Lord’s cricket ground is the venue, and the subject, for Richard Hester, a former Met Police man now in private security for near 20 years.
It was the Tuesday after the second Ashes Test of the summer – and there were still Australians about Lord’s cricket ground. That was because Marylebone Cricket Club – the home club, strictly speaking, of Lord’s – were playing another MCC, Melbourne Cricket Club. Entry that day was free. The bars were quiet, and re-stocking. The museum likewise was ticking over. Lord’s was very much a working cricket ground, but nowhere near the intensity of the week before, when England thrashed Australia. A Lord’s Test match has always been one of the social occasions of the summer – like Henley, or the Wimbledon tennis championships. In 2013, the visitors included Her Majesty the Queen, introduced to both teams; Prime Minister David Cameron; and Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Anyone who is anyone in cricket is there. It’s not enough merely to secure the venue; the authorities have to be as sure as they can be that the place truly is secure. Sporting and other venues have long been plagued by what was once called the ‘ten pence bomber’ – 10p being all it once cost to ring anonymously from a call-box and say a bomb was in place somewhere. Richard Hester Associates (RHA) provides explosive dog searches before and during international matches at Lord’s. Richard recalls 2005. Bear in mind the Ashes Test at Lord’s, the first that season, came soon after 7-7 and indeed began on 21-7, the day of attempted bombings in London. Richard recalls: “Obviously the Australians and the MCC and Cricket Australia were exceptionally concerned about the level of security.” RHAL assisted Lord’s safety officer with a report to detail the security measures in place to reassure Cricket Australia. Then on the Saturday came three phone calls, ‘saying there was a bomb in the ground’. The police gold command was able to look at the logs of the private security company, of what had been searched and when, and the search dogs did what Richard Hester describes now as ‘a few extra bits and pieces that we thought might be necessary’. They [the police] were happy there wasn’t an explosive device in the ground; otherwise we would have had to evacuate.”
Cricket history might have been different – as it happened, England lost that Test, but went on to win a famously close series. If the authorities had felt they had to err on the side of safety and evacuate Lord’s, would the rest of the game have gone on? Might the Australians have felt it best to postpone? There are precedents in cricket of teams choosing not to play, such as in Sri Lanka during the 1996 World Cup. As Richard adds: “That is the most serious incident we have to deal with; with the potential of some very serious repercussions.” Indeed, what if there had been a bomb and the searching had not picked it up? This raises the question – particular to search dogs, and private security and indeed any service: how can the service provider show that they give a good service, the service that they say they are offering, and how does the buyer, especially if they are a procurement generalist rather than a security specialist, know what they are buying? Richard stresses the quality of service of his dogs and handlers. He raises his concern that some places are paying for explosive search dogs but in fact the dogs are not so trained.
He is MD of RHA while Paul Whybrow, former City of London Police man, is operations director. The consultancy also offers investigations; its sports security division dates from 2000. Paul’s background was in fraud investigation; Richard’s in covert policing. Each man’s police work took him to North America, the Continent, and Asia. I recall Andy Williams, Nomura head of security, stressing contacts in his talk at Security TWENTY 13 in London, in the August print issue of Professional Security. As Richard says, a client may not want to send someone out from London to another jurisdiction; hence the use of knowing people who can help with your inquiries, and who understand local jurisdictions, to better bring a case to a successful prosecution. Or; the client may merely want assets traced and recovered. Another string to the RHA bow: close protection (CP) work, mainly with news and camera crews: “In fact we were in Libya from the start.” As for how to separate the real professionals from those who say that they are, Richard adds that all RHA’s CP people are ex-highly skilled ex-Service personnel, as their handlers are all highly trained ex-Police Dog handlers/trainers.
Pictured: the search of the Lord’s JP Morgan media centre.
Returning to sport; among other services RHA provides is Fire safety officers – serving firemen who deploy when on leave from the fire service. The venue is required to keep to standards, both of physical buildings and of staff, such as fire marshals, who are there and trained to judge what to do if a fire alarm goes off, directed by the Control room. A Fire officer can decide that an alarm does warrant a 999 call; but if not, that saves the cost and crowd concern of a fire engine arriving. Of Lord’s Richard says: “We have a very good relationship with the police, gold command and silver, and with the safety officer and the head of security. They are exceptionally thorough here; and their preparation pre-season is the best. We have a day-long table-top exercise where they get all the staff together and just throw every conceivable worst case scenario; and everyone discusses it and how to deal with it. That’s invaluable.” For instance, if an emergency does happen – and not even something malicious, such as an explosive device, but a power cut, let’s say, or a fire in a kitchen, as thousands of people at big games want lunch and tea. It’s no good on such a busy day as a Test match taking time to consider how to evacuate. You need to know what to do, to evacuate according to plan. And it’s not enough that people are trained, and given refresher courses; remember the 2005 hoax bomb threats. If you cannot show the logs, the documentation, that your team X has searched a stand, and when, and that X had recent refresher training in whatever the bomb threat is; what does the man making the decision to evacuate or not have to go on? How confident you sound?!
Search dogs are the same as people; if over the day nothing crops up, searching room after room, ‘they get tired and lose interest’. How to counter that? Richard says: “Because we are Home Office-authorised to carry explosive samples, kept in air-tight containers, we take a dog aside and put what we call a find out, hidden somewhere, say in a car park. And then take the dog there and get it to search the area and that keeps its interest, because it finds it and then gets its reward – a tennis ball.” But can the same reward work for a human!? I ask him jokingly. More seriously, I add that motivation of guard forces – the significant document from CPNI – featured in the August issue of Professional Security. Quality of service, pride in a job well done, simply the understanding of what doing a good job looks like, in searches requires years in that field of work and a working relationship between man and dog. The dog responds to the handler and the handler knows to focus the dog’s energy at the right time and place. In the heat, as in July 2013 in London, dogs and handlers alike can flag and get thirsty. If thirst is not satisfied, performance can falter (as true for the search dogs as the cricketers, and indeed the spectators; though if they have been drinking beer, perhaps by the afternoon they are the worse for wear. However, as a rule cricket crowds are good-natured.
In 1991 Richard was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal.
Visit www.richardhesterassociates.co.uk. For more about Lord’s visit www.lords.org.
