Bob Servant (11 page)

Right from the start having Cruncher on the round was top class. He wore his donkey jacket and his Dundee United tammy hat and held the ladder in those big arms and my God I wouldn't have minded going up the ladder myself. Frank was cock-a-hoop and all in all it was a decent atmosphere other than the fact we had to listen to Cruncher talk about the common plot devices of Agatha Christie and how he wished Dick Francis would ‘get over the horse thing' while Frank and I looked at each other with Just Agree With Anything He Says eyes.

One day I was berating Frank for all the customers we'd lost with his falls and Cruncher suggested I pay him a quid for every new customer he brought in. At the time it didn't seem a big deal but looking back it was like Jesus going to God and asking if there was anything he could do to help out. Just like Jesus was a breath of fresh air for the Christianity game, Cruncher's new customer search put me on the road to the business big time. Every day he'd have two or three more customers for us and the round got bigger and bigger.

Having said that, the customers Cruncher brought in were a funny bunch. They tended to be nervous individuals and most of them preferred to do their talking and paying through the letterbox but it was all the same to me. There was one guy who didn't even have any windows. He lived in a converted air raid shelter on Victoria Road but he left the money under the mat and shouted through the door to give his best wishes to Cruncher and suggested that we ‘just check the roof if you have the time'. We didn't even bother doing that to be honest. Lord Lucan could have been on the boy's roof having a packed lunch and we'd already be fifty yards up the road.

The success of the round didn't go unnoticed and I got a call from
The Courier
who wanted us to feature in their Rising Business Stars column.
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These days I know what the press are like and they've put me through the ringer but back then I was blinded by the thought of getting in the paper and all the skirt seeing it so I said, ‘OK then why not yes that's fine come down tomorrow.'

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42
William Topaz McGonagall, 1825–1902, much maligned Dundonian poet who suffered years of public humiliation in the bars of Dundee. Mercilessly lampooned by Spike Milligan through his McGoonagall character.

43
Photos on facing page courtesy of
The Dundee Courier
, all rights reserved. They show Cruncher McKenzie in his distinctive Dundee United woollen hat, Bob directing operations and Frank loyally perching on, or carrying, the ladder. The photos illustrated the
Rising Business Stars
section of 19 July 1974 –
‘Skylights Are The Limit For Servant's Window-cleaning Round
(“We've got the most honest sponges in Dundee . . . We work hard and we play hard . . . I'd say to the other window cleaners reading this – pull your socks up because we've caught you with your pants down.”)',

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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Due to time constraints, I'm going to stop correcting historical errors such as this. What's the point?

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 prawns
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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 do
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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,
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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.