When did guarding begin?
When the first cavemen made someone stand by the door of his cave, to keep a watch for animals, or other humans? There is a debate among pre-historians about whether the earliest men lived in harmony or whether as soon as they organised into groups they began fighting each other. Certainly before recorded history in Britain, Iron Age settlements were on hills and had perimeter walls, presumably guarded, in case of attack.
But just as traditionally the police (see the Metropolitan Police website http://www.met.police.uk/history/archives.htm) trace their origins to the Bow Street Runners of 18th century London, so can the origins of private security guards be traced to that time and place. Certainly you can only wonder at the lack of guarding that allowed Guy Fawkes in 1605 to rent a cellar under the then Houses of Parliament and sail barrels of gunpowder across the Thames to blow up the opening of parliament. It was foiled not by a guard but by a letter from a conspirator to someone attending the opening, warning him against going. The man let the authorities know, and a search of the premises caught Fawkes.
In a city like 1700s London housing hundreds of thousands of people, without the basic public conveniences we take for granted such as street lighting and until the Bow Street Runners a police force that enforced the rule of law as passed in the courts, citizens had to look to themselves. The wealthy had servants to guard their persons and property from thieves and highwaymen.
But as for commercial organisations that offered guarding as a service, most likely the most ancient is The Corps of Commissionaires. Today called The Corps, it majors on CCTV monitoring. Yet it w as founded as a result of a public outcry after the Crimean War (1854-6) when returning soldiers were out of a job and might have nowhere to turn. Charitable Victorian society set up the Corps to offer deserving veterans a job as a doorman. For more details see the Corps website: http://www.the-corps.co.uk/htmlsite/aboutus.asp
Similarly, the British Legion, set up after the First World War, established the Royal British Legion Attendants Company (RBLA) in 1928, as a charity to provide employment to ex-servicemen and women. That majored to this day on car park security and attendance, these days called Legion Security. The Corps and Legion have each histories of their company. For Legion’s, called Charity in Company, visit http://www.legionsecurity.co.uk/news.php
The two firms that make up G4S – Group 4 and Securicor can both trace their origins to before the Second World War, in Denmark and London respectively. The year 1940 incidentally saw a spurt in demand for commissionaires at factories and municipal buildings, to keep out spies, saboteurs and fifth columnists.
The nightwatchman is the stereotype that you have to get around in the past of guarding. Like all stereotypes, there is a grain of truth surrounded by myth. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp was among other things once a nightwatchman. During his decades of speaking in favour of regulation for security guard, Bruce George MP reminisced about how weekend guards might be recruited from tramps on a Friday night and at an extreme would not be relieved until the Monday morning. Yet the guarding forces of Rolls-Royce and other large workplaces would have been horrified to be lumped with such a stereotype, conjuring up images of shivering around a brazier. There were always what you could call the upper and lower end of the guarding market – for every grimy factory that did have a night watch warming their hands and stamping their feet, there were the immaculately-turned out Corps of Commissionaires at prestige events such as the Wimbledon tennis fortnight (though Securicor got the contract, which their successor firm has to this day). Some of the work of a security guard today was once part of the beat bobby’s tasks – to check premises on their patch were locked and secure. Equally, cash in transit was in the hands of the police. Broadly speaking, we can trace the rise of private guarding to the surge since the 1950s of recorded and reported acquisitive crime (to say nothing of the low-level crime that goes unrecorded by police, or unreported – not the same thing!) And, we can trace that surge in crime either to social changes or the simple fact that more cars and personal and commercial property got stolen because there was more of it about, as people became better-off. In retail, there has always been staff and customer theft, but the modern self-service store began replacing the behind the counter service in a big way after the 1940s. So loss prevention, retail guarding, had to respond to the retail trend of making it easier for customers to serve themselves – which made it easier for customers to walk out without paying. Frances Clarke, the retail guarding firm, began in Yorkshire the 1970s, working for a rising retail chain by the name of ASDA; recently Frances Clarke was acquired by Antec.
Broadly speaking, as crime rose, and the police struggled to respond to that rise – detection rates falling, especially in London – so private security filled the gap. But it is possible to overplay that change from relying on police to turning to private security. People were loath to give up on the police, who they had paid for in taxes, after all. Take the case of policing of football stadia, which were wracked by hooliganism from the 1960s. Football clubs responded not by turning to private guarding, but by bringing in (and paying for) police. Only in the 1990s, after the Hillsborough disaster in a South Yorkshire Police-policed FA Cup semi-final, did football grounds look to police themselves, largely with private stewards, making at many games uniformed police a minority or even a rarity.
As for style of guarding, it aped the uniforms and methods of the places the guards had come from – the police, and the military. The private guards were employed as authority figures, doing the jobs that the police could not or would not do. Think of the Group 4 guards at the Newbury bypass protests, and the Shell security staff who evicted Greenpeace protesters from the Brent Spar oil rig in the North Sea.
We can trace a line from a generation ago to the present state of guarding in two ways. First, the police and government accepted that they could not prevent crime by themselves, made law in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. At ground level, there had always been work between guards and police constables – as already mentioned, there was some overlap between work in the police and prison service, and private security, and a common background in the armed services, perhaps. It was arguably at command level that police held their noses in dealings with private security. The sheer torrent of crime, especially so-called low-level crime such as anti-social behaviour and shoplifting, was more than the police could deal with. Private security became a partner, from crime and disorder partnerships to Project Griffin, whereby in incidents such as 7-7 private security staff stand on police-erected cordons, alongside police officers.
The second line is the service that the guards – who are after all part of the service sector – offer. Gone, largely, is the militaristic uniform and attitude. In a shopping centre, or bank, where the client wants above all to offer friendly service to a paying customer, the guard wears a softer uniform and (to use the jargon) a customer-focused approach is prized. The security guard is as likely to have to look after a lost child (and calm an alarmed parent) as frog-march a trouble-maker or thief out the door. This change in the face of guarding matches change in business who are after all paying the wages, just like the medieval baron who was paying his guards, presumably to look tough and enforce the over-mighty subject’s rule on his land, rather than rescue damsels in distress.
It is instructive, when on a journey into a city, whether by car or on public transport, to watch for the times you come into contact with a private security guard, and a police officer. A guard may check your ticket at a barrier at the railway station; or may be at the gate at the car park; a guard stands on the entrance of a supermarket; a receptionist-guard will hand out a pass at the place you are visiting. There have always been gate-keepers. But it is fair to point to a sweeping change in the way business is done, mirrored by a change in the guarding. To take the media, there is a world of difference between the old Fleet Street, that broke up in the 1980s, and ‘Fortress Wapping’ and the new home of national newspapers at Canary Wharf. Sir Max Hastings in his memoir of editing the Daily Telegraph newspaper, recalled how in the mid-1980s when he became editor of the Telegraph then in Fleet Street (now in London Docklands) even though the Telegraph had a doorman, when the then plain Max Hastings came into work, he would rouse a tramp who had come in the night, for shelter out of the cold. Electronic access control has secured workplaces too, since those innocent days.
