Once, Ronnie Knight was the man who lit up Soho. He glided through smoke-filled nightclubs in a sharkskin suit, charm turned up to eleven, flanked by gangsters and showgirls, and married to the sauciest star in British cinema. He knew everyone. He could talk his way into anything—and talk his way out again. But when he died in 2023, aged 89, he was no longer the king of anything.

He was living in sheltered housing in Cambridge, watching TV crime dramas, his hands trembling with Parkinson’s, the past catching up in whispers and cheap whisky. His story—part East End legend, part cautionary tale—is one of swagger, seduction and survival, told most vividly in his own words:

“I wasn’t Robin Hood… I was a robbing b*****d.”

Hoxton Boy

Born in 1934 in Hoxton, East London, Ronnie Knight came into the world with soot under his fingernails and trouble stitched into his DNA. His brothers—John, James and David—were already orbiting the local underworld, and Ronnie was never far behind. But where they used muscle, Ronnie used charm.

He entered the club business via football manager Malcolm Allison, buying into Soho nightlife just as it became the pulsing heart of post-war London. At the Artistes and Repertoire Club on Charing Cross Road, and Tin Pan Alley next door, Ronnie created a place where crooks and crooners could mingle freely.

And he brought the sparkle. At one bash hosted by female impersonator Danny La Rue, Ronnie remembered:

“Noel Coward, tinkling away on the ivories for all he was worth,” while “Roger Moore drew the girls like horseflies to a cow-pat.”

Ronnie’s empire wasn’t built on charm alone. Behind the velvet ropes were pool tables rigged for profit, peep shows with quiet backers, and favours exchanged like cocktails. Villainy wore a tuxedo in Ronnie’s Soho.

Barbara and the Front Teeth Aches

Then came Barbara Windsor. She was Carry On royalty—blonde, busty, brilliant—and Ronnie fell for her hard.

“I fancied her so much my front teeth ached,” he later wrote.

They met through a film extra, and Knight rang her up repeatedly, persistence rewarded with a date. There was only one hitch: he failed to mention he was already married, with a wife eight months pregnant.

Eventually, he got his divorce and married Windsor in 1964. The ceremony was at 9 a.m. in a rain-soaked register office in Tottenham.

“It poured with rain and I cried on the way there,” Barbara said later. “It was such an awful way to get married. But Ronnie couldn’t care less.”

Even the honeymoon was odd: Kenneth Williams came along with his mother and sister. A circus of egos and insecurities.

Despite—or perhaps because of—the chaos, they lasted 21 years. But as Barbara became more famous, Ronnie became more possessive.

“He was a big baby,” she said. “He didn’t like other men looking at me.”

He hated showbusiness. He didn’t trust her world, or her co-stars, or her confidence.

“Among his own East End kind, he was top dog and confident, but among my showbiz friends he felt inadequate,” Barbara later said.

She paid the bills, kept the house afloat, and absorbed his sulks. When he asked if she’d slept with someone before him and she said yes, he sulked for two days.

Meanwhile, Ronnie handled his rivalries the old-fashioned way. When a former fiancé of Barbara’s dragged her down the street by the hair, Ronnie paid him a visit. He didn’t drag her again.

A Death in the Family, and a Bullet in the Arcade

In the mid-1970s, Ronnie’s brother David was stabbed to death in a Soho pub by Alfredo “Italian Tony” Zomparelli. The killer got four years for manslaughter. When he was released, someone shot him dead in the Golden Goose arcade.

Ronnie was arrested for the murder. A hitman, George Bradshaw, claimed Knight had paid him £1,000 for the job. Ronnie denied everything. At the trial, Barbara stood loyally by his side, and he was acquitted.

But he didn’t stay quiet. Years later, he gloated in print that he had, in fact, “got away with murder.” That line—cold, cocky—would haunt him. It even helped police campaign for the abolition of double jeopardy laws.

It also helped destroy his marriage. Barbara had had enough. So had he. Both took lovers. He slept with a woman in their bed. She had affairs with Sid James, George Best and Maurice Gibb. When it ended, Ronnie began plotting his next move.

The Great Escape

On the night his brother John was arrested in connection with the £6 million Security Express robbery, Ronnie phoned Barbara from Barcelona Airport:

“Don’t tell the Old Bill I was in on that blag.”

Ronnie had already squirrelled away over £250,000 via Barbara’s accountants—without her knowledge—and invested it in villas and flats along the Costa del Sol. He landed in Fuengirola and found himself surrounded by familiar faces. The place was teeming with British villains, all enjoying Spain’s then-friendly extradition laws. He was the biggest name among the so-called “Famous Five.”

He married a blonde barmaid 16 years his junior, Sue Haylock, and even had the gall to send champagne to the undercover police watching the ceremony. He opened a club called R. Knight’s. Brawls were regular. On opening night, a jealous husband stabbed his wife’s lover. The shine wore off fast.

By the early ’90s, the money was gone, the passport expired, and the glamorous fugitive was a broke, bloated, tired man sweating under a Spanish sun.

He finally returned to the UK in 1994, citing his mother’s failing health. He believed he wouldn’t face trial.

“Because no jury in the land could say they hadn’t heard of me.”

But he did face trial—for handling more than £300,000 from the Security Express robbery—and was sentenced to seven years. He served three.

Fade to Grey

In prison, he met another younger woman, Diane Lumley. They moved in together after his release. That, too, didn’t last.

“Sue had promised to wait for me,” he said. “But I stopped calling her when I got seven years. I loved her. I loved ’em all.”

By then, the legend was living in a small flat in Cambridge, nursing regret and watching crime shows on TV. The villas were gone. The suits were threadbare. The sparkle, faded.

His last attempt at fame came in the form of a memoir, in which he tastelessly recounted Barbara Windsor’s bedroom antics—including her impersonating a fairy godmother in suspenders. Whatever charm Ronnie once had, it curdled at the end.

The Curtain Falls

Ronnie Knight lived long enough to become his own caricature—a villain who outlived the glamour of his crimes. A man who danced with darkness and eventually sat down beside it, wheezing and watching reruns.