Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  First published by Pitch Publishing, 2019

  Pitch Publishing

  A2 Yeoman Gate

  Yeoman Way

  Durrington

  BN13 3QZ

  www.pitchpublishing.co.uk

  ©Stephen O'Donnell, 2019

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library

  Print ISBN 978-1-78531-509-1

  eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-595-4

  ---

  Ebook Conversion by www.eBookPartnership.com

  Contents

  PART ONE – RISE: RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY

  1. The Glasgow Strangers

  2. ‘Scotia’s Darling Club’

  3. The Grand Old Man of Ibrox

  4. The Third Man

  5. Disaster and Triumph

  6. The Other ‘Big Jock’

  7. Bigotry in the Modern Era

  PART TWO – FALL: FINANCIAL MALPRACTICE

  8. Thatcher’s Man

  9. Nine! Nine! Nine!

  10. World Domination

  11. Agent McLeish

  12. The Prodigal Father

  13. The Liquidation Game

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  The author would like to thank the following people for their help in the writing of this book: Douglas Beattie, Alan Bissett, Dr Joe Bradley, Elizabeth Clark, Mark Daly, Gerry Dunbar, Alex Gordon, Sandy Jamieson, David Low, Joe McHugh, Pat McVey, Katherine Midgley, Professor Patrick Reilly RIP, Emily Rudge, Brendan Sweeney and Pat Woods.

  PART ONE

  RISE:

  RELIGIOUS

  BIGOTRY

  Sine ira et studio, Tacitus

  1

  THE GLASGOW STRANGERS

  THIS is not a fairy story. Of the four teenagers who founded Rangers Football Club, following meetings and conversations in what is now Kelvingrove Park in the west end of Glasgow in March 1872, one was drowned, another declared insane, yet another was an accused fraudster, a bigamist and a ‘certified imbecile’, who lived out his days in a poorhouse, while the fourth was comparatively lucky – he died a lonely old man.

  These boys, described with characteristic bombast by Bill Struth, the club’s severe, authoritarian manager from 1920 until 1954, as ‘The Gallant Pioneers’, were looking to add the game of association football to their list of other vigorous pastimes, such as rowing, athletics and, since these lads were from the Gaelic stronghold of Argyll, shinty.

  In many ways Peter Campbell, William McBeath and brothers Moses and Peter McNeil were just an ordinary group of young friends, recently arrived into the city of Glasgow from the area around the Gare Loch, an inlet in the Firth of Clyde, 30 miles up the coast from their adopted home. Living mostly in crammed households, with elder siblings rather than parents, they were from unexceptional, lower-middle-class backgrounds and held ordinary, white collar occupations. But, fired up with what youth imparts, they were also upwardly mobile and ambitious and, perhaps having had their eyes opened by the nearby ostentatious wealth of the leafy west end districts in the second city of what was then a flourishing British Empire, they had lofty ideas about their prospects and of making a name for themselves.

  As an organised sport, football had burst out of the English public school system, following the codification of the game’s laws in 1863, and taken the country by storm. Thrilling and uplifting, yet also earthy and rugged, the game was quickly adopted by the harassed working population, who, through a shared sense of identity and belonging, took to supporting their local teams over the course of the next few decades in increasingly remarkable numbers.

  Inspired by the exploits of some of the other early Scottish sides such as Third Lanark and Vale of Leven, who were founded in the same year, and the dedicated amateurs of nearby Queen’s Park, the Gare Loch boys showed tremendous dedication to their new pursuit, practising six nights a week and playing their games at Flesher’s Haugh on the open spaces of Glasgow Green in the east end of the city. Often they would book their playing area hours in advance, with one of their group, usually Peter McNeil, given the task of guarding the field and planting the goal sticks in the morning, so that nobody would have moved on to their patch by the afternoon.

  Like many of the other great urban centres of Britain, Glasgow had expanded exponentially over the course of the Industrial Revolution, as the rustic, agrarian lifestyles of the previous century based on the annual cycle of the harvest were replaced by a relentless, factory-orientated routine, unaffected by climate or season. Glasgow Green was built on land set aside by the enlightened city fathers, who wished to provide residents with some space for recreation, an idea which would be embraced even more fully by the working population following the introduction of half-day Saturdays in the second half of the 19th century. By law, all factory activity on a Saturday now had to end by 2pm, allowing skilled workers to enjoy an extended period away from the factory floor for the first time. Tagged on to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the idea of the weekend was born, and across Britain Saturday afternoon became the designated slot for watching and playing the popular new game of football.

  Although the boys were probably still calling their new team ‘Argyll’ at the time, Rangers’ first recorded match, with a side cobbled together from a collection of the friends, siblings and fellow clansmen of the teenagers, was a goalless draw against a team from the town of Callander in Perthshire, played in May 1872. Fifteen-year-old William McBeath, the only founder member not from the area around the Gare Loch, was in fact competing against his home town and probably helped to organise the fixture by securing the opposition for his club’s inaugural match. Perhaps for that reason, young McBeath played out of his skin, was voted man of the match, and had to lie up in bed for a week following the bruising encounter in order to recover from his exertions.

  Described as a ‘terrible’ spectacle by William Dunlop, an early Rangers player, future president and, later, club historian, the match would have borne only a passing resemblance to the familiar modern game, with most of the team not even properly stripped and playing in their day to day clothes. The only players to wear ‘kit’ were Harry McNeil, elder brother of Moses and Peter, and his mate, Willie McKinnon, both of whom were regulars with Queen’s Park at the time, along with two other experienced players borrowed from a team called Eastern. Harry McNeil would go on to win ten caps for Scotland between 1874 and 1881. However, it seems unlikely that he would have been able to successfully introduce his amateur club’s pioneering passing game to this team of novices.

  Despite the tentative start, the young men persisted and it wasn’t long before their club was up and running, with office bearers elected and training sessions formally organised. The enthusiastic youngsters even managed to secure the patronage of the future 9th Duke of Argyll for their new enterprise, Queen Victoria’s son-in-law, the Marquis of Lorne, although the local aristocrat for the region of their familial homes left Britain in 1878 to become Governor General of Canada and never managed to attend any of their matches. They called their new team Rangers, as likely as not because they liked how it sounded, but it has also been suggested, perhaps rather implausibly, that the name might be a form of rhyming slang, as all these young
men were still relative strangers to their adopted city at the time.

  But the Rangers name is listed as belonging to a rugby club from Swindon in Charles Alcock’s English Football Annual of 1870. Alcock was a founder member of the FA, and a veteran of the seminal 1863 meetings at the Freemasons’ tavern in Lincoln Inn Fields in London, where the common set of rules for the game of football had been thrashed out and formally codified. He was also an important figure in establishing the first international fixture between Scotland and England, played at Hamilton Crescent in the Partick area of Glasgow in November 1872, just a few months on from Rangers’ foundation. Moses McNeil, true sports fan that he was, had a copy of Alcock’s annual and it was he who proposed the Rangers name, which was accepted unanimously. In 1877, the Rangers team were photographed, following their appearance against Vale of Leven in the Scottish Cup Final, in the same livery and colours as the Swindon club.

  Rangers were not invited to take part in the Scottish Cup in its inaugural year of 1873/74, but having secured membership of the SFA in time for the following season, the club played its first competitive match in the new governing body’s flagship competition in October 1874 and secured a 2-0 victory over Oxford, a team not from the English shires or the famous university, but from the east end of Glasgow. A year on from their formation, a childhood friend and contemporary of the founders, 16-year-old Tom Vallance, another aspiring young Victorian gentleman, had joined the club. Also from Garelochhead, he would go on to be one of the most significant figures in the club’s early history, as captain and later president. A sturdy defender, Vallance was joined in the team against Oxford by Campbell and McBeath as well as by the McNeil brothers: Peter, who captained the side, Moses and their elder brother William. Dumbarton, one of the leading lights of Scottish Victorian football, would see Rangers off in the following round but an important first step had been taken.

  Rangers had the advantage over the provincial sides of an enormous catchment area of prospective members and supporters, and their youthful energy and swashbuckling style of play quickly earned them a sizeable following. They were a nomadic club in the early years, and unlike teams such as Pollokshields Athletic, Govan and Partick Thistle, they were not tied to any particular area of the city, which, along with their continuing success, helped broaden their appeal as the years went by.

  There was of course no league structure in place in these early days, so challenge matches against suitable opponents had to be organised by the committees and match secretaries of individual clubs. Queen’s Park initially offered to send their second team, known as the Strollers, to take on Rangers, not wanting to deliver a potentially demoralising defeat on the youthful new side, but the Rangers committee declined this proposal, and with the club winning 12 and drawing two of the 15 other matches which were arranged in season 1874/75, they were keen to gauge where they stood in the hierarchy of Scottish football by facing the very best that the country had to offer. Queen’s eventually sent in their crack troops, and defeated Rangers by the comparatively narrow margin of 2-0 in November 1875.

  By this time, Rangers had outgrown park football and the club soon moved to its first permanent home in the Burnbank enclosure, to the south of Kelvinbridge in the west end of the city, where their first game was a creditable 1-1 draw against the great Vale of Leven side, although the team from Alexandria in West Dunbartonshire played the entire match with only ten men. Still essentially a youth team centred on three families from Garelochhead, there were the three McNeil brothers, Moses, Peter and Willie (Harry was still playing for Queen’s Park), Tom and his brother Alex Vallance, Peter Campbell, who was joined by his brothers James and John, alongside 18-year-old club president William McBeath.

  Despite Burnbank being the most convenient location in terms of proximity to the founders’ homes, the club only stayed in the West End for a year, moving south of the River Clyde to a ground at Kinning Park in time for the start of the 1876/77 season, after a cricket club called Clydesdale were unable to pay the rent and moved off the land. The new park, not far from the present Ibrox Stadium on a site which nowadays has the M8 motorway running through it, was opened on 2 September with a 2-1 defeat of old rivals Vale of Leven in front of 1,500 spectators. Rangers had added as many as half a dozen new players to their roster by this stage, including several from Sandyford, their former neighbours from the west end, who had recently disbanded, and the club seemed to be growing to maturity.

  The same two teams, Rangers and Vale of Leven, then met again in the Scottish Cup Final, Rangers’ first, which was played over three closely contested and controversial games in March and April 1877. By the time the Alexandrians eventually prevailed, winning 3-2 at the old Hampden Park in the second replay, Rangers’ reputation and popularity had increased considerably at a point when growing numbers of people from across the communities of Britain, but especially in the great urban centres of Scotland and England, were catching the football bug. Vale would go on to retain the cup over the following two seasons, knocking out Rangers on each occasion, while the Kinning Park men would have to wait another 15 years before finally getting their hands on the famous old trophy.

  It’s around this time, however, that the four young founders, the so-called Gallant Pioneers, begin to drop out of the club’s recorded history and their association with the team which they helped to establish begins to dissipate. Only recently has the full extent of their varied fortunes come to light, revealing the painful, unhappy story of what happened to the boys in later life. Moses McNeil was perhaps the least unfortunate of the four. He lived to the ripe old age of 82, making him easily the longest-surviving founder member of the club. A talented winger, Moses left Rangers briefly to join elder brother Harry at Queen’s Park in October 1875 and, in his first game, helped his new team to a famous 5-0 win over the great English side Wanderers, captained by Charles Alcock, in front of 11,000 people at Hampden. He returned to Rangers though just four months later, where he continued to play until 1882, far beyond any of the other pioneers. In addition, he made two international appearances for Scotland, becoming Rangers’ first capped player when he was selected to face Wales in 1876, and four years later he lined up against England at Hampden, in a game which finished 5-4 to the Scots.

  After football, Moses was employed as a commercial traveller for a firm of hosiers in Glasgow, then as a brush and oils salesman for a paint company. In later life, he moved back to Argyll where his links with the club he founded remained tenuous; in 1898, he attended a 21st anniversary reunion dinner of the famous 1877 Scottish Cup Final with Vale of Leven, organised by restaurateur and former team-mate Tom Vallance, but he didn’t manage to attend Vallance’s funeral in 1935 and he declined several invitations to Rangers reunions, including the 50th anniversary dinner in April 1923. Childless and unmarried, Moses lived out his last years with his sister Isabella at their secluded home in the village of Rosneath on the Gare Loch.

  After losing his place in the team he helped to found, Moses’s brother Peter McNeil took up an administrative role at Rangers, serving as honorary match secretary from 1876, and he later became treasurer of the SFA as well, a job not without its challenges in the 1870s and 1880s. But he resigned from both positions in 1883, for reasons which were stated in the Scottish Athletic Journal as the ‘pressure of business’, in reference to his efforts to maintain a sports outfitters shop, which he owned and operated along with his brother Harry in Glasgow city centre.

  The real reason for his departure from the football scene, however, seems to have had more to do with the declining condition of his mental health, although the full extent of his developing illness is unclear at this stage. But it says much for the regard in which he was held that, despite the appalling stigma often associated with such conditions in the Victorian age, his colleagues appear to have covered up his state of mind, offering sympathy and appreciation, and it was suggested that a testimonial should be organised for his benefit, although this never took place.
Sadly the ‘pressure of business’ took its toll on Peter and his increasingly impoverished family. His outfitters shop had disappeared from the high street by 1896 and bankruptcy ensued, apparently after a quarrel or disagreement with his elder brother and business partner Harry. With his family now eligible for poverty relief payments from their local parish, it seems that financial failure was too heavy a burden to bear, and by the turn of the century Peter was considered a danger to himself and others. He was sectioned and admitted to an asylum in Paisley, where he died in March 1901 after suffering what his medical records describe as a ‘growing mental paralysis for three years’.

  The youngest member of the group, Peter Campbell, had just turned 15 when he helped to found Rangers Football Club in the spring of 1872. Born on 6 March 1857, his father was a steamboat captain and later something of an entrepreneur in the expanding steamship industry and the burgeoning field of tourism and local excursions on the Firth of Clyde. His mother was also from a family of reasonable means and the handsome sandstone villa of young Peter’s childhood can still be seen today in Garelochhead, not far from the present site of the Faslane Naval Base.

  Despite being from a more affluent background than his fellow pioneers, young Peter was put to work as an apprentice, then a journeyman, on the yards between 1872 and 1879 in a shipbuilding industry at it zenith on the Clyde. Along with his brothers James and John, he played for Rangers in their very earliest years and his talents saw him earn two caps for Scotland, both against Wales, with Peter scoring twice on his debut at Hampden in 1878 in a convincing 9-0 victory, and then once more the following year in a 3-0 win in Wrexham.

  A forward known for his pace and unselfish passing, Peter played his last match for Rangers in September 1879, a 5-1 defeat to Queen’s Park in the Scottish Cup, before retiring from football following a brief spell at Blackburn Rovers. He then decided, perhaps following the family tradition, to take up the challenge of pursuing a career at sea and Campbell was appointed chief engineer on a steamer, the St Columba, which put to sea in January 1883 from the port of Penarth in South Wales, bound for the Indian colonies. However, a short time into its journey, the vessel was tragically lost in poor weather off the west coast of France. It wasn’t until a month later that wreckage from the St Columba was washed up along the shore of the Bay of Biscay, confirming the loss of all on board. Peter Campbell was 25 years old when he died.