Queen of Clean: ‘Earth-shattering secret that made me scrub the pain away’
After a shattering discovery ripped Lynsey Crombie’s world apart, she found comfort – and therapy – in housework. And now she’s making a successful career out of it as the UK’s Queen of Clean. She tells best how elbow grease saved her…
The windows of Lynsey Crombie’s home in Peterborough sparkle like diamonds and you can see your face in the spotless polished worktops.
You wouldn’t expect anything less, though, from the UK’s Queen of Clean.
Mum-of-three Lynsey, 41, is a ‘cleanfluencer’ – one of the new band of women storming social media while cleaning up financially… from, literally, cleaning up.
With 186,000 Instagram followers, regular appearances on ITV’s This Morning and two books to her name, Lynsey – who first came to fame on Channel 4’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners – is in a great place, career-wise.
But the passion for cleanliness that brought her here comes from a very dark place.
For Lynsey’s obsession with cleaning started 17 years ago after the horrific discovery that her new husband was a paedophile.
The trauma sent her into premature labour with the twins she was carrying. Overnight, she became a single mother with two babies in a special-care unit.
‘I was in shock, and then all the bleaching started,’ she says. ‘I was like a lunatic; I’d get a bottle of bleach and pour it everywhere, over anything my husband had touched, all down my arms to wash away the pain he had caused me.
‘I felt absolutely disgusting.’ Lynsey, 25 at the time, had known the man she won’t name for just over a year. They’d met when she was living in Kingston, Surrey.
He was seven years older and a company executive: ‘I was young and vulnerable; he was good-looking, with an amazing career, a big house and quite a bit of money. I thought I’d landed on my feet.’
They married within a year. But at the wedding, his sister took Lynsey aside and asked, ‘Do you know about him being in prison?’
Since her new hubby had told her he’d served time for being in a nightclub fight, Lynsey replied, ‘Look, everyone’s got a past, it doesn’t bother me.’
She now says: ‘My sisterin-law just turned and walked away. Obviously she was trying to warn me, but she didn’t do a very good job!’
The newlyweds moved to Newcastle where Lynsey would often wake in the middle of the night to see her husband on his computer.
One night, when she was 28 weeks pregnant, the police arrived: ‘They came in and ripped everything apart. They had a warrant for my husband’s arrest and took him away, with me saying, “What’s he done?” But they couldn’t tell me.’
Distraught, she went to
his parents’ house nearby. ‘Finally, his mother told me what he’d done. I found out he’d been in prison twice. I was so shocked, I instantly went into labour.’
Emergency medics flew Lynsey and her daughters, Olivia and Mollie, to the nearest premature baby unit in Edinburgh: ‘It was very touch-and-go. Mollie was especially poorly and on oxygen-feeding tubes. She was in and out of hospital like a yo-yo.
‘The unit was a very sterile place – you were always having to wash your hands, so that fuelled my obsession.’
After six weeks, Olivia was allowed home. Mollie followed a few weeks later, but had to go everywhere attached to an oxygen canister.
Isolated and still too shaken to tell others the awful truth,
Lynsey went out each day to buy cleaning products, then cleaned frantically until all they were used up.
‘There was this aggressive scrubbing because I was in so much pain internally and I was living on the breadline, so all I could do was stay home and clean,’ she says.
Eventually she told her family what had happened and went back home to Peterborough: ‘I was 25 and felt my life was over: my children were poorly, my marriage dead and I had no career or money.
‘I was so ashamed of what had happened to me. I had some counselling, but it did nothing – what worked for me was scrubbing.
‘But I soon realised that I was young, a mum and I couldn’t let what had happened shape the rest of my life. I thought, “I am not going to let what that man did define me”.’
She found a job as a GP’s receptionist, where she met her second husband, Rob. Things weren’t easy at first: ‘I was a horrible person. I used to shout and say such nasty things to Rob; I even took him to the police station to be Criminal Record Bureau checked. I can’t believe that he stayed with me.’
Two years later, though, they had a son, Jake, now 14. It was when he was a baby that Lynsey, unwilling to leave him in childcare, took a cleaning job in a care home where the elderly residents enjoyed sharing their time-honoured cleaning tips with her.
Soon she had clients all over the neighbourhood. ‘Cleaning is the perfect job for mums – you can pick and choose your hours and your clients. It’s good, honest work and great exercise – I didn’t have to go to the gym. And I enjoyed it.’
Lynsey was also working selling advertising on a local magazine, when a researcher from Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners called.
She explained her background and was snapped up. Soon she was travelling all over the country transforming some of Britain’s filthiest houses for TV.
Lynsey discovered Instagram four years ago and initially posted snaps of family life. ‘But one day I’d washed the floor and it had come out really nice. I had a bottle of Zoflora disinfectant, so I put that on the floor, took a picture and posted it on Instagram with #cleaning – the girls had taught me how to hashtag.’
Lynsey had 40 followers but the post attracted 190 likes.
‘It just went from that,’ she says. She carried on posting cleaning shots and within six months had 7,000 followers, at which point she began contacting brands, asking to promote their wares. ‘No one else was doing cleaning on Instagram then. I was offered £100 to promote a mop, and I was, like, “Wow!”’
Today, she commands thousands of pounds for sponsored posts.
‘It’s been a whirlwind for little old me who used to put
‘There was aggressive scrubbing because I was in so much pain’
my hand down loos,’ she laughs.
When it comes to cleaning products, she tends to favour a more old-fashioned approach. Her favourite products are lemon juice and vinegar.
‘ You really don’t even have to go down the cleaning aisle in the supermarket, there’s so much you can do with a lemon,’ she says.
‘I really like the idea of me taking people back in time to when things were much simpler.’
She says that her cleaning obsession has ‘calmed down’ – but still gets up at 5.30am to tackle her chores. ‘By 8am today I’d hoovered and polished and done the bathrooms; in the oven there’s two pasta dishes, so we’re all prepped for later.’
She doesn’t know what happened to her ex-husband, who was sentenced to time in Durham prison. The twins, who were on the Child Protection Register until they were seven, don’t know his identity but they have studied the Child Protection Reports on the case, kept in a box in the attic.
‘They’re amazing kids – it makes me so happy their father hasn’t won.’
Meanwhile, she’s proud to have channelled her trauma into a soaring career.
As well as social media, books and TV appearances, she’s launching a new vacuum and cleaning products range. She also still occasionally takes on cleaning jobs for the council.
‘ You have to keep it real, because the Instagram stuff is a bubble that could burst at any moment,’ she says.
She’s so busy – has she thought about, er, employing a cleaner?
‘Never!’ cries the Queen of Clean.
‘No one will clean to my standards.’
‘It’s been a whirlwind for little old me’