money. An Irish enforcer with a very violent reputation walked in and tried to take a pension from the club. The owner phoned Shaw, who had just lost his licence and was angry, humiliated and on edge. He armed himself with a hunting knife and went down there. He bought the man a pint of Guinness, asked him why, and got attitude back. Shaw hit him first, put him on the floor, and then used the knife. He was charged with grievous bodily harm with intent and remanded to Brixton Prison.
You did not collect from Roy Shaw's club. Not twice.
A newspaper report from the time tells it differently. It names him as Royston Shaw, a twenty-six-year-old car dealer from Church Lane, Romford, and puts the stabbing at the Nucleus Club in Monmouth Street, Holborn. When the case came before Bow Street, the injured man failed to appear. The prosecutor said he had refused to help the police in any way, had left his home address and could not be traced. In Shaw's own telling, the man did turn up and said Shaw had saved his life. Either way, Shaw walked away from it, and by his account he came home to find his son Gary had been born.
Parkhurst
The same violence that made his name kept pulling him back to prison, where he did time with some of the toughest men around. At one point he served alongside Frank "The Mad Axe Man" Mitchell, Jack "The Hat" McVitie and George Cornell, and he saved Cornell from a beating inside Parkhurst. All three were tough fighting men, and all three were later killed by the Kray twins or on their orders.
Shaw was held in Broadmoor, the prison for the criminally insane, before he was moved to Parkhurst. In his book Pretty Boy he claims he committed many acts of violence inside, and one he wrote about only briefly stands out. On the Parkhurst football pitch a big man from Birmingham was going in hard on a smaller friend of Shaw's, a London armed robber, who told Shaw he wanted to do him in. Shaw said they would wait until they were heading back to the wing. They caught up with the man on the concrete stairs and an argument broke out. According to Roy, punches were thrown on both sides and the man fell. Shaw alleges that either he or his friend killed him.
What makes it shocking is who the man was. He was no predator or informer, the kind prison justice treats as fair game. He was a tough man from another part of the country whose only offence was going in too heavy in the tackles. Inside, a two-footed challenge on the wrong man can be deadly.
The doors
Shaw minded doors for a while too. He was asked to look after several clubs in the West End, and one in Essex, the Carpenters, where a doorman had been murdered.
Not every door went his way. Security boss Michael Kelly tells of the night Shaw was refused entry to Hollywood's in Romford. Shaw was with a crowd of drunken car dealers who were egging him on to kick off with the doormen, and it ended badly for him. One of the Romford doormen, a huge man, burst out of the door, slammed him to the ground and beat him. By then Shaw was in his fifties, retired from crime and a wealthy man. He was still a very dangerous man, but he was not the force he once was.
Legend
Roy Shaw did it all, from armed robber to notorious prisoner to unlicensed fighter. To the doormen who came after him, he and Lenny McLean were the legends to live up to. His fans, and the people who were close to him until his passing, still hold him in high regard today.