Bob Servant (2 page)

No 64-year-old man could write an autobiography that didn't stray into inaccuracy but very few would produce one that was so firmly planted in, at best, exaggeration and, at worst, libellous fantasy. I tried to omit as little as possible but even correcting what is there, as you shall see, was a substantial task.

Once I knew Bob's word was shaky I retreated to Dundee's Central Library to trawl through six decades of local newspaper archives and simultaneously make hundreds of phone calls to those Bob mentions in the book. The reaction I had from former and current associates of
Bob varied from the bewildered to the angry and, surprisingly often, to the threatening. Some of the physical forfeits people suggested I would suffer if particular content stayed in the book were incredible, particularly when you consider I was talking to pensioners and many of them were female. On this development Bob was unusually comforting, which should have raised my suspicions. I later found out he'd contacted the most ferocious of those threatening me because of what he had written and offered
them
his ‘full support' in their criminal ambitions against
me.

The day I finished this book, documented later in the Acknowledgements, was one of rare delight and I can now look upon it with some pride. I apologise for what you may see as a rant but I, selfishly, feel better for having delivered it. Anyway, I now retreat to the editorial footnotes and leave the centre stage to a man more fitted for it than me. From here on in it's just you and Bob. I can only wish you the very best of luck.

Neil Forsyth
New York
2010

_________________________

1
Memorably, he once swore blind that he had not (as his neighbour Frank had told me) gone to the swimming baths despite the fact that when I found him he was standing in the shallow end of the swimming baths. He told me that he was ‘looking for someone' and so he hadn't actually ‘gone to the swimming baths' because he was ‘looking for someone' who might be there. It turned out he was secretly training to swim the River Tay, a project that followed the pattern for such things by being quietly dropped a few days later.

Well, well, well. Here we are again, back in the book game. I wasn't going to do another book. I'm a busy man and I have a lot of hobbies but ever since I wrote the last one I've had people asking me to write another book. Come on, Bob, they say, write another book. I try and ignore them or pass them off with bits and pieces (jokes, stories, a bit of patting) but after a while all these little jibes turn into an avalanche and the only way I can stop being buried is to stand up and shout ‘Fuck's sake shut up I'll do it OK!'

After I'd decided to write another one I had to decide what type of book to write. I wasn't going to do another one of emails. I've had my fun with that stuff and it's very important as an author that I don't get pigeonholed like Dick Francis. That left a few areas but the one type of book I've always enjoyed is autobiographies. If you're a big fish and you want to write a book then the autobiography pond is the only place worth swimming. Jesus kicked it all off with the Bible and every star name since has had a crack. Wogan did it with that one where he's wearing a blazer and grinning like the cat that got the cream (which he did, to be fair, for fifty years) and from memory Savile wrote three of the bastards.
²

Once I'd decided to write my autobiography I got the boy Forsyth in to edit. He was a pain in the arse to be honest, very lazy and a bit off in the head. I remember one day when he just totally lost it, saying how I'd ruined his life and all this. Well if giving someone a chance in life is ruining their life then it's a very strange world we live in. I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on him. What do you expect from someone who's in their forties and has never had a proper job?
³

When I sat down to write my story I started off by listing all the things I've done. It was a real eye-opener. It turned out I've done more stuff than anyone in Dundee and yet the arrogance of some of the people round here would make you sick. I looked at the list and I thought, ‘I'm a hero.' Then I worried that maybe I was biased or drunk so I put my clothes back on, walked round the house and came back to the list and read it as if it was about someone else. You know what I thought? ‘This guy's a hero.'

But I'm not. No-one's ever said I'm a hero and it's not because they don't want me to get a big head. It's because they don't think I am one. So I started writing and I didn't stop until I'd worked out every reason that I've not become what I should have become. It was hard to write in places, some noses are going to be put out of joint and the boo boys will have a field day.

I don't care. Because my name is Bob Servant. I should be the Hero of Dundee but it's just not happened. And here's why.

Bob Servant
Dundee
2010

_________________________

2
Bob's spot-on here. The television presenter and DJ Sir Jimmy Savile penned three autobiographies in a productive five-year burst –
As it happens
(1974),
Love is an Uphill Thing
(1976) and
God'll Fix It
(1979).

3
I'm 32.

Bob Servant (left) and Neil Forsyth. Broughty Ferry, Dundee, 2010

 

 

 

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

Anonymous

I don't believe in God.

Sir Terry Wogan (1938–)

 

Photo courtesy of Bob Servant's private collection, all rights reserved. Inscription on back of photograph reads: ‘Dawson Park, 1954'.

Until I was ten years old life for me was all about The Lone Ranger and I wish I'd never bothered. These days there are all sorts of rules with regards to kids. It's all fresh vegetables and people frowning at you if you spank them (especially if they're not yours). Well how times change, because when I was a nipper it was a complete free-for-all.

The first school I went to was Eastern Primary next to the mousetrap factory.
⁴
Working in the mousetrap factory made the folk there completely immersed in violence and they took it out on us. Every morning a kid would come in with a shiner or a dead leg. The headmaster went over to the factory to sort it out but the manager kicked him in the balls and after that our lesson times were switched so we didn't clash with the factory's shift changes.

It opened my eyes to violence and taught me that it could be an important weapon as long as you used it on someone that wasn't as good at it as you were. I was also scared, just a little bit, but scared enough. Even with the shift changes, you never knew when you'd bump into someone from the mousetrap factory in the streets around the school. I was lucky enough to avoid some of the hidings that others got but I picked up the odd slap and got chased home once by a woman that had just come off the nightshift.

It wasn't really something that I could bring up at home. Conversation was always encouraged at our house but not if I was involved. That was a pretty rigid rule which made it very hard for me to introduce topics. Every night Mum and Dad gave me a bag of chips and a glass of Barr's Limeade then sat me in front of the telly while they went off and did their own thing. Don't get me wrong – if I did try and talk to them they wouldn't just ignore me but they'd point out that they were busy people and I should really wait until I had something worthwhile to say. Looking back I can see where they were coming from, but at the time it left me a little bit lonely.

Being scared of going to primary school and being lonely at home is a tough combination for anyone, particularly children, but everything changed when I discovered The Lone Ranger. I remember it very well. The old Bakelite TV, the picture fuzzing at the edges and then that theme tune. Christ, it seems like yesterday. The Lone Ranger, flying about on his horse Tonto, saving all the skirt.
⁵
It used to break my heart when Tonto would look over at The Lone Ranger, swish his tail and call him
Kemo Sabe.
⁶
I'll never forget when . . .
⁷

These memories seem like yesterday inside my head but they're also tough to think about because, frankly, The Lone Ranger turned into a real monkey on my back. I get angry thinking about it even now. As far as I'm concerned it should have been made very, very clear that the show was made up and wasn't a documentary. When you're that age you pretty much take anything as gospel and that includes shows on the television. If other people, many of whom are old enough to know better, also suggest to you that a programme is based on real life then, to be fair, you're going to believe them.

The number of shoeings I picked up through The Lone Ranger years was ridiculous, but when you think The Lone Ranger has your back then you feel invincible. I'd be in the playground with all the hard nuts circling me like ants and I'd be whistling like a bastard and
looking up the Great Eastern Road and thinking ‘Come on, Tonto, you're cutting this a bit fine.'

When I was ten I came home from school with the dead leg from hell and Mum finally told me that The Lone Ranger was just George Seaton in fancy dress. She said that my dead leg was a credit to George Seaton's acting and that as an amateur actor herself she hoped that one day she would be able to affect audiences in the same way.

It was very disappointing for me to hear that The Lone Ranger was a lot of bollocks and, looking back, I think this was the first example of why I haven't become the Hero of Dundee. How can you be a Hero when people get together to shaft you like that? Everyone was in on it. Mum, Dad, the kids at school, even the fucking postman who used to pretend to have a gunfight with me on his way up the path.

Let me ask you this. When your life starts with the whole world pretending that you're a cowboy and best pals with The Lone Ranger then what chance have you got?

_________________________

4
For a forty-year period, from the 1920s to the mid 1960s, the Daly and Sons factory on Dundee's Great Eastern Road was the centre of the European mousetrap industry. The factory closed on Tuesday 3 August 1965. See
The Dundee Courier
of the same date –
‘Mice Celebrate on Black Day For City'
.

5
Incorrect. The horse was called Silver, Tonto was the name given to the Lone Ranger's laconic Red Indian sidekick.

6
Tonto did use this phrase regularly but again he wasn't a horse, he was a tail-less Red Indian.

7
At this point I have deleted a further four paragraphs on Bob's memories of The Lone Ranger, all of which were inaccurate, including the protracted description of an episode where Bob misremembers The Lone Ranger making love to a string of women while Tonto (again listed as a horse) offered vocal encouragement.

My father was a great man, so everyone says. I never saw much of him but the guys that say he was a great man are all pretty decent so I've got no reason to go against their opinion. They would know better than me. I don't think it had anything to do with The Lone Ranger cock-up but Dad wasn't around much after that. He said he was working on the North Sea oil rigs, which sounds impressive enough but this was the 1950s and oil wasn't discovered in the North Sea until 1970.
⁸

For a while Mum and I clung to the theory that Dad was a visionary. Unfortunately for us he was a bigamist. She should have guessed. He'd head off for two weeks with his swimming trunks, a sieve and a copy of the
Racing Post
. No-one knew much about the oil game in those days but even as a youngster I remember thinking that he must be pretty good at his job to get much oil with that gear.