Author: Brian Samways
ISBN No: 9780-9574725-6-3
Review date: 25/04/2024
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
By the 1990s, Brian Samways had set up his own guarding company, Kestrel Guards, based on the south coast and still going strong; and he had served as international chairman of industry body IPSA. While much of his book is about the 1980s, he closes his book with a chapter on this more recent period.
During the summer of 1996, Keith [Matthews] and I attended the offices of the civil engineering firm Balfour Beatty at Croydon to make a formal presentation to them in response to an invitation for the list of companies to be included on their list of tenderers for the security of a forthcoming road building project in the West Country. Quite obviously the major players would be included, however, not only did our presentation secure us a place on the tendering list, we were awarded the contract. The project was to build by-passes on the A31 at Tollpuddle, between Dorchester and Bere Regis in Dorset and A30 at Honiton through to Exeter in Devon, by a consortium, led by Balfour Beatty but including Tilbury Douglas and Deutsche Asphalt, grouped together under the operating title of BBTA, which would be constructing the roads under the Government’s new formula, DBFO (Design, Build, Fund and Operate), which put the responsibility of construction and long term maintenance firmly in the corner of the builders. We located our offices with the BBTA project teams at Rockbourne Quarry, just west of Honiton for the A30, where we appointed Ray Hargreaves, a former Senior Devon and Cornwall Fire Officer, who had been Commandant of the Devon and Cornwall Fire Training College, as our Operations Manager for both the A30 and A31 projects, supported by Graham Bennett, Wayne Gordge and Cyril Gough at Honiton and Joe Cotteral and Andy Joy as operation supervisors at Puddletown. The BBTA team, with whom we were to work closely, consisted of John Cope, Traffic Manager, Noel Brennan, Project Safety Manager, and Malcolm Henson, The Project Security Manager, a former Devon police officer to whom we were responsible on a daily basis.
Road construction projects at this time were fraught with danger, as a new group of environmental protesters had emerged calling themselves ‘eco warriors’ who were hell-bent on preventing the building of any road in areas of historic significance or places of outstanding natural beauty or where it would be harmful to the environment. They were already battle hardened from the confrontations of 1994, when over 2,000 of them faced off the police and members of Group 4 at Twyford Down near Winchester during the construction of the M3 extension, but worse was to come in January 1996 at the building of the Newbury Bypass on the A34, when 7000 so-called ‘eco warriors’ protested, by which time they had developed a new tactic, probably adapted from the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, of building a vast network of tunnels. A joint operation by Thames Valley and Hampshire Police, called ‘Operation Prospect’, costing £5m, resulted in 800 arrests, but the cost of the private security was £30 million, when only £7 million had been originally budgeted and the project took over 34 months to complete.
The protesters called this the third battle of Newbury, after the two previous battles which occurred in 1643 and 1644, during the English Civil War, and they caused widespread violent disorder and extensive criminal damage. One eco warrior that came to notoriety during this time was known in the national Press as ‘Swampy’. He was born Daniel Hooper in 1973, and was one of those arrested during ‘Operation Prospect’ and who was now well ensconced with hundreds of his fellow eco warriors at Fairmile, a road camp they had constructed near Honiton, where they had already constructed a vast network of tunnels and were occupying many trees in makeshift tree houses. The police had learned much from their previous encounters with the eco warriors and had now infiltrated many of the groups with undercover officers through Special Branch who provide valuable intelligence which ultimately led to a swift eviction operation by bailiffs supported by the police and immediately secured by ourselves, the last man – of course – being dragged from the tunnels, was ‘Swampy’ himself. Having gained the initiative it was important to maintain the security of the project along the many miles of construction to prevent any further unlawful occupation, trespass or sabotage particularly during concrete pours, the location of which were kept secret to the very last moment and always involved the deployment of additional security staff. The additional training required by our staff was intensive and included in depth familiarization of the project and the locations, the emergency procedures and the deployment in the event of an attack and the formation and training of ‘quick release teams’ in the event of protesters locking and chaining themselves to plant equipment and vehicles and other on-site machinery.
Our stated priorities were threefold, firstly the safety of the public, secondly the safety of all employees and visitors to the site and thirdly the safety of the protesters. The experience and expertise gained in the confrontations, arrests made, the demonstrations and site evictions, made the company something of an expert in dealing with these kind of situations and soon afterwards we were requested to provide security for a large site clearance at Epsom in Surrey where a large number of unlawful occupants had to be evicted, the extension of the M62 at Manchester and the A1 in Yorkshire.
