by Bob Servant
Frank Recruiting Halfwits Like Him
I got carried away with the Rising Business Stars article, there’s no doubt about that. I shouldn’t have challenged the rest of the window-cleaning community in print but when you’re riding a wave it’s very hard to stop rowing.
Sure enough Buckets Bennett came down to see me in his van. At first he was pretty angry giving it No Respect and so on but then Cruncher arrived and that took the wind out his sails a bit. In the end Buckets and I went for a walk in Dawson Park and did a deal. I wouldn’t go west of the Kingsway dual carriageway and he wouldn’t come east of it and in any future press interviews we’d speak positively of each other. I pretty much got everything I wanted and I went back to the boys feeling like Neville Chamberlain when he tricked Hitler into signing that confession.44
The result was that we could expand through half of Dundee and that’s what we did. Cruncher kept bringing in the customers and Frank asked if he could recruit some other workers. He said he was supposed to be number two and he wanted more responsibility in the shape of being what he called ‘a talent scout’. I agreed, which probably looks like a surprising decision, but you have to take into account just how good a manager I was.
When I read about some of the great Scottish football managers, I sometimes think I went down the wrong path in life. I’d love to sit down for a sherry and bacon roll with big Alex Ferguson and wee Jim McLean and have the three of us throw ideas and anecdotes off each other like footballs. They are two men who understand the importance of man-management and it was the window-cleaning round where I first developed a lot of my talent in that particular area.
The most important thing in a window-cleaning round is morale and the ladders but a lot of the time morale is affected directly by the ladders. If there’s a problem with the ladders then morale takes a dip and if everything’s OK with the ladders then everything tends to be OK unless there’s a problem with the buckets. Thinking about it, the buckets have an equal part to play in terms of morale along with the ladders. But if everything is OK with the ladders and the buckets then, generally speaking, it’s only personal issues that bring problems, which is when you need man-management.
Some window-cleaners, like some footballers, need a firm hand and some window-cleaners, like some footballers, need the arm round the shoulder. If I saw someone struggling on the round then I would instantly make that call – a firm hand or an arm round the shoulder? Frank always got a firm hand. He knows himself, although he’s never thanked me, that I made him the window-cleaner he became, which wasn’t a very good one but it could have been a lot worse.
Nervous Norrie, on the other hand, was very much an arm-round-the-shoulder man. Norrie was the first guy that Frank came up with to join the team and I was understandably concerned. We both knew Norrie from Stewpot’s, where he’d hardly covered himself with glory by hiding in the toilets for the Grand National despite the fact he didn’t have a bet on, but Frank promised me the guy had his nerves under control.
A window-cleaner with nerves is pretty much the worst window-cleaner you can get because one of the great dangers on the round is someone opening the curtains when you’re up a ladder doing the window. On the occasions I helped out on the ladders I didn’t mind this at all because I saw it as a chance for a bit of a chat or, at the very least, some of the smiling and waving, but I was worried about Norrie. I take no pleasure in saying that I was spot on as always.
Norrie’s window-cleaning Hiroshima came at a house in Duntrune Terrace. It belonged to Rash Scrimgeour, the deputy manager of Safeways who has that thing on his neck. Norrie was up his ladder when Rash pulled open his curtains. Norrie’s never really spoken about what he saw but years later someone said something about Rash Scrimgeour in Stewpot’s and the thing on his neck and I heard Norrie whisper, ‘Not just his neck,’ in a really angry way.
Anyway, the result at the time was that Norrie screamed, fell off the ladder into a bush and hotfooted it down Duntrune Terrace towards the Claypotts shops. I ran after him to try and get the arm round his shoulder but he was running on fear and I’d have had more chance of catching Alan Wells. That was Nervous Norrie finished with the round. He did keep going to Safeways though, which never sat right with me.
After the Nervous Norrie disaster I told Frank he had to come up with something special. When he arrived with Titch Thompson I nearly knocked him out with the Wogan bucket. Titch Thompson came up to my belt but Frank said he’d be good for basement windows and skylights. I gave Titch a chance anyway and to be fair it wasn’t bad having him around for the first few weeks. He was the quietest little guy you’d ever meet, never joined in the conversation and would only sometimes smile when me or Cruncher said a belter.
Then one day we were at some big house on Balmyle Road and it had a kid’s Wendy House in the garden. ‘Is that your house, Titch?’ I said as a little joke to start the day and, my God, you’ve never seen anything like it. The guy went at me like a wild animal, grabbing the neck and so on. I saw the old white light coming for me until Cruncher got him off. Frank threw a bucket of water over Titch and then, oddly, a bucket over himself. Cruncher let Titch go and he ran off down the road. People go on about wee men and how they’re always angry and want to wrestle the world but it wasn’t till that day I realised just how unpredictable they could be.
I told Frank that he was sacked as talent scout and took on the hunt myself. I decided to spread the net a bit wider and put the word out in Monifieth which caused more internal problems. Frank said we should be providing Broughty Ferry jobs for Broughty Ferry people but I told him right there and then that when I see a good window-cleaner I just see a good window-cleaner and if everyone in the world thought like that we’d all be a lot happier.
I got four or five guys from Monifieth and they were all good workers. They liked coming to work in Broughty Ferry because of the improvement in air quality and they were able to buy electrical goods and Beatles records here and sell them back in Monifieth for twice the price. With the Monifieth boys slogging away, Cruncher keeping Frank on the ladder and me switching between firm hands and arms round the shoulders, things were on the up and up.
By 1978 we’d reached the Kingsway dual carriageway when we got the contract for Fyffe’s Garage which is right in the middle of it. Just the other side of the traffic was Buckets Bennett. It was like the Kingsway was the Berlin Wall, Fyffe’s Garage was Checkpoint Charlie, I was Franz Beckenbauer and Buckets Bennett was Daley Thompson.
Something had to give.
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44 Due to time constraints, I’m going to stop correcting historical errors such as this. What’s the point?
22
Selling Up to Buckets Bennett
1980 was a year for cool heads and big balls. Buckets Bennett and I were like two master chess champions, circling each other and sacrificing prawns45 and sometimes going for little forays with our rooks and ladders. The thing was that we had great mutual respect. Sometimes we’d meet up on the forecourt of Fyffe’s Garage for a pow-wow and it was always very relaxed. We’d talk buckets and sponges and then he’d suggest I backed off from the Kingsway and I’d suggest he did the same and we’d both look at each other for a long, long time and then we’d both walk away backwards.
I was never too worried because I had Cruncher McKenzie there and to be honest I was making so much cash I’d kind of lost my sense of fear. Every Friday I’d pay the boys then I’d go and stash what was left in the wardrobe at the bottom of my bed. I called it ‘The Cupboard of Dreams’, which I thought was a fun nickname but any skirt that came back to the house always seemed to get a bit edgy when I suggested they have a look inside.
By 1980 that wardrobe was the most valuable wardrobe in Scotland, and that includes any antiques that the Queen had through in Holyrood. The only way you could have had a more valuable wardrobe in Scotland in 1980 would have been to stuff one with Lulu and Sean Connery. Knowing Connery as I do46 the big
man wouldn’t have a problem with that arrangement. He’d just look straight at the camera, send one eyebrow halfway to the moon, and slip into the wardrobe with that hairy chest of his twitching in the moonlight. And if I was Lulu, and I’m not,47 I wouldn’t be far behind.
With all the money I had stashed away in The Cupboard of Dreams I was living like a King. I had a wardrobe to be proud of and I ate magnificently. Great big steaks, lamb chops, whole sides of salmon. Poor old Frank would be sitting opposite grumbling into his sandwiches but, as I said to him, it was important he witnessed me eating like that because it gave him something to aim for.
So everything was moving along nicely when Cruncher arrived for work one day and made an absolute Chernobyl of an announcement. He had given up violence and was quitting the window-cleaning to start a small literary magazine called Mumblings From The Margins which would celebrate what he called ‘the maverick and the forgotten’. I said he could celebrate the maverick and the forgotten working with me and Frank on the windows but he had made up his mind and I didn’t fancy pushing him and finding out how committed he was to giving up the violence.
I had to act fast and I did. I begged Cruncher to work one last week, which he agreed to, then I went and tracked down Buckets Bennett. I told him that ‘a man from Aberdeen’ wanted to buy my round so I had just come to wish Buckets all the best. It worked a treat. He got angry and said after all our pow-wows he deserved the right to make an offer for my round. I said ‘No bother, but the boy from Aberdeen is paying £17,400’. I only said £17,400 because Dundee United had just paid £17,400 for that Brazilian boy48 and we’d all wondered if it was a funny number because of exchange rates.
Buckets gave the classic I’m Not Scared look more usually associated with washing machine repairmen and said he’d pay £17,401. I said, ‘Buckets, you’re a good man, you’re a Dundee man, and you’ve got a deal.’ The next day I went back with Cruncher and picked up the cash, had one of the best handshakes of my life with Buckets and went and found the boys.
I told them it was only the End of The Beginning and handed them all a month’s wages even though none of them had a contract. That’s the sort of man I am and they responded well. Cruncher said it would pay for the first issue of Mumblings From The Margins, the Monifieth boys said they’d open a shop in Monifieth selling imported luxury brands and Frank said he was going to go and visit his cousin in Coupar Angus.
So that was that. The Bob Servant window-cleaning round passed into folklore, the team went off and did their own thing and I, well, I got myself into a bit of trouble.
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45 Pawns, presumably
46 He doesn’t.
47 He isn’t.
48 See The Dundee Courier, 20 December 1979 – ‘United Swoop For Samba Star (“This is a dream for me. Growing up in las favelas our currency was dreams and the bravest dream I ever had was that one day I would play for Dundee United with Davie Dodds.”)’.
23
The Gin Crisis
The Gin Crisis. My God, where to begin? Well, after I’d sold up to Buckets Bennett and paid off the boys I wasn’t too sure what to do with myself. I thought I’d have a bit of time off, enjoy a couple of drinks and the next thing I knew I’d slipped into a living hell where it was just me, shouting, confusion and gin. It was a washout, a complete gin nightmare and I’m very lucky that I managed to claw my way out the other side.
I remember once watching Eric Clapton on Wogan when he talked about how hard he found it when a tour ended. He was used to life on the road when every day’s an adventure and suddenly he had time on his hands and had to make his own sandwiches and brush his own hair and he got a sad feeling. I watched Clapton tell that story to Wogan and I smiled in that sympathetic way you get a lot from swimming pool lifeguards and said to the telly, ‘I’ve been there, Eric, I’ve been right there.’
When I was one of the leading window-cleaning figures in Dundee I used to walk into Stewpot’s and it was like someone had turned on a tap marked Respect. Boys would ask me how the round was going, and how many customers I was up to now, and if Frank had done anything funny that day. Skirt would be watching me out the corner of their eyes and giving me the Pretending Not To Care stuff and Stewpot would be wanting to talk to me at a businessman-to-businessman level.
But after I’d sold up I went in there and it was like a morgue. I got nods and hellos of course but nothing of any great substance and it was like someone had shaken all the magic dust out of my clothes and hair. I needed to gee myself up a bit, make myself feel like the big man again and unfortunately I found that in gin.
The great irony is that I knew the damage that gin could do. I’d seen Frank’s aunt knit him jumpers with an extra arm. I’d read about the gin fan in Whitfield who strangled his neighbour’s pet rabbit because he thought it was making withdrawals from his bank account and saying stuff about his wife.49 I knew these stories and more and yet I still took a 9.5 double-pike swallow-dive into a great big puddle of gin and it took me a year to come up for air.
I remember the first gin I had very well, which is unusual. It was a particularly quiet afternoon in Stewpot’s and I was getting absolutely nothing from anyone. Not even much in the way of gestures. I said to Stewpot, ‘I think I’ll try a gin please, Stewpot,’ and he gave me one of those Oh Oh Here We Go looks so beloved by deep sea divers. He poured me the gin, I drank it and I’d found the answer to all my problems.
The Gin Crisis had begun. The afternoons weren’t too bad. I’d be in Stewpot’s delivering jokes and telling stories and although sometimes my words seemed to get their order mixed up, you could see that people were getting the gist of what I was saying from the way they looked at me. The evenings are a bit hazy. I remember something about a dog or wanting to be a dog but whatever it was I paid the money so no-one can point the finger on that one.50
After that, through no fault of my own, things slipped out of control. I can remember bits and pieces. Frank came back from his cousin’s but said he didn’t want to drink gin with me because of what happened to his aunt and I said that was selfish and we had a bust-up. Then I met some guy from Carnoustie on the bus and I told him about my bust-up with Frank and he said that he was a gin fan as well and he pointed down and I noticed that he had a bottle of gin with him on the bus and also that he was wearing one normal shoe and one welly.
I started seeing a lot of the gin fan from Carnoustie and then for some reason I was living with him. He had a small house in Carnoustie but from memory I was living in a tent in his garden which seems strange because it must have been yards from his house and I’ve never been one for the camping. Apparently I was in Carnoustie for nine months which seems unlikely because these are my only memories –
Gin Crisis Memory One – Stewpot’s Dad
Stewpot’s dad has a Bed and Breakfast in Carnoustie and one day me and my pal had drunk all our gin and were going to buy more when we spotted Lee Harvey Oswald up on the roof of Stewpot’s dad’s place. We ran back to the house and the Carnoustie gin fan stole an air rifle from his neighbour’s son then we rubbed mud into our faces and ran back to the Bed and Breakfast. Sure enough, there was Oswald, walking about up there like he owned the place and obviously hoping the Prime Minister or Idi Amin would drive past so he could sniper them.
We counted to three then stormed the Bed and Breakfast in a pincer movement. I shouted ‘You’ve shot your last Political Big Shot, Oswald!’ and my pal sprayed the Bed and Breakfast with the air rifle. Stewpot’s dad came out and said something about the police and how the guy was a builder. I was worried he’d recognise me so I ran off and it took me a few hours to get back to my pal’s house and the weird thing was we never spoke about Lee Harvey Oswald – we just had a singsong instead.
Gin Crisis Memory Two – The Pram
The two of us were charging through Carnoustie giving it the big one and then there was some issue with my leg and my gin pal found an old pram and he pushed me in
it while we had a singsong and it was a decent atmosphere.
Gin Crisis Memory Three – Tom Baker, The End
I can’t remember exactly what happened at the end between me and the Carnoustie gin fan but we were both very angry. He accused me of hiding gin and I accused him of being a liar and also that he was hiding gin. I got a bus back to Broughty Ferry and he tried to throw a brick at it but tripped over a wall and I fell asleep until someone woke me up at Dundee Bus Station.
The man that woke me up at the bus station looked exactly like Tom Baker. We got off the bus and I walked beside him saying that he looked like Tom Baker but then he started running even though he wasn’t dressed for it. I ran with him for a bit to keep him company but I couldn’t keep up so I stopped at a pub and they let me use their phone to call Frank.
The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed at Frank’s and he was saying that he’d poured out all the gin and Stewpot wasn’t going to serve me any either. Obviously I went straight for his neck but he’d tied my hands to the side of the bed using United scarves, which was unusually quick thinking from Frank.
For the next few days he fed me sandwiches and gave me tea through a straw. Once I’d got back my strength and my marbles he finally untied me and I got on with the job of piecing my life back together. When he talks about it now Frank always says that I came back from Carnoustie looking like I’d been in the Falklands and I say I wish I had been in the Falklands because at least then I’d have come home with a medal and God only knows I deserved one.
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49 See The Dundee Courier, 6 June 1978 – ‘Life’s Not Funny For Whitfield Bunny’.
50 See The Dundee Courier, 27 March 1980 – ‘Broughty Ferry Terrorised by “Werewolf”’, and The Dundee Courier, 28 March 1980 – ‘Broughty Man Fined’.