Author: Steve Sinclair
ISBN No: 978-1-903854-8
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 272
Publisher: Milo Books
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Guns, gangs and door wars in Britain’s wildest town is the title of Blackpool doorman Steve Sinclair’s memoir, The Blackpool Rock.
It’s a well-written story but the page after page of punch-ups and visits to hospitals and police stations, narrow escapes from meat cleavers, and all the swearing, is, frankly, exhausting. Two of the more entertaining but come to think of it still violent stories are of Sinclair while working on the QE2 going five rounds with the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard; and the time he had a Blackpool town centre club when his head doorman killed a ‘local would-be gangster’. Or at least so they thought until they were heaving the man up to put him in a chest freezer, and he started grunting. “We ended up putting him in a shop doorway and phoning an ambulance. Thankfully the council didn’t have CCTV up then.”
Of most interest to the private security person is the ending: police ask if he will train local door supervisers, so he goes to Blackpool College for a professional certificate in education. Sinclair and another trainer have put more than 1000 people through the SIA course. There does seem to be some irony in him teaching conflict management, after a career of getting stabbed, punched, and so on, and dishing it out – besides the more routine dealing with drunks and hard cases, besides going after doormen and others (with a baseball bat) who have hurt his mates, and being shot at (and shooting back with a sawn-off shotgun) during some debt collection work on the side. Sinclair has turned 50 though he still finds himself working on north-west doors. As he sums up, some doormen have a reputation for mindless thuggery, ‘not all of it undeserved’. “But in a place like Blackpool, they do a thankless job.” As Steve Sinclair says it is not a job for the faint-hearted; and all for £9 an hour.
This book and others like it – an associated genre is football hooligan ‘firms’ stories – is not aimed at security folk but at a market: people who get a kick (pardon the pun) from reading about young men’s extreme and sudden drink-related violence. Lines like: ‘The long and short of it was he ended up on a life support machine and I ended up having to keep my heard down for a short while.’ How interesting then that a man who plainly got a reputation on the doors, but an OK from the Criminal Records Bureau, and who has the (obligatory?!) photo of himself with a sun-tanned Charlie Kray, has another photo of himself in 2005 graduating with mortar board and a qualification to teach door staff. Whether the night-time economy as it’s now called has matured too, is another question.
