Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  With the country in the grip of a patriotic fervour at the perceived ‘national danger’, and with the war expected to be short and over by Christmas, many young men with an interest in football were enticed to join up and serve alongside their mates as part of a ‘football battalion’ attached to the Highland Light Infantry. Needless to say, most of these young men never came home. Back on the home front, Wilton’s salary at Ibrox increased during World War One, as did his bonuses, and he arranged for himself a benefit match against Everton. In his correspondence with the Merseyside club, Wilton candidly explained, ‘The proceeds go as complimentary to the writer after 30 years’ service. I do not wish, however, to advertise it as a “benefit”, so it will just be billed as an ordinary match.’

  During the war, both Wilton and trainer Struth served with the Red Cross at Bellahouston Hospital in Glasgow, in addition to their duties with Rangers. Wilton himself was well beyond the age of conscription, but as the junior partner, Struth was given the choice in 1917 of either being recruited into the army or going full-time with the Red Cross. He chose the latter.

  In season 1918, Celtic and Rangers were once again locked in a two-way tussle for the league championship, with both teams level on points going into the last game of the season. Rangers beat Clyde at Ibrox while Celtic were held at home by Motherwell, giving the Ibrox club their first championship success in five years. While criticism of Rangers was not often heard in the pages of the mainstream press at this time, the Irish-owned Glasgow Observer held no such reservations. Its football columnist, ‘Man in the Know’, described Rangers as ‘the piebald champions’, alleging that they had assembled a ‘variety troupe’ of footballers from other teams by taking advantage of the wartime rule that allowed players to move more freely between clubs on temporary loan arrangements.

  The columnist also accused Rangers of buying their way to success rather than developing and nurturing young players, although the same writer displayed less chagrin the following year when the title was again won by a single point as, in a mirror image of the previous campaign, Celtic captured the league on the last day of the season after a 2-0 win away to Ayr United.

  On 28 April 1920, Rangers regained the title from their great rivals with a game to spare following a goalless draw at Dumbarton. A few days later, the fixture card was completed with a victory over Morton, after which a fatigued William Wilton embarked on a break with club director Joseph Buchanan. They were guests of James Marr, a former committee man with Rangers in the days before the club’s incorporation, on his vessel the Caltha at Gourock on the Firth of Clyde. In the early hours of the morning, the boat was driven from its moorings by a storm and, as he tried to climb the mast and reach the safety of the quay, Wilton was swept overboard and lost, presumed drowned. It would be almost two months before the death of the Rangers manager could be officially confirmed, when his body was eventually found floating in the bay. Still aged only 55, it was a tragic end for a man who had looked after the interests of the club with diligence and dedication.

  William Wilton was a manager in every sense of the word. One gets the impression that, had he been in charge of a bank, he would have managed that institution in much the same way that he had presided over the affairs of Rangers Football Club. Administrators such as Wilton are the reason the term ‘manager’ is still in common use today, to indicate the person in charge of the club’s first team, rather than the more rarely heard, at least until modern times, continental terms such as ‘coach’ or ‘trainer’. ‘Trainer’ in fact more usually referred to the fitness gurus, James Wilson and later Bill Struth, who had more day to day contact with the players, while the manager, an aloof authority, maintained his distance. Following the vacancy created by the untimely death of his boss, it was a role which would seem custom-made for Struth. If Wilton set the tone for Rangers’ modus operandi, in the setting of standards and in his rigid, disciplinarian tendencies, his methods would be imitated, emulated and ultimately taken to a new level by his successor over the years to come.

  3

  THE GRAND OLD MAN OF IBROX

  OVER the course of the first 50 years of its history, Rangers Football Club had come to be seen and defined in Scotland as the team to face down the insurgents. Rivals Celtic had been phenomenally successful in the early years of Scottish league football, winning 16 of the titles contested between the inaugural season of 1890/91 and 1922, exactly half. The competition between the two Glasgow clubs had intensified on the field of play, but it was becoming increasingly heated more broadly too, with Celtic able to draw on the support of a huge, enthusiastic following from its Irish-extracted community of fans.

  As their local rivals, and with a big urban fanbase of their own, Rangers, a wayward and widely vilified club in their earlier years, had responded to the call from sections of the sporting press and elsewhere for a team to stand up for the native Scottish interests and meet the challenge posed by the foreign, Irish club. There is no date which can be pinpointed as to when this process began or was complete, with the nebulous world of Rangers’ internal affairs being notoriously difficult to penetrate, but what seems clear is that the Ibrox club were supremely successful in this new capacity.

  Between 1923 and the arrival of manager Jock Stein at Parkhead in 1965, Rangers won the league title on 23 occasions compared to Celtic’s four. Other great teams flourished during the same period, notably Hibs in the late ’40s and Hearts in the late ’50s; both had great, multi-championship winning teams, but neither could maintain a sustained challenge to the relentless, trophy-gathering momentum of the Rangers juggernaut.

  Of course, the gathering storm of the ‘Old Firm’ rivalry in Glasgow was not being played out in a social and cultural vacuum, but rather, in the early years of the inter-war period, against a febrile political environment across the British Isles. By 1922, Ireland had fought for and received a version of home rule, which allowed the newly created ‘Free State’ to be governed from Dublin, but the island would be partitioned and six of the nine counties of Ulster, what became known as Northern Ireland, an enclave with in-built Protestant majority, were to remain under British rule.

  The fall-out from this agreement, obtained from Westminster by the Irish statesman Michael Collins, led to the bloody and internecine Irish Civil War of 1922–23, of which Collins himself was a casualty. Many of the Irish immigrants in Scotland were from the border counties of Donegal, Sligo and Cavan and, following the suppression of the Easter Rising in 1916 and the execution of its leaders, there was strong support among sections of the diaspora in Scotland for the cause of Irish nationalism. Irish Premier Éamon de Valera later thanked the Irish in Scotland for their support in the conflict, while on the other side of the divide, the bowler-hatted Orangemen of the north, many of them ethnic Scots, reacted with venom and fury to the concessions that had been made to the rebels, which they feared would threaten their protected status on the island of Ireland. Meanwhile, across the water, the backlash against the Irish community from the Scottish establishment was ferocious.

  At a time when reactionary movements such as Nazism were germinating in mainland Europe, the Church of Scotland in 1923 commissioned a report on the malevolent influence of Irish immigration and the threat posed by the Education (Scotland) Act of 1918, which allowed for the provision of state-funded, Catholic education. While due acknowledgement must be given to any genuine concerns which existed at the time, it is fair to say the language of the report has dated badly over the ensuing decades and to the modern ear, more used as we are to the notion of multi-cultural, multi-faith societies, it is indeed a truly dreadful document. The report talks shamelessly and openly about the threat posed by ‘the Irish intruders’ to the native Scots and ‘their racial supremacy in their native land’. According to the report, ‘the time is rapidly approaching when… whole communities in parish, village and town will be predominantly Irish. It is, in fact, a sober and restrained prophecy to say that… the great plain of Scotland stret
ching from Glasgow in the west to Dundee and Edinburgh in the east will soon be dominated by the Irish race.’ It urged the Scottish people in response to ‘safeguard their heritage’ and indeed to take ‘whatever steps may be necessary to secure this just and patriotic end’.

  Note that the report had no concerns about Scotland’s tiny minority of native Catholics, ‘who have a right to call Scotland their country, in common with their fellow-countrymen of the Protestant Faith’, nor was there any complaint about the presence of what it referred to as an ‘Orange population’, immigrants from the partitioned six counties who were also moving across the water in increasing numbers at this time, for ‘they are of the same race as ourselves and of the same Faith, and are readily assimilated to the Scottish population’. The sole target of the report’s concern, the ‘menace’ as it describes them, was explicitly and specifically the Irish Catholic community who, it should go without saying, made up the vast majority of the Celtic support at the time. In an echo of the ‘Judenfrage’, the Jewish question, constructed by the Nazis in the years before the Holocaust, in Scotland the problem would come to be defined as an ‘Irischefrage’, the question of the Irish and what to do with them.

  The report was submitted to the Church’s General Assembly by the Committee on Church and Nation, whose members made up the rank and file of the Scottish establishment of the day: as well as the Moderator and the Procurator, the committee contained four Reverend Professors, eight Reverend Doctors, 17 Reverends, two MPs, three lawyers and two Lords. Despite the elite nature of the committee’s panel, the report was never reluctant to flatter the native Scottish working-class chappie, dismissing any suggestion for example that he was being outbred by his more vigorous and fertile Irish counterpart – doubtless the kind of juvenile sentiment which would have played into the hands of football supporters of the day. To be fair to the Kirk, most of this gibberish was retracted in the 1950s, after World War Two revealed the full extent and brutality of the Nazi atrocities, but of course it subsequently proved far more difficult to erase such a mentality from a bunch of hard core football fans, especially when notions of Catholic bashing and Protestant superiority were already being effectively employed as a vehicle to sporting success.

  Later in the decade, in March 1929, a series of articles published in the Glasgow Herald newspaper – a beacon of middle-class, Protestant respectability – poured scorn on the claim that the Irish were a menace to society, with the paper’s forensic examination of crime, unemployment and other statistics effectively rubbishing almost every one of the report’s allegations, claim by claim. With fantastically detailed research, the unknown author of the articles also ridiculed the idea, widely propagated at the time, that Scotland was being swamped by zealous Irishmen intent on converting the country to the Catholic faith, pointing out that, in contrast to the ‘stream’ of the previous century when Irish labour helped Scotland to become an industrialised nation, by the 1920s the levels of immigration from Ireland had been reduced to ‘the veriest trickle’, and came mostly from the partitioned six counties.

  Nevertheless, set against the backdrop of the harsh economic conditions in Glasgow at the time, the razor gangs and the slums familiar to us from No Mean City and elsewhere, the report set the tone for a bitter and divisive segregation of Scottish society, which spilled over on to the stands and terraces of the day and exacerbated what was already one of the most virulent and sectarian rivalries anywhere in the football world.

  For Celtic, trying to stand their ground and maintain their traditions, they found that the world was changing around them. As the report demonstrated, anti-Catholicism in Scotland had always been more of an issue among the establishment classes and the appointed elite, unlike in England for example, where the Stockport riots in the 1850s had seen Irishmen, fleeing the Famine, turned out of their homes and forced to live rough by the impromptu actions of an unruly mob. By the 1920s however, religious bigotry north of the border appeared to manifest itself most conspicuously in an unlikely, but growing alliance between the ruling and lower orders, which to a large extent bypassed the respectable, middle-class community – as the generally positive response to The Herald’s series of articles from its readers in that bracket of society later testified – while also flying in the face of such strong Scottish notions as working-class solidarity. This new, developing aspect to anti-Catholicism meant that the problem became particularly intransigent and harder to completely eradicate, and religious prejudice continued to tarnish sections of Scottish society long after the issue went out of fashion in the rest of mainland Britain.

  In addition, Scotland in the 1920s was a country that seemed to have lost its sense of direction. An abortive attempt to introduce a bill for Scottish home rule had been put before Parliament in 1914 but, following the war, the issue did not resurface as the country preferred to see itself in terms of its role within the Empire. Culturally, it was a time of the emergence of familiar national stereotypes, of tight-fisted curmudgeons recognisable to readers of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and, in Sir Harry Lauder’s popular portrayals of Highlanders singing and dancing and ‘roaming in the gloaming’ the country’s image of itself was reduced to little more than a music hall joke. With all the issues in Ireland spilling over on to the shores of her erstwhile Celtic cousin, including the movement back into the Glasgow area of a significant number of Ulster Scots, who brought their prejudices and discriminatory employment practices to traditional working-class occupations, most notably in the shipyards at organisations such as Harland and Wolff, anti-Catholicism in Scotland filtered down to the masses and became part of the lingua franca of everyday political discourse.

  The role of Rangers in this process, with the club now openly practising an exclusionary employment policy and revelling in its self-appointed status as the nation’s foremost Protestant sporting institution, cannot be underestimated. As Bill Murray observes of this period in his book The Old Firm, ‘The directors, management and foremen of the heavy industries in Scotland were nearly all Protestants, often Freemasons, sometimes Orangemen: in each case their sympathies went to the native Scots; that is to say Scots by name and religion, for they would not have considered a Catholic a true Scot. This clannishness, looking after “one’s own”, was rife in the industrial sphere, and was reflected in the Rangers football club.’

  Fellow historian Tom Campbell agrees, ‘Rangers FC, which had not been totally exclusive in its recruiting policy prior to the First World War, closed ranks as their religious apartheid proved immensely profitable at the turnstiles, in an era of poisonous bigotry.’

  Into this heady mix strode one William ‘Bill’ Struth, stepping with some poise over the unrecovered body of his former boss William Wilton to assume his role in the manager’s office at Ibrox, in June 1920. Struth was a strict disciplinarian and possessed the kind of stern, authoritarian presence that would make Alex Ferguson look like Claudio Ranieri. Perfect for Rangers, he dominated the club for over three decades the way a sergeant-major dominates his regiment, although, like several other figures who have intervened in the club’s history and helped to take Rangers in a radical new direction, Struth was not in fact a traditional Rangers man and had no traceable connection with the club before his appointment as fitness trainer at Ibrox in May 1914.

  Born in 1876 in Leith, Struth grew up in Edinburgh, although his family home was in the mill town of Milnathort in Kinross-shire, where he frequently returned with his parents. He had been a middle distance runner in his youth, never a football player, and, in an era when the Corinthian spirit of the Olympic amateur was being revived, the young Struth was involved in the often murky world of professional athletics, racing for money, and on at least one occasion, he cheated in order to win the cash prize. At a meeting in Porthcawl, South Wales, around the turn of the century, Struth mingled with spectators at the start of the race, hiding the number on his shirt to disguise the fact that he was a competitor, and, when the starter pistol was f
ired, he darted out of the crowd and sprinted to the finish 20 yards ahead of the other athletes!

  On crossing the line in first place, Struth made straight for the prize-winners’ table, where he was handed a voucher for his winnings, before tearing off to the local bank to claim the cash while his bemused competitors were still arguing with the officials in protest. Despite the fact that he was a qualified and capable stonemason, he would travel around the country on public transport, often ducking and weaving to evade the ticket collectors, in order to compete for money. A working-class boy, who couldn’t fit in, who cheated, he would take to his role as a figure of po-faced, establishment authority at Rangers like a duck to water.

  When his running days came to an end, Struth joined Clyde FC in 1908 as the club’s fitness trainer, and he moved to Rangers in the same capacity following the death of the incumbent James Wilson in 1914. Having worked closely with the players for six years, he was the natural successor to take over from Wilton after the secretary-manager was killed in a boating accident in May 1920, meaning that for the second time in six years Struth had benefited from the untimely death-in-office of his immediate predecessor at Ibrox. He displayed an initial reluctance, even a nervousness on his imminent appointment, telling the Ibrox directors that he wasn’t up to the task of becoming the club’s manager, but in fact he was the ideal candidate.