One night in Freddie Foreman’s club, a man punched a 17-year-old girl so hard he broke her jaw. She was carried out unconscious. The bully and his gang then armed themselves with pickaxe handles ready to go to war with Foreman and his crew. It would be a night of bloody violence that would cement Fred Foreman’s reputation as one of the most feared men in London’s underworld.
This is the story of Club 211. A cruel act of violence against a vulnerable girl and the savage retribution that followed. Fred Foreman was not called the managing director of British crime for nothing. In respectable company, polite, well-dressed, quietly spoken. The kind of man you’d be happy to have a drink with and think him quite the gentleman.
In the underworld, something else entirely. Foreman wasn’t just a man who gave the orders from the back of the room. He could have a right row himself. He proved it and in 1960s London clubland, that mattered more than almost anything else. Because this was London in the 1960s and London was the Wild West. People talk about the Krays, the Richardsons, the Nashers, big names, big families.
But Foreman himself said it clearly. It wasn’t just the famous firms. There were hundreds of them. Dangerous armed outfits spread across every borough. Robbers, gangsters, hard men with crews behind them. All of them ready to hurt or kill if the situation called for it. The 211 Club stood on Balham High Road.
From the outside, smart, roulette tables, blackjack, croupiers in dinner suits, customers coming from across London. Style, money, a touch of glamour. Foreman had been brought in by Bernie Cornfeld, a South London pub owner with an interest in the place. Local villains have been leaning on Bernie, testing the edges.
The moment Foreman’s name was attached to the 211, that stopped. He ran the casino upstairs, Bernie ran the bar and restaurant downstairs. Around him, he assembled the kind of men the 211 needed. Ronnie Oliff, Ronnie King, Johnny Cook, Lenny White, Mickey Regan. Not doormen in black coats checking guest lists, hard men. Men whose names alone could change the atmosphere in a room, but even that wasn’t enough to keep every problem outside.
Foreman had a name for the ones who kept coming through the door, Saturday night cowboys. Ordinary working men who’d spend the week behaving themselves, then arrived mob-handed at the weekend, full of drink, full of nerve, thinking a busy club was somewhere they could do what they liked. They were wrong.
Before I get to the worst night the 211 ever saw, there’s a man you need to know about. Johnny Hanlon. West London, hard as they came. Hanlon wasn’t a gangster in any organized sense. He was something in some ways more frightening. A street fighter, fearless, violent, completely unpredictable. And by the accounts of people who were there, genuinely terrifying.
According to Foreman, publicans and club owners would rather hand over money than have Hanlon and his crew loose inside their venue. He moved through West London nightlife like a wrecking ball. A crew of men around him who fed off his reputation and knew that as long as Hanlon was at the front, they could do more or less as they pleased.
Then one night, Hanlon walked into the 211. He didn’t know whose place it was. He was about to find out. Hanlon came in that night the way he always did, with people around him, wives, girlfriends, mates, the full entourage, confident, loud, already making his presence felt before he’d even settled. He started causing a nuisance, the kind of behavior designed to test the room, to see what it would take before someone said something.
Advertisements
Foreman had seen it a hundred times. He’d also seen what happened when you let it go unchallenged. He walked over to Hanlon, took his drink, and told him to leave. That was the moment Hanlon made the worst mistake of his life. He moved towards Foreman. What he hadn’t noticed was Ronnie Olive. Olive was leaning nearby, watching everything, waiting.
One of Foreman’s most trusted men. Quiet, patient, and when the moment came, devastating. Before Hanlon could do anything, Olive hit him with a big right hand. Hanlon was out before he hit the floor. The man who had terrorized West London pubs for years knocked spark out by a single punch before he even knew it was coming.
Years later, inside Wormwood Scrubs, Foreman was serving his sentence connected to the Jack McVitie murder. A man approached him in the yard, Johnny Hanlon. He looked at Foreman for a moment and said, “Are you Fred? Freddie Foreman?” Foreman offered him the recess, a quiet corner, the kind of place where things could be settled properly if Hanlon still had something to prove.
Hanlon didn’t want it. Instead, he apologized, held out his hand, and Foreman shook it. But not every story from the 211 ended with the handshake. Some ended very differently indeed. The worst night at the 211 started downstairs in the bar. The club was busy, a full house. Foreman and Mickey Regan were upstairs when the word came through.
Trouble in the bar. A gang had come in, around a dozen men. Foreman describes them as ugly, rough-looking. The kind of group that arrives already looking for something to happen. At the front of them was a man he called Flatnose, an ex-fighter, big, and completely without any sense of where the line was. Flatnose had punched a 17-year-old girl.
Not pushed her, not shoved her out the way. Punched her that hard he knocked her unconscious and snapped her jaw. She was a customer, a young woman out for the evening in a small club in Balham High Road. Foreman and Reagan came downstairs fast, but their gang were already moving, heading for the door, getting into cars outside.
Foreman and Reagan followed them out. Across the road, Flatnose and another man had stopped. They weren’t running. They went to the boot of their car and pulled out pickax handles. It was a statement, a show of strength, a message that whatever just happened inside, out here on the street, it was going to go differently.
It was the wrong move. Foreman had already collected a .38 pistol from upstairs before they came down. He called it the equalizer. He wasn’t carrying it for show. When the two men came forward with the handles, Foreman pulled the gun. They stopped in their tracks. He told them to drop the pickax handles, then Foreman went for Flatnose.
He punched him, punched him again, then pistol-whipped him around the head. This wasn’t a boxing match. It wasn’t controlled. It was punishment, deliberate, personal punishment from a man who had just watched a teenage girl carried out unconscious with a broken jaw. Mickey Reagan dealt with the other man. Then Foreman put the gun into Flatnose’s shoulder and pulled the trigger at close range.
The bullet entered the shoulder and traveled through his body before exiting through his side. Somehow it missed the major arteries. Somehow it missed the heart. Flatnose went down. Foreman turned to the other man, grabbed him, punched him, warned him never to come back anywhere near the 211. Then, he put the barrel of the gun behind the man’s ear and fired.
The blast took the ear clean off. Foreman and Regan went back inside, cleaned themselves up. Somehow, one of the injured men managed to get behind the wheel and drive himself and Flatnose to hospital. The girl with the broken jaw ended up in the same hospital. Police were called. No statements were made. Nobody had seen anything.
According to Foreman, Flatnose and his mate understood that what they had received that night was a taster, not the full measure of what was available to them if he pushed it further. They were never heard from again. Fred Foreman is in many ways a contradiction in terms. He’ll tell you himself he was brought up to behave as a gentleman in every aspect of life.
Manners, respect, conduct. These weren’t things he paid lip service to. People who knew him describe a man who genuinely lived by them. And yet, he shot a man in the shoulder outside of Balham club and took another man’s ear off. He was convicted in connection with the disposal of Jack McVitie’s body. He stood at the center of one of the most dangerous criminal networks Britain has ever produced.
But the underworld has its own codes, its own morals, its own logic. And by those standards, Foreman was consistent. He didn’t hurt people for sport. He didn’t cross lines that his world considered lines. And when the violence came, in his mind at least, it came for a reason. Which brings us back to Johnny Hanlon. Years after the night Ronnie O’Sullivan put him on the floor of the 211, Hanlon had continued pushing, testing people’s patience, and eventually he pushed the wrong ones too far.
According to Foreman, while he was in Spain, he was approached and asked to kill Hanlon. He refused. Not because he couldn’t. Not because he was frightened of the consequences, but because he wasn’t a contract killer. He didn’t do it for those reasons. That was his line, and he held it. Make of that what you will.
In a normal world, it makes no sense, but Freddie Foreman didn’t live in a normal world. He lived in one with his own rules, his own justice, and his own version of honor. It was his profession. If you want more on Fred Foreman, I covered another story on him a while back, a lifelong feud with a dangerous gunman who shot his brother in a place I’ll leave to your imagination.
Revenge followed. One man disappeared, and the hunt for the man responsible went on for years. That one’s in the bottom left thumbnail, and it’s well worth your time. If you enjoyed this one, smash the like and subscribe if you haven’t already. It genuinely makes a difference to the channel.
Until next time, The Enquirer out.
