I was born in Southeast London during the latter part of the 1960’s. My mum was a single parent on a low income and we had no home of our own. This being the case, she decided to take work as a live-in cook/house keeper, which basically meant that we lived wherever she could get a job.

I can say without any exaggeration, that she probably covered most of the country, looking after others just to put a roof over our heads. Unfortunately my mum used to find it difficult to hold a job down, so we moved around a lot. To me this meant lots of different schools and the fact of always being the new kid.

This allowed me to experience bullying from all shapes and sizes, all equally unpleasant. This of course led to the need for me to learn how to defend myself and so began my martial arts journey.

I started with karate when I was 11 years old, training in various styles for the next 7 years. Until one day I started to look elsewhere for combat proficiency. This came after an altercation, that I had with two lads who attempted to mug me outside Belsize Park tube station in London.

Now, when I look back at this little episode I can appreciate what a learning experience it was. I can also see the pros and cons regarding how I dealt with the situation at the time.

The two lads approached me, one in front and the other just to his right. Then one of them said something like “Oi mate have you got any spare change?” I simply said “no, sorry” in a polite tone as I kept walking.

From here one of them blocked my path and came back with “alright then, any money we find on you, we’re taking!” I instantly realised the seriousness of my situation, I dropped my gym bag to the floor and acted pre-emptively by punching one them in the mouth, then kicking the other in the groin.

Although my shots were fast and accurate, they had absolutely no effect what so-ever other than temporarily stunning my opponents.

The reason for this (unbeknown to me at the time) is that my muscle memory had only been conditioned to deliver touch with control impact.

This is what comes from the practice of punching and striking out at nothing more than air, and training for point- semi-contact sparring for years. Instead, (as I later realised) I should have been developing the muscle memory for true knock out force, which only comes from lots of impact training on pads and bags.

After a brief spell of hyper-vigilance I ended up fighting tooth and nail with flailing fists and hair pulling tenacity. Nothing even remotely resembling the traditional karate that I had learnt so far, came out.

The two lads ran off empty handed, leaving me stunned and dishevelled and confused as to why karate had proved so ineffectual.

Just to add insult to injury as I bent down to pick up my gym-bag, my brand-newly acquired, silk woven black belt fell out of the bag onto the path, this was followed by me kicking it up the road in disgust with myself.

Of course on hindsight I can now see, that it wasn’t karate that failed me in this street situation. It was the fact that the karate training methods, that I had been practiced for years, were just inappropriate for the street situation I was facing.

So my training journey continued on into many different systems. Over the years I trained in Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino weapon systems, Western boxing and Wrestling.

At the age of 23 I threw myself into to strength training and weight lifting in an attempt to increase my size and strength. I continued with this for the next ten years, trying my hand at competitive lifting with good success at amateur level.

Of course training in all forms of combat has been a wonderful education as well as an opportunity to meet and train with some of the best people in the world, some of whom I am proud to call my friends.

It was around this time that I started working as a pub and night club doorman, and I’ve got to tell you, that my learning curve at least in terms of what I have found to work for me in a ‘live’ situation, only really kicked in when I started to work on the doors.

This was and still is at times a massive test of character. All of a sudden there was this drastic need to quickly chip away at all the un-essentials, and whittle down every thing I had learnt so far to no more than one or two good strikes that had worked for me on more than one occasion in the past.

In over a decade working on the door, I have learned an awful lot about myself, and about the way that I respond under pressure. I also feel that I have at least for me, managed to sort the wheat from the chaff regarding the fighting arts that I’ve studied so far.

For the last few years I have been studying Western Combatives, these are the methods based on the great hand-to-hand combat instructors of WW2. I have a great passion for this stuff not just the physical techniques but also the history of it all.

Of course more important than techniques are the concepts of being pre-emptive, training for impact and learning all you can about the adrenal response.

All this has been said and written about before, by bigger and better people than me. I have merely met similar conclusions from similar experience.

This can all be summed up with the following quote from a great author who’s name escapes me.
“ Thirty seconds on the sidewalk is worth three years in the dojo.”

I therefore decided to write my book Up Close, Nothing Personal. Self-Protection for Door Security Staff.

This is a book full of functional information gained through the active learning of real experience, both my own and from those I aspire to. Any student of Self-Protection will find it a worthy addition to their training.

Anyone involved in the field of security and door work will without doubt find it both useful and eye opening.

Geoff Thompson, who was kind enough to review the book, had this to say- “This fine tome written by Lee Morrison is- as far as I can ascertain – the first of its kind, a book about working the doors and staying alive.”

I now spend most of my time writing and teaching Self-Protection and Personal Security skills to the public sector, several girl schools and door/event security companies in and around the Southampton area where I now live.