‘Every knuckle tells a story’ [Photo courtesy of Steven Cantor]

ALLAN Crossley could bench press the trunk of a tree, break a brick with his bare hands and defend nightclubs from gangs of marauding gunmen – but he was also “a very caring individual” and a committed Christian with a deeply held faith in God.

Mr Crossley, who died in late June, lived in Tufnell Park and swam for many years at Highgate Men’s Ponds.

“He cut a “formidable” figure, according to his friend Alan Polling, and was crowned Britain’s Strongest Man in 1984.

Mr Polling first met Mr Crossley in the 1980s, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, a Baptist church in Elephant and Castle where the “strongman” worshipped until he died.

He said: “He was a very big character. He was a physically big fellow and a big personality.

“He worked – rather oddly, for somebody who was a person of evangelical faith – as a bouncer for nightclubs. That’s what he did for a living.

“I never found him personally scary, I found him very friendly.

“But I can well imagine people could have found him pretty formidable – you certainly would have found him pretty formidable if you’d been misbehaving outside a nightclub.

“Most Sundays I would see him, and he used to

come on this motorbike – he had a big motorbike. It might have been a Harley Davidson.”

He added: “A lot of our conversations were around matters of faith and his concerns for people. He was a very caring individual, I thought.”

Mr Crossley, who was born in Northern Ireland in the early 1950s, was well-known across Camden.

According to tailor Chris Ruocco, who met Mr Crossley at the men’s bathing ponds, he worked as a bouncer at Camden Palace (now Koko), and his favourite food was steak.

“He was steak man,” Mr Ruocco said.

As a bouncer and Britain’s strongest man, Mr Crossley attracted much media attention.

He was interviewed as part of a documentary, entitled Bounce: Behind the Velvet Rope, by the American director Steven Cantor.

Mr Cantor told the New Journal: “He was a tough guy – I wouldn’t want to run into him in a club.

“His life was between eating and working out.

We filmed with him for about two days and he was incredibly strong, but not in the way where you’d look at him and think he’s a bodybuilder. He could kick your ass.”

“At one point he said, ‘weapons are my family’ – that’s become a running joke in my production company. But he was a cool dude, he was tough,” he added.

In Bounce, Mr Crossley said of his hands: “Every knuckle tells a story: [I’ve] got cuts and marks from people’s teeth, but each one of them teeth was a lesson for the person that got hit with them, they can either walk away or be carried away.”

Mr Crossley was also featured in a BBC documentary, where he is filmed bench pressing the trunk of a tree and breaking a brick with his bare hands before diving into the Men’s Ponds in Hampstead Heath.

Mr Polling said: “All this training comes in handy for this line of work – we’ve had times when gangs of people have attacked the club with guns, iron bars… coming in through the windows 12-handed because they couldn’t get in the doors.

“We’ve had loads of those sort of things happen to us over the years: we’ve had cars driven at us, petrol bombs, [we’ve been] shot at, gangs fighting outside… using fire extinguishers to hose them down on a cold night, but I can only say that I put it down to the grace of God that I’m still standing all in one piece,” he added.

“I like to be fair doing this job. It’s sometimes a bit hard: you’re branded as a thug, yet you’ve saved umpteen lives, you’ve stopped umpteen fights.

“The police know that without people like me, these places wouldn’t be safe for the public to go to.”