Bob Servant
Page 7
Still, at least it wrapped things up with Daphne. Relationships never end well and I’m glad the two of us broke up in a way that we’d probably have both laughed at later, if we’d ever seen each other again. Frank and I decided to go out to celebrate and luckily we had a reason to do so. It was Terry Wogan’s 32nd birthday. We’d both got heavily into Wogan by that point and Stewpot let us have one photo of him up in the pub which was a nice gesture and added a happy ending to what had been a tricky few months.
Wogan’s 32nd Birthday38
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37 Bob’s way off here. The Games commonly known as the Hitler Olympics were the Berlin Olympics of 1936. For Germany to have entitled the 1972 Munich Olympics as the Hitler Olympics would have been needlessly provocative.
38 Photo courtesy of Bob Servant’s private collection, all rights reserved. Inscription on back of photograph reads: ‘Wogan’s 32nd Birthday, 3 August 1970. I lent Frank £2.’
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Making Frank My Number Two
I’ve made some great decisions in my life, really top class. I’ve never worn a cardigan, I’ve never had a moustache and I got my double entendre phase out the way in the 1980s before every man and his dog started using them under John Major.39 Entering the window-cleaning game was another very good decision. Making Frank my number two wasn’t.
The window-cleaning game is a hard business full of tough nuts but everyone knew it was a licence to print free money. By 1970 Frank and I were sick of doing jobs here and there and having to cut down on luxuries to make sure we had the readies to spend in Stewpot’s every day. We were looking for something bigger and better, and one day in the summer of 1970 we found it when Stewpot leant over the bar, something he’s always excelled at, and asked if we’d heard about Safehands Riley.
Safehands Riley wasn’t the biggest name in window cleaning – that was Buckets Bennett from Invergowrie – but he was an established figure and had a respectable little round which covered off West Ferry from Victoria Road to Dawson Park. I was on nodding terms with him and Frank knew him on a ‘Hello’ basis, and he had a reputation for being a decent man and not thinking he was Cliff Richard like a lot of the window-cleaning big guns.
What Stewpot told us was remarkable. Safehands Riley had been attacked by a German Shepherd at a house in Strathearn Road and had completely lost his confidence to go to houses with enclosed gardens. West Ferry is full of big gaffs so that had pretty much taken Safehands out the game and now he was looking to offload his round and get into something that, as he put it, ‘would let him see his grandchildren grow up’.
I found that surprising, particularly because Safehands didn’t have any kids, but I also saw it as an opportunity so I said, ‘Action time, Francis,’ and me and Frank headed up to Safehands’ house in Ellieslea Road. There was no answer at the door but we heard him shouting and went round the front. He was hiding out in an upstairs bedroom and in a terrible state, unshaven and speaking to us through a gap in the curtains.
He said that the whole thing had been a nightmare and all he remembered was a big set of teeth, a lot of barking and feeling trapped. Sharp as a tack I said, ‘That sounds like when I had a girlfriend,’ which eased the mood and Safehands said it was the first time he’d laughed since he got out the hospital because all he’d been doing was sleeping, taking medicine and trying not to think about German Shepherds. ‘Sounds like when I had a girlfriend,’ said Frank and I told him to go and wait in the street.
Safehands and I got down to business. He said he’d give me his list of clients, a ladder, a bucket and more sponges than I’d ever need for £500. For the next half an hour I played every trick in the book. First I told him to say the price again in exactly thirty seconds, ran over to his outside tap, filled my mouth with water and then spat it out in surprise when he said the price. Then I did the ‘get really angry and ask why they’re treating you like this’ move. Then I did the ‘I’m walking away, I’m walking away’ and walk really slowly until they call you back. Then I did the Woe Is Me and pretend to cry one-two. By the end Safehands was on the ropes and wrapped up in my web of tricks. We met at £496 as long as I paid cash.
I had a week to get the money and I came up with the fairest way of raising it. Frank kicked up a bit of a fuss, as I knew he would, even though I pointed out that selling off most of the house’s furniture would instantly double the size of the rooms and to double the size of the rooms in any other way would cost a fortune.
He was particularly difficult about his mum’s antique piano but, like I told him, neither of us could play a note and his mum would have to have pretty long arms to bang out a tune seeing as she now lived in the Goodbye And All The Very Best Nursing Home in Stobswell. I opened the windows and said, ‘Shall we see if she can reach the piano, Frank?’ and did the cupping the ear thing and finally he crumbled and admitted I was right. He looked a bit down, so I cheered him up by telling him I had two big surprises for him later that day, which was a bit daft because I didn’t have any surprises for him at all and he’d almost definitely have settled for one.
But you don’t get to where I am in life without being quick on your feet, so once the furniture cowboys had come and picked up the gear and given me my £500 I told Frank to get his jacket on and took him down to Vissochi’s Ices on the harbour. ‘Are we going to Vissochi’s, Bob, are we going to Vissochi’s?’ he kept asking and he nearly exploded when we arrived and I ordered him a treble scooper which he’s not really supposed to have because of his excitement problem.
We went and sat on a bench and looked out over the harbour. I was having a great think, mostly about the window-cleaning round and how much money I would make, and then Frank interrupted it by asking me what his second surprise was. It must have been the view or the fresh air but I took a deep breath and said that he was going to be my number two on the window-cleaning round.
He didn’t say anything so I turned round and I don’t think I’d ever seen him so happy. He had this big smile. He looked a bit like he was going to cry, and he had ice cream all over his face. I looked at Frank, sitting there at the harbour while the sun set and the swans quacked away, and I thought to myself – ‘Oh sweet Jesus what have I done?’
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39 See The Dundee Courier, 5 April 1986 – ‘Local Man Banned From Broughty Greengrocer (“He’d stand at the counter making comments about the vegetables and weeping with laughter”)’. See the Daily Express 17 May 1991 – ‘Major Pleasure Promised to Female Cabinet Members’. See The Times, 16 November 1991 – ‘Prime Minister Anticipates “Major Election”’.
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Frank’s Falls
1970, 1971 and 1972 were big years for me. I learnt a lot about life, I learnt a lot about business and, believe it or not, I learnt new ways in which Frank was an idiot. Traditionally, Frank had shown himself to be an idiot with things to do with his mind and his mouth but he pulled out a whole new twist over those years by showing me that slapstick could be a bad thing.
I’ve always loved slapstick and I still do. If you were to walk past my house on a Saturday teatime you’d be forgiven for thinking Billy Connolly was giving me a one-to-one or Del Boy was in here doing the falling through the bar routine over and over again but in fact it’s just me watching the famous television show You’ve Been Framed.
I’m not sure if you watch You’ve Been Framed but I’ll tell you right now that I’ve been watching the telly for fifty years and there’s not been a better show and that includes the Coronation and the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you’ve not seen the show, You’ve Been Framed is a collection of short documentaries when everything is fine to start with and people are laughing and talking to each other and the boy on the camera will shout ‘Grab the rope’ or ‘Stand closer to the water’ or ‘Come on then, do something’ and you’re sitting watching the documentary and you know what’s coming so you’re already sort of giggling to yourself and then BANG! it’s slapstick time.
There’s a few storylines that crop up a lot. Sometimes one of the people in the documentary will fall into water. Sometimes they’ll fall off their bike into a bush. Sometimes they’ll be hit in the knackers by a ball thrown by a kid. Sometimes they’ll be dancing with the bride and the bride’s dress will fall down, and so on and so on. It doesn’t really matter because it’s nearly always a belter. In fact the only bit of You’ve Been Framed I don’t like is when they sometimes show a collection of documentaries where it’s two babies kissing and the audience gives it the ‘Aaaahhh’ routine. If I want to see people kissing I’d watch Gone With The Wind or Blind Date and I’d want them to be grown-ups at least.
My point is that I’m a slapstick fan and probably one of the biggest around. If I’m walking to Stewpot’s and a kid cycles into a lamppost or some skirt decks it in her heels then I’ll be doubled over for about ten minutes. One time I saw a guy trip over his dog’s lead and fall into an industrial bin outside Safeways and I was laughing so much I had to go home and put myself to bed and really, really try to get it out my head because I was genuinely worried I was going to have a heart attack. For the next month I took the long way to Stewpot’s because I was scared if I went past Safeways I’d suffer an aftershock.
So when me and Frank started the window-cleaning round and he spent the next three years performing slapstick you’d think I’d be happy. But I wasn’t because it was a pain in the arse. He was damaging the equipment and it hardly filled our customers with confidence. I tried to help him. First I put a photo of Terry Wogan on the bucket to give him some company up there but then he started talking to Wogan, lost what little concentration he had and down he came. Then he said it was just bad luck so I bought a so-called lucky wooden elephant off Gypsy Henderson but that just gave Frank someone else to talk to and Lo And Behold he was lying on the ground and giving it the Can’t Feel My Feet stuff.
The Wogan Bucket40
If I was to list Frank’s falls between 1971 and 1973 then this book would be as big as a house. Well, probably not quite as big as mine but probably as big as yours. Anyway, the falls were mostly the same. I’d tell Frank not to fall off the ladder – he’d fall off the ladder, I’d take a photo for insurance purposes, that photo would somehow wind up in Stewpot’s, Frank would go in the huff because the photo had wound up in Stewpot’s, Frank would resign, Frank would ask for his job back, I’d tell Frank not to fall off the ladder, he’d fall off the ladder, etc, etc.
It was tough going but there were some good moments along the way. I’ve just been up to my attic and gone into my Frank Being An Idiot Box. Frank says I keep the stuff in that box to pull out and humiliate him which is just pathetic. Anyway, here’s some of his best falls.
Incident Report41
Date – February 1971
Place – Bill Wood’s garden on Strathearn Road
What Happened? – A nice soft landing for Frank’s soft head. I’d left him up there talking to the Wogan bucket while Bill and I had a chat about a few political rumblings at the Bowling Club and then we heard this yell and, surprise surprise, there was Francis whimpering away.
Blame For Insurance Purposes – Frank
Incident Report
Date – October 1972
Place – Dawson Park
What Happened? – We’d just won the contract for the Dawson Park greenhouses. Frank had taken to wearing a plastic helmet which in my view made him over-confident and that was proven here with gusto. This was probably my favourite of Frank’s falls because of the way that just when he thought it was all over he got spanked by the ladder. It took me and the Parkies ten minutes to stop laughing, get a grip of ourselves and reluctantly lift the ladder off him.
Blame For Insurance Purposes – Frank
Incident Report
Date – August 1973
Place – The Taychreggan Hotel
What Happened? – This was embarrassing for several reasons. The Taychreggan was the biggest job on the round, Frank was left still holding Gypsy Henderson’s so-called lucky elephant, he fell twice in one day, and he was wearing his Christmas jumper in the middle of summer. Under the circumstances it was hard to feel sorry for him and I didn’t.
Blame For Insurance Purposes – Frank, Gypsy Henderson
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40 Photo courtesy of The Dundee Courier, Rising Business Stars, 19 July 1974.
41 All four dramatic photos courtesy of Bob Servant’s private collection, all rights reserved. In each case the inscription on the back of the photograph is the ‘Incident Report’ given.
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Bringing Cruncher On Board
Even though some of them were decent entertainment I knew that Frank’s falls had to finish. He was at risk of breaking the ladder and not all of our customers had as good a sense of humour as me and they played the Extremely Unprofessional and You’re Sacked cards. I worked out that the only way I could guarantee that Frank would stop falling off the ladder was to get a real-life Strong Man to hold the ladder in a vice-like grip while I went off and charmed the customers with my eyes and stories.
The toughest nut I knew, of course, was Cruncher McKenzie, but he hadn’t spoken to me since the Lord Dundee’s Lover cliffhanger fiasco. I went to the shops and bought a copy of Poetic Gems by William McGonagall42 and went up to his house.
Cruncher opened the door and did a look that could freeze a snowman. Then he saw the book and cracked the most wonderful smile and said ‘In you come Robert’. We sat down in Cruncher’s living room and he talked for about an hour about McGonagall and how he was much misunderstood and how Cruncher saw similarities with his own life.
‘Was McGonagall a hard nut as well, Cruncher?’ I asked and Cruncher looked very serious and said, ‘Robert, he was the bravest man who ever held a pen.’ I wanted to say ‘What about Tony Hart?’ so much it gave me a sore tummy but I bit my tongue and suggested that Cruncher came and worked with me and Frank on the windows.
Cruncher said that he’d been working as a bouncer at the Goodbye And All The Very Best Nursing Home because they’d let in a young piece of skirt and all the old boys were thumping each other to try and impress her. I did a That’s News To Me look and said working on the windows would get him out and about and Frank and I would happily talk books with him all day long. He had a wee think and then smiled again (not as good as the first time but by no means badly) and said, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’ which I recognised as a lyric from an Elvis song. ‘Just don’t wear your Blue Suede Shoes, Cruncher,’ I said and winked so he knew I was in on the joke but he didn’t seem to want to keep it going.
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.43 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.”)’,
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