Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  At the unveiling of a portrait in oils on 15 May 1953, Struth was described by Thomas Kerr, the Lord Provost of Glasgow and a Rangers partisan of long standing, as ‘a Napoleon who had never met his Waterloo’. In reply the manager, by now in his late 70s but still not yet retired, declaimed as follows, ‘I have been lucky – lucky in those who were around me from the boardroom to the dressing room. In time of stress their unstinted support, unbroken devotion to our club and calmness in adversity eased the task of making Rangers FC the premier club in this country.

  ‘To be a Ranger is to sense the sacred trust of upholding all that such a name means in this shrine of football. They must be true in their conception of what the Ibrox tradition seeks from them. No true Ranger has ever failed in the tradition set him. Our very success, gained you will agree by skill, will draw more people than ever to see it. And that will benefit many more clubs than Rangers. Let others come after us. We welcome the chase. It is healthy for all of us. We will never hide from it. Never fear, inevitably we shall have our years of failure, and when they arrive, we must reveal tolerance and sanity. No matter the days of anxiety that come our way, we shall emerge stronger because of the trials to be overcome. That has been the philosophy of the Rangers since the days of the gallant pioneers.’

  The portrait in oils hangs today in the trophy room at Ibrox.

  4

  THE THIRD MAN

  STRUTH’S successor as Rangers manager was the former East Fife and current Preston North End boss James Scotland ‘Scot’ Symon. Proper, formal, somewhat aloof and certainly difficult to get close to, even within the camaraderie of a dressing room, Symon had made few, if any, close friends during his time as a player at Ibrox in the 1940s. He seems to have been much of a muchness as a footballer, in and out of the first team, with a solitary international cap to his name, but his single-mindedness and professionalism ensured that by the end of his playing days he had amassed over 250 appearances for the Light Blues. The record books, however, would reduce that total to just 37, as Rangers continued their domestic dominance during the unofficial fixtures of the war years.

  He was a tough-tackling half-back in an era of tough tacklers; team-mate Willie Waddell noted that when he hit an opponent, they ‘stayed hit’. Symon was something of a surprise choice to become only the third manager in the Ibrox club’s history; the favourite at the time was former captain and current manager of Partick Thistle, Davie Meiklejohn, but by this stage ‘Meek’ was known to be fond of a drink and this had counted against him in the eyes of the ever-influential Struth. With the tacit approval of his predecessor, Symon assumed his seat in the Ibrox manager’s office in the summer of 1954.

  It was tricky for him at first. There were still members of his squad whom he had played alongside, and although Symon was not the type to go in for dressing-room fraternisation, it was always going to be a difficult transition for a former team-mate to replace such an über-authoritarian figure as Struth. In truth, Symon inherited a mess from his predecessor; the ‘Iron Curtain’ defence was past its peak, and hadn’t been replaced. More generally though, things had been allowed to wither on the vine at Ibrox, as Struth’s health inexorably deteriorated and his grip on power at the club waned.

  A somewhat pathetic figure by the time he was finally ushered towards the exit door, the manner of Struth’s decline had been dispiriting for everyone to behold and morale in the dressing room was low at the time of Symon’s appointment. Celtic had just captured a rare league and cup Double, their first since 1908, winning the championship by five points from Hearts and defeating Aberdeen 2-1 in the final of the Scottish Cup, a team who in turn had put six past Rangers without reply in the semi-final, in what was perhaps the most traumatic in a series of poor results for the Ibrox club at this time.

  In addition, 35-year-old centre-half Willie Woodburn, the pivot of Rangers’ renowned defence, whom Symon had asked to carry on in the short term to help him reshape and rebuild the team, was given a life ban from the game for head-butting Stirling Albion’s Alec Paterson in a League Cup game at Ibrox in only the new manager’s fourth game in charge. Woodburn, a dominant and destructive figure at the heart of the Iron Curtain, had a track record of violent indiscipline; he had previously been suspended for 14 days in 1948 following a clash with Motherwell’s Dave Mathie, for 21 days in 1953 for punching Clyde’s Billy McPhail, and latterly for six weeks after a sending-off, also against Stirling, the previous season. Having warned the defender that ‘a very serious view would be taken of any subsequent action’, the SFA, no doubt emboldened by the departure of the obdurate Struth, threw the book at Woodburn, imposing the harshest possible sanction, suspending the player sine die after a committee meeting which lasted all of four minutes. Rangers finished the 1955 season without a trophy.

  Things might have been worse for Symon if the championship that season had been retained by Celtic. That would have seen the Ibrox club’s great rivals winning back-to-back league titles, something which had never happened under Struth, but instead the trophy headed north to Aberdeen, Celtic finishing three points off the pace, with Rangers a further five behind in third. Celtic, who in 1949 had rejected an offer to manage the team from Matt Busby, a man steeped in the club’s traditions, remained an infuriatingly inconsistent side in the 1950s, sometimes spectacular, more usually awful. After winning the Double in 1954, the club failed to consolidate and build on their success, and this bought Symon some time. In the early post-war years, the Parkhead club had entered a period of purgatory that endured for 20 years, during which time they often contrived to lose more games than they won over the course of a season and, on at least one occasion, flirted with relegation.

  In the period following the post-war resumption, Celtic had been more noted for their brushes with authority than their achievements on the football field, and on a couple of occasions they were asked to post notices in the stadium warning fans about their behaviour, following incidents of crowd trouble on the back of perceived injustices in matches against Rangers. Then in 1952, following another troublesome Old Firm game on New Year’s Day, in a series of recommendations the investigating Glasgow magistrates requested that the SFA consider whether ‘the two clubs should avoid displaying flags or emblems which might incite hostile feelings among the spectators’.

  Within the committee rooms and the corridors of power at the perennially blinkered SFA, this suggestion crystallised as an instruction to Celtic to remove from Parkhead the Irish flag, various versions of which, along with the flag of the Union, had flown over the stadium since it was built. Chairman Robert Kelly was appalled at the notion, but there were many, it seemed, for whom the Tricolour was indeed an inflammatory and provocative emblem, and these apparently included SFA acting president Harry Swan of Hibernian and secretary Sir George Graham, who had instigated the directive. The irony of Hibernian, a club with such demonstrably Irish roots, leading a campaign of this type against Celtic, with their similar tradition, seems to have been lost on no one, and at one point during the ensuing crisis, with Kelly and his team of lawyers stubbornly refusing to accede to the SFA’s demands, there was a chance that Celtic could have been thrown out of the league.

  The matter came to a head at an SFA council meeting in April when Swan gave Celtic three days to comply, but his proposal was eventually defeated by a single vote. Calmer heads had prevailed and the situation died down, largely because Rangers, despite their nominal involvement, had remained suitably aloof and nonplussed by the whole affair, and eventually voted with their rivals when it came to the crunch. It has since been claimed that Rangers sided with Celtic because of the ‘Old Firm’ financial imperative, the idea which went back to the days of the previous century that the two clubs, despite their great rivalry, fed off one another commercially. While the potential pecuniary impact of an expulsion of their Glasgow cousins cannot be ignored, Rangers were canny, and knew that, in a sporting sense, they had Celtic where they wanted them; a big club, yes, but an outsider
, an underachiever, the black sheep of Scottish football.

  The last thing Rangers wanted was for Celtic to take down the flag, abandon their Irish heritage and potentially be rehabilitated into mainstream Scottish footballing orthodoxy. This was more or less exactly what had happened with Hibernian, and the Easter Road club were now arguably the most potent force in British football. Celtic had stood their ground and survived – just – without being humiliated, although the whole episode serves as an indicator of how the establishment in Scottish football was aligned during this period. As Celtic historian Tom Campbell pointed out of the affair, ‘Whatever the outcome intended – and humiliation [rather than expulsion] was the more likely – the motivation behind it lay in bigotry.’

  By 1956, Scot Symon well and truly had his feet under the table at Ibrox. He bought Bobby Shearer from Hamilton, another uncompromising full-back who would go on to captain the club, and teenager Alex Scott emerged, a pacy outside-right, to replace the veteran Willie Waddell, who had opted for retirement in the face of persistent knee and hamstring problems. Symon further added to his squad with the signing of striker Don Kichenbrand, who arrived from South Africa to play alongside his compatriot, the ever-present winger Johnny Hubbard. Known as ‘The Rhino’, Kichenbrand was a physical centre-forward who became associated with a series of outrageous misses, although he scored plenty as well in a free-scoring age.

  Unsuspected by anyone at Ibrox at the time, Kichenbrand had been brought up as a Catholic back home in South Africa, and in Scotland he went to extraordinary lengths to disguise his faith, even joining the local Masonic Lodge in Lanarkshire. The Rangers scout had forgotten to do his homework on the striker and only learned of the player’s background when the pair were on the point of departure to Glasgow, as Kichenbrand later confided to the Daily Record, ‘The only time anyone asked about my religion was a few minutes before I boarded the plane at Johannesburg for the flight to Scotland. Charlie Watkins, the man who had convinced Glasgow Rangers they should sign me, suddenly said, “By the way, you’re not Catholic, are you?” When I told him “yes”, he nearly collapsed. Then he growled, “Don’t mention that again – to anyone!” I never did. My team-mates and bosses at the club just assumed that I had been vetted before I was signed. Every player was.’

  Symon was also allowed to appoint his own backroom staff, a relatively modern development at the time, and he replaced former centre-forward and ex-team-mate Jimmy Smith with a new trainer in close confidant Davie Kinnear, although the manager was still obliged to submit his team selections on a Thursday night for approval by the board. Rangers won the league in 1956 and they won it well, taking the title on the back of an undefeated run of 23 games. The following season Symon made the important transitional move of replacing his ageing skipper, the giant George Young, by returning to his former club East Fife to sign Harold Davis, a war veteran who had sustained injuries while serving with the Black Watch in Korea and still had shrapnel embedded in his chest.

  Rangers successfully defended the title in 1957 and in the same season the club ventured into European football for the first time, when, after initially receiving a bye, they were drawn to play French champions OGC Nice in the second round of the European Cup. Symon’s side won 2-1 at Ibrox in a game which was remarkable for English referee Arthur Ellis’s mistake of blowing the full-time whistle after only 85 minutes, before the Halifax-based official was obliged, after realising his error, to recall the players from the dressing room so that the match could be completed. In the second leg, despite taking the lead through a Johnny Hubbard penalty, Rangers were defeated by the same scoreline, as right-half Willie Logie became the first British player to be ordered off in a European tie following a confrontation with Nice’s Bravo, who was also dismissed. Unfortunately for Rangers, Nice won the subsequent play-off 3-1 in Paris to ensure that the Ibrox men exited European competition at their first attempt.

  By now it seemed clear that normality was being restored in domestic Scottish football, with Symon steering his side back to their accustomed position at the forefront of the national game. The only serious aberration at this time was an astonishing 7-1 defeat to Celtic in the League Cup Final in October 1957, a scoreline which remains a record margin of victory in any British cup final. But once again it proved to be a one-off for the Parkhead side, as Rangers embarked on a run of consistent success over the next several years. The 1950s overall had seen other teams challenge the Ibrox club, initially and most notably Hibernian, in a more evenly contested era than previous years. Celtic and Aberdeen had won titles too, and towards the end of the decade, Hearts assembled a formidably gifted team, led by the legendary Dave Mackay and with an attack spearheaded by the so-called ‘terrible trio’ of Wardhaugh, Bauld and Conn.

  The Tynecastle side won the league in 1958, scoring an astonishing 132 goals in the process, and then repeated the feat in 1960 after agonisingly losing out to Rangers in their defence of the title the previous year. Hearts had beaten Symon’s side 2-0 at Tynecastle in the penultimate match of the season, leaving Rangers just two points clear going into the final round of fixtures. The Ibrox men, needing only a point to secure the championship at home against a relegation-threatened Aberdeen team, lost 2-1, but they were rescued by Celtic, who completed a joyless campaign by defeating Hearts by the same scoreline at Celtic Park and in the process handing the title to their rivals.

  Heading into the new decade, however, Rangers seemed capable of sweeping all before them once more. Dundee, managed by Bob Shankly, challenged successfully for the league in 1962 with an attack built around the brilliant Alan Gilzean and former Hibs and Hearts winger Gordon Smith, who became the only player in Scottish football to win the title with three different clubs, none of them in Glasgow. On the back of that triumph, the Taysiders reached the semi-final of the European Cup the following season, where they were eventually defeated only by the great AC Milan team of Maldini, Trapattoni, Rivera and co.

  But Rangers were the team who were knitting together all the gaps in these other clubs’ elusive glimpses of the limelight. Still the most consistently successful team in the country, the Ibrox side appeared in the 1950s and early 1960s to have won the affection of the nation, and it was estimated that the club could now claim roughly half the watching public in Scotland among its supporters. Rangers, it seemed, had become almost the default team of choice for vast sections of mainstream Scottish society, while still maintaining a hard-core following who were ferociously loyal to the Ibrox cause. Jock Stein’s father, when his son was a Celtic player in the early ’50s, used to wish his boy good luck before a game at the weekend with the words ‘I hope you manage to draw’, as he himself preferred to head off to Ibrox to watch Rangers.

  But the club’s popularity among the football-supporting public at this time is perhaps best illustrated by the scenes which greeted the team after they returned undefeated from a three-match tour of the USSR in June 1962. Against Soviet club sides depleted by the absence of key players, who were competing for their country at the World Cup in Chile, Rangers had earned narrow but worthy victories over Lokomotiv Moscow and Dynamo Tbilisi, before ending the tour with a creditable draw against national champions Dynamo Kiev. On arriving home in Glasgow, the Rangers squad were welcomed back on to Scottish soil like conquering Cold War heroes by an army of supporters responding to a call from the Rangers Supporters’ Association for ‘every available fan’ to turn out and acclaim the team at the airport. Even the Glasgow Lord Provost, Mrs Jean Roberts, weighed in when she told the Scottish Daily Express, ‘My husband is a keen Rangers fan. They have been jolly good ambassadors for Glasgow and Scotland. I would like to say to them, “Well done boys and welcome home.”’

  The estimated crowd of between 10,000-15,000, which congregated at Renfrew airport on the evening of Monday, 11 June, caused chaos by breaking through steel barriers and flocking on to the runway apron as the Rangers team plane was about to land. With the police undermanned and unable to interve
ne, fans crowded around the plane in jubilation, unaware of the risk to their own and to the public safety, as the airport tower set off flares warning away incoming aircraft, whose pilots were obliged to execute a go-around manoeuvre. On the ground, the crew of the Rangers plane refused to open the doors to allow the players and other passengers to disembark, causing delays to several other flights which were unable to depart, while an earlier arrival, a BEA flight from Manchester, had to make an emergency stop on the runway and cut its engines with supporters perilously close to its whirling propeller blades, after it was wrongly identified as the Rangers plane. All the local newspapers subsequently described the unprecedented chaos and disruption at the airport, which resulted in a report being sent to the Minister of Aviation, Peter Thorneycroft MP, but overall the hacks, many of whom had travelled on the Rangers plane, were almost as enthusiastic as the fans in their reporting of the incident and of the team’s success on foreign soil, with some of the coverage apparently suggesting that Rangers, by remaining unbeaten on their tour of Soviet Russia, had successfully defended the honour not only of Scotland, or Britain, but of the whole of western civilisation.

  Under the headline, ‘Hail, the conquering heroes’, Gair Henderson, writing in the Evening Times, decried the scenes at Moscow airport, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin successfully returned to earth after becoming the first man in space, which could only have seemed lowkey in comparison to the welcome that had attended the Rangers party, while in the Scottish Daily Express, youngster Willie Henderson, who had been used mainly as a substitute on the tour, noted, ‘I thought we’d done well in Russia, but you’d think we’d won the World Cup.’