Author: Mick Upton
ISBN No: 9781 904 031 5
Review date: 14/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher: Entertainment Technology Press
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Authors did it, got the t-shirt: A couple of books under the umbrella of Buckinghamshire New University are outstanding guides to close protection (CP) and the UK leisure security sector.
They do overlap in that VIPs and stars of entertainment require guarding. Mick Upton who wrote the later book – From Ancient Rome to Rock N Roll – does quote from Geoffrey Padgham’s earlier one, about CP. As the title suggests, Mick does cover mainly the history of his sector – I say his sector on purpose because he was one of the makers of UK stadium and stage private security, the founder of ShowSec. As he admits with typical honesty and humour, that name came off the cuff when the BBC asked for a company name for contract purposes. Some of the book is given over to his career which, true, can often be of more interest to the writer than the reader, but Mick’s story is dizzily outstanding. For instance: he helped save Michael Jackson (and fellow legit security staff) from a beating or worse by Liverpool rogues; once parked Paul McCartney’s Rolls Royce; and – as a tale involving a Kray seems to be compulsory – had to intervene when Charlie Kray was selling t-shirts at a Bob Dylan concert. Leisure security is a small world and other veterans and pioneers such as Mark Harding, Terry Wise and Mark Hamilton are all there.
Monsters of Rock
If you think this name-dropping and tales of past decades is entertaining but not of use today, you pull up short as Mick tells of the two deaths at the 1988 Monsters of Rock open-air concert at Donnington. He was head of security and crowd management. Even though Mick was a witness, he writes unemotionally, no doubt deliberately, and the reader has to imagine how it was to find those last two casualties face down in mud: “At first I did not realise that they were people.” As he writes later, ‘the leisure security industry has had to learn some very hard lessons’. He ends by admitting the sector ‘has not always enjoyed a good relationship with the police and some might argue that this is still the case’. However police officers are among takers of the crowd management and security courses at Buckinghamshire. Most touching of all – which says it all about his pursuit of learning, to help the sector he helped to set up – he describes at the start going around the Colosseum in Rome, measuring and working out the similarities with today’s stadia – even the separate gates for VIPs. However today’s venues lack entry points for lions and exit points for dead gladiators!? p
Skills
The full title of Padgham’s book is Close Protection: The softer skills. He makes the contentious yet valid point that ‘hard skills’ – carrying firearms, for one thing – are rarely used. Indeed, he gives the cases of the assassination attempts on presidents Reagan and Sadat, where armed security staff were around, but in the confusion a reaction took time – too long to save Sadat. Chapters cover threat assessment and profiling; standards of dress and diplomacy; communications; planning and the dilemmas of blending in with the principal, while being neither over-protecting nor a yes-man. It’s only fair to bring in here Kevin Horak of Clearwater Special Projects’ book, The New Bodyguard. (See also Modern Bodyguard by Peter Consterdine, www.peterconsterdine.com). Rather than rank one above the other, suffice to say Horak’s is longer (and dearer) and goes into more detail of what the individual CP or team should do, say, to prepare for a car journey or trip away, and so on.
Skills
Both men cover similar ground. Both stress the need for good personal habits: give up smoking, Padgham advises. To be fair Padgham does not claim his book is a ‘definitive guide. He ends: “The days of the thug-like individual undertaking the bodyguard role will never go away, but it is undoubtedly in decline … The mandatory SIA CP licensing system is not perfect, but provided it is policed effectively it will have a positive and profound effect …” Padgham like Horak do as they recommend: they don’t tell tales about past principals. Padgham was a career Met Police man who was for 17 years a personal protection officer for HRH Prince Andrew. Retiring in 2001, he has since worked with Buckinghamshire; and, again, leading by example, has a foundation degree in protective security management. He’s training director of the Hereford-based trainers Anubis. Padgham, like Mick Upton, warns against becoming too over-familiar with the principal you are protecting, who is often your employer. Upton advises: when you come home, leave your tour jacket behind – that is, don’t fall into the trap of thinking private jets and five-star hotels and (literally?!) rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous is real. You are an employee. Bodyguarding is 14-hour, seven-day week stuff and tiring. Besides kidnap attempts and stalking, some people simply get a kick out of insulting celebrities – even, according to an anecdote of Upton’s, after getting the star’s autograph! An overlap between close protection and more general, leisure leisure security is the ‘don’t you know who I am?!’ rant from people trying to get back-stage without an invite. Upton adds that his usual answer was: “No, I don’t know who you are and what’s more I couldn’t care less who you are.” To the best of his knowledge he never turned away a genuine person.
Style
Just a last line to praise both books as authoritative and yet easy reads – less easy to pull off than it sounds – and the fine presentation. It all reflects well on Bucks New University.
Also Close Protection – The Softer Skills, by Geoffrey Padgham , 2006, ISBN 9781 904 031 390. £11.95.
And for more about Bucks courses in crowd management and security visit www.crowdsafetymanagement.co.uk
