Lenny McLean and the Man Who Attacked His Daughter on Old Ford Road

The man who grabbed Kelly McLean from behind on Old Ford Road pulled her jacket up over her head so she could not see, and in that moment every one of her friends ran, except one.

Kelly was still a girl. It was early evening, somewhere in the East End of the 1980s, and she and her friends were walking to the shop for sweets. Her hands were in her pockets. She could not get them out to protect herself. She had no idea what came next. A punch, a bottle, a blade.

What the man did not know, and what every child on that estate did, was who her father was.

Mum, Mum, we've been jumped, get Dad

Kelly McLean, at the flats

Kelly told this story herself, in her 2018 memoir, My Dad, The Guv'nor. She describes a childhood that would be hard to picture now. Seven or eight girls in a gang, out on the estate until dark, knocking on doors and running off, playing games called Knock Down Ginger and Tin Tan Tommy. Loud, cheeky, out for sweets, not trouble.

That evening they were heading along Old Ford Road past a bus stop when a man and a woman came the other way. Kelly remembered drawn faces and bad skin. They looked, in her telling, rough and out of it, the kind of couple you cross the road to avoid. One of them called out, "Hello beautiful."

Kelly asked her friend Vicky if the remark had been aimed at her. Vicky thought it was meant for Kelly. The girls kept walking. They were kids. Then the man came up behind Kelly and the jacket went over her head.

Her friend Karen did not run. She stood in the road and screamed at a grown man to get off her friend. For that, according to Kelly, she took a punch full in the face. Karen said later that all she could see was stars. She still did not leave.

Kelly wriggled free, and the fear turned into temper. She went for the woman. The man stepped between them and told her that if she laid one hand on his partner, he would make sure she was black and blue all over.

He must have thought it was simple. A group of young girls, no men about, and the rest of the gang already gone.

Kelly looked at him and said something that should have sent him straight to the nearest bus. "Wait here," she told him, "while I go and get my dad."

She and Karen ran for the flats. On the way other children joined them, and by the time they reached the block, Kelly remembered, there were about thirty kids running behind. Not one of them went back to warn the man. Every child in the street wanted to see what happened next.

The man did not leave. According to Kelly, he picked up an iron bar, pushed it down the front of his trousers, and waited for her father.

Her father was Lenny McLean. By then he was the most feared unlicensed fighter in Britain, six foot two and more than eighteen stone, the man who had beaten Roy Shaw in two of their three fights and who minded some of the hardest doors in London. He had not come by any of it easily. He was born in Hoxton in 1949. His father died young, and by Lenny's own account he and his brothers were beaten by their stepfather for years. He made his name in unlicensed boxing rings and on the cobbles, and then on the doors of London's pubs and clubs. Men who had fought him tended to talk about him quietly, if they talked about him at all.

Most men who knew the name would not have stayed on Old Ford Road for him. This one did.

Kelly reached the block and shouted for her mother. "Mum, Mum, we've been jumped, get Dad." Her mum shouted up for Lenny. "Len, Len, Kelly's been jumped."

Within seconds he was at the bottom of the stairs, and he was fuming. He looked at Karen's face. He asked where the man was.

They walked back out onto Old Ford Road together. The street was packed by now. Kids were shouting, "There's Lenny, go on Len." The whole road knew what was coming. Kelly said she remembered thinking the man was going to need a lot more than an iron bar.

When the man saw who was coming, Kelly says, he froze. Whatever plan he had made with the bar went out of his head at the sight of her father walking towards him.

Lenny did not need a weapon, and by her account he did not even close his fist. He gave the man one open-handed slap across the face. Kelly describes him going up in the air like a rag doll and landing in a heap in the middle of the road, just missing a passing number 8 bus. He was out cold.

He was not the only one dealt with. While the street watched Lenny, Kelly's mum went for the woman, and in Kelly's words gave her a right hiding.

When the man came round, Lenny took him by the throat. From now on, he told him, every time he saw Kelly or her friends he was to look at the floor. The man promised it would never happen again. Lenny's answer, as his daughter tells it, was that he would like to kill him, but there were too many witnesses about. Then he told him to get gone before he got really hurt.

The couple went off down Old Ford Road barely able to walk, with the street laughing behind them.

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The part of the story Kelly seems proudest of comes after. It shows the side of her father the public never saw.

Karen worked in a chemist's on Roman Road. In the days after the attack she saw the same couple walk past the shop more than once, and it frightened her. So she went up to the McLeans' flat and told Lenny.

From then on, for weeks, Kelly says, her father walked Karen home from work every night. He never made a speech about it. She had stood by his daughter when everyone else ran, and she had taken a punch for her. As far as Lenny was concerned, that made her family.

Lenny McLean was a complicated man, and his daughter's book does not pretend otherwise. She writes about his drinking years, and about the times her mother took the children away until he sobered up. He gave up drink, and in her telling a sober Lenny was a far better father. He died of cancer in July 1998, aged forty-nine. His autobiography, The Guv'nor, came out that year and sold in huge numbers. Weeks after his death, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels opened in cinemas with Lenny playing the gangster Barry the Baptist, and made him famous to people who had never been near a fight.

The man on Old Ford Road had picked a group of young girls because they looked like easy targets. He was wrong about one of them.

The full story is in our film on Gangland.