Tales from the Reserve Room

Spoiler: it was nothing like Jason Bourne

Said nobody, ever.

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I’m recovering from a debilitating illness, so lack the energy to bemoan the state of UK policing. Sod that. Instead, I’m in a reflective mood; one, perhaps, for a tale of Days of Yore. I think these stories deserve recording before they disappear, like tears in the rain.

Okay, are you ready? Let’s jump into my time machine, back to the mid-late 1990s.

Have you ever seen a detective or espionage drama where a late-night phone call’s made to a government number? A tip-off about the dodgy Russian bloke living next door? A plea for help, from a long-retired source? A ‘walk-in,’ from a spy, looking to spill his or her guts? There really was an office for that sort of stuff, at New Scotland Yard. I worked a fair few shifts there myself.

Unsurprisingly, such sexy calls were a rarity. They happened, very occasionally, usually when someone else was on duty. Most of the time, though, it was like any other type of police work - long hours of boredom, punctuated by the occasional exclamation mark of bullshit, surreality or lunacy.

The ‘Reserve Room’ was on the 16th Floor of Scotland Yard, back when it was located at Broadway in SW1, opposite St James’s Park tube station. A big room overlooking central London, its greyish walls were interspersed with 70s-era wooden veneer. It was the 24/7 call centre for SO13 (the Yard’s Anti Terrorist Branch) and SO12 (Special Branch).

In my day, it was run by a legendary detective sergeant from SO13 who anybody who’s anybody knows (hello, Terry, congrats on the gong mate). Imagine Radar from ‘M*A*S*H’ crossed with Arthur Daley from ‘Minder’. He had the diplomatic skills of a Dag Hammarskjöld, as in a world not known for harmony, he got on with everyone. He once tried to sell me an air-conditioning unit from a bloke he knew in Turkey.

For the uninitiated, SO13 was a relatively small branch made up of grizzled CID officers. In the crudest terms, 13’s remit was to investigate bombs after they went off. SO12 was bigger - the intelligence and security police - made up of ‘honorary’ pseudo-detectives meant to develop intelligence on the sort of people who’d like to set a bomb off.

It was occasionally, truth be told, an unhappy union. SB officers worked with the spies over at Thames House and tended to lord their superior vetting clearance over their SO13 cousins. SO13, on the other hand, considered themselves hard-bitten ‘proper’ detectives from London’s gnarliest CID offices and squads (although, given the reactive nature of their role, they tended to be by-the-numbers Major Incident / Homicide types as opposed to proactive detectives).

I remember once having to venture into the SO13 exhibits office to borrow some kit (for a newish SB officer, this was like a hobbit sneaking into Smaug’s cavern looking to purloin a purse full of gold). “Hello,” I said to the DS in charge, “My name’s Dominic Adler, from Special Branch.”

The DS looked up from his copy of the Racing Post. “Fucking congratulations,” he grunted, ending the conversation and returning to the 4.15 at Haydock.

An SO13 ‘challenge coin’. Given 13’s legendary ability to spin almost any ‘action’ into a trip abroad looking for evidence, we joked they were ‘short on sleep, long on airmiles.’

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Special Branch DCs were put on a revolving ‘RSE’ roster (which stood for ‘Reserve Special Enquiries’) for early and late turns. This meant you left your usual desk for a shift, which for many was a pain in the arse (there were crosswords to do, gossip to be had and pubs sources to visit). Interestingly, only special branch sergeants performed night duty reserve. SB wasn’t wildly rank-pissed, so this was unusual (and welcomed by the constables). Partly his was due to the necessity of having someone with rank present after hours (SB wasn’t rank-pissed, but the rest of the Job most certainly was).

It was also because the reserve room was responsible for the joint Branch armoury; opposite the main office was a vault containing rows of shiny Glock pistols and Model 10 revolvers. The sergeants and duty officers had to check and account for them all every shift - I’m sure this has changed nowadays, with professional armoury staff. An old colleague of mine from divisional policing, then a DI in SO13, tragically took his own life in the armoury in 1998. I wrote a funny story about John here.

I actually didn’t mind reserve room duty. There were TV sets showing 24-hour news (Sky, which back then would run any story about anything on the flimsiest of leads, was known as ‘The Intelligence Chanel’). There was a different flavour of gossip (SO13’s swaggering guv’nors were some of the most notoriously indiscreet at the Yard. They seemed oblivious to the rat-bastard SB officers earwigging their conversations). There was free tea and coffee. There was even, very occasionally, something interesting occurring. You could also shoot the breeze with the police staff reserve room full-timers who really ran the place.

And so the scene is set, like that old sitcom ‘The Odd Couple’, with two mutually-loathing protagonists cooped up together for 24 hours a day. Even then, SO12 and SO13 were at cross-purposes; SO13 ran the Anti-Terrorist Hotline so wanted people to call with information (so they answered that particular phone). SO12, for whom everything was TOP FUCKING SECRET, were suspicious of anyone calling in the first place. This was the 90’s, by the way. There was no external email - everything was done over landline telephones.

It didn’t help the Reserve Room was so bloody accessible. The telephone number, the famous ‘Whitehall 12-12’ still remains (call 0207 230 1212 and you’ll still get the Yard). All anyone had to do was dial it and ask for ‘Special Branch’. The main switchboard would happily put any caller through (don’t try this now - there is no Special Branch).

You can imagine how that worked out, didn’t you?

Typical callers to the Special Branch reserve room. The one on the right was usually the more lucid of the two.

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The reserve SB officer’s desk had a draw full of essential reference material; the Police Gazette and national Special Branch almanac, an up-to-date copy of Wisden, confidential numbers for the security service reserve and other agencies (including the army’s London District). There was an internal SB directory for the airports and other subunits like surveillance. Of course, there were menus for the best local takeaways and a ‘Time Out’ restaurant guide for visiting officers.

There was also a book (Trigger Warning - deeply politically incorrect sweary 90s content ahoy!) listing new applicants for the Branch, in which officers were invited to comment upon candidates in not-very-HR compliant terms (the game ‘C’ or ‘G’ is believed to originate from this tome - the rather binary categorisation of being either a Cunt or Genius). I remember one aspiring Pc being described as ‘strange, but good at cricket’. I imagine he was accepted immediately. Another ‘never wore socks.’

Then there were two hardback A3-sized notebooks, entitled NUTTERS ONE and NUTTERS TWO. These were easily the most valuable weapons in the reserve officer’s arsenal, listing the menagerie of regular callers who’d ring special branch out-of-hours ‘for a chat.’

This is, of course, problematic on a number of levels - not least its shocking marginalisation of the mentally ill. Not to mention deeply ironic; most police officers are, themselves, quite mad. You see, otherwise bonkers ‘intelligence nuisances’ occasionally tell the truth. The world of espionage, terrorism, dodgy politics (etc) attracts odd people like wasps to a cream tea. Sure, some are as mad as hatters, but might possess info containing a nugget of veracity.

The books NUTTERS ONE and TWO was, I suppose, an attempt to chronicle potential nuisances whilst giving an element of arse-covering in case there was any substance to their ramblings. Anything promising was escalated. Branch legends tell of several unlikely sources who yielded valuable information. I’m sure these are true.

In any case, the ‘Nutter’ volumes became a wealth of drily-observed Branch wit about the mores of the world’s tinfoil-hat wearing obsessives (there really were some funny bastards in SB). I might have added my own contributions, as a mad phone call (from across the Globe, given Scotland Yard’s fame and the ease with which the switchboard would prostitute our number) was a given, especially on late turn (the witching hour being 8pm). Full Moons were especially busy.

There was an eccentric lady from the United States who insisted she was romantically involved with Prince Charles. She also liked trying to lure reserve officers into sexually-explicit conversations. Then there was a bloke who gave himself an agent cryptonym and would ring for covert mission instructions. Officers would leave notes in the Nutters Book along the lines of ‘I asked him to leave a copy of Pravda on a bench in St James’s Park’ and the fellow would be as happy as Larry. There were ranty political haters. People who claimed MI5 were firing invisible beams into their houses. Journalists trying to be clever (spotted them a mile off, they sounded reasonably sane).

SO13 had their own nutters too, but we didn’t really share. Our nutters, you see, were more classified than theirs.

The Reserve Room was the anti-Jason Bourne, dealing with emergencies like missing protection teams and wheel-clamps on surveillance vans.

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One Christmas, being a mercenary, overtime-hungry bastard, I volunteered for Christmas reserve duty from the 24th to 26th December. They gave me a pool car to get to work and lots of money. I had no kids back then and, as I’ve mentioned before, find Christmas a shitty time of year.

The highlights were, I seem to remember, as follows:

On Christmas Eve, the Commander arrived with bottles of whiskey for the fulltime reserve staff. He was a star. “You’re driving,” he said to me smugly, pouring himself a glass. He was the bloke who caught me and my DS in the pub and let us off, what a gent.

On Christmas Day an elderly clergyman called from Belfast, demanding to know where his personal policemen were. No, I didn’t enter him into the NUTTERS book, as it was my old mate the Reverend Ian Paisley (we’d met at Heathrow, where he would issue Christian blessings to random SB officers at the drop of a hat). “WHERE ARE MY PROTECTION BOYS?” he demanded (he was very loud).

“I have no idea, Sir, this is the Metropolitan Police,” (in Ulster, he was looked after by the-then RUC).

“IT’S SPECIAL BRANCH ISN’T IT?” I suppose, to the Reverend, the security state was an amorphous, trench-coat wearing, shoulder-holstered blob.

“Yes it is. I’ll see what I can do, Sir.”

“GOD BLESS YOU SON.”

I made a few calls to our protection people who spoke to the RUC, reuniting Paisley with his bodyguards. I suspect it was the Reverend who’d wandered off and not the protection guys, but this was what Reserve Rooms are for; to oil the out-of-hours wheels of the mundane.

Then, on Boxing Day, one of our surveillance vans was wheel-clamped. There was an unhappy surveillance photographer hiding in the back at the time. Who you gonna call? That’s right, the bloody Reserve Room. I telephoned an obscure department at Transport for London to get the bastard thing unclamped again.

Like I said, it’s hardly Jason Bourne, is it?

Although a Reserve Room is different from an Operations Room (which was next door), which did occasionally have a Bourne-esque vibe when there was a decent job on. I might write about that another time.

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What did I take away from the experience? I’m a person who has tried (and occasionally failed) to learn something from every situation I’ve found myself in.

Well, I’d say;

1. In this line of business, you really do need people to deal with issues you can’t really categorise. 24/7. Not doing so is how little stuff escalates into big, shit-hitting-the-fan stuff.

2. Mad people might be mad, but that doesn’t mean they’re lying.

3. Sharing information is better than not sharing it.

4. Tribes are good, until they aren’t. You need a genuine mixture of people and a culture that supports teamwork.

5. Cricketing ability is not an indicator of law enforcement potential (controversial Branch opinion).

6. SO15 was an answer, but it wasn’t the answer. This is a hoary old debate on which I shan’t dwell, as the die has long been cast. Nonetheless, it’s a hill I’ll die on. I also know a few SO13 people will quietly agree.

7. If confronted by a problem, its better to do something rather than be slopy-shouldered or do nothing. Sometimes you’re the person on the spot. Deal with it as best you can and in good faith.

8. If you need some Turkish air-conditioning units, I know a retired SO13 DS who probably has some knocking about for a song!

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   By the way, my decade in SB informs the vibe of my fab new book, Red Labyrinth. Check it out if you like espionage thrillers.