Mark’s wingman is the irreplaceable Dave ‘ease and squeeze’ Bertie. Dave is ex-special forces with a background in close protection, performance and specialist driver training at the very highest level, having instructed for police and governmental departments in hot spots all over the world, (he clearly also left the university of p*^s taking with a distinction)! Dave and Mark’s teaching styles are like chalk and cheese but it works because they compliment each other perfectly and boy oh boy, do they have a lot of knowledge to impart between them.

Two things struck me about these fellas more than anything else. Firstly, I was receiving training from individuals who’ve well and truly done the job, whether that’s been getting a principal away from hostile fire in some godforsaken corner of this earth or chauffeuring the great and the good here in Blighty. The second thing is they haven’t spent a career instructing parrot fashion ‘by the book’ as some police advanced drivers have a tendency to do.

This pair have, on many occasions it seems, upset the norm by taking a grasp of the rule book, using great parts of it as bog paper and rewriting their own version for one reason alone… their way works in the real world when the mucky stuff hits the fan.

Now, I’ve been a chauffeur a long time and although I had no intention of going on this course thinking I knew it all, I’d be lying if I said a little bit of me wondered just how much there was for me to learn. The answer to that question duly arrived, well before the end of the first day and at a pace that kicked me square in the meat and two seasonal.

Bespoke’s combined chauffeur, advanced driving and protection driver course lasts for eight days, with those students who are doing the shorter chauffeur and advanced driving course attending for the first five, ending with their RoSPA advanced test. Although the specific protection part of the course largely takes place over the last three days, (after we’ve taken the RoSPA test as well), security consideration is a big part of the instruction from day one, so even those students on the more basic course get plenty of decent protection-orientated driving knowledge under their belts before they depart.

A vital element of the course is understanding and fully appreciating the capabilities of both manual and automatic cars, something many of us chauffeurs fail to do. I thought I was pretty adept at handling a luxury saloon but I now need to hold up my hands and concede that I’ve been failing to drive any chauffeur car to its full potential for the past twenty years-somewhat of a wake up call as you can well imagine.