Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  By 1923, Allan was simply in a rush and misused his position as editor of the club’s yearbook so that his deadline could be met. Incredibly, he altered the date just to give himself more time to write his book, and as a consequence of this historical vandalism, Rangers’ Cup Winners’ Cup victory in 1972 was allowed to pass without being properly celebrated as part of a centenary season success story. As late as 1996, Allan’s date was still being used on club merchandise and retail outlets, and his gratuitous alteration is also the reason why visitors to Ibrox Park today can still see the year 1873 erroneously emblazoned on its listed building façade.

  Much of this general historical apathy may have been due to a reluctance to peer under the bonnet, as it were, at the thorny issue of sectarianism, which has blighted the club for most of its history. It’s an area which has often become a taboo subject for everyone concerned with Scottish football and certainly not a matter which is openly discussed in the club’s approved literature. There is in fact no evidence that Rangers were an anti-Catholic team in their earliest guise, and although it is known that the young founders of the club were from Presbyterian stock, there is no record of their intentions or attitudes towards alternate branches of Christianity. While it’s true that anti-Catholicism was rife in Glasgow in the mid-to-late 19th century, as it was across large sections of imperial age Britain, there are no early references to Rangers being associated with parochial Protestantism, and if there was any social prejudice around the team and the club in the early years, it would only have reflected wider Victorian attitudes, which were certainly not peculiar to Rangers.

  Celtic, it seems, in spite of this broader malaise, were largely welcomed across the sporting community at their formation and there is little recorded evidence of initial hostility towards the team of Irishmen, even when they very rapidly became extremely successful. In fact the only significant early criticism of Celtic came from other Irish clubs, such as Hibernian and Carfin Shamrock, from whom the new Glasgow club, in the days before binding professional contracts, recruited some of their first players. Celtic also took two players from Renton FC, namely ex-Rangers man Neil McCallum, a scorer against his former side in his new club’s first ever game in May 1888, and James Kelly, who would go on to make 139 appearances for Celtic, many of them as captain, before becoming a renowned director and establishing a dynasty at the Parkhead club which would last for over 100 years.

  In terms of religious or ethnic prejudice, however, by and large sport was seen as a transcending force against such base dispositions and typically there was tremendous camaraderie among players of opposing teams. Celtic, for their part, took the decision very early on that the club would be open to all, and not, unlike Hibernian at the time, run as an exclusive institution for practising Catholics. When the ‘Irishmen only’ notion was briefly mooted by one of the competing factions in the run-up to the club’s incorporation in 1897, the idea was dismissed by a columnist in the Irish-owned newspaper the Glasgow Observer, which noted, ‘To raise the question of religion is singularly out of place when dealing with sporting matters, and I trust that the last has been heard of it in Celtic circles.’ It was a message that would be heeded by Celtic, in all matters of recruitment, but sadly not by their great rivals, over the ensuing years.

  This would be a great pity, not least because this civilising, essential fairness of football, a game of skill and guile as well as strength and speed, was one of the reasons the sport had such a captivating influence on the general population, the equality and fairness of its laws and principles standing in marked contrast to the harsh and grinding weekly routine of those earliest supporters and followers of the game, whose working lives at the sharp end of imperial age Britain would all too often have seemed less than fair. There was a close sporting bond between Celtic and Rangers in the very early days, which would seem to confirm the view that there was no significant prejudice or hostility at Ibrox even after the Irish team’s formation, and the two clubs would often invite one another to their respective grounds whenever English opposition were in town.

  In 1892, the Scottish Sport observed that ‘the light blues are favourites with the Parkhead crowd’, and the following year, when the two squads travelled together on the train to their matches in Edinburgh, the same publication noted, ‘Both teams also returned together. They are getting very “pally”. And why not?’

  Soon, the neighbouring Glasgow clubs took to arranging numerous fixtures between themselves, convenient of course because of their shared locality, and on top of occasional player benefit matches they would often meet in the Glasgow Cup and the Glasgow Charity Cup as well as, from 1896, the Glasgow League, in addition to their fixtures in the Scottish League and the Scottish Cup. While it’s true that, as time went on, there was the occasional ruction on the field in the heat of competition, behind the scenes the two clubs retained close ties, with Celtic generally taking the lead in challenging the vested interests of the conservative establishment which ran Scottish football at the time.

  But if Celtic’s stance overall tended to be bolder and more brash, they always included Rangers in their machinations because they needed a partner and ally, particularly after the Scottish League was established, which precipitated the era of professionalism. In these endeavours, the Parkhead club was actively supported by Rangers, as the two institutions started to flex their muscles in terms of their administrative power and their draw at the turnstiles. In 1894, both teams abandoned their customary trips to England over the festive season and instigated instead the first of the traditional Ne’erday matches against one another, a feature of the fixture card which has persisted down to the present day. The following year, the minutes of Rangers’ committee meetings reveal what was referred to as the ‘Celtic Agreement’, an unofficial accord whereby neither club would rent out their ground without a healthy share of the takings being allocated to the host. With both grounds much in demand as neutral venues for cup ties, or for clubs who didn’t have the luxury of a large-capacity stadium, this effective cartel established by the two clubs proved very lucrative.

  By the time of Celtic’s foundation and their establishment of a friendship with their near neighbours, Rangers had vacated their rented home at Kinning Park and moved to their new ground at Ibrox. The relocation was not accompanied by immediate success, however, either on or off the field. After an initial season treading water, which was notable yet again for complaints by opponents about Rangers fielding professional players, notably when striker Bob Brand appeared in a game against Cowlairs in the Glasgow Cup which resulted in Rangers’ 2-1 victory being scratched and a replay ordered, the team’s form slumped dramatically in season 1888/89. Of 39 games played, only 13 were won, with seven draws and 19 defeats, including a 6-1 thrashing at the hands of Celtic in the Glasgow Cup at Ibrox in the first competitive meeting between the pair. Off the field, the committee which ran the club was in uproar; the 1888 AGM was described by the Scottish Umpire as ‘the most cantankerous ever in the history of the club… and that is saying a great deal’, and amid further squabbling, the club’s half-yearly meeting in November had to be adjourned for a week’s cooling-off period to allow passions to thaw and tempers to subside.

  By the end of that conference, Tom Vallance had announced his intention to sever his formal ties with the club and stand down as president at the end of the season, ending the final link between the club and its early founders. Despite all the publicity which had accompanied the initial move to Ibrox, crowds were now down as low as 500 and on at least two occasions the club couldn’t find enough players to make up a full complement of 11. On New Year’s Day 1889, Aston Villa arrived in Glasgow expecting to play Rangers, only to find that, due to an administrative error, their expected opponents were not even in the country, but had journeyed to England to fulfil a fixture instead, where they lost to Blackburn Rovers. In addition, the club was burdened with the debts incurred from the construction of the new ground and, with the accounts show
ing that annual turnover had dropped by £1,000, it’s no exaggeration to say that Rangers were teetering on the brink of extinction at this time.

  Things began to improve for the club, however, when, in May 1889, Rangers appointed 23-year-old William Wilton to the post of match secretary. Along with new president John Mellish, who had replaced Vallance, Wilton attended a meeting, at the invitation of the West Dunbartonshire village side Renton, in Glasgow in March 1890, which would lead to the formation of a Scottish league. The league, based on the model which had been introduced in England two seasons earlier, would provide regular fixtures for the invited teams, as well as a trophy at the end of the campaign. Although it initially played second fiddle to the major cup competitions, the league quickly became a great success and a second division was introduced in 1893, which expanded to include teams from beyond the central belt.

  The game, already hugely popular, would take further strides forward in the new decade as professionalism was finally and inevitably permitted in Scotland in 1893, in part to deal with the problem of Scottish footballers heading south to earn their living, where payments to players had been legitimised in 1885. The introduction of the league and regular fixtures led to a general improvement in the standard of play, but it also precipitated the decline of former giants of the game Queen’s Park, the steadfastly amateur club having refused to join, which was perhaps most keenly felt following the heavy defeat inflicted by Celtic, the new kids on the block, in the Scottish Cup Final of 1892, 5-1 at Ibrox.

  It was a warning that would go unheeded by the Mount Florida club. A new hierarchy was emerging in the Scottish game, based on the strength of the teams with the largest catchment area of supporters, at the expense of the smaller, more rural and amateur sides. In addition, after the emergence of Celtic, football fans from the outlying districts around Glasgow started to lose interest in the fortunes of their local teams, preferring instead to travel to Ibrox to support the only side that seemed capable of standing up to the Irish phenomenon. In the 1893/94 season, Celtic won the league but Rangers overcame their dreadful record against the Parkhead men up to that point by defeating them in four games out of six, a feat which no other team had previously achieved, and in the absence of any credible challenge from Queen’s Park in the new set-up, the Ibrox side seemed to be the obvious candidate to restore wounded Scottish pride.

  Two years later, in September 1896, the Scottish Sport were clearly indicating Rangers, whom they had started referring to without any obvious sense of irony as ‘Scotia’s darling club’, when they appeared to issue a rallying cry for a native Scottish team to break the stranglehold of Celtic and the recently reformed Hibernian, who were leading the way in the race for the league championship after recent victories over Hearts and Rangers respectively. ‘The two Irish teams are at the top of the table. Is this not a reflection on Scotland?’ the paper lamented.

  With the supporter base so polarised and the battle lines so clearly defined, the beginnings of religious and ethnic prejudice also began to appear in the press around this time. Cartoons were published in the pages of the sports journals with unflattering comparisons between the Irish Celt, generally depicted as rotund and ugly, and the true Scottish Ranger, which would unquestionably by today’s standards, and perhaps even by the standards of the day, be considered racist. Commenting on sketches which appeared in the Scottish Referee, historian Bill Murray, who made a systematic study of these cartoons, noted that they ‘depicted the Celtic player with the dumb look of a creature emerging from a peat bog, while the Rangers equivalent had the noble stature and intelligent eyes of the Aryan’.

  Rangers were clearly being portrayed as the team of choice for the indigenous Scot, and the antidote to the phenomenon of the neighbouring Irish club, whose supporters, even in the lean years, seemed to follow their team with a quite astonishing degree of enthusiasm. The foundation of Celtic had an elevating effect on the impoverished section of the Glasgow Irish, but their emergence also coincided with the first tentative steps of prominent Catholics into the spheres of business, the professions and local politics, and the subsequent success of the club lifted spirits across the whole community. Rangers, on the other hand, such a controversial institution back in the 1880s, were now seen as the last great hope for the Scottish, Protestant establishment.

  In the face of this polarisation, the fortunes of the provincial village sides must have seemed curiously irrelevant, even to many of the local residents, as the revolution in cheap and accessible public transport allowed fans to travel easily to Glasgow, where footballing passions were being aroused in great numbers, with attendances at Ibrox and Celtic Park regularly dwarfing the population of some entire rural communities. By the end of the decade, six of the original league invitees had been put out of business, including Victorian giants Vale of Leven, founding fathers Renton, whose belief in a ‘brotherhood of equality and fraternity’ had failed to survive the transition to professionalism, and Dumbarton, although within a few years the latter would re-emerge.

  Dumbarton had won the inaugural league championship, jointly with Rangers, as the two teams completed their maiden campaigns with 29 points collected from their 18 fixtures. After a 2-2 draw in a play-off at Cathkin Park in a match which saw Dumbarton retrieve a two-goal deficit, the two clubs were declared joint champions. The following season, the Sons would march to the title and claim the championship outright for the first and last time in their history, but just five years later, after their 5-1 loss to Rangers in the Scottish Cup Final of 1897, Dumbarton, great stalwarts of the Victorian era, finished bottom of the Second Division and folded.

  By contrast, following the appearance of Celtic and the introduction of the league, Rangers recovered quickly from their parlous off-field state at the start of the decade, with crowds of over 20,000 now being attracted to Ibrox for the big games. To secure the title outright, however, the club would have to wait until 1899, when Rangers completed the season by winning all 18 of their matches, a remarkable feat which has never been matched in world football, although they lost the Scottish Cup Final 2-0 to Celtic. By then, the Ibrox club had finally managed to capture the Scottish Cup for the first time, beating the same opponents 3-1 in the final in 1894 in a match which saw Celtic’s attacks repelled repeatedly by the renowned Ibrox full-back pairing of Jock Drummond and Nicol Smith. Rangers then picked off their opponents, with the crucial third goal scored by talisman John McPherson, before Willie Maley’s consolation.

  After having to endure such a long wait before they could finally claim the old trophy, the Scottish Cup was won again by the Ibrox club in 1897 and retained in 1898, with victories in the Hampden finals over Dumbarton and Kilmarnock. Then, in 1899, the club took the step of forming a limited liability company, the Rangers Football Club Limited, and £12,000 was raised from new shareholders to help fund the construction of a revamped stadium on the site of the present Ibrox Park.

  The incorporation of the football club meant the end of the old committee structure, which saw the club’s business conducted openly, and the establishment in its place of a closed boardroom, where directors could now plot, scheme and ruminate behind the scenes in complete secrecy.

  As part of the reorganisation at Ibrox, match secretary William Wilton was the first man to be appointed as the club’s team manager, in May 1899. Wilton was born in Largs in 1865 and he paid his membership fees and joined up with Rangers in September 1883, although his talents seem to have been away from the football field, and he never played for the club’s first team. He did, however, turn out for the ‘Swifts’, Rangers’ reserve side, and after his appointment as match secretary in 1889 he found himself in charge of scheduling games for the ‘Swifts’ although, because he didn’t understand football, he wasn’t on the second string’s selection committee. Gradually his influence on Rangers grew and he successfully argued for an expansion of the club’s main selection committee following acrimonious in-fighting and a series of poor results in 1887.
Later, he instigated the Ibrox Sports, a chiefly athletics event which put the stadium to use during the close season, and which continued to run during the summer up until the 1950s.

  Bald, bespectacled and something of a busybody, Wilton had a ringside seat during some of the more glaring oversights and malpractices of the old committee, and he had seen the club at its administrative and financial nadir. Determined to improve matters, he oversaw the expansion of the first Ibrox stadium, including the construction of a new press box, for which he was fêted by the Fourth Estate, and he guided the club through the murky waters of professionalism and the arrival of the new league structure, combining his duties at Rangers with the role of the league’s first secretary, in addition to a position within the SFA. After his appointment as the club’s first manager following incorporation, he guided the team to new levels of success on the field, as the season of maximum points in 1899 was followed by three subsequent victorious campaigns, allowing Rangers to establish themselves as the undisputed best team in the land, with four titles in a row between 1899 and 1902.

  Rangers were now looking at the prospect of a very bright future. With the incorporation of the club, a new stadium designed by renowned architect Archibald Leitch which was attracting an average of 13,000 fans for every league game (considerably more for the fixtures against the Irish teams, Celtic and Hibernian), and four consecutive league championships in the bag, all complemented by some heroically biased coverage in the Scottish press, everything seemed to be falling together nicely for Rangers by 1902. The ‘New Ibrox’ or ‘Greater Ibrox’ had, thanks to Wilton’s solicitations, been selected as the venue for several cup finals as well as for the prestigious home international matches, the jewel in the crown of which was the annual Scotland versus England game. Prior to 1906, when the fixture was moved permanently to Hampden Park, clubs with suitable stadiums used to compete to host the big internationals and the 1902 match against England was to be held at Ibrox Park.