The Peace Commission

About the Book

'Its easy money, right up until the time you've got to earn it...'

These were the words which convinced Brian Cole to accept an invitation to join his colleague as a club bouncer to a local night club at the age of nineteen.

For ten years Brian Cole has worked within London's vast and violent leisure industry. Now in The Peace Commission he tells his story for the first time.

With his first job, minding a pub in Bethnal Green, London, Brian Cole become familiar with the harsh realities of life on the door. For years after, he lived to protect other people's investments - with a constant willingness to risk all for his close friends.

The Peace Commission is a hard-hitting catalog of tales about the men and women who fend off mindless violence nightly whilst incorporating an interesting sociological perspective of recent changes that have taken place within the industry of door security in the United Kingdom.

About the Author

Brian Cole started working as a club bouncer at the age of nineteen. No one would have figured him as a bouncer, least of all himself. At the time he was a scarcely educated, troubled kid from a single parent family. As it was, almost without prospects, Brian had decided to follow the path of his good friend, Jake Welch, and become a club bouncer for all the wrong reasons. Several years spent on the club scene went a long way in convincing Brian to return back to full-time education in hope of hanging up his doorman jacket some day.

The college syllabus that he had selected to study in 1998 had changed considerably since his school years. At the end of this particular English literature course the students were all requested to submit five finished assignments with instructions on what each piece of work should be written about; a piece on Shakespeare, a few pre-nineteen hundred writers and the last, which caught Brian's attention was labeled a piece of work documenting a true-life dangerous situation that you have been involved in... So that was when Brian started scribbling a few incidents down on paper; stuff that he had been involved in whilst working as a club bouncer. In no time at all, this diary became too lengthy to submit as an assignment for the course but disaffected by this, he continued on writing. Some years later that same piece of coursework somehow, and to be fair, quite remarkably matured into this journal.

From this time forth it has been Brian's goal throughout to write his diary in an impartial manner, detailing precise circumstances and basically telling it how it was; even if this meant divulging curtain failings in his own character which he would rather have kept private. Writing this way, Brian would like to think that he has chipped away at the age old image of 'the club bouncer' that he knows many people visualize himself and others like him to be.

Woven within the fabric of this text is the knowledge that the author of The Peace Commission and many of his colleagues are not debauched, obdurate hard-bastards but they carry out a job, which can at times bring out the worst in them all. From a number of London's seedy tough pubs to the West End's finest clubs, Brian's history and experiences within this industry has allowed him to put together a piece of writing which is compelling and informative on equal levels.