The Man From London Wanted a Quiet Word

Hull, mid-nineties. Retail security by day, minimum wage with delusions of authority, and I’d come to it fresh off the back of the RAF, where at least the wages had the decency to match the risk. Civilian life had other ideas. Civilian life said: here’s a radio, here’s a lanyard, here’s a shrinkage target that means more to head office than your actual name does.

I ran the security team at Hammonds. If you’re not from Hull or old enough to remember, Hammonds was the department store, the one with the House of Fraser name stitched somewhere behind it in the ownership structure, the kind of place that smelled of perfume counters and quiet aspiration. My job was to stop it from leaking money out of the fire doors, and for five years, my team and I did that job properly. Properly enough, that shrinkage kept dropping, year on year, against a town centre crime rate that gave us absolutely no right to expect that kind of result. We weren’t lucky. We were good. There’s a difference, and it matters to this story.

But good doesn’t pay the mortgage on its own, so I did what a lot of people in that position do... I found a second income. Mine came in the form of a club called Spiders, out on the edge of town, a place with the sort of reputation that preceded it by several postcodes. Six to eight hours a shift, after a full day at Hammonds, standing on a door that led into a room where the night generally ended in broken glass, spilt lager, a discarded condom or two, and university students arranged on the floor like they’d been poured there. This was before SIA licensing turned doorwork into something you needed paperwork for. Back then, if you had the stomach for it and didn’t mind cash in hand, it was simply a trade you picked up, like a second job stacked on top of the first, except this one came with vomit and the occasional swinging fist.

I got the job through one of my own Hammonds lads. A retired rugby player, well known around Hull, the kind of man whose reputation walked into a room several seconds before he did. Even retired, even working a door for extra money, same as me, he had a presence that made most trouble evaporate before it started. That’s the thing nobody tells you about proper security work, retail or doorwork, it was never really about being able to fight. It was about the right person standing in the right doorway, radiating the quiet promise that fighting would be a mistake.

So that was the rhythm of those years. Store by day, Spiders by night, the two worlds never quite touching, except that they were both, in their own way, about the same thing... protecting a business from the people who wanted to take something from it, whether that was stock or atmosphere or a night that hadn’t yet gone wrong.

Then, one ordinary day, a man came up from London.

He was the Director of Security for House of Fraser, the parent company sitting somewhere above Hammonds on an org chart I’d never had reason to look at closely. He arrived unannounced, which should have told me something straight away, because men like that don’t turn up for the pleasure of your company. We talked for half an hour. Pleasant enough. The sort of conversation that feels, in hindsight, like being patted on the head by someone who already knows what they’re about to do to you. Then he asked for a quiet word in my office.

I’ve thought about that phrase a lot since. A quiet word. As if what followed was going to be gentle, because it was delivered at a low volume.

He told me I was being made redundant. My team, the one that had spent five years quietly outperforming every projection anyone had set for us, was being absorbed into a contract security company. And here’s the part that still sits somewhere behind my ribs when I think about it... Our success was the reason. Not despite it. Because of it. Head office had looked at what we’d achieved and concluded, with a kind of logic only accountants seem capable of, that if a managed team could get results like that, then surely an unmanaged one, minimum wage, no continuity, no investment, could get roughly the same thing for a fraction of the cost.

They were wrong, obviously. I found that out secondhand, from the ones who stayed on under the new contract company and watched shrinkage climb back up to where it had been before we ever got there. But by then, it didn’t matter what I knew, because I was gone, and knowing you were right after the fact has never once paid a bill.

Some of the team wouldn’t accept the takeover and left on principle, which I respected more than I could say at the time. Others stayed and rode it out, and it was they who kept me posted, in the way people do when they’ve watched something they built get quietly dismantled by someone who never had to watch it happen.

I did what you do. I started looking. And in amongst the usual small ads, I found one for a company I’d never heard of, Shield Security. Rang the number more out of habit than hope.

A voice answered that I half recognised before I could place it. Dave. One of my old Hammonds team, part-time back then, full-time postman the rest of the week, moonlighting on security, same as half of us seemed to be doing in one form or another. Turned out he’d started Shield Security through a Territorial Army connection with a property development company, and he needed an operations manager.

So that’s where I went next.

I look back on that whole stretch now, the double shifts, the House of Fraser man’s quiet word, the strange full-circle of ending up working for someone who’d once worked for me, and what stays with me isn’t the redundancy itself. It’s the shape of the lesson underneath it, the one that’s followed me ever since... doing the job well is never the same thing as being safe in it. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes the better you are, the more visible the case becomes for replacing you with something cheaper.

I don’t know that I’ve ever fully made peace with that. I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing you’re meant to.

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Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham