The success and longevity of P. and A. Campbell, borne from the entrepreneurial zeal of John McLeod Campbell and his brother Alexander, made the death of Peter at the age of 25 all the more tragic, as fate denied him the opportunities afforded his relatives. The history of the Campbells of Kilmun makes no reference to Peter of Rangers fame – naturally, perhaps, as he played no role in their Clyde operations, but the impact he had on Scottish sporting culture has lasted longer than the considerable maritime achievements of his other family members. Peter was present at the birth of Rangers, but brothers John and James also gave the club sterling service in its early years and the family links with the McNeils remained strong in the second half of the 19th century. The 1881 census, for example, listed James as living with Moses, Peter and William McNeil and their sister Elizabeth at No. 169 Berkeley Street in Charing Cross, Glasgow.
Peter had arrived in Glasgow a decade earlier and was the youngest founder of Rangers, having just turned 15 when he embraced the idea of organising a team with his three friends, not least as a release from the toils of the work on the Glasgow shipyards where he was employed. His employment records, accessed from the historical vaults at Greenwich, show he spent five years as an apprentice with the oldest shipbuilding company on the Clyde in Glasgow, Barclay Curle, at Stobcross Engine Works between 1872 and 1877. John Barclay had started shipbuilding on the Clyde in 1818 and his yard lay half a mile outside the city boundary, on a patch of land near to the present-day Finnieston Crane, surrounded on three sides by open countryside. Facing the Stobcross Shipyard, on the south bank of the river, was the estate of Plantation, with the huts of the river’s salmon fishermen standing back from the river bank. It is almost impossible to imagine the site in the present day, where the Squinty Bridge now connects north and south of the river, alongside the Mecca bingo hall and Odeon cinema that make up one of the city’s best-known leisure parks.
In today’s post-industrial era the shipyards of the Clyde often struggle to compete, financially at least, with other areas of the world but in the 1860s, shortly before Peter began his apprenticeship with Barclay Curle, 80 per cent of British shipping tonnage was constructed on the Clyde. He would have worked in an industry at its peak in the 1870s as bigger and faster ships were built up and down the river. They included the exotic, such as the Livadia, built in 1880 at Fairfield for the Czar of Russia, and government contracts, not only in Britain, but estimated at half the maritime nations of the world – including Japan, who took control of the Asahi from the Clyde in 1899. Throughout most of the 19th century the shipyards of Glasgow proudly held the record for the speediest transatlantic crossings, with the firm grip of a rivet in an iron hull as Clyde-built ships were successful from 1840 to 1851, 1863 to 1872, 1880 to 1891 and 1892 to 1899. By the end of the century, Fairfield-built vessels Campania and Lucania could make the journey in five days and eight hours. In the 20th century great liners would maintain the reputation of Clyde shipbuilding, including the Lusitania, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.
Peter stayed an additional two years with Barclay Curle as a journeyman from 1877–79 before leaving for at least seven spells at sea on board the London-registered merchant ship Margaret Banks, ranging in time from a fortnight to over six months. His apprenticeship served on the Clyde in Glasgow, he was clearly keen to extend his education to the waters of the wider world. As part of the process he sat engineering exams in March 1882, at Greenock and Glasgow, but failed each time on a poor grasp of arithmetic before passing at the third attempt the following month, on 12 April. Even the most mathematically gifted would surely have offered long odds on his death within 12 months, but betting on an extended life at sea has always been a dangerous gamble.
Campbell’s passion for the water was matched by his enthusiasm for football and he was an inspired supporter of Rangers, not to mention one of its most outstanding players throughout the 1870s, playing for the team in its very first match against Callander in May 1872 until he bowed out in a 5–1 Scottish Cup defeat to Queen’s Park in September 1879. He also spent part of a season at Blackburn Rovers from 1879 and was one of the first Rangers players to cross the border, at a time when the English game was being criticised for its ‘shameful’ move towards professionalism. Campbell and Moses McNeil had become the first Rangers players to win representative honours when they turned out for a Glasgow select against Sheffield at Bramall Lane in February 1876, helping their adopted city to a 2–0 victory. Campbell was twice chosen to represent Scotland, scoring a double in a 9–0 demolition of the Welsh at the first Hampden Park in March 1878 and following it up in April the following year with a single strike in a 3–0 victory against the same opposition at the Racecourse in Wrexham. He was also named vice-captain of the club in its earliest years and was renowned as a forward player of some repute, earning praise from Victorian sports historian D.D. Bone as ‘the life and soul of the forward division.’4 In the Scottish Football Annual of 1876–77 Campbell was described as a ‘very fast forward on the left, plays judiciously to his centre-forwards and is very dangerous among loose backs.’ Three years later, the same review book gushed: ‘Peter Campbell: one of Scotland’s choice forwards; has good speed, splendid dribbler and dodger and is most unselfish in his passing.’ Sadly, the last mention of Campbell in the Scottish Football Annual of 1881–82 featured him in a list of ‘Old Association Players Now Retired’. It read simply: ‘Peter Campbell: one of Scotland’s choice forwards; has good speed, splendid dribbler and dodger and is most unselfish in passing; gone to sea.’
Peter Campbell. This picture of the Rangers and Scotland winger from the 1877 Scottish Cup Final team is the only one currently known to exist.
Campbell’s love for football and Rangers was passed to siblings John and James, who played for the club in its earliest years before they sought a new life in other parts of the world. In February 1884, James left Glasgow for Australia to take up a post with the Union Bank of Melbourne. He lived to a ripe old age, dying in Brisbane in 1950. His younger brother Allan had also joined him in Australia and died in the same city in 1932, aged 72. John Campbell also emigrated, this time to the United States, and died in Middletown, New York, in 1902, aged approximately 46. Jessie Campbell lived until her late 70s before her death in 1931. The Campbell connection with Craigellan remained strong until 1939 when youngest daughter Mary, then aged 78, passed away at the family home.
Peter set off on Sunday 28 January 1883 from Penarth in South Wales on his second voyage with the St Columba, a 321-foot-long steamer of over 2,200 tons, which had been built on Merseyside in November 1880 for Liverpool company Rankin, Gilmour and Co., although the roots of the firm were Glaswegian. The St Columba was bound for Bombay with a cargo of coal, but it never got beyond the dangerous waters off the west coast of France and, with hindsight, it should never have left its berth near Cardiff Bay in the first place. The weather that weekend was dreadful and merited mention in the press at the time, as several disabled vessels ran into Plymouth harbour for shelter. The St Columba clearly entered a maelstrom and God only knows the horrors suffered by the crew in those final moments as the waves lashed the vessel, cruelly whipping them into the sea and certain death. The report sent from Cardiff five weeks later confirmed the terrifying circumstances and stated: ‘The missing steamer…was under the control of Captain Dumaresq and there is no doubt she was overpowered by the terrible weather which prevailed in the Bay of Biscay at the commencement of February.’5
The passing of Campbell did not go unnoticed in the Scottish game and ‘Scotsman’, writing in national publication Football: A Weekly Record of the Game, paid a particularly warm tribute. He wrote: ‘To most of us it is allotted that our virtues are not discovered till we cross the narrow isthmus that separates us from the great majority, but in the case of Mr Campbell, although our appreciation of his never failing amiability, his unchanging kindness, his tact as a club official and his brilliant play on the field may be intensified owing to the dire calamity, st
ill, when in our midst he was so universally beloved that even his opponents on the field could not for a moment harbour any angry thought about him. It was he who, along with Thomas Vallance and Moses McNeil, nursed the Rangers in its days of infancy and brought it to the position which it held so honourably, and since business engagements forced these players to retire, the once famous and popular “Light Blues” have had rather an uneven career. Mr Campbell played for Scotland against Wales and for Glasgow against Sheffield, but he retired before representing his country against England. Memory is said to be short but it will be long – aye, very long, ere one of the truest and best of fellows shall be forgotten by his many friends.’6
The warm tribute of ‘Scotsman’ contrasted sharply with company owner Rankin’s words in a vanity publishing tome from the turn of the 20th century, A History of Our Firm, which, no doubt unwittingly, managed to read as disregarding and uncaring. His somewhat indifferent tone shone through as he discussed the company’s penchants for naming its vessels after saints in the 1880s. He rattled through the alphabet, from St Alban to St Winifred, before adding: ‘On our adverse experience of the letter “C” we have not repeated St Columba and St Cuthbert, whose losses were both accompanied by some loss of life. My brother always favoured Saints’ names taken from his favourite Sir Walter Scott.’8
In a later chapter, however, he reflects on the company’s low points. He wrote: ‘I draw a veil over the ghastly period wherein the ships St Mirren, St Maur and St Malcolm disappeared with all on board. It was a terrible time. At a later date the St Columba under Captain Dumaresq was never heard of. I may have been overwrought, but a vivid dream wherein I saw her sinking is often times with me still. I pray that we may never have again to pass through such a time. Captain Davey, who has revised these notes, told me Mrs Dumaresq had a similar dream, of which she informed Mrs Davey at the time. If I have written mostly of disasters it is to be said they have been relatively few. Successful voyages have largely predominated, but these are usually uneventful.’
If only Peter Campbell had lived long enough to be able to recollect the same.
The End of the Innocence
The Glasgow Charity Cup success of 1879, on the back of a controversial loss in the Scottish Cup Final, should have ushered in a new era of success for Rangers. At the annual members’ meeting in June that year, held at the Dewar’s Hotel in Bridge Street, it was reckoned ‘the club has never been in such a flourishing condition since its formation in 1872, also now possessing the title of being the premier club in Scotland.’1 There was a comforting stability around Kinning Park as the Light Blues approached their first decade of existence. William McBeath had since left, but at the annual meeting Tom Vallance had been returned as first-team captain and Peter McNeil as honorary secretary, while fellow founders Peter Campbell and Moses McNeil sat on the committee as well. There was order and consistency but, if there was a criticism to be made, little new blood to sustain the momentum built throughout the 1870s. In time, the subsequent five years would be recognised less as the start of the big push and more as the end of the innocence and a worrying decline towards financial crisis and an unpopularity that could never have been predicted in 1877 when so many thousands of Glasgow’s citizens first thronged to Hamilton Crescent and Hampden to embrace their new association football favourites.
Success on the field, then as now, brought with it problems associated with their new-found popularity. Rapacious English football agents plundered the Light Blues in the aftermath of their two Scottish Cup Final appearances, not least because the game was growing at an increasing pace south of the border. Peter Campbell ultimately left for Blackburn Rovers, who had been formed in 1875, as did Hugh McIntyre, who became landlord at the Castle Inn in the town. McIntyre was an upholsterer by trade, but it was the Lancashire club who were undoubtedly feathering the nest of his future financial prosperity with the offer of a profitable pub. McIntyre, who also went on to gain notoriety as one of the earliest Mr Fixits, was widely criticised for accepting the move to the English club. Bolton added to Kinning Park woes in 1881 when they persuaded Archie Steel, William Struthers and John Christie to join. Not surprisingly, the following season, for the first time in their short history, a Rangers side shorn of its most talented stars lost more matches than they won.
The departure of Campbell and McBeath left only the McNeil brothers and Tom Vallance as the original pioneers, but changes were afoot that, in the short term at least, would loosen the bonds between the club and the band of teenagers who had brought it into existence. Firstly, Tom Vallance accepted a position on the tea plantations at Assam and left Glasgow in February 1882. Such was the affection in which he was held that he was presented with 50 sovereigns by the club at his farewell reception at the Bridge Street Hotel and as he boarded the train for London the platform was thronged with well-wishers.
Moses McNeil had been a committee member from the beginning of the club’s existence until as late as 1879, but the nature of his relationship with the team he helped to form had begun to change as Rangers entered the 1880s. He remained a regular in the side until February 1881, when he played his last game of the season in an 8–2 defeat of Partick Thistle. It would be over 13 months before he would pull on the Rangers shirt again, for a 3–2 defeat at Aston Villa on 25 March 1882. Moses played his last first-team game for Rangers a fortnight later, on 5 April, in a goalless draw with South Western. In subsequent years he would feature for the ‘ancients’, an old boys’ XI who frequently played charity and exhibition matches around the country, but his days at the sharp end were over. It is entirely likely that Moses was sidelined or usurped by others keener to grab the club’s key executive positions. Apart from a 12-month stint as honorary treasurer in 1876, he became a bit-part player in the running of the club. Few would argue against the fact that in helping to create Rangers in the first place he had made more than a sizeable contribution.
The club was also thrown into a state of flux in the early 1880s by events outwith its making. Firstly, in November 1882 club president Archie Harkness tragically died from typhoid fever at the age of just 26, leaving a widow whom he had wed less than five months previously. He had been suffering ill health for several months, but still insisted on taking training at Kinning Park on summer evenings and was acknowledged as an influential member of the club he had first joined in 1874 as a friend of the McNeils.
Secondly, the club lost one of its longest serving officials when Peter McNeil was forced to step down from the post of honorary match secretary as a result of business pressures at the end of the 1882–83 season. The sports outfitting store owned by Peter and his brother Harry had moved from its original premises to a new building at No. 91 Union Street and the switch necessitated a focus on their business enterprise at the expense of the club the McNeils had helped to form. Peter also stood down from his post as treasurer of the SFA at the same time.
At this stage Rangers were rudderless and this was reflected in the end of season stats, which showed only eight matches won and 16 lost from 29 games played. The club played the season in white and blue hoops. Their faces were almost permanently red. It came as no great surprise when they ditched the shirts at the end of that solitary campaign. In its end-of-season review the Scottish Athletic Journal was moved to warn: ‘One has always to be particularly cautious in forecasting the form of such a shifty, uncertain set of players as the Rangers. Today they do something extraordinary and tomorrow they exhibit such a falling off that one is perforce compelled to write them down a very ordinary lot indeed.’2 Sarcasm dripped from the pages of the Journal like the self-confidence from the very soul of the club. A few weeks earlier, a reader had written to the newspaper asking for details of the club’s defeats over the previous months. They replied mischievously: ‘It is impossible to give the exact number of defeats as these have been so numerous. In fact, it is only an average of once a month they get what is popularly called “a look in” and when that happens it is genera
lly against second rate clubs.’3
Financially, the club was in a precarious position. By the summer of 1883 the praise of four years earlier, when the club was described as ‘flourishing’ and lauded as the biggest and strongest in the country, rang hollow. The club were £100 in debt, despite a £30 bail out from new president George Goudie, who had replaced Harkness. Membership numbers had stalled as little attention was paid to the recruitment of those who could have brought fresh ideas and impetus to the Kinning Park set-up. Throughout the second half of the 1870s membership numbers had remained stable at between 70 and 80 per season, but there was a fine line between close knit and clique. Admittedly, it would have troubled few on the back of two appearances in the Scottish Cup Final in the space of three years and a Charity Cup success, but it would prove problematic to those who wisely took a more long-sighted view of the club’s sustainability. In 1880, for example, Queen’s Park attracted 97 new members and their numbers exceeded 300. Indeed, the Hampden club were so popular that they were forced to restrict membership numbers to 350, while season-ticket holders were limited to 600. The financial crisis of 1883 brought to a head the need to widen the sphere of influence around Kinning Park and a recruitment drive proved so successful that by the start of the 1884–85 season Rangers boasted 180 members, a record number.
It had become clear that there was a void at the heart of Rangers and that the club needed a radical restructure, which duly took place at the annual general meeting in May 1883 at the Athole Arms. Tom Vallance was back from India and, although he had suffered poor health which had forced his return so quickly and his playing career had been compromised as a result, he was too valuable an ally not to be welcomed again to Kinning Park with open arms. He was quickly named president, with the club’s delicate finances placed in the hands of treasurer Robert White. The post of captain was deleted from the list of office bearers and instead a 10-man committee was appointed to oversee team selection. It was a break with tradition for the Light Blues, but acknowledged at the time as a wise move and one that had proved successful for other clubs in Scotland and England.
The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872 Page 11
