The Kellys of Kelvingrove

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  DEDICATION

  I dedicate The Kellys of Kelvingrove to the memory of Joe Fisher who, over many years, never failed to find answers to my research questions when he worked in the Mitchell Library.

  He advised an endless number of writers who will never forget him and will always be grateful for his generous help.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to my dear friend, Michael Malone, who wrote all the poetry in this novel.

  Also my thanks to retired Detective Inspector Robert Barrowman QPN, who has conscientiously helped me with several novels.

  1

  Police officer Jack Kelly and his friend Eric Gilroy were off duty and looking forward to the Old Firm match. They were both well wrapped up in coats and woolen scarves because it was a grey, misty day.

  As they met up after leaving their tenement flats, Eric said, ‘We’ll be lucky if we can see the match if this gets any worse.’

  ‘It’ll take more than a smir of rain and a bit of mist to stop the Old Firm match.’

  Already enormous crowds were flooding the streets. Thousands of men were aiming in the same direction – Ibrox Park and the Old Firm match between Celtic and Rangers. Both Jack and Eric were wearing Rangers scarves. The nearest subway station to Ibrox was Copeland Road and the platform there was difficult to negotiate because of the mountains of mail bags lying around as a result of the postal strike. There were mail bags piled up in all sorts of places all over the town.

  At last Jack and Eric were inside the stadium and standing tightly packed together with the rest of the eighty thousand spectators. A fantastic, exciting match got going. Jack and Eric clutched their heads and bawled out when Jimmy Johnstone put Celtic ahead. Then, with only seconds remaining, Colin Stein grabbed the equaliser. Bobby Lennox smashed a drive at the Rangers goal. Gerry Neef, making his first league appearance of the season for the Light Blues, touched the ball on to the bar. The ball went crashing back into play and wee Jimmy Johnstone brought out a tremendous roar from Celtic fans as he sent the ball speeding into the back of the net. That looked like the end for Rangers but up they came with a glorious Colin Stein equaliser with only seconds remaining.

  Most of the spectators filed happily away towards home but at the end of the stadium where Jack and Eric were standing, something terrible started happening. People had begun to go down the stairs to leave when they thought Rangers had lost, but when the goal was scored at the last minute and there was a roar from the other fans, they turned to rush up again. This coincided with a massive number of spectators still making their way towards the exit and the subway.

  Then someone carrying a young boy on his shoulders fell. Others tripped and fell on top of him. Crash barriers on the stairway were broken by the crowds as fans piled on top of one another.

  Up until then, the match had been a fairly good-natured occasion with no trouble either on the terraces or on the pitch. Now, as Jack and Eric looked in horror at the twisted bodies, they were reminded of Belsen because the bodies were entangled as they had been in the pictures which came out of the concentration camps. Both Jack and Eric struggled in among the victims in a desperate effort to pull people free. Jack groaned in agony as his hip was crushed. But he used every last vestige of strength to continue to clamber around the mangle of bodies and stricken souls to save whoever he could.

  Everyone, whether Rangers of Celtic supporters, forgot their normal allegiances and fought to save whoever they could in a frenzy of activity. Others were grappling onto whatever they could find to avoid falling into the carnage. One man managed to push his son over the fence to safety before he was immediately swept away with the force of the crowd. As his son shouted to him, he saw his father die upright, the life squeezed out of him.

  Bodies were turning black. Others who had any breath left in them were receiving frantic help. A priest was fighting to resuscitate a man wearing Rangers colours. An Orangeman was struggling desperately to pull a Celtic supporter free.

  Jack lost sight of Eric and prayed that he had escaped injury. Many people, still wearing their club colours, were trying to pull people free. Ambulances and police cars and fire engines had arrived but had some difficulty in reaching the scene because home-going crowds leaving the match, many of them drunk, were unaware of the tragedy.

  Jack knew many of the police officers and one of them pulled him out.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jack, you’ve done enough. Go home.’ Then he saw Jack limping.

  ‘No, get into the ambulance. I’ll get them to take you to the Southern General.’

  ‘I’ve got to find Eric. Eric Gilroy. He was with me.’

  ‘We’ll find him, Jack. Get into the ambulance.’

  ‘No, I’m OK. Just got a bit crushed. Isn’t this a terrible tragedy? It all happened so quickly. I’ve never seen anything like it, have you? Come on, we’d better help to lay out the bodies.’

  There were bodies in the dressing rooms, in the gymnasium, even in the laundry room. Many were already dead. Others were having resuscitation given to them by training staff. Doctors and nurses flocked to join them in doing everything possible to bring breath back to crushed bodies.

  ‘I’ll never forget,’ Jack said later, ‘seeing Bob Rooney, the Celtic physiotherapist, with tears in his eyes, giving the kiss of life to innumerable victims.’

  Eventually Eric Gilroy was found among the dead and Jack was reduced to tears.

  ‘He was a good, conscientious police officer.’

  One of the other policemen said, ‘And he died as he lived – trying to help others.’

  Jack limped sadly away, knowing he would never forget this misty day of the second of January 1971.

  2

  Jack was persuaded to get a medical check-up. It was decided eventually that there was nothing much more they could do for his crushed hip, except he would, from now on, be confined to working limited hours in the police station and at the desk. He missed getting out and around on the beat but knew he was lucky to have survived the Ibrox tragedy and so he accepted his lot.

  But he’d gone off the area where he lived. He’d gone off his tiny one-bedroomed tenement flat. It hadn’t even a bathroom, just a pokey wee lavatory.

  All right, he’d taken the flat originally because he had a thing – a horror in fact – of getting into debt. He had a savings account and everything he ever bough
t or had was paid in cash. The flat had a very low rent and that’s why he and his wife Mae had moved in there. Every stick of furniture in the flat had been bought with cash. No way would he ever consider hire purchase. For one thing, he’d seen too many people get over their heads in debt and become dishonest as a result, and indeed end up in jail.

  So he and his wife Mae had always lived very frugally and carefully, although he always felt a bit embarrassed, ashamed even, that he couldn’t invite his friends to the flat for a meal and a bit of friendly hospitality. The kitchen in the flat was small and overcrowded with just a table and chairs and a cooker and a stand for the pots and pans. There was one other room where he and Mae slept.

  They desperately needed a bigger house but it would have to be rented. A fair-sized rented house wasn’t easy to come by these days. Not that Mae ever complained. She was a good-natured soul – a plump wee blonde who hardly reached past his elbow.

  Indeed, she seemed perfectly happy in the tiny tenement flat. He had to sigh and shake his head at her when she said, ‘As long as you’re there, it’s fine with me.’

  Never before had it been less than fine for him. He supposed his feelings stemmed from the Ibrox disaster. He had never bothered all that much about the flat before.

  But now, although he never confessed to anyone, he still had nightmares about the event. Even when he looked out the tenement window, he could see the crowds milling along towards the subway. In his nightmares, he could still see the piles of mangled corpses, some a ghastly dark blue colour, some black. Many standing up had had the life crushed out of them and had turned black.

  Some people, indeed many people, had to undergo long treatments by psychiatrists after their experiences at Ibrox but he could not succumb to anything like that. He was after all a serving police officer. It was his duty, he believed, always to show courage. It was a strain, especially when he suffered continuous pain with his hip, as well as the emotional and mental strain. But he was determined to manage.

  He told his pals on the beat, ‘Keep your eye open for a rented place for me in a nice district, as far from my present dump as possible. OK?’

  ‘Sure, Jack,’ they all agreed. ‘No problem.’ Eventually, God bless them, they found a perfect place.

  ‘How can I ever thank you,’ he gasped when he saw the house and the lovely situation it was in.

  ‘You can invite us all for slap up dinners in your posh new dining room,’ they all told him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he promised. ‘I certainly will.’

  3

  First there were the funerals. Everyone paid their respects but what could anyone say? What consolation could anyone offer? Normally a funeral is of somebody of a ripe old age and an occasion to be treated as a celebration of that person’s life. But here there had been five young lads between only thirteen and fifteen years of age from the same village. There had been lads from other places aged thirteen, fourteen, sixteen and eighteen. The oldest man, as far as Jack knew, had been in his forties.

  Lord Provost Sir Donald Liddle wept at a press conference when he made an announcement about the dead.

  There had been an eighteen-year-old girl who should have had the rest of her life in front of her. Apparently, she had been a great Rangers supporter and she had made a wee doll of Colin Stein. She worked in a factory and the girls who worked beside her dared her to go to Ibrox and deliver it to him personally. And because she was a cheery extrovert of a girl, she did.

  Jack found the funeral services nearly reduced him to tears each time. He imagined how the families of the victims must be feeling. He admired the football players of both teams who turned up each time to pay their respects. Police officers attended as well.

  Jack said to one of them, ‘The worst of all is they were so young. They should have been able to enjoy so many more years of life.’

  ‘I know, and there’s nothing that any of us can say to the families that would be of any help or comfort.’

  It seemed to go on endlessly and only the thought of the house his police officer pals had found for him kept Jack going. Over and over, he imagined welcoming them into the spacious dining room and treating them to a good dinner. It would be his way of thanking them for literally saving his bacon. There had been so many times recently when he thought he was going mad.

  He hadn’t discussed the house with Mae yet. The Ibrox tragedy and the attention to the families took obvious precedence over everything else. Mae was friendly with Eric Gilroy’s wife who was broken-hearted at losing Eric and so all Mae’s attention and most of her time went to her friend.

  On his way home from one of the funerals, Jack had gone with one of his police officer friends to have another look at the house.

  ‘God, Charlie. I can hardly believe my luck with it being so near the Kelvingrove Art Galleries as well.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s a really beautiful building, isn’t it?’ Charlie said. ‘And look up there. You wouldn’t even need to walk all round the park to get there.’

  Jack gazed across the narrow part of the Kelvin River to where, past a line of trees further on, there was a very rough, very steep slope. At the top was an area at the back of the Galleries where there was a car park and a large fountain.

  He laughed. ‘If I felt nimble enough. But I can’t see me making a climb like that with my hip. Not to worry though, it won’t take long going round the park way to either the front or the back of the Galleries.’

  ‘It’s damnable that Eric won’t be here to see you move into your house, Jack. Or to come and have the slap up feeds you’ve promised us.’

  ‘I know. As somebody said, he died as he lived – a good police officer trying his best to help people. We’ll drink to his memory, Charlie.’

  ‘Yeah, definitely. He won’t be forgotten. Talking of drinks, how about us going round to the Art Galleries restaurant now and having a bite to eat and a drink.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  They tried to keep cheerful as they walked but the aura of the funerals they had both been attending still clung around them. Once in the restaurant, however, they felt slightly better. The area they settled into was fronted with glass that looked out on to an interesting view of the outside of the Galleries. They tried their best to relax and shake off the memories that depressed them so much.

  After a couple of drinks, Charlie said, ‘It’s not surprising we’re feeling so low, Jack. I mean, to be so closely involved in such a tragedy, and then all the funerals.’

  ‘And the tragedy of the families. I’m haunted by their obvious grief, Charlie. I confess I still see their faces in bed at night. It puts me off my sleep just thinking about them.’

  ‘Have you tried a stiff whisky before you go to bed?’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘That’s what helps me.’

  ‘You feel the same then?’

  ‘Of course I do. We all do. We’d be inhuman not to be seriously affected by it. Let’s order another whisky now and on your way home, you can buy a bottle and start taking that bedtime drink.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I will.’

  Although he doubted if even downing the whole bottle would cure how bad he felt.

  4

  ‘But darling, I don’t want to move,’ Mae Kelly said. ‘It’s so convenient for the shops and everything.’

  Jack groaned. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mae. It’s practically prehistoric. One room and kitchen and lavatory. Not even a bathroom. The house I’ve got the chance of has three bedrooms, a sitting room, a big dining room and a bathroom. And it’s in a beautiful situation. What could be better? At least come with me to see it.’

  She certainly didn’t feel a hundred per cent happy about the move but where her handsome police officer husband went, she would go to. She adored the black-haired, cleft-chinned, dark-eyed Jack. She felt sorry for him too. He had been injured in the Ibrox disaster and was left with a painful limp. As a result, he worked permanent day shift behind the front desk of the local p
olice station.

  ‘We’ve been very lucky to get the chance of this Waterside Way house, especially with it being rented. On my wages, we’d never have enough cash to buy any property, but with all our savings over the years, we can just afford to rent.’

  Mae hesitated. ‘You could get a mortgage, Jack.’

  ‘Now, Mae, you know how I feel about owing money.’

  She did indeed. Jack always insisted that he’d never owed a penny in his life and never would. She admired him enormously for his strong principles. There were few people who had any principles at all these days. They lived very frugally but as a result, they each were even able to keep a savings account going.

  She loved so many things about Jack, including his love making. He was so sexually passionate. And Jack was always right. As a result, she went along with him to look at the Waterside Way house. It was the first house in a row of seven houses, all joined together, each with a garage attached. There was a sitting room and a dining room and a kitchen downstairs and upstairs was a bathroom and three bedrooms. At the end of Waterside Way there was a path with a small wooden footbridge over a narrow part of the River Kelvin. At the other side of the river was a line of trees and a rough, steep slope stretching up beyond the trees. Eventually, in the distance, the back of the imposing Kelvingrove Art Galleries could be seen.

  ‘What do you think?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ Mae said.

  ‘You’d better have a look out the back.’

  There was a muddy slope at the back of the houses, then the slope reached down to the quiet Museum Road. Beyond was park land and then the University of Glasgow and the Hunterian Museum.

  ‘Actually, it’s got the best of both worlds,’ Jack said. ‘Like being in the country, yet near to town. So we’ll take it. OK?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Her heart warmed with love towards Jack. Trust him to get something wonderful like this. Probably he’d asked all the police officers on the beat to keep an eye open for somewhere nice. Anyway, now that she’d seen the place, she was happy and looking forward to the move. She could hardly wait. It was then, unexpectedly, that the trouble started.