The first and second weeks went by without incident. There were no problems, but I felt a bit humiliated, as none of the other doormen spoke to me – not one. Then, during the third week, there was an incident at the bar. I don’t really know what happened, but one lad in a group of three threw a pint mug against the wall. I went racing in and got him outside onto the Lowestoft seafront. We got the other lads out, too, but one of them then punched the door, causing the glass to cave in. I kicked the door open and went back out. I punched one of the lads – he went down. I hit the second lad – he went down, too. And the third one ran away, which I was glad about. An ambulance then came and took one of the lads away. And that was the end of that; in those days, the police didn’t really get involved. They didn’t want to know.
The next day, Karen Shaw said that she needed to speak to me urgently. ‘Here we go,’ I thought. ‘I’m getting the sack.’ But I was really desperate for the money. I was only getting £7.50 a night, but I had just got married and had a small child. Times were hard, but instead of getting the sack I got a pay rise! She said I had done a great job, and from that day onward I got a little more respect from the other doormen. Word quickly went round that I knew how to handle myself, and I was left alone. I stayed on that door for about a year and was then offered a job as a crane driver in Angola, which I accepted.
I stayed in Angola for two years. It was interesting, but at that time there was a war going on. We’d fly into Kinshasa and from there across to Kabinda, a province of Angola where groups would often kidnap foreigners for money and goods. From Kabinda, we would then follow the coastline down to Luanda in Zaire. We stuck to the coast because of the high risk of getting shot at – not by the army firing at Western civilians not involved in the conflict, but by some lunatic seeing a helicopter and deciding to shoot at it. It happened all the time.
I saw and witnessed some good things in Angola, but I also witnessed some really terrible things. Many of the crew members on the rigs were very prejudiced against black people. We had an incident when a Kelly hose – a large-diameter high-pressure flexible line used to connect the standpipe to the swivel – came off the crane and hit one of the Angolan boys. His injuries were quite severe, but the Americans who managed the rig would not have him flown to hospital on
their
helicopter. They made him go on the boat. His ribs had pierced his lungs, and the boat was bashing about on the waves. By the time he got ashore, he was dead. As compensation, his wife got a food parcel every month. That was how it was. Life was very cheap in Angola.
On another occasion, I gave an Angolan some cigarettes for two small black ivory statues. Unbeknown to me, you were not allowed to take them out of the country, because the Angolans thought that Westerners laughed at these effigies. We didn’t laugh at them, of course; we saw them as works of art. But the Angolans had some very strange beliefs. When I got to the airport for my flight home, the statues were taken off me, mainly because they thought I was American, and they didn’t much like the Americans. In fact, no one out there much liked the Americans. (At that time, the Soviet Union was arming one side of the conflict and America the other.) I was pushed along the corridors of the airport by armed soldiers. Most of the soldiers had their weapons loaded with the safety catches off, which I wasn’t too happy about, but when they realised I was English and not American I was released. I never got the statues back, though.
The choppers we used out there had originally come over from the Vietnam War, as had a lot of the pilots who worked for us. It was the early 1980s, and it wasn’t really that long since the Vietnam War had ended. The pilots were really nice people but shot to pieces and really off their heads. They used to do crazy stunts with their choppers when we were in them, but we were young and foolish and thought it was a laugh.
On one occasion when we were due to return to the UK, we took a chopper from the rig and landed in Luanda. We were then going to take a small twin-engine Otter plane – apparently one of the safest we had – from Luanda to the capital Kinshasa for the scheduled flight to Belgium and then home. When we were in Luanda, we waited in a bar, and I got chatting to three Dutch mercenaries – they were man-mountains. I had a couple of beers with them, and they were really nice guys but completely off their heads.
Very often when we had a crew change, half of the Angolans wouldn’t turn up, because the army trucks had come round to their village and had taken most of the young men to fight at the front. These Angolan crew members were used to being on the rigs, where they were fed steaks, eggs, orange juice, and all of a sudden they were put on the front line with no food, no uniform and no life. Some of them would run away from the army and walk through the jungle back to the rig. It was incredible to see them turn up for work, a week or so late.
After two years in Angola, I returned to the UK. I was still doing the doors and went to work at a big hotel. There was a very successful nightclub attached to the hotel. It was a good place to work, because the people were nice, and if you are good to people, people are good to you. However, the owner’s two sons did cause them a lot of problems. Most evenings, I would have to go jogging with one of the sons, because he couldn’t go out alone. He couldn’t go anywhere on his own, because he had so many enemies. At the time, he had a Porsche and lots of money, and women were throwing themselves at him. Because of this, he made a lot of enemies, although I always found him to be a good guy. Basically, if he jogged, I jogged; if he went somewhere, I went with him; whatever he did, I did too.
One particular incident involving the son that springs to mind was when I was working the doors one night. A Mercedes pulled into the drive with five big men sitting quietly inside. One of them wound down a window and told me to go and get the owner’s son. I asked him if he had a problem. He told me that the son had been a very naughty man and had shagged his girlfriend. I then asked the bloke if the man in question had tied her down and forced her to have sex with him. He said no, so I then said that it seemed consensual to me and that he needed to get his arse back home and sort things out with his girlfriend rather than causing problems at my club. He said that I was either a very stupid man – there were five guys in the car – or a good man. I said, ‘Well, you boys are in the car, and there are five of you, so it is entirely up to you what you decide to do.’ Thankfully, we talked some more, and they eventually drove off.
There were a lot of incidents like that when people tried to get to the owners of the club. It was all mainly personal stuff that I didn’t much care for. However, there was one funny incident when a right ding-dong started up – it was like something out of a cowboy movie. People were fighting everywhere, and the son’s £10,000 Rolex came off. We shouted ‘stop, stop, stop’ and everyone helped search for the watch. Once it was found, everything started up again. It was bizarre.
The doormen caused a few problems themselves. They would bring other people’s wives and girlfriends to the club to shag. Numerous husbands would come down to the venue looking for their wives. Although I had a lot of opportunities, like most doormen, I had a wife whom I treasured and would never let down, so I never got involved – a couple of the other doormen were the same.
In some respects, I think my wife was proud of the fact that I worked as a doorman, and I met some really nice people on the doors. But don’t get me wrong, I also did some things that I really regret. I put people in hospital and knocked people’s teeth out – things like that. At the time, it was probably the macho thing to do, but now that I am 55 I look back at some of these things with regret and think maybe I could have handled them differently. However, doormen were different in those days. You didn’t have the police hounding you as you do now, there was no licensing or accountability and the management rewarded you for being tough.
I was involved in a really terrible incident when I worked the doors at a venue called Hedley House in Oulton Broad, near Lowestoft. The doormen were not allowed to go into the ladies’ toilets on their own; they always had to go in with another doorman. One evening, I was called into the ladies’ toilets because a young girl had collapsed, so I took another doorman in with me. The young girl was lying on the floor, and I just knew she wasn’t well. I just knew it. I lifted her head up, stroked her hair, spoke to her and asked the other doorman to go quickly and phone an ambulance. The young girl’s friend was with me, so I wasn’t left alone with her. The doorman shot off but almost immediately came back again and said that he didn’t want to call an ambulance, as he didn’t think there was anything wrong with her. I told him that the girl needed an ambulance. The owner of the club then came in and agreed that she was not well but he would put her in a taxi instead. I said to the manager, ‘No, you don’t need a taxi. You need an ambulance.’ But because he was the boss and paid the wages, he took over, and although I continued to protest they put her in a taxi and sent her home. The next day, I got a call from John Beckett, the head doorman of the club, saying that she had passed away. It was her 18th birthday.
There were many other times on the doors when I put a drunk young girl into a taxi and was happy that I was doing my best, both as a gentleman and as a professional doorman, to make sure that she was safe. But there were lots of other times when I had arseholes coming into my establishments and causing trouble, and because I was small I had to be really hard. I actually lost my job when I went too far confronting someone outside one of the clubs I worked at in full view of the punters. We were full, and there was a queue. One chap asked me how long it would be to get in, and I said that I didn’t know – it was one out, one in, so it depended on how many people came out as to how many people I could let in. The first time he asked, he was as good as gold. The second time he came up to the door, he was a little more aggressive, calling me an arsehole and a twat. The third time he came up, he was getting very loud and out of hand. He was getting far too confident for my liking, so when he came up for the fourth time I let him have it. I realise now that I probably should not have done what I did, but he had wound me up so much that for the first and only time in my life I gave a man a good kick when he was down. I should not have done it, but in my reckoning I was only small, he was a big guy and he would have probably strangled me if he had got up.
At that time, I was on £60 a night as head doorman, but by the end of the night I was sacked and told in no uncertain terms that no one would touch me again. As far as they were concerned, I would never work the doors again. But I think that there was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes with the other doormen who wanted to get me out and get their friends in.
Doing the door has been an amazing journey, and being a good doorman really does make you a better person. You look at life differently. When you speak to most doormen, there is this comradeship between them, which you rarely find in other industries. But, of course, as in all walks of life, there are some bad doormen out there as well.
Even though I continued to work on the rigs, I always went back to door work when I was on leave. My wife used to ask me if I was tired of bouncing, but I was never tired of it. I loved it. When I first started, I needed the money. We were really desperate for the cash, which was one reason I never let anyone beat me up – I was so desperate not to lose my job. However, as time passed and I worked offshore, I didn’t need the money as much. I’d put all the money I earned on the doors over the year into a sock. When it had mounted up, it would pay for a holiday or some other luxury.
After being dismissed from Hedley House, I did quite a long spell on the rigs in the hellhole that was Nigeria. When I was there, I worked with a guy who was a doorman in the Gorbals, Glasgow. As soon as he mentioned where he worked, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I immediately thought that he must be tasty. It was one of the roughest areas not just in Glasgow but in the whole of the UK. He was basically a good guy but very noisy, and he wanted to let everyone know he was the boss. However, an incident made me seriously doubt him.
We were working in Warri, one of the ten most dangerous places in the world at that time. Pirates operated on the Warri River, but being ordinary crew we had to travel up and down the snake-and-crocodile-infested waters in large motorised canoes without any armed guards before meeting up with the barges that were towed down from Eket. Management travelled separately with armed guards with machine guns – that was the difference between management and ordinary crew. It was only once we got onto the barges that we had armed guards protecting us from the pirates.
On one occasion, we were kidnapped by the Nigerian crew, who locked us up in the barge. They then doused the vessel with diesel and threatened to set us on fire if the company we worked for didn’t give them what they wanted. There were two main tribes working on board, and they just didn’t mix – although they hated us even more! The chief wanted a generator, lights, enough diesel for about six months, some goal posts for the children of his village, a football and some money.
When we heard that the crew were threatening to set us on fire, the so-called ‘handy’ doorman from Glasgow went to pieces. He started to blubber, saying that he couldn’t understand what was going on or why the crew would want to do such a thing. I told him that there was nothing to worry about. They just wanted money and would not set us on fire. However, this tough doorman from the Gorbals in Glasgow could not get it into his head that he was not going to die. And when I then tried to explain to him that if they did set fire to the barge, we wouldn’t feel anything anyway, as we would fall unconscious with the heat and the fumes, it made him even worse! Needless to say, the company did negotiate, and we survived, but I saw the doorman in a totally different light from that time onwards. People had seen his weaknesses when they had been looking for leadership.