The stories about Iron Foot Jack are endless – but which are true?

IT has been hard to take the disc jockey Mike Read seriously since he wrote and performed the “UKIP Calypso” for Nigel Farage’s party back in 2014.

There he was, conjuring up a faux Jamaican accent and branding anybody who didn’t find it all just a bit of fun as humourless. I mean, lighten up guys!

So it’s conflicting to all good woke columnists like your dear Harrington to turn on Talking Pictures – just past the movie channels on your cable box – and see Read on top form in the regular slot called The Footage Detectives.

He can be found in a memorabilia shed with the channel’s smart creator, Noel Cronin, rifling through old reels and marvelling at how things used to be.

That in itself might sound a bit UKIP Calypso-y but you don’t have to hate all this modern technology that they have now, adore GB News, nor even think anybody who isn’t British is somehow both creaming unemployment benefits while taking all the jobs, to enjoy a bit of celluloid time travel.

And Read and Cronin do a good job explaining how old black and white films were shot and spotting faces and places from what seems like a neverending supply forgotten footage.

An army of wry letter writers keep it chugging along and, while the pace is unchallengingly lilting, there are usually two or three segments that will make you smile in each episode.

It was this show which reminded me of the legend of Iron Foot Jack – a character recently mentioned by Read but who walked these streets long before my own time conniving in the West End’s watering holes.

People used to come to the area, Read suggested, just to see if they could see the parish raconteur known for his metal boot.

At some stage, his right leg had been shortened after an accident but everybody who remembers his gait has a different account to what that accident was.

Jack Neave was his name, an Australian in London and a nightclub owner who enjoyed being known as “the King of the Bohemians”.

He was sentenced to hard labour in the 1930s after being found guilty of running a disorderly house in relation to the Caravan Club in Endell Street near Covent Garden.

By the 1950s, he was almost ever present on the Soho streets, often up to some mysterious scheme to raise a few pennies. You could see him in The French, the long-gone coffee house in Old Compton Street.

“I came to know many a famous old Bohemian bore such as Iron Foot Jack, with his pocketful of yellowing press cuttings,” the late jazz singer George Melly wrote in his memoirs.

“Jack, dressed in a wide hat, cloak and knotted scarf and smelling like a goat in rut, claimed that his six-inch iron foot was the result of losing part of his leg to a passing shark, an unlikely explanation as he had retained the foot itself.”

Jack was buried in Hampstead Cemetery after his death in 1959 but in the right cafes and bars people still share stories about what he may or may not have done, each telling getting slightly more colourful.

And he’s still getting a mention from the nicely sentimental nostalgia addicts at Talking Pictures.

If you remember him or one of his crazy schemes or stories, do write in and tell us about them.