by Bob Servant
Neil Forsyth is an author and journalist. A fellow Dundonian and friend to Bob Servant for over twenty years, his Delete This At Your Peril – The Bob Servant Emails is now available from Birlinn in a newly expanded edition. Forsyth is also author of Other People’s Money, the biography of fraudster Elliot Castro, and a novel, Let Them Come Through.
Also by Neil Forsyth
Delete This at Your Peril – The Bob Servant Emails
Non Fiction
Other People’s Money – The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Most Audacious Fraudster (with Elliot Castro)
Fiction
Let Them Come Through
www.neilforsyth.com
Bob Servant Hero of Dundee
Neil Forsyth
First published in 2010 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
Copyright © Neil Forsyth 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 84158 920 6
eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 001 2
The moral right of Neil Forsyth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Photographs on pp. xvii, 31, 52, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 82, 89, 93, 108, 124 © Jim Gove; photograph on p. xx reproduced by permission of Getty Images
Typeset by Brinnoven, Livingston
Printed and bound by Cox and Wyman Ltd, Reading
For my wee sister Carol,
with love.
Contents
Introduction by Neil Forsyth
A Big ‘Hello’ From Bob Servant
1 The Lone Ranger Being a Lot of Bollocks
2 Dad
3 Teachers Not Appreciating My Help
4 Meeting Frank
5 Mum and Uncle Harry
6 Joining the Merchant Navy
7 Alf Whicker
8 Not Joining the Merchant Navy
9 Not Having Any Black Pals
10 Finding Stewpot’s
11 Chappy Williams and Tommy Peanuts
12 The Great Skirt Hunt
13 Women Not Saying What They Mean
14 Lord Dundee’s Lover
15 Frank’s Mum Going to Live in the Nursing Home
16 Having a Girlfriend
17 Hiding Not Being an Olympic Sport
18 Making Frank My Number Two
19 Frank’s Falls
20 Bringing Cruncher On Board
21 Frank Recruiting Halfwits Like Him
22 Selling Up to Buckets Bennett
23 The Gin Crisis
24 Mum Having to Cough It for Me to Get My Dream House
25 The First Day of the Cheeseburger Wars
26 People Talking About the Wild West But Forgetting About the Quicksand
27 The Failure of the Bank of Scotland’s Executive Winners Club
28 The Cheeseburger Civil War
29 The Cheeseburger World War
30 Building the Anything Goes Annexe to Bob’s Palace
31 The Failure of Hands Across The Water
32 Saving Father O’Neill from the Vice-like Grip of God and Jesus
33 Accepting There’s a Possibility That It’s Just Me and Frank
34 Not Becoming a Celebrity Even Though I Didn’t Want To Be One Anyway Because I Hate That Stuff
35 Not Hearing Fuck All Back on the Football Jobs
36 Dr Wilkie Stitching Me Up Like a Kipper
37 Not Trusting Frank With My Funeral Masterplan
38 Liking Dundee Too Much
Acknowledgements
Introduction
by Neil Forsyth
It’s a great privilege to stand sentry over another offering from Dundee’s own Bob Servant and what an occasion it is. If you had suggested to me a few years ago that Bob would write his autobiography with my assistance I would have been surprised. If you’d told me a few months ago I would have been astonished for the book you hold has been a labour of love. This is not my story of course but perhaps, through my experience, you can catch an early glimpse of your companion for the next hundred or so pages. I can certainly offer a window to a fascinating mind.
I met Bob Servant twenty years ago, when I was twelve and he was a glamorous local personality. Since then we have built a friendship based on football, distrust and the bars of our shared hometown of Broughty Ferry, Dundee.
Two years ago I edited a book for Bob and it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant experience. I was therefore interested when he approached me to edit his memoirs. For his many faults Bob has lived a fascinating life and he was offering to ‘open cans of worms’ on various matters that I felt could have a wide audience. Dundee’s Cheeseburger Wars of the 1980s (in which Bob played a dominant role) are often described by social commentators as the closest a British city has come to anarchy in modern history, while I felt Bob’s knowledge of local government corruption could be a damning indictment on the traditional flaws of localised political control.
Although living in America, I agreed to return to Dundee for six months and help shape Bob’s memories. From there we swiftly entered the realms of disaster. It must appear churlish for an autobiography’s lowly editor to open a book by denigrating the book’s subject but it is hard for me to do otherwise when the horrors of the experience are so fresh in my mind. Editing a book is a demanding task at the best of times. When it is conducted against a backdrop of committed insanity it becomes truly torturous.
The initial problem was finding Bob. After greeting my arrival in Dundee with the promise of ‘going at it hammer and tongs’ we then began an exhausting cat and mouse existence. Ever since selling his cheeseburger van business and before that his window-cleaning enterprise for large, possibly untaxed, sums Bob has lived a life predictable only through commitment to whims and flights of fancy. Every day for weeks I’d spend long hours trying to track him down after another appointment went unmet. When I found him I’d be given an elaborate cover story backed by evident falsehood1 and the assurance that ‘tomorrow is D-Day’. I realised with horror that the only way I could get the book finished was to move into Bob’s house.
I needed to move anyway. I’d been staying at my family home but Bob had effortlessly managed to strain my relationship with my parents. Bob rarely calls mobile phones because he believes they are ‘a fiver a minute’ so got my parents’ number from the phone book and called the house directly. Unfortunately Bob enjoys beginning phone calls to associates by impersonating a police officer reporting a misdemeanour. With my parents of retirement age it was an exhausting and often traumatic experience to continually assure them I had not committed the various crimes Bob would suggest in those opening, comic stages of his calls.
With immediate regret I took up residence, and ultimately refuge, in Bob’s spare room. He would wake me in the morning in a variety of ways. If he’d enjoyed a night of revelry he’d come in wearing his pyjamas, sit at the end of my bed and relate the previous evening in studied detail. Many times I would have been with Bob for the duration of the evening in question and yet he would show no hesitation in reporting an entirely different set of events to which I had witnessed. There would be exaggeration or even outright fabrication with regards to the physical attraction any females had felt towards Bob, while his memory would often fail him in recounting how successful any jokes he’d made during the night had been.
On other occasions Bob wo
uld generously incorporate my bedroom into his morning grooming routine. If I was lucky, I would wake up to Bob whistling and brushing his hair into shape beside my bed. Other times I was less fortunate. I will, sadly, never lose the memory of the morning that Bob walked calmly into my bedroom wearing only a towel. He’d been in the bath when he had remembered an admittedly interesting biographical note that he thought I should have ‘hot off the press’. Bob then proceeded to tell me this story while drying himself.
At first he simply lifted one foot to a chair and, side on to my nervous presence, began to dry his undercarriage with a see sawing effect. His left thigh hid the engine room of his fading build but in many ways this was worse. While he spoke energetically of an event from the early 1970s I found it hard not to imagine the effects of his coarse towelling. My imagination was soon no longer required.
In a spectacular alignment, as if matching a physical crescendo to that of the conversation, Bob coquettishly dropped his left foot to the floor. With the morning sunlight that peeked through the blinds showing as stripes across his flesh, Bob hunched and held the towel taut between his legs. I had seconds to come to terms with what was about to happen and it wasn’t enough. Bob’s hands set off, the towel once more began it’s see-saw swing and with every flick, what he refers to with dedication as Bobby Junior bounced into the air in a small lunge towards me.
Of course now I wish (often, if not daily) that I had shown the necessary sharpness to pull my cover over my eyes. Yet half asleep and near-frozen with horror I found myself uncomfortably transfixed. I remember only how it ended. ‘And that,’ said Bob calmly as mayhem reigned around his midriff, ‘is why you shouldn’t trust a golfer.’ He walked with great certainty from the room.
* * *
Compared to the towel incident, other irritations with Bob probably seem more innocent. There was his gleeful discovery of my dictaphone which was closely followed by the ‘jokes’ he’d leave on it for me. Sometimes he’d be a dog, sometimes he would be a child calling for help because they were ‘trapped in the machine’, sometimes a high-pitched woman saying she’d ‘seen me on the bus’ and would I like to give her ‘the good stuff’?
I began to get a feel for Bob’s monumental mood swings which belong on a scale all of their own. Great, victorious breakfasts could be followed by afternoons when he huddled in his armchair, muttering darkly about a perceived slight from a local shopkeeper or the postman. Bob thrives on company and reacts poorly when he lacks it. If I went to bed at what he saw as an overly early time, for example, he would wait an hour then burst into my room dressed as a ‘ghost’.
The cumulative effect of all this was that I had what I am not too proud to call a minor breakdown. Two months before the book was to be delivered all Bob had achieved was to reduce me to a nervous, insomniac wreck with a phobia of the male genitals. Through the tweaking of key lifestyle choices, I could have achieved all that without leaving America.
To his credit, Bob was sufficiently shocked by my reaction to begin writing. For several weeks he worked religiously on an opus that grew around him while I watched with pride. ‘Not yet,’ he’d say with a wink when I tried to steal an early look at his work, followed by a range of comments regarding omelettes, eggs and, cryptically, ducks.
I therefore had at least some lingering hope when Bob finally gave me his work. Any literary ambitions I had were instantly swiped. I had developed giddy visions of working with material that could be pitched somewhere between Samuel Pepys and Charles Pooter. What I was handed belonged more fittingly between Adrian Mole and the Beano. Admittedly I greatly enjoyed Bob’s memories with their raw fury and ambition, but then the editing process started and Bob had his final joke at my expense.
No 64-year-old man could write an autobiography that didn’t stray into inaccuracy but very few would produce one that was so firmly planted in, at best, exaggeration and, at worst, libellous fantasy. I tried to omit as little as possible but even correcting what is there, as you shall see, was a substantial task.
Once I knew Bob’s word was shaky I retreated to Dundee’s Central Library to trawl through six decades of local newspaper archives and simultaneously make hundreds of phone calls to those Bob mentions in the book. The reaction I had from former and current associates of Bob varied from the bewildered to the angry and, surprisingly often, to the threatening. Some of the physical forfeits people suggested I would suffer if particular content stayed in the book were incredible, particularly when you consider I was talking to pensioners and many of them were female. On this development Bob was unusually comforting, which should have raised my suspicions. I later found out he’d contacted the most ferocious of those threatening me because of what he had written and offered them his ‘full support’ in their criminal ambitions against me.
The day I finished this book, documented later in the Acknowledgements, was one of rare delight and I can now look upon it with some pride. I apologise for what you may see as a rant but I, selfishly, feel better for having delivered it. Anyway, I now retreat to the editorial footnotes and leave the centre stage to a man more fitted for it than me. From here on in it’s just you and Bob. I can only wish you the very best of luck.
Neil Forsyth
New York
2010
_________________________
1 Memorably, he once swore blind that he had not (as his neighbour Frank had told me) gone to the swimming baths despite the fact that when I found him he was standing in the shallow end of the swimming baths. He told me that he was ‘looking for someone’ and so he hadn’t actually ‘gone to the swimming baths’ because he was ‘looking for someone’ who might be there. It turned out he was secretly training to swim the River Tay, a project that followed the pattern for such things by being quietly dropped a few days later.
A Big ‘Hello’ From Bob Servant
Well, well, well. Here we are again, back in the book game. I wasn’t going to do another book. I’m a busy man and I have a lot of hobbies but ever since I wrote the last one I’ve had people asking me to write another book. Come on, Bob, they say, write another book. I try and ignore them or pass them off with bits and pieces (jokes, stories, a bit of patting) but after a while all these little jibes turn into an avalanche and the only way I can stop being buried is to stand up and shout ‘Fuck’s sake shut up I’ll do it OK!’
After I’d decided to write another one I had to decide what type of book to write. I wasn’t going to do another one of emails. I’ve had my fun with that stuff and it’s very important as an author that I don’t get pigeonholed like Dick Francis. That left a few areas but the one type of book I’ve always enjoyed is autobiographies. If you’re a big fish and you want to write a book then the autobiography pond is the only place worth swimming. Jesus kicked it all off with the Bible and every star name since has had a crack. Wogan did it with that one where he’s wearing a blazer and grinning like the cat that got the cream (which he did, to be fair, for fifty years) and from memory Savile wrote three of the bastards.2
Once I’d decided to write my autobiography I got the boy Forsyth in to edit. He was a pain in the arse to be honest, very lazy and a bit off in the head. I remember one day when he just totally lost it, saying how I’d ruined his life and all this. Well if giving someone a chance in life is ruining their life then it’s a very strange world we live in. I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on him. What do you expect from someone who’s in their forties and has never had a proper job?3
When I sat down to write my story I started off by listing all the things I’ve done. It was a real eye-opener. It turned out I’ve done more stuff than anyone in Dundee and yet the arrogance of some of the people round here would make you sick. I looked at the list and I thought, ‘I’m a hero.’ Then I worried that maybe I was biased or drunk so I put my clothes back on, walked round the house and came back to the list and read it as if it was about someone else. You know what I thought? ‘This guy’s a hero.’
But I’m
not. No-one’s ever said I’m a hero and it’s not because they don’t want me to get a big head. It’s because they don’t think I am one. So I started writing and I didn’t stop until I’d worked out every reason that I’ve not become what I should have become. It was hard to write in places, some noses are going to be put out of joint and the boo boys will have a field day.
I don’t care. Because my name is Bob Servant. I should be the Hero of Dundee but it’s just not happened. And here’s why.
Bob Servant
Dundee
2010
_________________________
2 Bob’s spot-on here. The television presenter and DJ Sir Jimmy Savile penned three autobiographies in a productive five-year burst –As it happens (1974), Love is an Uphill Thing (1976) and God’ll Fix It (1979).
3 I’m 32.
Bob Servant (left) and Neil Forsyth. Broughty Ferry, Dundee, 2010
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
Anonymous
I don’t believe in God.
Sir Terry Wogan (1938–)
Photo courtesy of Bob Servant’s private collection, all rights reserved. Inscription on back of photograph reads: ‘Dawson Park, 1954’.
1
The Lone Ranger Being a Lot of Bollocks
Until I was ten years old life for me was all about The Lone Ranger and I wish I’d never bothered. These days there are all sorts of rules with regards to kids. It’s all fresh vegetables and people frowning at you if you spank them (especially if they’re not yours). Well how times change, because when I was a nipper it was a complete free-for-all.
The first school I went to was Eastern Primary next to the mousetrap factory.4 Working in the mousetrap factory made the folk there completely immersed in violence and they took it out on us. Every morning a kid would come in with a shiner or a dead leg. The headmaster went over to the factory to sort it out but the manager kicked him in the balls and after that our lesson times were switched so we didn’t clash with the factory’s shift changes.