John Bindon was a man of violence. There were plenty of violent men in Britain in the 1960s and 70s. Armed robbers, pub enforces, professional villains, men who had done time, men who had left others in hospital. Names that still carry weight decades later. And yet, one name stands out from the rest. John Bindon.
Not just as an actor, not just as a celebrity hard man, but as a man other deadly men genuinely rated. Freddy Foreman once called him London’s hardest man because Foreman was not some journalist writing color for a Sunday paper. He was an underworld figure with a reputation of his own. A man who knew exactly what violence looked like.
And according to one account in the book on Bindon, he believed Bindon would have destroyed Lenny McLean in a street fight. Bull claims a fight was offered 15K to fight McLean through Joey Pyle, but Bindon turned it down. Another hard man he did fight was a giant from Paddington known as Ginger Charles, a proper old school villain, a man with size, pedigree, and a taste for violence.
The sort of man who did not scare easily and had many scalps under his belt. There had been bad blood between the two for some time. Paddington versus Fulham. One hard man measuring himself against another. And inside a pub behind Bindon’s rented Belgravia mews house, it finally kicked off. According to Vince Charles, his father had started having a go at Bindon after a drink.
What happened next was short, savage, and one-sided. Bindon ran over and kicked him so hard he went crashing down the stairs and broke his arm. Then he jumped on top of him and kept punching him until he was a bloody mess. Only when a showgirl called Suzy intervened did it stop. Bindon walked away virtually untouched.
Years later, even Vince Charles admitted his father took a long time to get over that hiding. That is where this story really starts. Not with the films, the giant manhood, or Princess Margaret, but with violence because John Bindon did not become deadly overnight. It was a journey of street fights, pub brawls, and enforcer work that spiraled into the horrific death of another man.
John Dennis Arthur Bindon was born in Fulham in 1943. Working-class London, no silver spoon, no polish, no soft edges. He left school early and had already built a reputation for fighting while still a teenager. He earned the nickname Biffo. You do not get called Biffo by being mild-mannered.
You get called Biffo because you biff people. He went to borstal. He was in and out of bother. He had already developed the quirk that would define the rest of his life. The need to answer everything physically. That is what separated men like Bindon from ordinary street fighters. It was not just that they could fight, it was that violence became their first instinct. An argument became a beating.
An insult became a grudge. A push became a war. That was Bindon’s real education. Not school, not film, not society parties, fear. And he learned early how useful fear could be. Then came the break that changed his life. In the mid-1960s, director Ken Loach spotted him in a pub and thought he looked right for the screen.
No formal training, no drama school polish, just raw presence. Bindon got a role in Poor Cow. More work followed. Then came performance, Get Carter, television appearances, and a steady run as one of British cinema’s natural heavies. But the industry did not transform him into something else. It simply pointed a camera at what he already was.
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That was the appeal. Bindon did not need to act like a gangster or a brute. He already looked, sounded, and moved like one. There was menace in him that casting directors could not fake. And off screen, he kept proving it. One quote often attached to him sums him up perfectly. He once said that when he was a wild young man, he hit an awful lot of people, mostly policemen who got in his way when he was having a small tickle.
He said he had done most of his prison time for hitting coppers. Then in typical Bindon fashion, he joked about the absurdity of later being put up for a bravery medal by the police. That was him all over. Violence, charm, cheek, no remorse. And always the sense that he found the whole thing darkly amusing. He did receive recognition for diving into the Thames to rescue a drowning man, but even that came wrapped in rumor with some claiming he had only jumped in after police appeared.
That was the problem with Bindon. Nothing around him stayed clean. Every good deed had a shadow. Every success carried a threat. Every room he entered, he seemed to bring chaos with him. And while his screen career grew, so did his off-screen reputation. This was not just a man making crime films.
This was a man living a double life. In one world, Bindon was around actors, directors, models, and socialites. He drank with stars, mixed with the fashionable set, moved from King’s Road circles and West End nightlife. Women found him magnetic. Men found him unpredictable. He had a party trick of exposing his large manhood. Wild stories of lifting five half tankards of beer with it spread like wildfire.
True or not, it added to the mystique. On one occasion, that party trick ended with a huge Irishman objecting. They argued and Bindon laid him out cold with one punch. Despite the celebrity status, he was still very much the Fulham hard man, still fighting in pubs, still mixing with villains, still spoken of in the same breath as gangsters, pub racketeers, and enforcers.
George Sewell later recalled that Bindon was brilliant company, one of the funniest men he had ever met, but also a bloody liability. He remembered being in a pub with him one night when Bindon laid into a man after an argument so badly the victim ended up in hospital. Blood sprayed over the walls. That is an important anecdote.
Bindon was not violent only in dramatic gangland moments. He was a volatile casually, socially, almost recreationally. That is what made him so dangerous. You were never far from a flashpoint. By now, the legend was growing fast. Bindon was linked to glamorous women. He was linked to aristocratic circles. There were stories about his relationship with Vicki Hodge, stories about Princess Margaret.
Some were denied, some were repeated so often they hardened into myth. Photographs only added fuel. He was linked with the Richardsons and the Krays. A violent kid from Fulham had somehow forced his way into elite circles without losing his original nature. He did not become refined. He did not adapt. He did not soften.
He brought the street into those worlds with him. That made him fascinating. It also made him unstable because eventually, a man cannot serve two masters forever. And Bindon’s real master was always violence. In 1977, Bindon was hired as a security coordinator for Led Zeppelin on their US tour. On paper, it sounded perfect.
Big presence, real intimidation factor, a hard case around one of the biggest bands in the world. In reality, it was a disaster waiting to happen. Because there is a massive difference between security and aggression. A proper security man controls the temperature. A man like Bindon raises it. At Oakland Coliseum, tensions had been simmering between the band’s camp and Bill Graham’s crew.
Then it blew. Accounts differ on the exact wording and who pushed things over the edge, but the outcome is clear enough. Bindon knocked stage crew chief Jim Downey unconscious. Then matters escalated again around an incident involving Peter Grant’s young son and a savage beating of Bill Graham’s security man, Jim Matzorkis.
Suddenly, this was not backstage theater. It was criminal exposure. Charges followed and Peter Grant later said hiring Binden was the biggest mistake he ever made as Zeppelin’s manager.” That tells you a lot. Binden was useful right up to the point he became uncontrollable. That is the story of his whole life.
But the real turning point came back in London. Johnny Dark. Outside the Rainly Yacht Club in Fulham. By now, Binden’s life had drifted deep into a murky overlap of nightlife, underworld company, favors, threats, and reputation. The actor and the hardman had become inseparable. Then came the confrontation. Dark, a London gangster, ended up in a knife fight with Binden.
By the end of it, Dark had been stabbed nine times and was dying. Binden was wounded, too. And what happened next only made it worse. He fled to Dublin with his own knife wounds covered up. That is not the action of a man who thinks he’s just come through a harmless pub dust-up. That is a man who knows the gravity of what has happened.
Eventually, he gave himself up and stood trial at the Old Bailey. The prosecution painted it as a contract killing dressed up as self-defense. A £10,000 murder linked to the drug world. The defense said the opposite. They argued that Binden feared for his life and had been blackmailed over missing drug money and cocaine worth thousands.
Whatever the truth behind the fight, one fact remained. A man was dead. Another man with a long history of violence was in the dock for murder. And now everything that had once made John Binden marketable, the menace, the aura, the reputation, was working against him. Because in a courtroom, legend cuts both ways.
But somehow, he walked. Binden was acquitted in 1979. The jury accepted self-defense. It was said Bob Hoskins appeared as a character witness. It was also said the judge’s summing up was sympathetic and the prosecution witnesses poor. Legally, that was the end of it. But in reality, it was the beginning of the collapse.
Because acquittal did not restore his career. It damaged it beyond repair. Film and television can tolerate difficult men. Sometimes, they even celebrate them. But murder trials are different. Chaos is different. Unpredictability is different. Directors started seeing him not as authentic, but as a risk. And once that shift happens, you’re finished.
That is where John Binden’s myth becomes tragic. He spent years building himself into the ultimate hardman. And when the industry first saw it, it loved him for it. Then eventually, it recoiled from the exact same thing. The violence that made him famous also made him unemployable. By the 1980s, the energy had gone out of his story.
He became more reclusive, more shut away, less visible. A man with a shrinking world. And that must have been hell for someone like Binden. Because hardmen live on momentum, on being noticed, on being talked about, on entering a room and feeling people shift. But time takes that away. Age takes the edge off. Reputation stops earning. The glamour fades.
The phone stops ringing. What is left then? Usually just the wreckage. And Binden had built plenty of that. He had the films, the women, the wild stories, the underworld whispers, the royal rumors, the rock and roll chaos, the murder trial. But strip all that away, and what remains? A boy known for fighting, a man known for violence, a life that could never properly leave that road behind.
He died in 1993 aged just 50. Only 50. Some say of AIDS, others say cancer. For a man who had lived as recklessly as John Binden, maybe it was always going to end early. But it still feels abrupt. And this is why John Binden still matters in any serious conversation about Britain’s deadliest men. Not because he was the most prolific killer.
Not because every rumor attached to his name was true. And not because his life was admirable. He matters because he embodied a certain kind of British violence that was once half feared and half glamorized. He could batter a feared man in a pub, move among gangsters, turn up in major films, drink with celebrities, brush up against royalty, then end up in the Old Bailey on a murder charge.
That is not a normal criminal life. And it’s not a normal acting career. It’s something darker. John Binden did not just play Britain’s violent underworld on screen. He carried it inside him. And in the end, that was the truth of the man. Not the gossip. Not the myths. Not the headlines. Just this. Wherever John Binden went, violence followed.
And more often than not, he was the reason. Okay, thank you for watching. Hope you enjoyed that one on John Binden. Some interesting photos and a bit of context which you may not have seen before. If you like this, please consider smashing the likes and subscribing. A lot of people watch the videos, but don’t subscribe, and it really help me get to my goal of 100,000 and hopefully the silver play button.
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