Guards! Guards!
In the Watch of gg, you ring your bell and keep your head down, in Nobby’s words. In the Patrician’s: the Watch are a bunch of incompetents commanded by a drunkard. Captain Samuel Vimes is the drunkard while the incompetents comprise just two men, Sergeant Fred Colon and Corporal Nobby Nobbs. The laws of the city are redundant as everything is run by the guilds and no one goes to the Watch to report even a lost dog. The odd bit of patrolling and calling out ‘Twelve of the clock and all’s well’ – even when it isn’t – takes up the Night Watch’s flagging energies.

Then Carrot Ironfoundersson enters with the law book to hand and things change. Fresh from the Copperhead mountains, his enthusiasm stirs up the Watch enough that when an enormous fire-breathing dragon begins to terrorise the city Captain Vimes isn’t going to take it lying down (in the gutter, with a bottle of whisky in his hand, as per usual). Through diligence, bravery and cunning manipulation of the laws of chance – ‘I reckon the chances of a man with soot on his face, his tongue sticking out, standing on one leg and singing The Hedgehog Song ever hitting a dragon’s voonerables would be… what’d you say, Carrot?’ – they uncover the mystery of the dragon’s origin and after arresting it and letting it go they are awarded with a kettle, a dartboard and a small wage increase as befits the heroes they have almost become.



Watch house is melted by the dragon. It was valued at AM$200. After its fiery demise the Watch take over a large house in Pseudopolis Yard, opposite the Opera House. It has real carpets and everything.
Lady Sybil Ramkin gives the Watch a pet swamp dragon, Goodboy Bindle Featherstone. He is almost immediately re-christened Errol after Nobby’s brother. He later saves the day by facing down the noble dragon and flying off into the sunset with his new, unexpectedly female, companion.
The Laws And Ordinances of The Cities of Ankh And Morpork has well over 326 pages.
The Watch patrol the hours of darkness. They get up when the rest of the world is going to bed and they go to bed at dawn.
The Treacle Mine Lane Watch House jail was just big enough for six very small people. It rarely contained any large people.
Watchmen are referred to as the ‘boys in brown’.
Reading someone their rights takes two forms:
1. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right not to injure yourself falling down the steps on the way to the cells. You have the right not to jump out of high windows. You do not have to say anything, you see, but anything you do say, well, I have to take it down and it might be used in evidence.”
2. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right not to be summarily thrown into a piranha tank. You have the right to trial by ordeal.”
Pay scale:
Trainee: $20 a month.
Corporal: $30 a month plus $1 responsibility allowance (may be docked for being a disgrace to the species)
Sergeant: $30 a month plus $5 responsibility allowance
Captain: $39 a month plus $2 plumes allowance
This changes at the end of the book to a basic rate of thirty dollars, with increments as per rank of at least four dollars
Guards! Guards!