Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  The fixture had been instigated as early as November 1872, thanks largely to Charles Alcock and his friends at the FA, at a time when competitive football was still dominated by alumni teams from the public schools and the universities. It was an era which, by the turn of the century, must have seemed curiously quaint after 30 years of almost uninterrupted growth and expansion in the game’s popular appeal, and by 1902 the interest in the annual cross-border contest with England was huge. The crowd had been urged to arrive early and an hour before kick-off, on Saturday, 5 April, Ibrox was full, and as the marching bands provided their pre-match entertainment, latecomers continued to try to gain admittance to the stadium, resulting in an estimated attendance of 75,000, well in excess of what the new ground was designed to accommodate. The terracing was constructed from wood, supported and reinforced by a steel structure, which rose to 40 feet off the ground at the back of the stand. Iron railings divided each block of terracing, which were supposed to limit the capacity in specific areas and counteract the swaying effect of a large crowd.

  Concerns were raised before the match that the structure might be unsafe but these were dismissed, with the press reporting that it had been tested by engineers and used safely in previous matches. However, the wet weather had degraded the strength and integrity of the wooden boards and around the tenth minute of the match, under intense pressure from the sheer weight of numbers in the crowd, who were probably stamping and swaying and grouping in a section towards the back of the West Stand, the structure collapsed and hundreds of people plunged through the yawning gap to the ground below. Twenty-five people were killed and more than 500 were injured in what would later become known as the first Ibrox disaster. The game was allowed to continue to a conclusion, but the result was eventually declared void, and the match was later replayed in Birmingham with proceeds going to the relief fund set up for the victims’ families. At the time it was the worst accident in the history of British football, although sadly it wouldn’t remain so.

  Following the disaster, lattice stands constructed from steel and wood were gradually phased out across the country and replaced with terraces built on banks of earth and reinforced concrete, the kind of which were in use at football grounds throughout Britain for most of the 20th century. The accident reveals the extent to which football had developed by the turn of the century, beyond the capacity of the authorities to cope with its increased popularity, especially in west central Scotland where the game had been embraced with particular enthusiasm. At a subsequent trial, which effectively served as the inquiry into the disaster, the constructor of the affected section of terracing was acquitted of all charges, and while no blame was officially apportioned to Rangers, there was severe criticism in the press, including from the Catholic Glasgow Observer, who noted that Celtic Park was, ‘a splendidly equipped ground, which has stood the test of previous record crowds’, and which had been overlooked in favour of ‘the Rangers wire-pullers’.

  Celtic Park had in fact been selected to host the England fixture on all four of the previous occasions it was played in Scotland between 1894 and 1900, and seemed to be the preferred venue, but for some reason Ibrox was chosen in 1902. The finger of blame was being pointed at Wilton, who was stung by accusations that crowd safety had been jeopardised by the desire to pull in as many paying spectators as possible, and that, as a result of his behind-the-scenes machinations, the fixture had been moved to a less suitable ground. The manager responded by putting his entire squad of players up for sale in order to raise money for the improvements to Ibrox which were necessary to meet the new safety requirements. Over the next two years the club would spend £42,000 on Ibrox, including £15,000 on the outright purchase of the ground, but on the field they suffered as a result. Rangers would go on to win the Scottish Cup in 1903, but it would be a while before they would be able to field a team as strong as the four-in-a-row champions again.

  The tussle in the awarding of the England fixture to Rangers and Ibrox in 1902 was indicative of the souring of relations between the two Glasgow clubs by this point. The friendly association between some of the early Celtic players and their counterparts at Rangers had long since melted away and been replaced, on the field at least, by a series of tousy incidents in numerous stormy clashes between the sides. As early as 1894, following a league game at Celtic Park, some Celtic players had complained to the Glasgow Observer’s columnist about the sectarian abuse they had been subjected to, with the paper subsequently reporting that, ‘the language some of the Rangers players used was most disgraceful – “Fenian”, “Papist”, “Irish” all being hurled with, of course, the most vulgar accompaniments. This is not how it used to be; Rangers and Celts were always pretty friendly, and the change of front seems strange.’ Clearly, the initial healthy rivalry between the two clubs was rapidly beginning to be disfigured by a religious and ethnic dimension, and it was now not uncommon for games between the teams to end in a brawl.

  In 1896, following another heated encounter, the Scottish Sport laid the blame for the deteriorating on-field relationship at the door of both clubs, wondering if it was ‘possible for the Celtic and Rangers to meet now, not even in a charity match, without the worst feelings and considerable amount of foulness creeping into the play’. The paper was moved to lament the ‘bad blood’ which had developed between the two clubs, and cautioned that the increasing antipathy ‘would cool the public interest’. It was a warning which the broadcaster and historian Bob Crampsey would later describe as ‘one of the most inaccurate prophecies of all time’.

  This was the time of the emergence of the ‘Old Firm’, as they became known, a sarcastic reference coined by the Glasgow sporting journal Scottish Referee to describe not only the polarisation and extent of the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic by this point, but there was also the suggestion that this mutual animosity was proving financially beneficial to the two clubs at a time when the giants of Victorian football were going to the wall. The press had already noted a curious dichotomy in the affairs of both institutions which was becoming evident throughout the 1890s; on the field, the rivalry was growing increasingly bitter, with an attached religious and ethnic animosity becoming gradually more apparent, but at boardroom level there was still a tacit admission on the part of both clubs that their burgeoning rivalry was proving profitable at the turnstiles.

  However, by the turn of the century, relations behind the scenes had also begun to cool, and even after the Ibrox disaster, the ill-feeling continued. Rangers had organised, as part of the victims’ relief fund, a tournament involving the top two teams from Scotland and England, dubbed the British League Cup. The strength of the Glasgow sides at this time can be seen from the outcome of the two semi-finals, with an under-strength Rangers comfortably defeating Everton, the English league runners-up, while Celtic took apart champions Sunderland with a 5-1 rout of the Wearsiders’ famous ‘team of all the talents’. In the final between the two Glasgow clubs, Celtic came out on top and claimed the impressive Glasgow Exhibition Cup, which Rangers had offered to the winners.

  Later, however, Rangers would ask for the trophy back, on the grounds that it was the property of their club, and that it had only been ceremonially presented to the winners. The cup had been won the previous year in an eight-team tournament to mark the Exhibition with a 3-1 defeat of Celtic in the final and was engraved with the inscription ‘Won by Rangers FC’. Needless to say, Celtic refused all requests to return the trophy, maintaining that it was won fairly on the field of play in a properly organised competition.

  Celtic and Rangers were by now establishing their dominance over the Scottish game by consistently annexing the league championship, including Rangers’ four in a row between 1899 and 1902, which was surpassed by Celtic’s six consecutive titles between 1905 and 1910. The changing of the guard seemed to take place at the end of the 1905 season when Rangers lost a play-off to Celtic for the league, 2-1 at Hampden, in a match which was noteworthy for the choice of referee.<
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  Following more controversial incidents in games between the teams that season, including the enforced abandonment of a cup tie at Parkhead, the SFA took the unprecedented step of appointing an English official for such an important match, Mr F. Kirkham of Preston. It was not a happy end to the season for Rangers, who had also lost the Scottish Cup Final at Hampden after a replay, 3-1 to Third Lanark. Thirds, a former soldiers’ team founded in 1872 as Third Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, who had only severed their links with the military the previous year, would go on to win the league the following season, but their 1904 success would be the only occasion the title would not be won by Rangers or Celtic until Motherwell’s sole championship-winning season of 1931/32, which in itself was the only success outside of the Glasgow duopoly between the wars.

  Increasingly during the Edwardian period, Rangers were attracting to Ibrox the kind of crowd which could match Celtic in terms of numbers and fervour, although, despite the clearly defined divisions in the supporter base, it seems that the rivalry had not yet had time to fester to the point of extremism in the wider society. The two sets of fans were still able to come together if they felt that the ‘Old Firm’ imperative was being used to exploit their allegiances, and in 1909 supporters of the two clubs were involved in an extraordinary event following the Scottish Cup Final replay between the two teams.

  It was commonly believed at the time that Rangers and Celtic preferred to meet each other in the semi-finals of the cup competitions, so they wouldn’t have to share the gate receipts with a third-party club, whose neutral ground would be in use for the final, but that year the two teams avoided each other until the showpiece, which ended in a 2-2 draw at Hampden in front of 70,000 spectators. Some newspapers had wrongly suggested that the subsequent replay would be played to a conclusion but, after another draw, it gradually became clear that there would be no extra time and that the final would have to proceed to a third match at a future date.

  At this point the angry crowd, with the rival fans apparently acting in unison, started rioting, tearing down fences, setting fire to the pay-boxes and bombarding the police and the fire brigade, when they were eventually mobilised, with a shower of stones. The two clubs were embarrassed at the accusation that they had arranged a third payday for themselves, a claim which, although implausible, reflected the widespread view, chiefly emanating from the press, that the duopoly were still more partners than rivals at this time, especially when it came to the matter of exploiting the paying public for financial gain.

  In the end, the clubs reached a mutual agreement with the SFA not to play a third match and the cup that year was withheld, depriving Celtic of the possibility of a third consecutive league and cup ‘Double’. The riots, although shocking, suggested that an element within both groups of supporters still instinctively believed that they had more in common with each other than they did with the people who were running the game and those who were making so much money out of football’s popularity. It seems conceivable that the rivalry in Glasgow might have developed along the same lines as in other cities along the west coast of Britain, particularly those who have benefited down the years from a strong Scottish and Irish influence, where evidence of a healthy relationship, in footballing cities such as Liverpool and Manchester, between Scottish migrants, Irish settlers and the local culture is readily apparent in the region’s successful football teams. Big clubs in these and other cities in England had started to diverge along religious lines around the time of their formation, but the divisions were not allowed to persist.

  In Glasgow, things were to take a different turn however, with Rangers adopting a strict no Catholics, exclusionary employment policy for most of the 20th century. To be fair, Rangers had attracted very few Catholic players to their ranks by the end of the Victorian era, but a few had turned out or guested for the team in the first 40 years since the club’s foundation. In the first decade of the new century by contrast, Rangers seemed to have no compunction at all about signing Catholics, as the club agonised over their pursuit of Celtic, who were enjoying the most successful period in their history at the time, with a run of six consecutive titles between 1905 and 1910.

  At least three Catholic players were signed by Rangers in the first decade of the century, although none made any impact at the club, with the possible lone exception of Willie Kivlichan, a Glasgow University medical student, who lasted the entire 1906/07 season at Ibrox, before switching to Celtic in a controversial swap deal with Alex Bennett. But the arrival on the Clyde in 1912 of the Belfast-based shipbuilders, Harland and Wolff, seems to have been a crucial turning point in the consolidation of a permanently divisive, sectarian element to the rivalry in Glasgow.

  Harland and Wolff were not, it seems fair to say, an equal opportunities employer. Back in Ulster, they had allowed their Protestant workers to purge the company of Catholic colleagues at a time when the political situation across Ireland was becoming increasingly unstable, particularly after British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s repeated attempts during the 1880s and ’90s to introduce a Home Rule bill for Ireland. The proposed legislation had provoked a panicked, violent reaction from the Unionist community in the north of the country, which was stoked up by Lord Randolph Churchill for his own political purposes and later condemned by his son, Winston, who described the subsequent anti-Catholic riots in Belfast over the summer of 1886 as ‘savage, repeated and prolonged’.

  Harland and Wolff were subsequently operating an exclusionary employment policy, which they had applied with impunity in Ireland and which they now brought with them to Scotland, along with thousands of workers over the ensuing years, whose skills were readily transferable to the Clydeside yards and who were far more zealous in their anti-Catholicism than their native colleagues. Soon after their arrival in Govan in 1912, the same year that the company’s flagship vessel, the Titanic, foundered in the mid-Atlantic, Harland and Wolff loaned their neighbours Rangers £90,000, as the club continued to struggle with the costs associated with the construction and modernisation of Ibrox Park, as well as the ongoing fallout from the stadium disaster a decade earlier.

  In his book The Spirit of Ibrox, Rangers historian Robert McElroy all but admits that as a condition of the loan, Harland and Wolff insisted that the Ibrox club should adopt the same employment practices as the shipbuilding firm and remain a Catholic-free zone. The exact details of the arrangement between Harland and Wolff and Rangers were not disclosed at the time, with the conditions of the loan agreement stating only that it was ‘subject to those private agreements made between the parties but not subject herein’.

  Some credence can be given to McElroy’s claim, however, not least because it appears in an officially approved history of the club, although such an allegation is difficult to prove conclusively, both because of the veil of secrecy which had descended over Rangers’ affairs in the years following the club’s incorporation, but also on account of the tacit vow of silence in the face of controversy which surrounds the activities of Freemasons and other largely Protestant-only secret organisations, whose members would have included high-level officials in both institutions at the time. Also in the same year, 1912, the chairmanship of Rangers, following the death of the respected James Henderson, passed to Sir John Ure Primrose, a man who had previously split with the Liberal Party over his opposition to Gladstone’s Home Rule bill in 1886 and who, as patron and honorary president of the club in 1890, had publicly established the enduring link between Rangers and the Masons when he recruited the Ibrox side to a fundraising event for the Grand Lodge of Scotland. In the absence of any formal arrangement between Primrose’s Rangers and Harland and Wolff, secret or otherwise, the club’s deliberate failure to sign Catholic footballers from this point onwards can only be put down to coincidence and as a result, anti-Catholicism, and religious prejudice in general, would subsequently become a disease which would fester at the heart of Scottish football right down until recent times, a persistently chronic conditi
on which has stubbornly resisted all attempts to eradicate it, returning spasmodically even when subjected to the most modern treatments. A failure to acknowledge and properly diagnose the problem, as it pertains to Scottish football, as primarily a Rangers matter from this moment on would ultimately only exacerbate the issue.

  In the meantime, the Ibrox club were continuing to expand under diligent secretary-manager William Wilton. New turnstiles were ordered to accommodate an increased average attendance of over 20,000 for league games at Ibrox and the club finally ended Celtic’s run of six consecutive titles by winning the league in 1911, then repeating the feat over the following two seasons. In 1914, Rangers recruited Bill Struth as the club’s fitness trainer to replace James Wilson, who had died earlier in the year from pneumonia. Struth, then working for Clyde, had written to the club requesting consideration for the vacant position, which four years earlier he had turned down. As a former athlete, rather than a football player, Struth was perhaps the ideal man to oversee the training regime of an early-20th-century professional footballer, where the work consisted largely of strict fitness regimes involving running, shooting and long walks in heavy sweaters. Struth’s regimented approach would give Rangers the edge over some of their less disciplined rivals, and he would later go on to succeed Wilton in the role of manager and lead the club to new levels of success and domination in the 1920s and ’30s.

  With the advent of war in Europe in 1914, Celtic restored their hegemony of Scottish football with four consecutive league titles, including a remarkable run of 62 games undefeated between November 1915 and April 1917, a record which stood for over 100 years, as league football continued to be played in Scotland during the conflict. It was thought that the game would inspire workers in the munitions factories and elsewhere by giving them something to look forward to at the weekend, but there was also a more cynical motivation behind the decision to maintain the league programme as, following a meeting between the football authorities and the War Office, clubs in Scotland were used as recruiting posts for the war effort.