by Ronald Smith
******
I began scouring around for second hand wood, and I soon heard about a demolition firm based in Dundee, called Ajax Metals, the largest in the area. I went to a site they were demolishing and arranged to buy a lorry load of beams. The foreman said, "Go down and select your wood and we’ll put it aside."
"When will you deliver it?"
"In a couple of days,"
"How much will it cost?"
"Fifty quid,"
"Fine," But nothing happened. I did this again, and still no wood was delivered.
So I went to the office and walked in. Old Flynn, the boss, and a couple of his sons were there. He was a small, stout man with deep set, cunning little piggy eyes that watched everything.
“Listen, mate," I said, "1 don't know what sort of business you're running here, I came in and arranged to buy wood and it didn't turn up. Why is it so difficult to buy off you? Is this a front for something else? Are you able somehow not to have to sell stuff to people? What's going on?"
He was tickled by this aggressive approach, "O.K. Next time you'll get what you're after." I argued with him about the price, beat him down, and he gave me a good price, too.
The site was a huge jute mill, covering about seven acres. I walked about, asking the workers what sort of guy Flynn was. "Aye, he's quite reasonable," they all told me. Even though he had a reputation for being corrupt, I got the impression he was pragmatic and businesslike.
I was careful to make sure he trusted me; I never took anything without going to him and asking how much. I felt that he would know if I picked up even one little nut. The result was that I was left alone; nobody else was left to find his own materials as much as I was. I was very scrupulous to declare everything, never to try to pull the wool over his eyes in any way. I felt that he had an animal awareness of everything that went on, which was demonstrated one day when I took Jamie with me.
Jamie had picked up a little brass tap he fancied and put it in his pocket; it didn't show, but when we went to the office, Flynn said to Jamie, "What have you got in your pocket?" He knew.
"Listen," I said, "you know that I've never taken any stuff. I told him not to take anything."
"Aye, I know I can trust you, but I don't trust him as far as I can throw him."
There was a lot of material on the seven-acre mill demolition site that nobody wanted; stuff that would eventually be bulldozed away. So I approached Flynn, "You're a reasonable man," I told him, "you can't afford to remove a lot of this stuff, you can't sell it. What about us coming to a deal? I won't argue with you about the prices any more if you'll let me have that leftover stuff for nothing,"
He said yes.
I was very careful of my appearance when I went to see Flynn, dressing as any worker and avoiding the more flamboyant garments I sometimes adorned myself with. He was fascinated by me and would invite me in for chats and cups of tea, giving me interesting little bits of information; for instance, under Dundee there is a warren of tunnels; one which runs under the Law is big enough to drive a car along and would make a bomb-proof nuclear shelter.
I was careful always to deal with him, because he gave me a much better price than his sons did.
In one of his condemned factories I had found a marvellous table, fourteen feet by six, with a cast iron base; Old Flynn said I could have it for £20. I arranged for someone to be at the factory to have it open and help me remove it. On the way there I picked up a tattooist friend in Dundee, named Jimmy, to give me a hand, but when we reached the building, no one was about.
Damn. Anyway, I had bought it, and I knew my way around, so we climbed through a side window and up to the third floor. There was the table, but each part weighed two hundred weight, too heavy to carry down the stairs. Jimmy noticed I had a rope in the car, and suggested we lower it out of the window in bits.
"We'll tie one end of the rope around a pillar, lower it down, I'll climb down the rope and untie it, then I'll climb back up,"
Yes, I thought, but it's a busy street, just a question of time before the police turn up.
One of the pieces swung into the window of the RAF Club on the street; and broke it, but no one appeared to notice.
Just as we had lowered the last section and Jimmy was going down the rope, the police drove up.
"We're just moving this table which I've bought from Tom Flynn; you can phone him up to check it, only let us finish loading this last piece,"
But they couldn't get in touch with him, so I said, "You can come with us to Flynn's office."
I almost had them agreeing to let me follow them, but they made me lead as we set off, the table loaded into a trailer which was illegal - the tax had expired on the car for that matter, and the engine was inclined to overheat, so I was in some trepidation. And I was dressed very hippy : a quilted jacket with velvet trousers.
Dundee has an absurd traffic system consisting of one-way streets so one can't cut across town easily; another result of Flynn's demolition, I imagined. It was five minutes to five on a Friday evening, the rush-hour traffic in full flood. Ahead was a two-way street with no right turn allowed; if we entered that street we would have to go all the way into the centre of Dundee, through traffic jams, then up a steep hill which would cause the car to boil over.
I turned right.
We drove up to Flynn's office and got out of the cars; the cops came over to take me to task, but I opened first.
"Listen, if you're going to talk about that right-hand turn, you know as well as me we would have gone all the way into town, we would still be there, we'd be pissed off; I did the most sensible thing, I saved your time, didn't I?"
They had to agree.
As we walked towards the office, I suddenly knew what was going to happen, because of my clothes.
Flynn looked startled by my appearance, my hippy costume, "You know that table you sold me? Well, these policemen saw me loading it and thought I was stealing it."
Flynn looked blankly at me for a moment, and said "I've never seen him before in my life."
The cops looked at me, eyes hard and narrow.
"You bastard!" I burst out, "I was expecting that from you."
Then Flynn began chuckling; I laughed; and the policemen joined in too, I observed Flynn and the police; they watched his every move with deference. He was like their boss, I realised; he owned them.
Old Flynn presided over the destruction of Dundee, becoming, in the process, the most powerful politician there, finally the provost. He developed one of the largest debts of any city in Britain, even borrowing money off the Arabs. He would slap seven-day closure orders on tenements and knock them down for the corporation, making a lot of money. The corporation would sell land to him cheap, then he'd sell it back dear. This went on for ten years. Dundee was then the most corrupt city in the U.K.; if you were busted, you could walk into a bar and openly bribe a sheriff with a tenner so he would let you off the next day.
Flynn ran a brothel outside the city where he entertained the councillors. There was no pretence; it was all out in the open; he was like the Godfather of Dundee, Everything was in the family; most of his employees were relations; it was a sort of clan system.
Various people tried to get him. The Procurator-Fiscal once prepared a dossier on him; it went right to the highest level, to the Secretary of State for Scotland, and came back: 'No prosecution allowed.'
Dundee has an extraordinary history. A whaling fleet had been based there and a local flax-spinning industry. It was a good site for mills because of the sloping ground which provided water power. The Freemen of the town were organized into guilds and held all the strings, refusing to allow any competition to set up. The workers, Irish-Scots who lived in the town, were the unfree, virtually slaves. In the nineteenth century, a Dundonian went to Pakistan and discovered that the jute which was too coarse and brittle for weaving, could be softened with whale oil, and woven. Jute exports from Pakistan commenced and Dundee was transformed; it becam
e the rope and sacking centre of the world, the richest city in Britain for a brief while: the mill-owners got richer and richer, spending their money on more grandiose factories, or sumptuous houses in Broughty Ferry, or across the river. But they didn't pay their workers any better; Dundee became the only place in Britain where the women died before the men, because they slaved under appalling conditions in the Mills; It also had the shortest people in the country, stunted by malnutrition.
Flynn came from the lowest class, the tinkers. When he took over, he did more damage than the Germans, demolishing the old city centre, and building huge housing schemes on the cold northern uphill side of the city, where there is today a high murder rate and runaway heroin addiction. The strange thing is that Flynn was loved by many people in Dundee.
But Flynn was just a front for Kerr, the architect, one of Joey Buchanan's father's associates, I met Kerr once, as a result of seeing am advert for a stove, in the 'Courier'; the address was Cash Castle, set in cemetery – like grounds: stagnant ponds, no flowers, just grass. The Castle had been converted at great expense, with a fantastic, Italianate door and costly hardwood windows, but on closer inspection I could see the window-frames and the door hadn't been fitted properly; there were gaps between the walls and the wood-work, and the door-handle was inadequate. Outwardly so ritzy, it was shoddy close up.
'I'll beat down his price for the stove,' I thought to myself. I rang the bell and Kerr opened the door. I took one look at his cold, dead, fishy eyes, and knew at once this was someone I couldn't bargain with.
Inside, the castle was lavishly and expensively decorated with mosaics, a library full of books on art, and a large collection of Scottish paintings. I could tell that he had bought them because of the artist's name, not because he liked them; the collection was a mixture , some great, others drab and awful. This was where most of Flynn's money had gone, siphoned from the destruction of Dundee into this lavish, yet strangely lifeless and gimcrack castle.
I bought the stove and left, with a shiver of disgust.
