Mr Knox's cousin, Vicky May, 16, said he was more like her big brother.

She said: “You never think it will happen to you. Rob wasn’t a thug, it wasn’t gang-related. Everyone loved him. He was more like a brother, he would always look out for me. He was friends with so many people.”

Vicky was enjoying a night out when she was told her cousin had been stabbed.

Relatives travelled with him in the ambulance whilst she went home to care for her younger brother.

Mr Knox, 18, had a younger brother, Jamie.

Vicky said: “They were like one.”

Friend Liberty Butcher said: “He would never start an argument. He would have been the one to stick up for someone. He had so much going for him.”

Rob was formerly a pupil at Beths Grammar School.

Rob’s friend Tom Hopkins, 18, who plays football for Southend United youth team, pinned down a man armed with a knife outside the bar with the help of friend Tarik Ozress, 17.

The pair wrestled with him for several minutes before police arrived.

Tom was stabbed in the head during the struggle.

He said: “Rob was just trying to help out. He was like that. I grabbed the knife, I didn’t know at the time that he had another knife. It was just chaos.”

Friends said Rob and younger brother Jamie were trying to protect each other during the fight.

They said there had been a row over a phone last week and they believe this could have been revenge attack.

During the fight Nick Jones, 19, was also stabbed in the hand and Charlie Grimley, 17 was stabbed in the cheek and arm.

Flowers have been piled where the teenager died.

One tribute read: “The flowers will die, the sun will set, you are someone I will never forget.”

Rob told in a newspaper interview in 2004 about how he had coped with bullying at a previous school.

He revealed that he had been picked on which had resulted in him moving to Beths Grammar school.

He said that for three years he had been the victim of a bullying campaign.

He said: “I am totally different now. I used to be so unconfident because of my weight and the bullying. But nothing gets to me now.

“I have always been quite a chubby child but it wasn’t until I went to Secondary School that I got bullied for it.

“I tried not to let it get to me but it hurt. I was at a new school and was really trying to make new friends but there was a group of ten boys who made it impossible.

“The bullying got so bad I dreaded going into school. They used to push me and beat me up in the corridor or outside in the school grounds.

“I started really hating myself. I didn’t like what I saw.”