Jacquie Davis, one of a handful of female bodyguards, is part of Greymans, the Berkshire-based security and risk management company. She spoke recently on the Radio 4 Saturday Live show about her 30-year career from evading the Pakistan Army to telling Steven Spielberg she was a romantic novelist.
How did she start? “Back in the 70s I joined the police service. I quickly found out that women were not going anywhere; and one of the guys owned a security agency on the quiet and we all used to work for him; and I never looked back.” As for female bodyguards, ‘there weren’t any’. What, the interviewer, the Rev Richard Coles asked, do you need to know as a bodyguard? “All sorts of things – reconnaissance, how to do recces; how to get from A to B; map reading; you have to be aware of what’s going on around you. Defensive and evasive driving, so you know how to get out of situations. First aid. It’s not your job as a bodyguard to get into a fight; your job is to body-cover and remove your client from that situation; and leave your back-up team to deal with what is going on. Unfortunately people see these great, huge all brawn and no brain guys with pop stars and think they are bodyguards and they aren’t, they are minders, which is a huge difference.’ She gave the example of the much-photographed large minder accompanying the pop singer Britney Spears, who, she suggested, would not be able to run 50 yards. Richard Coles – ironically, once a member of the 1980s pop band The Communards – asked about celebrities. She said: “Everyone in the entertainment world gets their problems. They can be blackmailed; you get a fan who can become a stalker; or the person who has genuine problems you don’t read about in the newspapers, which we deal with.’ It suited her that people around her client did not take her in as a guard: “Very often they are thinking I am the wife, the mistress, or the PA, which is great; because if they should be an attack there is an element of surprise, which will come from me.” So there are attacks? “In this country, not so much. But I have been all over the world in the last couple of years on quite a sensitive job and we have been able to stay one or two steps ahead of people who wanted to assassinate my client.” She recalled being chased through Pakistan having rescued a hostage, and then chased by the Pakistan Army, having to cross mountains into India. She then remembered her training in the Brecon Beacons.
On a lighter note, Coles asked if she was ever asked to look after someone she did not want to? She agreed. She tends to look after higher-risk clients than pop stars, who she termed ‘very trying and very exasperating’. She spoke of an unidentified American client who her company was doing a fraud investigation for; every time the client was given news, it appeared in the National Enquirer newspaper – the client ‘just decided to blow it to the world’.
On that note, she agreed the job needed patience: “Trust me, our work is not all glamour, it can be very boring sometimes. The days of standing around in hotel corridors are over, because most of the time we use covert cameras.” That is, whereas in the 1980s and 90s guards would stand in hotel corridors, so as to challenge anyone who got out of the lift, now monitoring can be by CCTV, to make guarding more discreet, and less of an intrusion on the client, who after all has a life. “I was with JK Rowling for many years on Harry Potter tours; ‘you poor woman’, I used to think, ‘every time you turn around, I am there’.” On that point, she agreed that a bodyguard can become an important member of the VIP’s circle: “Especially if you are looking after teenagers, they are hugely influenced by you; so you have to be very careful. If you have some Middle East children, they don’t always have boundaries, so you have to draw them in.” she gave the example of an unnamed princess who asked, before Jacquie went on a break, for a puppy, a tiger cub and a baby. Jacquie said that she could only provide the puppy. On Jacquie’s return, the princess had her wished-for baby.
Jokingly as an ex-pop star now a broadcaster, Coles asked how much it would cost to hire a bodyguard for himself. While Jacquie said: “It would absolutely depend on the risk factor,” she added that ‘low risk’ would cost £600 upwards a day. Coles asked about ‘hairy corners’, and the cliché that you have to be prepared to take a bullet. She answered: “Absolutely. It isn’t because you are a hero,” as the actor Kevin Costner dived across the stage to save Whitney Houston in the Hollywood film, The Bodyguard. “Your training would automatically kick in. If you are well trained, you shouldn’t be in that situation, because you are seeing what is going on and I have a belief the day you are born it is already mapped out [what is going to happen to you].” She added: “I lost a couple of colleagues in Iraq who were private bodyguards and a suicide bomb drove up beside them; and I have worked with these people around the world, and thought they were invincible. That was a shock to the system.”
As for what she tells people about her work, she said: “I just tell people I am a PE teacher, because I don’t want to have that conversation. I am either going to get some macho guy saying, don’t be ridiculous, you are a woman’.” She added that she is friends with the former SAS soldier now best-selling novelist Chris Ryan, who has a similar problem: “Someone in the pub always wants to take you on – unless you are paying me to hit you I am not going to hit you’.” She recalled even telling the actor Denzil Washington at a party that she was a PE teacher. Apart from her job, she said: “I love making and icing wedding cakes. But I am not interested in the latest Mulberry handbag; I would rather test the latest AK47.” As for how she came to be in such a man’s world, she explained that she was a youngest child and the ‘boy my father never had’ and so was always tinkering with the car, changing oil and spark plugs and the like, unlike her sisters.
Do you bear the scars of your chosen profession? Coles asked. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t know what I know; sometimes I wish the world was a wonderful place. I see the bad side of the world, the cruel side of the world; and sometimes it gets you down a bit.” Her husband is now dead but while alive the couple were married to their jobs ‘and then to each other’.
Fellow guest on the R4 Saturday morning programme on July 11, the entrepreneur James Palumbo, then spoke of how he had to go to work wearing a bullet-proof vest – ‘terrifying’ – because he took on the drug dealers at his nightclub, the Ministry of Sound. While a club might hold 2000 people and take £30,000 or more a night, the drug take at the peak of the ecstasy boom was more. “It’s big, big business, and it was controlled by the door team.” At first Palumbo was naïve and did not understand what was going on. When he did, he found there was no reasoning with the doormen. Palumbo gave the example of collaring a drug dealer and asking a doorman to search the man. According to the doorman, a pat-down turned nothing up. Palumbo then pulled out a huge bag of tablets from the man’s pocket. “Not being able to reason with them, I had to bring the police in, in a very covert way and circumnavigate my own security team.”<br><br>For more including a link to the Greymans website, visit the Radio 4 website –
