A sign outside the Chelsea Football Club training ground in the swish Surrey village of Cobham says that players will not sign autographs – but Mark Rowe found one man in Cobham who will sign: veteran private investigator (PI) Peter Heims.
The loan by new Loughborough University security management lecturer Danie Adendorff of Peter Heims’ 1982 book Countering Industrial Espionage gave me the idea of visiting Peter. At 81 he is still going strong and not quite retired. Three years ago, in Las Vegas, he was presented with the title of ‘world’s oldest private detective’ and as he noted, it’s not been officially challenged by anyone older – although he’s not sure if it’s something to boast about. Cobham has become famous lately as the home of the Chelsea FC training ground and hence home to many of that team’s players. As I have never been inside a Premier League footballer’s home I am unable to compare it with Peter’s. Suffice to say Peter’s wife Iris let me in the front door and took me to Peter’s study. The couple have been very much co-workers, in the PI and related fields. My first task was to hand to Peter Danie’s copy of his book, and ask Peter (without asking Danie first!?) to sign it. Peter did, and then produced another copy, which he signed for me, with a kind word also. As he wrote I took in his study. Spotless like the rest of his home, the room had glass cabinets holding books – I recognised Advanced Surveillance by Peter Jenkins, a Who’s Who, a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Churchill’s History of the Second World War, dictionaries, and many A-Z county atlases. On the walls were many framed photos. Some you can see on Peter’s website www.peterheims.com and indeed you can read an interview with Peter from a Rotary Club magazine. As a sign of how social attitudes have changed, Peter recalled wryly that when he joined Rotary the reaction was, ‘oh dear, do we need somebody like that in our Rotary club?’ Peter was accepted, and among the many certificates and awards on his walls – I noticed a Guild of Security Professionals one – was one from the Rotary Club of Leatherhead. Clearly Peter has been respectable enough.
And he has long been a prominent figure in UK private investigation, for example as a past president of the Association of British Investigators (ABI), and as its public face; as a public speaker and a campaigner for regulation of UK private security. In the Commons debate before the Private Security Industry Act 2001, Bruce George MP name-dropped Peter Heims. How ironic that the PSIA named private investigators as a sector for licensing, and ten years on, no badging, and the Coalition Government that proposed abolishing the Security Industry Authority seems uninterested in regulating PIs. Peter said he was ‘fed up’: “I have given up with the SIA. I am very disillusioned.” However Peter came across above all as still being active and interested – when he joked that he had become a private investigator, ‘oh, 90 years ago’, his computer behind my seat surprised me by making a bonging noise, to tell (I presumed) of incoming mail. Peter in fact is only in his seventh (!) decade as a PI, having started in a Surbiton agency in 1953 after he served in the Army. He was a para, and indeed I saw that he was wearing a Parachute Regiment tie. He said: “When I came out of the forces I knew exactly what I wanted to do, I wanted to be a policeman.” He tried for the Met, Surrey Police, the river police, and another force but – he was too short. And to prove his point Peter stood behind his desk. The police turned him down. “I was devastated.” He tried a few jobs; and someone gave him the idea of the ‘next best thing’ to the police – a private detective agency. Peter made a list of a dozen or so London and local detective agencies – he was living at Hampton Hill in Middlesex, where he had been a grammar school boy – and went around them. Typically elderly former policemen were running them and as Peter recalled, they ‘all took one look and said, what experience have you?’ Peter had no experience, and got nowhere. Eventually he called on an agency in Surbiton, run by Queenie Davis, who employed two staff. One had walked out an hour before Peter called. She had a job that had to be done, that night. Peter could do that job, and if he did it reasonably, a full-time job was his. “Whatever it was, I did it ok,” Peter recalled, “because I got the job with her. I worked with her for two years, and then bought her out.” In those days the PI’s life was largely tracing debtors and divorce work, largely, as Peter said, done by former policemen. He had the idea that what happens in the USA today, happens in the UK tomorrow; and that way, by seeing what American businesses were doing, he would stay ahead. Peter for a time was in guarding – a company called Twentieth Century Security – and published a monthly security magazine. He was besides until quite recently editor of the quarterly magazine of the ABI (Eric Shelmerdine now in that seat). As Peter wrote at the start of his 1982 espionage book, he worked too as a consultant: “Security has always been concerned with such bread and butter problems as the protection of premises, safeguards against fraud and theft, the vetting of staff and the transport of valuables. But these things, in security terms, are elementary when compared with the wider, and increasing problem of industrial espionage, which has grown alarmingly in this country and abroad, particularly in the United States.” I talked with Peter on the theme of how in some ways, naturally, the book had dated – computers 30 years ago might be the size of rooms (reading punch cards), and there were such things as typewriters and carbon paper. Yet in other ways the book was as relevant now as then – commercial competitors might ‘bug’ rooms, steal information, corrupt workers, even insert ‘sleepers’ as members of staff to spy from inside. Peter pointed out that it’s an off-shoot of state spying. In the 1980s the Cold War with Russia was still running; other nations, now, are our commercial rivals. As Peter told me, most industrial espionage cases are not publicised. They may not be discovered, or the businessman who does discover the espionage does not want it to be public, in case he is laughed at, or his business suffers. And in any case, how many cases (of hacking of mobile phones for instance) ever reach court? A great advance since the book is the internet, which as Peter said has opened a lot of fields for the private investigator. On the other hand, Peter said, the Data Protection Act has gone against private investigators. For more about Peter, visit www.peterheims.com; or see him, and Iris, at the ABI annual conference in Leicester in April.
