Nevertheless, Rangers progressed to the next round where their opponents, Arbroath, defeated the Kinning Park men 4-3 at Gayfield. After the loss, Rangers complained that the pitch was too narrow, describing it, in a terse telegram sent back to Glasgow, as a mere ‘back green’. Experienced protestors by now, club officials took a measuring tape out to the field to see if they could prove their case and when the pitch was found to be 11 inches short of the required width the inevitable appeal went in and a replay was ordered by the SFA, which Rangers won 8-1. The club then received a bye through to the quarter-final, but four days following their subsequent 5-3 defeat at the hands of eventual winners Renton, the Scottish Athletic Journal wryly observed, ‘So far there has been no protest from Rangers.’
Even by the following year, the SAJ still hadn’t let the matter drop when it stated in September 1885, ‘Rangers last season protested their way from round to round and created in doing so a scandal which shocked the whole football world’. By the time Rangers moved to their new ground at Ibrox in 1887, however, the SAJ had clearly admitted to itself that it was fighting a losing battle in its campaign against the wayward club. Apparently realising that it was flowing against the tide in terms of Rangers’ growing popularity, it replaced the chorus of disapproval with ‘adoring approbation’, as a rival publication, the Scottish Umpire, which had recently been established by, among others, John Mackay, noted with a degree of contempt. Rangers had effectively seen off their critics in the press, and within a year the Scottish Athletic Journal and the Scottish Umpire had merged to form the twice-weekly Scottish Sport, which would describe Rangers in the 1890s as ‘Scotia’s darling club’.
The days of youthful innocence at Rangers were well and truly over. President Tom Vallance, the only remaining link with the club’s founders, was clearly exasperated at the direction the organisation was taking, and at some of John Mackay’s antics in particular. Late in 1883, under Mackay’s influence, the Rangers players refused to sanction the appointment of Vallance to umpire a game between their club and Dumbarton, just a few months after the incident over the Daphne disaster fundraising match, which had caused considerable bad blood between the two sides. Referees at the time were assisted by two umpires, one chosen from each team, but Mackay had persuaded his players that Vallance’s honesty would undermine their efforts on the field, and was insisting instead that he should be nominated to stand referee himself. The club president immediately resigned in protest and was only persuaded to return after an apology was issued on behalf of the squad. Mackay himself continued to umpire, but was so incapable of impartial officiating that he would often provoke partisan interventions from his opposite number, the opponents’ nominated man, with the result that games involving Rangers would frequently descend into bad-tempered chaos.
In October 1885, the SAJ had offered the view that, ‘The social decadence of the Rangers may be dated from the day Mr Peter McNeil resigned the match secretaryship and J.W. Mackay took it up.’ Perhaps as a result of such accusations, the tendency among the club’s modern historians, in typical Rangers fashion, has been to scapegoat Mackay for these and other indiscretions and for the general condition of the club during this troubled period. It is a tactic which has often been repeated since, to blame an individual for his erroneous ways rather than contemplate the uncomfortable idea of a wider malaise at the club.
There was at this time a cultural failing at the heart of the institution, which allowed an individual of the calibre of Mackay to become such an influential administrator, a person who would not have been allowed anywhere near rival contemporary clubs such as Dumbarton, Renton, with its ‘brotherhood of equality and fraternity’ ethos, or Queen’s Park, needless to say. Overall the impression is of a club borne out of the passion and youthful enthusiasm of a group of teenagers, but despite lofty Victorian notions about the civilising effect of manly, competitive sport, suffering from a lack of cohesive and moral leadership. With the departure of the youthful pioneers and the dwindling influence of Vallance, there was no older, father figure on the scene to nurture the club into maturity, to show concern for its future wellbeing, once it grew into something big, successful and ultimately unwieldy. The club had lost its way and grubby, boorish and uncharitable behaviour was the order of the day at Rangers.
The club’s internal problems coincided with a terrible run of form on the field for the Rangers team. During a poor spell between 1881 and 1883, Rangers lost 16 of 29 matches, including five defeats in a row at one point, and the club was quarrelling with some of its best players, most notably George Gillespie and forward Charlie Heggie, a player who had the distinction of scoring four goals for Scotland on his international debut but never appearing for his country again, with both men eventually leaving the club. To make matters worse, by 1887 Rangers’ lease on their Kinning Park ground had expired and the club was evicted. Still under the presidential stewardship of Tom Vallance, Rangers moved to the first Ibrox Park, built on derelict land at the Copland Road end of Paisley Road, a relatively remote area of Glasgow at the time.
Situated 100 or so yards to the north-east of the present stadium, the press helpfully printed maps and illustrations in order to help supporters find their way to the new location, which quickly sold out. An abortive attempt to relocate the club to the Strathbungo and Pollokshields area of the city had failed when local residents, wary of Rangers fans’ poor reputation by this time, vetoed the idea and Vallance was concerned that the notoriety of their supporters would follow Rangers to their new home. The president tried to assuage such fears at a banquet for invited guests on the eve of the club’s first match at Ibrox, when he announced, ‘I have known very respectable people come to our matches and not renewing their visits but that has all gone and I am sanguine that in our new sphere we will be able to attract to our matches thousands of respectable spectators.’
Ibrox Park had opened in a blaze of publicity, but things didn’t get off to a great start for the team at their new home. In a game played to mark the ground’s inauguration, there were disturbances among spectators as well as a hefty defeat, as Rangers suffered an inauspicious 8-1 loss to Preston North End, the great Lancastrian side who would go on to win the first two titles of the newly established Football League in 1889 and 1890. By the closing stages, some of the capacity crowd of 20,000 spilled over on to the pitch, causing the game to be abandoned five minutes from full-time and following the match, at a reception dinner, the Preston chairman and manager, Billy Sudell, urged the Glasgow press to remind the Rangers fans about their manners, after the fixture came to an unruly and premature end.
Later the same year, a meeting was held at St Mary’s Hall in the Calton area of Glasgow which would lead to the foundation of Celtic Football Club. If Rangers arrived early on the football scene, a young infant having to learn and grow gradually as the game evolved, Celtic by contrast were a team born late, like a foal, that had to spring up from the ground in an instant and start running around almost immediately, with its limbs in full working order, competing with its peers and rivals. The first meeting between Rangers and the new team from the east end of town took place in May 1888, as Celtic made their debut on the stage of Scottish football, and a 5-2 victory for the nascent club was followed by a convivial night’s entertainment back at St Mary’s Hall. The future success of both teams was toasted and initially there was great friendship and camaraderie between the two clubs; two of the Celtic players, brothers Tom and Willie Maley, were founding members of the Clydesdale Harriers Athletics Club, who functioned out of Kinning Park, and they knew many of the Rangers contingent well.
Celtic were founded by Brother Walfrid, a senior figure in the Catholic Marist religious order and the headmaster of St Andrew’s school in the city centre, with the help of prominent members of the local Irish community, chiefly Doctor John Conway and the well-known and respected builder John Glass. Walfrid, Conway and Glass had been bouncing ideas around for some time about ways to help the childr
en of the impoverished Irish immigrants in Glasgow’s east end. There had been a sizeable Irish community in the Glasgow area for much of the 19th century; in 1840, it was estimated that the Irish, including many itinerant workers, made up around a quarter of the city’s population and this only increased later in the decade with the disaster of ‘An Gorta Mor’, the Great Famine, caused by the blight on the potato crop, which led to the exodus from Ireland of over one million people. The Irish were generally unskilled and prepared to take on almost any form of employment and it was their labour on which much of the growth and industrialisation of Glasgow in the 19th century had been built. But despite the poverty and deprivation of so many, there were also prominent citizens, such as Conway and Glass, as well as the clergy, who were venerated in the Catholic community for their vocation.
The chief idea behind the new club’s foundation was to raise funds in order to provide the needy children of the city’s east end with ‘penny meals’ through the St Vincent de Paul Society, which was attached to the Sacred Heart mission in the four main Catholic parishes within the archdiocese of Glasgow. Many in the community had been badly affected by the collapse of the City of Glasgow bank a decade earlier, which had precipitated an economic slump with hundreds of labourers, from all backgrounds, being put out of work, including at the nearby Parkhead Forge ironworks which was forced into temporary closure. The Welfare State was still more than half a century away and there was no concept at the time of civil intervention on behalf of those who found themselves on the soft underbelly of society, but Walfrid and his colleagues were acutely aware of the plight of the less fortunate among their fellow countrymen and they had been active for some time in efforts to try and mitigate their circumstances.
In February 1887, the Scottish Cup was won in Glasgow by the Edinburgh side Hibernian, an exclusively Irish, Catholic team whose application to join the SFA in the 1870s had originally been refused, with their membership fee returned along with a terse letter explaining that the SFA was for ‘Scotchmen, not Irishmen’. Walfrid, Conway and Glass witnessed the celebrations among the Irish in Glasgow at the success of the Edinburgh side, and before long steps were undertaken to establish a team which could similarly represent Glasgow’s own community of Irishmen. Early in the new year, not long after the inaugural meeting at St Mary’s Hall in November, the founders began soliciting for labour from a largely volunteer workforce to build a stadium for the proposed new club. The response was overwhelming, and by May Celtic were ready to take their first steps. Unlike their friends and neighbours Rangers, who had endured lengthy, nomadic years of development, often struggling to break even and wondering on occasion if they would have a ground to play on, Celtic simply had no time for such tribulations.
In order to accomplish their immediate goal of raising money for the needy, Celtic had to be fully functioning from the start and the club became an overnight success story, able to take players from other teams seemingly at will in order to get themselves off the ground, and a huge, almost instantaneous cultural phenomenon. In their first season, Celtic reached the Scottish Cup Final, before losing to Third Lanark, and by the second year of their existence, they were attracting crowds of 25,000 to their home in Parkhead. Celtic too had their blood on the carpet moment, caused by internal disagreements in the early days between the charitable arm of the club and the business faction, who saw professionalism as the inevitable way forward for football.
In the end, the pragmatists prevailed, just as professionalism had, as the argument was reflected in the wider game, and the Celtic Football and Athletic Company was incorporated in 1897. The idealists were swimming against the tide, as the game continued to grow in popularity, but the club retains a charitable tradition to this day, and the initiative and zeal of its modern-day supporters towards organising events and raising money for worthwhile causes remains impressive.
Despite the close early ties between the two Glasgow clubs and the spirit of sporting solidarity in evidence at St Mary’s Hall in May 1888, the sudden appearance of a serious nearby rival seems to have had a galvanising effect on those associated with Rangers, with the Ibrox club’s income quadrupling between 1889 and 1894. Over the course of the coming decades, the two clubs would find themselves locked in a seemingly endless tête-à-tête, each vying for supremacy over the other while leaving rivals floundering in their wake, as the Glasgow duopoly inevitably began to dominate the game in Scotland. Football, once the game of the patrician classes, now witnessed its most intense rivalry between Rangers, the grubbiest of the grubby, and Celtic, the poorest of the poor.
But with Rangers there would be a darker motivation, and it wasn’t long before the club’s whole identity and raison d’être would become intricately linked with their neighbours from the east end of the city. If Celtic were formed to support and represent an immigrant community, Rangers would go on to become the reactionary club, the sporting arm of a wider social movement to keep the Irish population in the west of Scotland firmly in its place, as the Ibrox club gradually assumed the mantle of the team to stop the Catholics.
2
‘SCOTIA’S DARLING CLUB’
DOWN the decades, Rangers fans and others associated with the club have generally paid little attention to the club’s history. The tradition of storytelling, of exploits recollected and hardships overcome, so common at other clubs, is not strong at Rangers, and the club has on the whole been poorly served by erstwhile historians. The relatively small market for books on the subject has, at least until recently, offered the discerning reader little beyond the established pattern of inane hagiographies of former players and managers, and uncritical, self-congratulatory chronicles of the team’s achievements, usually written with the club’s approval, which reflect on little beyond Rangers’ seemingly unending association with sporting success.
Reading these books it is often difficult to get to the truth behind controversial issues and incidents involving the club, as rational analysis is sacrificed in favour of the more partisan perspective. There is also a predilection for the mundane and the jejune; when one writer, Robert McElroy, co-author of Rangers: The Complete Record was discussing his new book with a club director in the early 1990s the only significant question he was asked was, ‘How many photographs are going to be in it?’
This general level of disinterest in discovering and enjoying the past has meant that the early period has often been overlooked, resulting in some particularly curious anomalies. By 1972, 100 years had elapsed since the club’s foundation, but the centenary was allowed to pass without any acknowledgement or celebration, because the mistaken notion that the club was founded in 1873 had not been properly investigated and revealed. Victory in Barcelona in the European Cup Winners’ Cup Final, achieved with a 3-2 win over Dynamo Moscow in May 1972 and arguably the high water mark of the club’s on-field achievements, would have been a fitting way to salute such a historical landmark, but unfortunately, somewhere along the way, Rangers lost track of the fact that they were founded in 1872, and they wrongly marked their centenary the following year, in 1973, a season in which the club had been banned from Europe due to the behaviour of their fans in the Nou Camp.
It might seem strange that a famous football club should be unable to accurately pinpoint the date of its foundation, but then Rangers, at least until very recently, are a club with a fairly dismal record of producing historically reflective books. One early example was The Story of the Rangers by sports journalist John Allan, published in 1923. If traditional books about Rangers have offered little more than facile, obsequious eulogies, preaching to the already converted, then The Story of the Rangers is certainly no exception.
Allan at the time was an influential columnist with the Daily Record, who would later go on to edit the paper, and he was a fervent supporter of the Ibrox club and its interests. He was described by manager Bill Struth as having ‘the clasp of a loyal Ranger’, an early reference, no doubt, to dodgy handshakes and secret societies. Al
lan had almost unrestricted access to Struth’s dressing room in the 1920s and he was on hand in the aftermath of the 1928 Scottish Cup Final, when Rangers finally ended their 25-year hoodoo in the competition with a 4-0 win over Celtic, to congratulate Davie Meiklejohn after he scored the opening goal from the penalty spot. ‘You sunk that penalty like an icicle, man,’ Allan told the stand-in Rangers skipper. ‘Icicle?’ ‘Meek’ promptly replied. ‘I never felt so anxious in all my life. It was the most terrible minute of my football career.’
Allan, uncle of the malevolent 1960s club director and PR guru Willie Allison, was also editor of the official Rangers handbook, the annual chronicle of Rangers’ sporting record. For season 1920/21, the annual lists Rangers’ foundation date as 1872, but in the following year’s edition the date is omitted. It is also missing the season after that, but by 1924 the year of the club’s establishment is once again included, but listed as 1873. Allan does not discuss any controversy surrounding the timing of the club’s foundation in The Story of the Rangers, and, had he been in any doubt, a minimal amount of basic journalistic research would have confirmed to him the correct date of 1872, which had been universally accepted up to that point. It seems that Allan, in his determination to publish his history of the club in time for its 50th jubilee, perpetrated an Orwellian rewriting of events and simply altered the year to suit his own purposes. It is true that the office bearers of the club were first elected in 1873, and perhaps Allan used this as his pretext, but this is a relatively minor administrative matter in a club’s history and not one used elsewhere to date a club’s foundation.
Tangled Up in Blue Page 3
