Cliff Field was a man mountain, 6 ft 7, 20 stone plus with a right hand that would knock out a bull. In the early 1980s, Field fought Lenny McLean in two short, vicious, unlicensed fights, both ending with McLean carried out of the ring. But before the unlicensed fighting, Cliff Field had worked some of the most violent doors in London.
He had worked for South London gangster Eddie Richardson, moving through a nightclub world where trouble came with broken bottles, knives, mobs, and bloodshed. He was stabbed. He was jailed. And in one final brawl, he would lose an eye and with it the fighting life that had made his name. This is the story of Cliff Field’s life on the doors and the tragic decline of a man once thought impossible to put down.
Before Cliff Field became known for those brutal unlicensed fights with Lenny McLean, he had already spent years around violence. Not ring violence, not Queensbury rules, door violence. The kind that came without warning, without gloves, and without anyone stepping in when things went too far.
One of the clearest accounts of that world comes from former doorman Ray Hill, who remembered working around Cliff during a savage night at a club in Acton, West London. The club sat close to Acton police station, but that did not make it safe. If anything, it showed how wild those nights would become. Even with the police nearby, this trouble still came.
Hill described the place as a club that was always on the edge. Friday to Sunday, it could be murder. The doors were stacked with serious men because they needed to be. On certain nights, there were five, six, sometimes seven doormen working. Not for show, but because everyone knew what could happen once the drink started flowing.
And that night, according to Hill, the door was full of men who could properly handle themselves. By then, Cliff was already a formidable man, won the Royal Navy Imperial Services title, and later turned professional. He was not just a big man standing on a door, he was a trained heavyweight with a right hand that ended most fights and an indestructible chin.
But none of that meant much once the club erupted into violence. Because this was not boxing. This was a room full of men going at each other with whatever they could grab. Ray Hill remembered the warning signs, men arriving in small groups, two here, one there, dribs and drabs. Not coming in as one obvious firm, but filtering into the club until enough of them were inside.
Then it went. The door flew open, the fight spilled out. Inside, bottles and glasses were flying. Chairs and tables went over. Men were being smashed across the head. Others were being stabbed. The doormen were trying to do what doormen always try to do in that situation, get the violence out of the club before the whole place was wrecked.
But once it started, it was beyond control. Hill remembered one of the doormen being hit with a heavy round pint mug, the old thick glass type that could split a head open. Then Cliff was hit. A pint mug came down across his head. It would have put on the floor. Cliff Field stayed upright. Then came the knives.
According to Hill, Cliff was stabbed two or three times during the chaos. By now, the fight had moved outside into the street near Acton Hill Street. The men who had caused the trouble were backing off, turning again, picking things up, throwing bottles, grabbing crates, still looking to carry it on. And Cliff, bleeding heavily, was still trying to get to them.
This is the part of the story that sums Cliff Field up. Not simply that he was a hard man, but that he’d been hit over the head, stabbed, covered in blood, and still kept moving forward. Relentless forward pressure. Hill described him in a white t-shirt and jacket, soaked in blood, pushing on with Dave Griffiths as the fight ran down towards the cinema.
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There was no bell, no referee, no doctor stepping in because of a cut eye, just men in the street, glass underfoot, blood everywhere, and Cliff Field refusing to go down, pushing forward, punching, head-butting, slinging people across the street. For a man whose professional boxing career had been damaged by cuts, there was a grim irony in it.
In the ring, the sight of blood could stop the fight. On the doors, blood meant nothing. You either stayed on your feet or you went under. That night in action did not make Cliff Field famous. It was not one of the fights people bought tickets for. There was no crowd cheering his name, no purse money, no title on the line, but it showed the world he was living in.
A world where reputation mattered, where backing away could invite more violence, where men learned to go forward because going backwards might get them killed. And for Cliff Field, that lesson would matter because later, when another man came at him with a knife outside of a club, Cliff did not wait to find out how far it would go.
After acting, Cliff Field knew what a bad night on the doors could become. He had seen how quickly a club could turn. He survived that night, but he knew a crowd could become a mob, how a man could be hit with a glass, stabbed, swallowed by bodies, and still have to fight his way out. So, when Cliff later found himself facing trouble outside another club, he was not looking at it like a normal man.
He was looking at it like a doorman who knew what knives could do. A big man who understood that once a gang moved in, hesitation could cost you more than pride. By his own account, Cliff was working for Joey Seagram, minding a club when trouble gathered outside. He said there were around 200 men out there, drunk, angry, wanting to fight the door.
For most people, that would have been enough to step back, shut the doors, and wait for the police. But the old door world did not always work like that. The men on those doors were expected to hold the line. If trouble came to the entrance, they were the barrier. They were the wall between the crowd outside and the club behind them.
And Cliff Field was built like a wall. 6 ft 7, 20 stone plus, a former navy boxing champion with a heavyweight’s right hand. At first, according to Cliff, he did what he had done most of his adult life. He used his hands. Two men came forward. Cliff put them down, one right hand each. Bang, bang, quick, heavy, final.
But then the situation changed. Another man came towards him. This one had a knife. And this is where the action fight matters, because Cliff Field was not imagining what could happen if a blade came out. He knew. He had been there. He had felt the sudden chaos of men closing in. He had been hit with glass.
He had been stabbed. He had seen how quickly street violence stopped being a fight and became survival. So when that man came at him with a knife, Cliff did not box him. He did not try to manage him. He did not wait for a clean opening. He threw everything behind the punch. All the weight, all the fear, all the instinct of a man who had learned that if someone pulls a knife on a door, you cannot afford to be second.
The punch landed with catastrophic force. Cliff later said the man’s face seemed to disintegrate. He went down badly hurt, his face broken. And in that moment, the difference between ring violence and street violence became clear. In the ring, Cliff’s right hand had won fights. On the doors, it could completely break a man’s face.
The door team managed to get back inside before the situation got even worse. But the damage had already been done. The next day, Cliff was arrested. He was charged with grievous bodily harm. And when the case came to court, the full reality of what he had done was laid out in front of him. Photographs of the man’s injuries were shown.
Cliff said he felt sick looking at them. That detail matters because Feild was not describing it like a boast. He was not laughing about what he had done. He was not treating the injured man as just another body on the pavement. He seemed genuinely shocked by the result of his own strength. His father came to visit him afterwards and told him he was lucky.
The man had nearly died and Cliff knew it. He later said that if the man had died, it would have gutted him. But the court still had to deal with the violence. In 1978, Cliff Feild was sent to Wormwood Scrubs for 18 months. Cliff came out in 1979 and looked back at the prison before leaving.
He told himself he was never coming back. And for a while, it looked as though he might still have one more rise left in him. Because back in Dunstable, skint, drinking in the Eight Bells, Cliff Feild was about to hear the name that would make him part of British hard man folklore. Lenny McLean. According to Cliff, he first heard about McLean when pub manager Johnny Stevens told him there was a man in London knocking everyone out.
The money was good. Cliff was skinned, so he took it. By his own account, he was badly overweight when he began training, around 26 stone, and had to strip the weight off fast, sweating it out on a bike with a bin liner under his gear. The papers loved the build-up. They called Cliff the man mountain. One report claimed McLean side had a bank manager put 15 grand up winner takes all.
That may have been straight reporting. It could have been the fight world hype. But either way, the result gave the story its weight. Cliff Field beat Lenny McLean. The first fight was short and vicious. Lenny came out hard trying to bully him early. Cliff let him work, let him burn through that first rush, then started catching him. And this was not clean boxing.
According to Cliff, McLean nutted him, so Cliff nutted him back harder. That was the unlicensed world, rough, ugly, and barely controlled. But once the fight settled, the difference showed. McLean was dangerous, but Cliff had the better boxing brain, the better timing, and the heavier finish. Within five rounds, McLean was stopped.
The rematch came in the early ’80s. Cliff later remembered bumping into McLean whilst he was out running. Lenny was standing there having a cigarette. Cliff told him he ought to stop smoking. McLean told him it made no difference. He couldn’t breathe after two rounds anyway. The second fight was even more decisive.
Cliff said he caught McLean with a combination and knocked him out cold. He remembered McLean lying there so long that for a moment he thought he’d killed him. When McLean came round, he did not even seem to know he had lost. But there was no lifelong feud. Cliff later went round to McLean’s flat and took his own son with him.
When McLean’s boy asked why Cliff had beaten his dad up, McLean said, “Son, don’t worry about it. We’re just earning a pound note.” That was the strange code of the unlicensed world. Savage in the ring, civil afterwards. And for Cliff Field, those two fights put him permanently into British hard man folklore.
But the reputation did not save him. It only made him better known in the same violent world that was already doing its damage. Then came the night that ended it. By 1984, Cliff Field was working at Caesar’s Palace near Luton. He had survived professional boxing. He’d survived the doors and being stabbed.
He’d beaten Lenny the Guv’nor McLean twice and made good money on the unlicensed circuit. But one night inside that casino, the violence finally took something from him that he could not win back. According to Cliff, it started after an argument with a barmaid. He was angry, wound up, and as he moved through the place, he barged past a group of travelers and told them to get out of his way.
That was all it took. The situation turned instantly. Cliff dropped two of them, one with a head butt, one with the right hand that had done so much damage over the years. But then another man came from the side and smashed Cliff straight in the eye with the glass. It exploded and for the first time in his life, Cliff Field knew he was in real, real trouble.
After losing the eye, Cliff said he was gutted. He hit the bottle. The fighting career was finished. The earning power disappeared. The hard man reputation was still there, but the life behind it had collapsed. By then, drink had been with him for years. From navy shore leave through the pubs, the clubs, the doors, and the unlicensed circuit.
But now it became something heavier, something darker. The man who had once been paid thousands to fight was soon back doing scrap work, then struggling, then drifting, and eventually ending up on the streets. That is the real tragedy of Cliff Field. After a lifetime of surviving violence, the boxing ring, the Navy, the doors, the street fights, the knives, and the old unlicensed circuit, it was a smashed glass in a casino that took the sight in one eye and ended his time in the sport he loved.
Cliff Field passed away in 2010, age 67. But despite the struggles that came later, he was much loved by family and friends, and his story should not be remembered only for the fall. He was a Royal Navy man, a combined service champion, a professional heavyweight who was never knocked out, a sparring partner to Joe Bugner, a man who shared a ring with Muhammad Ali in an exhibition, and the fighter who beat London’s governor, Lenny McLean, twice.
