Lenny McLean - Early Life

Early Life

Lenny McLean was born into a large working-class family in Hoxton in the East End of London. His father, Leonard McLean senior, had been a Royal Marine during the Second World War, but after being debilitated by a near-fatal disease which he contracted in India he became a petty criminal and swindler. He died when Lenny was six years old, and was buried in a pauper's grave, as many working class men of the time were.

Lenny's mother, Rose, later married Jim Irwin, who was, like her previous husband, a conman. Unlike the elder McLean, Irwin was also a violent alcoholic, who physically abused Lenny and his brothers for many years. By the age of ten, McLean had suffered many broken bones. However, when Lenny's infant brother Raymond was beaten brutally with a belt, McLean's great-uncle Jimmy Spinks - a feared local gangster - attacked Irwin, nearly killing him, and threatened to cut his throat should he ever need to return to protect the children again.

Lenny admired his great-uncle thereafter and when he became a street fighter he said that he considered every victory to be won on behalf of his vulnerable younger self. He expressed the rage resulting from his abusive childhood with such abandon that often it would take several men to separate him from his defeated opponent.

During his teenage years, McLean mixed with various criminals for whom he ran errands. He was arrested for petty crimes and served eighteen months in prison. After he was dismissed from his first legitimate job for beating up his foreman, he worked at odd jobs. By the age of fifteen, McLean realised he could earn a living from fighting and pursued it as his main means of income.

McLean's first unlicensed boxing match came about as a result of a chance meeting while in his late teens: when his car broke down in the Blackwall Tunnel, rather than using his superior physical strength to push it, he abandoned it and went to buy a replacement from an associate known as Kenny Mac, a gypsy used car salesman in Kingsland Road, Hackney, only to find the replacement quickly failed too. McLean returned later to demand his money back, but rather than repay it, Kenny Mac offered to give McLean a new car in exchange for McLean fighting in one of Mac's organised bouts later that night in Kenny's yard. McLean's opponent was just under 7 feet (210 cm) tall and weighed 20 stone (130 kg); he lasted less than a minute against McLean, earning McLean £500, a considerable prize at the time.

Kenny Mac and McLean became friends and on numerous later bouts Mac acted as McLean's boxing manager, with McLean subsequently becoming the best-known bare knuckle street fighter in Britain.