On the streets of Fulham, Barry George’s increasingly bizarre and eccentric behaviour meant he was the social misfit to be avoided.

City traders, shop staff and predominantly lone women all came to have personal experience of the fantasy world that ‘Mad Barry’ inhabited.

Some he would pester as Barry Bulsara, the cousin of Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen whose real name was Farookh Bulsara.

Others he would stop to boast about being Tom Palmer, the SAS corporal and first man to burst through the windows of the Iranian Embassy during the 1980 siege.

Sometimes he would pursue his prey on roller skates claiming to be a stuntman called Steve Majors, taking the surname of the actor Lee Majors, and the first name of his character Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man whom Mr George idolised.

From an early age he had learned to retreat into a made up world to escape his social ineptness.

Born at Hammersmith Hospital on April 15, 1960, his father Alfred George, 29, was a truck driver known as Paddy, and his mother Margaret, 24, was Irish. He was the youngest of three children, his sisters Michelle, five, and Susan, three.

Susan, received the majority of their mother’s attention because she suffered epilepsy, a condition that was to kill her at 28 when she swallowed her tongue during a fit. Mr George was also later diagnosed with the condition.

Aged just seven, Mr George became withdrawn when his parents’ marriage collapsed. He attended four primary schools where teachers were concerned bullying meant he had become lost in a world of his own.

His parents’ divorce and the realisation his father was not returning home devastated him.

It was after being sent to a special needs school in Sunningdale that his fantasies began to emerge; teachers recalled his obsession with Gary Glitter and how he wanted to be called Paul Gadd, the singer’s real name.

His obsession with firearms - police found photographs of him brandishing numerous weapons and a pamphlet titled Ambush and Counter Ambush’ at his bedsit - may have begun at the school’s rifle range.

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