Lord Willie Haughey, whose entrepreneurial flair stretches back to his days as a young boy in the Gorbals on Glasgow’s south side, has hailed his move into building houses with Ediston as a “monumental shift” in the direction of his business.

It seems fitting for many reasons that the Gorbals has been chosen for the first major housing development he is undertaking with Edinburgh-based property group Ediston, as part of plans to spend more than £1 billion on building 11,000 homes over the next nine years.

The Gorbals remains the head-office location for Lord Haughey’s global City Facilities Management Holdings business. It is also where, more than half a century ago, the entrepreneur began developing his business skills and earned himself the nickname of “Willie the Hatchet” because of the tool he used to chop up doors from old, abandoned, due-to-be-demolished tenements to sell to pensioners as firewood.

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Today, the scale of the City operation he has built since launching the venture with his wife, Lady Susan, in 1985 is thrown into stark relief by the

£640 million deal through which

Ediston is taking a 24 per cent stake in Lord Haughey’s family-owned business. The deal involves City issuing new preference shares.

City has built a global workforce of about 14,000 from its Gorbals base, has an annual turnover of around £1.3bn, and has expanded successfully into Australia, the US, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and France.

It was on the Go Radio Business Show with Hunter & Haughey that the entrepreneur recalled with some humour the “small hatchet” he used to break down wooden doors of old tenements in the Gorbals, and the frightening-sounding nickname it earned him.

In an interview with The Herald, Lord Haughey recalled “at the age of nine and 10 and 11, going around the houses selling firewood to the pensioners” and “collecting ginger bottles”. He also ran errands for people.

Lord Haughey said: “Everyone in the Gorbals then was kind of poor. The only thing to do was to work to earn money.”

He added: “I was always into having my own business.”

Between the ages of 11 and 15, Lord Haughey delivered milk.

Noting he was working from 5.20am in those days, Lord Haughey said: “I loved it. It kept you fit as well.”

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He added: “My mum used to say to me, ‘Why do you always look at the day the clocks go forward as the best day of the year?’ [I said]: ‘Because it is lighter in the evening’.”

Crown Street in the Gorbals is the location for the planned development by Lord Haughey and Ediston of 356 luxury apartments of around 1,200sq ft.

Lord Haughey, who left school in 1971, cites as a crucial moment in his business life his move to Abu Dhabi in 1983, by which time he had completed an apprenticeship as a refrigeration and air-conditioning engineer. “Once I was qualified, I decided to see what the world had to offer,” he said.

He described the two-and-a-half-year period which followed as a “working MBA (Master of Business Administration)”. Recalling his time working in Abu Dhabi for UTS Carrier, part of the “largest air-conditioning company in the world”, Lord Haughey said: “I went there as an engineer and ended up as the general manager. I actually ended up running a business. That was like a working MBA.”

While he was away, he saved up £70,000. “In 85, that was quite a lot of money,” he said.

When he moved back permanently to the UK in 1985, the City business was born. Lord Haughey highlights the key part played by his wife, who ran the accounting and administration side and retired from the business in 2007.

The group was launched with the founding of City Refrigeration, predominantly serving the licensed trade with customers including major brewers such as Tennent’s, Belhaven, Scottish & Newcastle and Alloa.

After building up this business over nine years, a 67% stake was sold to investment capital group 3i in 1994 for £5.6m, with the Haughey family retaining 33%.

A key moment in the group’s development came a few years later, when it won a major facilities management contract with supermarket giant Asda. This took City into a much bigger global market.

Noting this key contract “morphed” the business from a refrigeration to a facilities-management company, Lord Haughey, a former director of football club Celtic, said: “The Asda contract changed the whole business.

“The rest is history. We just grew and grew and grew. We bought 3i back out again in 1999. We bought all the shares we had sold. From 1999, we owned all the company.”

In the early years of the new millennium, City Building Engineering Services was launched within the group.

Lord Haughey highlighted the fact the City business is focused on the technical services side of facilities management, such as electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning work, while noting its annual turnover of around £100m from cleaning services.

Asked if he had envisaged building a business of the scale City is at now when he started, Lord Haughey replied: “Never. I never dreamed about being across the globe. We had done a good job for people – they just asked us to do more and more. We are very fortunate for the business we have built.”