A commercial forerunner of the guarding firm G4S lost its crown at the end of the 1960s; because of official sensitivity about such a symbol, a file at the National Archives at Kew shows.
File HO 290/57 shows that the Home Office didn’t like Factoryguards’ use of a crown. As one civil servant minuted, although the crown as used by firm (an arm of Group 4) came with four arches (pictured) which was unlike the British royal crown, ‘the elaborate design together with the fact that the crown is surmounted by a similar mound and cross as in a royal crown would undoubtedly be taken by most people to be a royal crown and convey the impression that its wearer possessed if not police authority official or government authority of some kind. This seems to be what the firm intends to imply and if so it is highly objectionable.’
Like some other security firms of the era, Group 4 had among its directors senior retired figures from the civil service and police; partly to make such young firms look respectable and to head off criticism – such as, that private security was seeking to impersonate or take over from the police. The company chairman and a director was Sir Ronald Hoare, a former deputy police commissioner. Among the other directors was Lord Mancroft, a former Home Office parliamentary secretary of state. The managing director was Jorgen Philip-Sorgensen, a mainstay of the British security industry in the last third of the 20th century, and based in Broadway on the edge of the Cotswolds. In January 1970, the company’s secretary DEW Taylor, wrote that the company would discontinue the use of any type of crown, ‘as it is certainly not our intention to create a false impression in the minds of the public that our employees have some official standing or are government employees.’
Among themselves, the Home Office officials admitted that their stance could have been tricky; because an alternative crown that Factoryguards offered was not a royal emblem, and the consent of Queen Elizabeth II was not necessary. But as a letter from the Home Office to the company put it in January 1970, ‘it could be mistaken particularly at a passing glance by the man in the street who is not knowledgeable enough to distinguish between one type of crown and another for a symbol of royalty’. A sign that Factoryguards had been seeking to gain, however subtly, a royal cachet was that alternatives were around, including its own; their headed notepaper carried a design of an owl, standing above crossed keys.
The origin of the dispute showed deeper forces were at play, A letter from AJ Smith, of 86 Lincoln Road, Redcar, went to his local MP. Smith began by describing himself as an ex-police officer ‘and after long service’ now an industrial shift security officer for ICI nearby. He wrote: “I am very concerned as our many of my police colleagues and other industrial security officers about the manner in which profit making security firms are imposing deceptive impressions of ‘official backing’ upon the public. They wear uniforms with all sorts of insignia upon them and to the uninitiated could easily be mistaken for police officers, especially as they move about on the public roads often in official looking vehicles fitted with radio.’ The police, then, were jealous of their monopoly of public order policing; Group 4 arms did cash in transit besides. The MP passed the letter straight to the Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, for him to take up.
Smith added: “We in industrial security have always tried to keep our uniforms and insignia within the scope of the regulations which govern the wearing of uniforms which resemble those worn by the police but it would appear that no such control is imposed on those mushroom profit making firms.”
As the law stood, the Police Act 1964 made the wearing of a uniform to deceive the public an offence; a 1930s Public Order Act had similarly outlawed wearing of military uniforms (to combat Mosley’s Blackshirts). The police, as the file pointed out, watched security uniforms closely.
