Author: Brian Samways
ISBN No: 9780-9574725-6-3
Review date: 20/04/2024
No of pages: 180
Publisher: Forces & Corporate Publishing
Publisher URL:
www.forcespublishing.co.uk
Year of publication: 13/05/2016
Brief:
Protect & Secure: My 30 years in the contract security industry 1980-2010, by Brian Samways, is a rare, interesting and welcome window on manned guarding company management from the 1980s on. With Brian's agreement, we offer here an extract. Protect & Secure is for sale on Amazon; or directly from the author, priced £8.25 plus £1.80 postage and packing. Published 2016 by Forces & Corporate Publishing, ISBN 9780-9574725-6-3.
price
£8.25
Late in 1984, Brian Samways joined Paramount, then a guarding company based on the Great West Road in Brentford, west London ….
One of my earliest contracts I acquired after I joined Paramount was the Penguin Books Warehouse and Distribution Centre on Bath Road, Harmondsworth, opposite Heathrow Airport. Penguin Books had been founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane, VK Krishna and Alan’s brothers, Richard and John Lane, although Sir Allen was the dominant character in the company.
At the time I acquired the contract the Pearson Group were the owners and our task was to provide a security officer, seven nights a week (a total of 84 man hours) based in reception, to regularly patrol the offices and particularly the warehouse, (which contained thousands of publications, those awaiting despatch and those returned for pulping), in a security and fire prevention role. My contact within the company was Ken Ife, who answered directly to Nigel Eastment and I enjoyed a good relationship with both of them. Penguin Books had a history of being quite controversial on the subject matter it published and, on two past occasions this had led to lengthy court actions. The first was the publication of DH Lawrence’s book ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ which took place in No 1 Court at the Old Bailey, under the Obscene Publications Act 1959; however the court found in favour of Penguin Books, which at the time was said to be one of the most significant events in post war literary history, probably heralding the arrival of the more liberal permissive society. The second case concerned the publication of ‘Fanny Hill’ a book by John Cleland in 1964, but once again the court found in favour of Penguin Books. These trials, however, did not provoke anywhere near the protest and reaction it received when they decided to publish Salman Rushdie’s novel, ‘Satanic Verses’, a book of fiction about the prophet Muhammad.
Salman Rushdie, twice winner of the Whitbread Literary Prize, could not have imagined the worldwide condemnation his book would evoke throughout the entire Muslim world, who considered it blasphemous. The protests reached a peak in 1989, when the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a Fatwa (a legal document issued by a Muslim cleric) calling for the death of Rushdie. Rushdie went into hiding as the threat to his life was real and imminent and the inferred threat to Penguin Books, the publishers of the so-called blasphemous book, was more than a possibility and was to be taken seriously. Overnight our security commitment changed from 84 man hours a week to in excess of 600, in addition to which we were requested to provide security cover for their administrative building in Kensington. At Harmondsworth a garden shed was hastily purchased by Ken Ife and placed in the centre of the entrance driveway to the premises as a temporary guard post to control ingress and egress to the establishment, until a permanent structure could be built, but the first day turned out to be a disaster as it caused a massive traffic jam on the Bath Road, (the A4 is one of the arterial routes into London), as employees queued to gain access to their place of work.
The guard post was quickly re-sited further back from the road and a windscreen pass system initiated to speed up the flow of traffic into the site. A few days later a purpose built guard post was installed, complete with electronic barriers, both for ingress and egress and an area created whereby visitors’ vehicles, and selected random staff vehicles, could be searched on arrival at the site. Our staff were issued with extended mirrors for examining the undersides of vehicles to detect any suspicious items or suspect explosive devices in addition to which they were trained in the use of x-ray machines for the examination of all incoming mail and packages, and the Anti-Terrorist Police also gave instructions to our officers and the Penguin staff in bomb threat procedures and evacuation drills, all very reminiscent of my days in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. There was a daily ‘security status’ bulletin, which in fact was based on the Government’s daily status as it applied to all Government buildings and military establishments – black, red, amber or green depending upon the prevailing situation or perceived degree of threat on any particular day. As a result we developed a close working relationship with the local police and Special Branch officers who regularly visited the site. This situation continued for some considerable time and to the best of my knowledge the fatwa on Salman Rushdie has never been rescinded.
