The formation of Celtic in November 1887 also hastened the advent of professionalism in the Scottish game as they quickly became one of the powerhouses of the sport. There was nothing serendipitous about it – Celtic raided Hibs for players with the promise of greater riches and left the Easter Road club, champions of the world only three months earlier following their 2–1 defeat of Preston at Leith, in a depressed state as the mantle of foremost Catholic club in the country was seized by the canny businessmen in control of the east end of Glasgow. To highlight the farce of the situation, Celtic players even threatened to go on strike in 1891, two years before professionalism was introduced in Scotland, if their wages were not raised to the levels of new signings recently secured from the English League. The Parkhead players were paid a bonus of £3 and presented with a new suit for winning the Scottish Cup in 1892 and three years earlier it had been noted that Celtic donated £432 to charity at the same time as captain James Kelly, a young joiner from Renton, had bought a pub for £650. The Athletic News posed the relevant question: ‘Where did he get the money?’18
Hibs had also been under investigation for payment to their star player Willie Groves after Vale of Leven hired a private detective following a Scottish Cup tie to investigate his dubious amateur status amid allegations he was being paid up to four times his salary as a stonemason in ‘broken time’. Clubs were permitted to make these ‘broken time’ payments to players who missed work shifts to prepare for or play in important matches, but Queen of the South Wanderers took it a stage too far when they were caught making payments to two of their players – both of whom were unemployed. In addition, clubs frequently kept two sets of books, only one of which was displayed with a flourish whenever SFA auditors came knocking and whose fictional figures had been created with all the craft of a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. Cowlairs and St Bernard’s were caught out and suspended. The Scottish Sport newspaper estimated in 1892 that one unnamed club had paid out £1,150 in salaries the previous year. However, the commercialism of the sport was becoming less of a trickle and more of a torrent. Celtic secretary John McLaughlin, who, coincidentally, acted as pianist and accompanist at the Rangers Glee Clubs for many years in those more innocent times, famously declared: ‘You might as well attempt to stem the flow of Niagara with a kitchen chair as to endeavour to stem the tide of professionalism.’19 His observation could not be disputed – Rangers announced a profit of £500 when they won the first Scottish League championship in 1890–91 and the Light Blues and Celtic were regularly turning over £5,000 a year by that time. The Glasgow Charities Cup alone helped raise £10,000 for the needy of the city from 1877–1890.
The popular newspapers of the time disliked the idea of clubs paying their players and Scottish Sport summed up press feelings best when it carried an editorial on rules for professionalism which had recently been introduced by the Scottish Football League. The Sport loftily declared: ‘Our first and last objection to them is that they exist. The entire rules stink of finance – money making and money grabbing.’20 Rangers were included in this mix, of course, but there was more than the financial expansion of the game causing unrest about the way the Kinning Park club was running its business. Mackay in his position as honorary match secretary had become exceedingly unpopular. His politicking had made him a major player at the club but not without winning enemies elsewhere, particularly within the pages of the Journal.
The farce of the situation, not to say the depth of control he held over others at the club, was highlighted at the annual meeting in May 1885, held at Ancell’s Restaurant on Glassford Street. The income of the year was listed at £804, with an expenditure of £604. Astonishingly, approximately one sixth of the expenditure was paid to Mackay for printing costs associated with the club – bills, members’ tickets and advertising. In comparison, the printing and stationery bill at Queen’s Park that year was only £29. His ‘Vampire’ nickname was never more appropriate, as the Journal said: ‘Mackay proves his capacity for blood sucking by bleeding the Rangers to the extent of about £100…honestly, of course – all in the way of trade! It is a very profitable thing to be match secretary of the Rangers when it brings grist to your own mill.’ 21
The excesses of Mackay may have been less of a talking point had Rangers continued their success of the late 1870s into the new decade, but further trophy success proved elusive. Admittedly, the low of only eight victories in 1882–83 was not repeated, but the campaigns that followed were far from vintage. In 1883–84, for example, Rangers won 22 of 36 games played and in 1884–85 there were 24 wins from 40 matches, most of which took place at Kinning Park. Crowds of only 500 were not uncommon at home matches the following year, with modest opposition like Battlefield and Fifth Kirkudbrightshire Volunteer Rifles. As president, Tom Vallance had promised at the start of the season that the Scottish Cup and Charity Cup would be on the table by the end of the campaign. For once, he proved not to be a man of his word.
Eventually, the pressure told and by the summer of 1886 Mackay had resigned, 12 months after he had been knocked off the executive committee and on to the general committee of the club. Rangers turned to a familiar face to steady the ship as Peter McNeil returned and assumed the role of vice-president, his first period of office at the club since business pressures had forced his resignation three years earlier. The Journal noted the return of McNeil on 8 June with great warmth and claimed it was ‘delighted…this denotes a change. I hope the new committee will inaugurate a new policy now that they have got rid of J.W. Mackay…if the old policy is carried about, bankruptcy awaits them.’22
However, the Journal could not resist one final dig. ‘By the way’, it added ‘who is to represent the club on the Glasgow Association Committee? J.W. Mackay has been appointed treasurer without a club and, of course, the printing bill is a substantial sum as he can fix his own prices. Should the Rangers or any other club father him, they know the consequences. If he cannot get a club, he must give place to a less notorious man.’
William McBeath
William Shakespeare once wrote that sorrow comes not as single spies, but always in battalions. That was in Hamlet. It could equally have been written about MacBeth. Or McBeth. Or McBeath. Or McBeith, or any one of the many derivatives of the surname used throughout the life of the founding father about whom least has, until now, been chronicled. If William McBeath had proved as adept at evading tackles on the field of play as his historical footprints have been at slipping the best efforts of researchers off it he would surely have followed in the path of fellow pioneers Moses McNeil and Peter Campbell and won representative honours for Scotland. Unfortunately, the faint tracks he did leave, which have required expert genealogical assistance to help trace back in time, lead along a sad path of poverty and the poorhouse, mental decline and the tag of ‘certified imbecile’, two marriages (the latter of which appears to have been bigamous) and even a criminal charge for attempted fraud. His final resting place in a pauper’s grave, in a lair shared with a total stranger, lies unmarked, literally under a holly bush in scrubland at the forgotten fringes of a Lincoln cemetery.
Until now the life of William McBeath, beyond his contribution to the formation of the football club, has remained a mystery. He is first mentioned in reference to Rangers in 1872 as a family friend of the McNeils and one of the four founding fathers of the club. However, he played his last game for Rangers in November 1875 and disappeared from club records soon after. Not even a photograph of him has ever been uncovered. In truth, the game of football did not appear to be his forte, despite his best efforts – he was forced to take to his bed for a week after the club’s first game against Callander, so exhausted was he by the effort required to participate in the developing sport. However, like Peter McNeil, he clearly enjoyed the respect of his peers for his organisational skills and W.D. McBeath was the first president of the club, listed in the roll of office bearers for the 1874–75 season.
The last recorded mention of William in con
nection with Rangers came in the pages of the Scottish Athletic Journal in April 1884 when he was honoured by the club at its half-yearly meeting for the role he played in its conception and subsequent birth. The paper reported: ‘Mr William McBeath, one of the founders of Rangers FC, was presented with a beautiful gold badge by a few of those who were intimately associated with him in the management of the club when he was one of its active members. The presentation was made by Tom Vallance, who is a sort of connecting link between the ancient and modern members, and the grateful manner in which he did so was worthy of the occasion. Mr McBeath replied briefly and after thanking those who had been good enough to honour him, said that he looked upon the days when he played for the Rangers as the brightest and jolliest of his life. Mr McBeath, I may mention, was one of the four who were at that birth of Rangers. One of the number, Peter Campbell, was drowned some time ago, the other two, Messrs Moses and Peter McNeil, live to tell that the management of the Rangers now is very different to what it was then. Mr McBeath, many of his old friends will be happy to learn, is doing well and is still cultivating those tastes for high art which made his company so pleasant to the more scholarly of his companions.’1
Unfortunately, relating the life story of William is more akin to painting by numbers than flourishing wide brush strokes on a canvas coloured by rich memory, warm anecdote and bountiful documentation because, quite frankly, very little exists. However, a fuller picture has finally emerged from the faint sketches of yesteryear on which research for this chapter has been painstakingly drawn. Confidence about the conclusions here remains absolute, even if there is a wish for a happier tale to tell than the sad story that developed over the 61 years of his life.
William McBeath was born in Callander, Perthshire, on 7 May 1856. He was the son of Peter McBeath, a draper and general merchant born in Callander in 1803, and Jane Duncanson, 16 years his junior (his second wife) and was also born in the village that provided the team for the first Rangers game at Flesher’s Haugh in the spring of 1872. (This team may have travelled from Perthshire for the fixture. More likely it was a team of exiles; youngsters who, like William, had a connection to the village but who had since moved to Glasgow to seek their fame and fortune.)
Main Street, Callander, c.1890. The Annetta Building on the left, now the Waverley Hotel, is the site of Peter McBeath’s grocery store. The family lived above the shop.
On the face of it, the McBeath family appeared to lead a comfortable enough existence at their home on Callander’s Main Street. The family’s general store and their home upstairs is occupied today by the Waverley Hotel. Peter was 52 when William was born, a brother for Jane, aged seven, and Peter, aged nine. Another child, a boy, was born after William, but did not survive beyond infancy. William also had another four half-brothers and sisters from his father’s previous relationships, including two from his first marriage to a Jean McFarlane, who died in 1841 at the age of 39.
Unfortunately, Peter McBeath did not live long enough to profit from the soaring popularity of his birthplace through the Victorian tourist trade as he died of heart disease in November 1864, aged 60. His wife and two of the children, William and Jane, moved to Glasgow soon afterwards to start a new life, drawn away from their countryside roots towards the rapidly expanding industrial heartland of Scotland, a million miles away from the picture postcard image Callander was beginning to portray to the wider world. It was in Glasgow that the teenage William would make the friendships which would earn his name a place in Scottish sporting history.
The Waverley Hotel in Callander today occupies the site of Peter McBeath’s grocery store. Pioneer William was brought up in the house above the shop.
By the time of the census in 1871 William was 14 and working as an assistant salesman. He lived with his sister Jane, a 21-year-old saleswoman, and mother Jane, 50, who was listed as a housekeeper and head of the family home. Their surname, in what would become a consistent scenario of administrative blunders and careless pen strokes, was listed as McBeth. Crucially, they lived at No.17 Cleveland Street in the Sandyford area of the city – a street that still stands today (although the address no longer exists) running parallel with North Street, a stone’s throw from the Mitchell Library. At the same address – that is, living in the same tenement close – were five members of the McNeil family, including eldest daughter Elizabeth, 30, the housekeeper, eldest son James, 27, a commercial traveller, brothers Henry, 21, a commercial clerk, William, 19, a seedsman, and Peter, 16, a clerk. (Moses was at this time still living at home on the Gareloch.)
This is the most compelling evidence that links William McBeath of Callander with the McNeils in the early 1870s and the formation of Rangers, although the birth of the club would have represented a period of mixed emotions for a boy who was still two months short of his 16th birthday. At the same time that he and his friends were planning their new adventure in association football, William’s mother died, aged just 53, in March 1872. Her death certificate, signed by her youngest son, again confirmed the family address as No. 17 Cleveland Street and noted her passing was a result of chronic bronchitis, which she had suffered for several months and had, in turn, led to heart disease.
It was undoubtedly a crushing blow to young William to lose his second parent so early in life and, sadly, death was a spectre that was to shadow his existence throughout the second half of the 19th century. The most distressing tale of all the McBeaths, including even William himself, was the terribly tragic short life of sister Jane, who must have felt she was preparing for decades of happiness when she fell in love with and married shipping clerk Daniel Lang in Glasgow in June 1873. However, by December of that year Daniel, aged just 22, had died from consumption. The effect on his new wife must have been devastating and sadly, in July 1879, when she was only 28 years old, widower Jane also passed away, killed by the scourge of tuberculosis at her home in Kirk Street in the Perthshire cathedral town of Dunblane, a few miles from the original family home in Callander. Once again, it was left to William to sign the death certificate.
In 1878 William moved across the Clyde to Kelburne Terrace in the Crosshill district of Glasgow, following his marriage to Jeannie Yates (or Yeates) Harris, 21, who had been born in the Govanhill area of the city, the daughter of a hosier, David Harris, and his wife Agnes. At the time of their wedding in Glasgow on 28 March 1878, by United Presbyterian minister Alexander Wallace, William was working as a draper’s traveller and living at No. 41 Elderslie Street, a short free-kick from Cleveland Street. The marriage certificate noted the groom’s full name as William Duncanson MacBeth, which is significant for two reasons. Firstly, as far as can be established, William’s middle name of Duncanson was acknowledged for the first time on official documents and his mother’s maiden name was possibly adopted by a loving son following her death six years earlier. Secondly, a slip of a registrar’s pen consigned the name of McBeath to the annals of history. William would never again be known, in official documents at least, by the name with which he was born.
Initially, the marriage of William and Jeannie MacBeth seemed to follow a happy and familiar pattern. Two years after their wedding Jeannie gave birth, in April 1880, to a son, also named William Duncanson MacBeth. However, within 12 months the family left Scotland and set up home in Bristol. Almost certainly the demands of William’s job as a commercial traveller took the family south, although the nature of his business and the company for whom he worked are, unfortunately, unknown.
At first the family lived in the St Paul district of the city, at No. 16 Albert Park (the street still exists) and they remained there until at least 1886. The family was expanded still further in 1882 with the birth of a daughter named Agnes Isabella and another son, named Norman Douglas, in 1890. Business must have been going well for William because the family had taken an upwardly mobile step by 1889 when they moved to a more upmarket address, No. 2 Chestnut Villas in the Stapleton area of Bristol.
It is impossible not to read the entry f
or the MacBeths in the census of 1891 and conclude anything other than that the family, like Man of the Match William against Callander in 1872, were at the top of their game. Their residence at Chestnut Villas was well established and William and Jeannie were affluent enough to employ a domestic servant, 15-year-old Somerset girl Lillie Field.
However, some time after 1893 (the last known date linking them with their home in Stapleton) the family unit collapsed in such a spectacular style that it would never again be reunited. What devastating episode would eventually force them to send young Norman northwards to live with his grandmother in Glasgow? What caused the breakdown of the relationship between William and Jeannie? Agnes would eventually find refuge working as a nursery governess in Torquay, but what became of her after 1901, when she seemed to fall off the face of the earth? What became of William junior, who has also proved impossible to trace beyond his 10th birthday in the 1891 census?
It is tempting, knowing the events that were to follow in the spring of 1897, to conclude that whatever employment William enjoyed throughout the 1880s and into the early half of the 1890s was somehow compromised, perhaps by unemployment or some other economic fate. Perhaps the situation was more prosaic – a lack of health or plain bad fortune, or simply a marriage doomed to failure from the start and which no number of children conceived in hope could ever help to heal. Unfortunately, a lack of evidence leaves them as frustrating and unanswered threads that even Rumpelstiltskins himself would struggle to weave into a definitive narrative pattern.
The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872 Page 13
