We featured University of Leeds academic Dr David Churchill pre-covid for his work with the Corps Security archive. He’s one of the few academics to take up the study of the private security industry. He’s now running a heritage seminar in London on Friday, September 16. Mark Rowe spoke to him.
His aim; to show people in the security sector that there are some interesting heritage resources, about security and belonging to security firms. Two notable firms to be featured next month are the Corps (for most of its 160 or so years, known as the Corps of Commissionaires, the Corps for short) and Chubb, the West Midlands-born lock manufacturer and still a household name, though like many old business names it’s morphed in ways the original could not have dreamed of.
Professional Security put a deliberately unfairly provocative question to David, that could be thrown at the study of history as a whole; if you’re a hard-bitten security person, what’s the use of a rusty old lock to your work?! “Good question,” David acknowledged, but he then went on to make the case for history (and heritage, not quite the same thing). Sometimes, we may think about the past in terms of how it’s directly useful to whatever we’re doing, today or tomorrow.
But life and work isn’t all about immediately-useful knowledge and expertise. Heritage material (pictured courtesy of the Corps and London Metropolitan Archives, some of the Victorian founder of the Corps Sir Edward Walter’s beautiful copperplate letters) can be useful for connecting with people; giving a different perspective to employees and customers.
David said: “One of the things I am particularly keen on; there’s been a recognised issue within security for some time, how you get people to recognise the value of security, or how to get people to think about security as something worth investing in. Showing this industry has been around for a very long time, that it has a lot of accumulated knowledge and resources of different kinds, and there is a tradition of security, and it has been connected with major, serious names and institutions, helps to show this is not something ephemeral or tangential to business.”
Security, to sum up, is an expertise in its own right, and security people have been grappling with crime prevention issues for a long time; as the seminar hosts the London Metropolitan Archives – not far from the Corps’ base at Farringdon, as it happens – will show. The LMA is home to some 17 metres (in shelf space) of the Corps’ archive material; its finances, personnel, property and publicity. Cataloguing and digitalising it may be of interest to family historians with a commissionaire, typically an Army veteran, in the family tree.
The LMA also holds the archive of Chubb & Son, the locksmith and safe manufacturer, amounting to more than 100m, including videos and films by the company’s fire and security arms.
But to leave David for a minute, I recently spoke to a security manager who’s using the Corps for site alarm monitoring. Now to be sure, that manager would not have chosen the Corps if the price was not right and if the contractor did not provide a satisfactory service. But, the manager unprompted spoke of the history of the Corps. In other words, in a ‘me too’ contract security market that’s crying out for differentiators – rather than cutting price – heritage can make a company different, and make everybody in that company feel better about their work; besides giving customers a reason to feel good about their choices.
Back to David; he confirmed that companies such as Corps Security and Chubb do find something powerful in their history; and that it can have a good effect on organisational culture and purpose.
About the seminar
Email Dr David Churchill at [email protected]. David is the author of a book titled Crime control & Everyday life in the Victorian city (published by Oxford University Press in 2018), and has since gone on to the 20th century, such as the development of intruder alarms.
