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Author: George Bass
ISBN No: 9781472159427 hardcover
Review date: 19/07/2026
No of pages: 290
Publisher: Hachette
Publisher URL:
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/george-bass/what-the-bouncer-saw/9781472159427/
Year of publication: 07/05/2026
Brief:
price
£22
In its way the book by George Bass is the most important for the public reputation of the UK’s private security industry, writes Mark Rowe.
He lives in Canterbury, where he works at the local university as a security guard ‘and licensed bouncer’. It’s a job he’s done for years – a chapter late on tells how he got it, aged 25, in 2007 – ‘and I really enjoy it, getting involved with everything from fights to fire alarms, people who need support, incidents of self-harm, escorting VIPs, stopping local teenagers smashing windows and discouraging drunk students from shitting in the shared kitchen bin’.
Words
That gives the reader at the very start a clue to the author’s sense of humour and what he’s about to tell: to quote the sub-title: life on the front line of the security business’. We learn something about the security officer’s life (seldom told), and the antics of students, as seen through the lens of someone paid (albeit hardly enough to afford a family) to look after them. In fact my only gripe with this funny, always interesting book is the title: while it nods at the Joe Orton play What the Butler Saw, it hardly does justice to the range and importance of work the author (and 40 or so fellow officers at the campus) does. At worst, he’s giving life to the tired stereotype of the security officer as ‘bouncer’, although he does work the door at the student bar. The rest of the book shows that term ‘bouncer’ is doing a disservice. ‘Words are your riot shield,’ the author recalls the first head guard he knew, Connolly, saying as words of advice. The author terms his method ‘verbal jiu-jitsu’.
Early on in the book (page 31) the author tells of a shift that includes helping a female student whose mental health support worker doesn’t turn up; and ‘loads of freshers ask me for directions to their classes’, leaving him ‘talked out for the day’. As at other universities, and indeed at bus stations, town halls and hospitals, security officers are there to serve (‘we love to chat’, the author tells that female student). The author plainly has a way with words, and (like the police?) a dry humour. Words are another sort of shield, to make the absurd and sad parts of the job more palatable. The author notes that one new student ‘is carrying so many boxes that he must have come down on a goods train’. A troublesome student who’s a thread through the book is given the nickname ‘Super Nugget’ for having so much take-away food (students, this book shows, don’t have many secrets from the patrollers). The drey humour isn’t peculiar to the author; early on he recalls a workmate who was cremated to music, the song ‘Road to Hell’ by Chris Rea (‘everyone tried not to giggle’).
As for the students, the security patrollers are ‘responding to people suffering from emotional bruises’, whether self-harm (such as the student who filled his locker with canisters of nitrous oxide for a ten-second high) or not. That determines the equipment for the patroller (keys, radio and body-worn camera) and the variety of jobs (including cleaning vomit as best they can as left by freshers). When snow falls, officers do ‘path clearing duty’ with a bucket of salt and dustpan. Are they appreciated? As anywhere, and like other service jobs – bin and recycling men, and actual cleaners – some do say thanks, some say ‘you missed a spot’. Later, the author notes that a facilities manager who accidentally sent widely an email complaining that security staff are lazy, ‘phoned us once in a panic because a student had entered her office requesting an extra towel’. Early on, the author describes watching on CCTV another security officer evacuating a student housing block, and the fire brigade arrive; yet it’s the guard – whose trousers are ‘from a budget workwear catalogue’ who does the search (‘we have too many expectations placed on us’). Besides the routine, the author relates carrying a ceremonial mace down the centre aisle of Canterbury Cathedral to start a graduation (‘no dicking around’ an assistant security manager told him beforehand).
Money
The author inhabits an England that seldom makes it into hardback: a breakfast with a former workmate is at Wetherspoon’s (‘it can be lively in there sometimes, like being at work without radio support’), and rough sleepers by the roundabout at the top of the high street (the author has a pound coin in his back pocket to offer them). Money is tight. An increased direct debit for gas matters, as does getting a one-off £750 ‘hardship payment’. The author, who routinely breakfasts on porridge, has no time for the ‘online seminar delivered by an external firm on how to cope with rising prices’ if it’s done by someone on a higher wage.
Students
A thread through the book is the odd or extreme behaviour of some students, from those who the officers have to deliver eviction letters to (such as Super Nugget) to the student in the ‘silent zone’ part of the library who wants to report someone for ‘loud sniffing’. Another head-scratchingly unnecessary query is ‘where do I keep my teabags?’. The supposed adults, the staff, can be short of initiative also; the author tells of a lecturer who rings Security saying that he can’t get into a car park because the gates are shut (‘we just pushed them together to make it look like the car park was shut in an attempt to ward off the doggers and drug users’).
Conditions
As for working conditions, in 2022 the author’s name was one of the few drawn out of the ‘Christmas holiday hat’, ‘which means I’m allowed to use annual leave to book December 25 off work’. Why does he stay with the uni (it also uses agency temp guards), and doing the same sort of work? Partly, the alternatives aren’t appealing; police are ‘swamped’, while he applied to the university in the first place because he dreaded shift work at a factory so much. Partly, it pays just enough so that he can look after his family: “It didn’t matter if everyone I knew outside the job was on better wages than me: none of them looked any happier.”
