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

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.

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

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 falsehood
¹
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 would 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.