Bad characters in Beatles songs | Page 3 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

The man in the crowd with the multicoloured mirrors on his hobnail boots

Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime

A soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust

So the first two lines are clearly a dirty rotten pickpocket but then it gets weird on the third line 

I think it can be read both ways. Here’s a nice interpretation:

Quoting Derek Taylor from here:

“‘The Man in the crowd with multi-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots’ was form something I’d seen in a newspaper about a Manchester City soccer fan who had been arrested by the police for having mirrors on the toe caps of his shoes so that he could look up girls’ skirts. We thought this was an incredibly complicated and tortuous way of getting a cheap thrill and so that became ‘multi-coloured mirrors’ and ‘hobnail boots’ to fit the rhythm. A bit of poetic license,” adds Taylor. “The bit about ‘lying with his eyes while his hand were working overtime’ came form another thing I’d read where a man wearing a cloak and fake plastic hands, which he would rest on the counter of a shop while underneath the cloak he was busy lifting things and stuffing them in a bag around his waist.

“I don’t know where the ‘soap impression of his wife’ came from but the eating of something and then donating it ‘to the National Trust’ came from conversation he’d had about the horrors of walking in public spaces on Merseyside, where you were always coming across the evidence of people having crapped behind bushes and in old air raid shelters. So to donate what you’ve eaten to the National Trust (a British organization with responsibilities for upkeeping countryside of great beauty) was what would now be known as ‘defecation on common land owned by the National Trust.’ When John put it all together, it created a series of layers of images. It was like a whole mess of colour,” Taylor concludes.