Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  Until Frenchman Paul Le Guen’s ill-fated spell in charge of the club in the mid-2000s, White remained the only Rangers manager never to have won a major trophy. Like Le Guen, White had tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce a more progressive approach and move Rangers on from what was seen at the time as the burden of their own traditions. To an extent he can be seen as an unlucky manager, running a tremendous Celtic team extremely close in his first season, despite the Parkhead club being able to concentrate solely on the league after early elimination from both the Scottish Cup and in their defence of the European Cup. But Celtic managed to claim five of the six domestic trophies that were available during White’s two years at the helm and Rangers simply weren’t used to this level of failure.

  The manager also spent considerable sums of money on his squad, including the purchase of Scotland’s first £100,000 player, Colin Stein, who was signed from Hibernian as an intended replacement for the discarded Alex Ferguson. He also failed in a bid to revive Jim Baxter’s career when he brought the former talisman back to Ibrox on a free transfer from Nottingham Forest, but the magic had gone, Baxter’s lifestyle had caught up with him and he was a shadow of his former self. White was not reluctant to give youth its chance, in the form of Alex MacDonald, signed from St Johnstone, and he played an important role in the development of Derek Johnstone, Colin Jackson and Alfie Conn Jnr – all four of whom, along with Stein, would play an important role in Barcelona a few years later, when Rangers finally got their hands on a major European trophy.

  A talented, forward-thinking coach, who had been recommended by Jock Stein for several posts prior to his appointment as Rangers manager, White enjoyed some success at Dundee after leaving Ibrox, leading the Taysiders to three consecutive Scottish Cup semi-finals, where they were defeated on each occasion by Celtic. However, he finally managed to get the better of his nemesis, Stein, when Dundee, with a team containing ex-Celt Tommy Gemmell, one of the heroes of Lisbon, defeated the Parkhead men in the final of the League Cup in December 1973.

  By then, however, White’s name was already fading from the memories of those who follow Rangers. While his contribution to the club in the end was modest, at times it almost seems as if White has been airbrushed out of the Ibrox side’s history, with The Official Biography of Rangers, by Ronnie Esplin and Graham Walker, listing his date of birth only as ??/??/1933, while his place of birth is left blank in the book. For the record, David Wilson White was born on 23 August 1933 in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire. He died on 17 July 2013, aged 79, in nearby Wishaw General Hospital.

  Intriguingly, former Rangers captain John Greig claims that, during his spell at Ibrox, White may have been let down by certain players, who failed to show the manager the respect he was due. One player whom White certainly never saw eye to eye with was Scot Symon’s last signing for the club, Alex Ferguson, who considered himself a stronger, harder man than the manager, and the pair never got on. Greig, who played with and against Ferguson, describes his former team-mate’s style of play, ‘He was always a handful, a pest. He bustled about with his elbows parallel to the ground – and he was all skin and bone so that, when he got you, it was like being stabbed.’

  Ferguson, who cost Rangers a record £65,000 from Dunfermline in the summer of 1967, endured a short and unhappy spell at Ibrox, as, in the end, the club ganged up on him and the striker became the ultimate stooge during his time at the club. The manager didn’t rate him, the directors had their own reason to be suspicious of him, and the boyhood Rangers fan became a victim of the club’s increasing tendency to look for scapegoats for their fluctuating fortunes at this period in their history. McLean and Forrest were made to take the blame for the Berwick episode, Symon carried the can for Celtic’s resurgence and by 1969 Ferguson would be held responsible for the 4-0 defeat to Celtic in the Scottish Cup Final. Drafted into the team due to the absence of his intended replacement at the club, the temperamental Colin Stein who was serving a five-week suspension, Ferguson failed to pick up Billy McNeill at a corner as the Celtic captain headed his team into an early lead, from which Rangers were unable to recover.

  However, this wasn’t Ferguson’s only offence in the eyes of the Rangers board, and in particular the club’s PR guru, Willie Allison. Ferguson describes Allison, one of the chief plotters who moved against Symon, as ‘a diseased zealot’ and ‘a religious bigot of the deepest dye’, and of course Ferguson’s wife Cathy was a Catholic. When he arrived at Ibrox, another director, Ian McLaren, had asked Ferguson where he had been married and when the player replied that the ceremony had taken place in a registry office, rather than in a Catholic church, it seemed that the club’s new striker had got away with his strange choice of wife. But he was never fully accepted; Symon had been sacked only weeks after Ferguson joined the club and the player had a strained relationship with White, who didn’t seem to appreciate his rugged style of play.

  After the cup final defeat, Ferguson was made to train with the Rangers third team and play against amateur sides, until he was eventually transferred to Falkirk. Having grown up in Govan as a Rangers supporter, Ferguson subsequently lamented in his autobiography, ‘No other experience in nearly 40 years as a professional player and manager has created a scar comparable with that left by the treatment I received at Ibrox.’ He pinpointed Allison as the main cause of his distress and when the arch-manipulator approached the striker towards the end of his time at Rangers to reveal that he had cancer, Ferguson admits that he didn’t have an iota of sympathy for the man.

  The whole episode with Ferguson presented Rangers in a very poor light, revealing a nasty streak at the heart of the club in moving against one of their own in this way, as the Ibrox institution failed to honourably face up to a range of unforeseen challenges at this time. It wasn’t just on the football field that the club found itself floundering; the shifting sands of social reform seemed to have left the whole Rangers edifice on shaky ground, as the traditions which the club represented came to be questioned by the changing attitudes and the reinvigorated social climate of the 1960s.

  Throughout the Depression era of the inter-war period, the Catholic community in the west of Scotland had found itself at the sharp end of the poverty and deprivation which blighted the region, but by the time of the rise of Jock Stein’s Celtic, Glasgow had benefited from widespread improvements in living and working conditions. The provision of affordable housing, which had begun in the 1930s with the slum clearances, expanded after the war under both Tory and Labour governments, with a surplus of modern council houses ensuring that for the first time working-class people had access to such basic amenities as electricity, hot water and indoor sanitation.

  At the same time, the post-war economic expansion across Britain ensured high levels of employment, rendering the nepotism and parochialism of the 1920s and ’30s, when Catholics had been excluded from much of Scotland’s workforce, a redundant and inefficient anachronism. The modern welfare state, introduced by the post-war Labour government, had helped to lift the standards of health, education and social security among the community as a whole, but these new public services also opened up an undiscovered land of career opportunities for Catholics in sectors with no previous history of discrimination against them. In this new era of a more liberal, egalitarian outlook, it wasn’t long before Catholics, now with a more tangible stake in society, began to enter the business and professional classes in considerable numbers, and as the process of integration continued, many of the old fears and myths about Scotland being swamped by zealots and succumbing to radical Popery were revealed as the lies and prejudices which they had always been.

  Politically, it was a time of the rise of the Labour Party, still with an unashamedly Socialist agenda and a bastion of Catholic support in pre-war times, which now came to replace the Tories as the default party of choice among the broader Scottish electorate. By the late 1960s, changes in society allowed even the concept of celebrity, unlike today, to feel like a refreshing new breakthr
ough in an era when for the first time people from ordinary backgrounds could become rich and famous, especially if they had a talent for music or sport. This new cultural narrative, accompanied by a widespread challenge to the age of deference and all the other old certainties which had long been cherished by the Scottish establishment, meant that for the first time Rangers’ exclusionary employment policies came under serious scrutiny, in the media and elsewhere, and throughout the 1970s the club was repeatedly left squirming by its inability to shrug off the unwelcome accusation, which was at last being uttered against it – the best-kept secret in Scottish football – that Rangers were a sectarian club.

  It’s notoriously difficult to equate the fluctuating fortunes of particular football teams with cultural changes in the wider society, but it’s impossible not to conclude that during the iconoclastic 1960s the times just caught up with Rangers. The modern world gatecrashed their party, leaving them isolated and confused, out of time and out of place, the sly Willie Allison still trying to manage the club’s hidden agendas. Rangers fans, uncomprehending, looked back to the all-conquering side of 1964 and wondered where it all went wrong, as Stein’s Celtic, a team which hadn’t won back-to-back league titles since the days of World War One, went on to collect nine consecutive championships between 1966 and 1974.

  The Ibrox side weren’t about to go quietly into the night, however, and Celtic, the erstwhile European champions, were chased every step of the way for the first few years of the Jock Stein era, but ultimately they couldn’t be caught, and in the early ’70s the challenge from Ibrox was starting to wilt. By then, however, football, even in Glasgow, would be placed in its proper perspective by the full force of tragedy.

  5

  DISASTER AND TRIUMPH

  DAVIE White had been dogged throughout his spell in charge of Rangers by the club’s former player Willie Waddell, who had won the title as manager of Kilmarnock in 1965, but who was now working as a football writer for the Scottish Daily Express. An assassin with a typewriter, Waddell had mockingly dubbed White ‘the boy David’ in his influential column, a reference to White’s youth and perceived lack of managerial experience. More than just a clash of personalities, the two men had an obvious history of antipathy towards one another, possibly because, as a one-club man in his playing days and now a successful manager in his own right, Waddell himself expected to be offered the Rangers job when Symon was dismissed, or he may have resented the fact that White, as a player with Clyde, had spurned his advances when he tried to sign him for Kilmarnock, White later admitting that he turned down the proposed move because he ‘didny fancy’ Waddell. Whatever the reason, Waddell won out in the end when Rangers turned to their former player in the autumn of 1969 and appointed him only the fifth manager in the club’s history.

  Waddell’s appointment, like White’s, was, in part at least, a reactive move, designed to counter the apparent advantage which Celtic had recently been exploiting in their dealings with the media. Rangers were being outflanked on the public relations front by Jock Stein, who knew how to use the press to his advantage, and he was on amicable terms with many journalists; Waddell, having worked for two tabloid newspapers since his retirement as a player in the mid-’50s, was considered an industry insider and it was hoped that he would be able to manipulate the news agenda back in Rangers’ favour. He was a gruff, abrasive character, not fussed about winning popularity contests or gaining the approval of others. Club legend Sandy Jardine described him as ‘in many ways a bully, goading players into a response through his strong personality’.

  In terms of discipline and authority, Waddell was very much an acolyte of former manager Bill Struth, whom he had played almost his entire career under since making his debut for the Ibrox club as a 17-year-old in 1938. Rangers were reverting to type and it was hoped that Waddell would whip them back into shape in the traditional manner, after White’s more laid-back approach. To this end one of the first casualties of the new regime was Jim Baxter, back at the club for a second spell after being re-signed by White on a free transfer from Nottingham Forest. Deemed unfit by Waddell, he was considered surplus to requirements and Baxter, ever the drama queen, promptly retired in disgust.

  The new manager seemed to have a positive initial impact on the Rangers team. Winger Willie Johnston remembers that he made a strong first impression, marching into the dressing room on his first day in the job and announcing, ‘My name’s Waddell, some of you already know me and those of you who don’t soon will.’ Rangers won eight of their first nine games under the new regime, a run of results which put them back in contention for the title, with the only interruption coming against Celtic at a freezing Parkhead in January, when the Ibrox men secured a creditable goalless draw. But after being knocked out of the Scottish Cup at the same venue in February, their form slumped badly over the spring and Rangers finished the season with only two wins from their last ten matches. In May, Celtic reached another European Cup Final, where, despite being considered favourites, they were defeated, 2-1 after extra time, by the underrated Dutch side Feyenoord. The setback, however, had no impact on the Parkhead club’s continuing dominance of the Scottish domestic scene, as the championship headed to the east end of Glasgow for the fifth season in succession, this time by the comfortable margin of 12 points.

  Nevertheless, the encouraging start made under Waddell continued into the following season when the League Cup was won by Rangers in October 1970. The only goal of the final against Celtic came just before half-time, when 16-year-old Derek Johnstone beat Billy McNeill in the air to head home the winner and become the youngest player ever to score in a British cup final. It was the Ibrox club’s first major trophy in four and a half years, since winning the Scottish Cup in 1966, and Johnstone’s goal prevented the trophy from heading to the east end of Glasgow for the sixth successive season.

  Rangers fans must have felt that the Parkhead club were on the point of extracting a measure of revenge for that loss at Hampden, when just a few weeks later, on 2 January 1971, in the final minute of the game, Celtic opened the scoring at Ibrox through a Jimmy Johnstone header after a shot from Bobby Lennox had bounced down off the crossbar. It looked like the champions would finally end their 50-year run without an away victory in the traditional Ne’erday fixture but, with almost the last kick of the game, Colin Stein equalised for the home side from a Dave Smith free kick and the match finished 1-1.

  What happened next is still the cause of some controversy. At first it was believed that supporters, who had turned to leave the ground in despair at the prospect of seeing Celtic celebrate victory, tried to return when they heard the roar of the crowd after Rangers equalised and, in the ensuing melée, disaster struck. The alternative, widely accepted view of more recent times, however, is that stairway 13, in the northeast corner of the ground, was simply too steep and too narrow to safely accommodate the departure of almost one third of the over 80,000 people who were in attendance that day. Regardless of the cause, 66 people, remarkably few of them over the age of 30, were crushed to death. A further 145 were injured.

  Exactly what triggered the calamitous events has never been definitively pinpointed, but it doesn’t seem credible to preclude the late drama in the game as a possible contributory factor at least, in the late jubilation and swirl of spectators, particularly given the sudden and diametrically contrasting mood swings among the heaving crowd following the late goals for either side. Rangers fans had developed a sense of fatalism when it came to Old Firm games at this time, and during the match they had started singing ‘The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’, in quaint recognition that the only realistic challenge to Celtic’s title hopes that season was likely to come from the Pittodrie club.

  Journalist Graham Walker, a 14-year-old spectator in attendance on the day, writes how he saw one man head-butting a fellow supporter in sheer frustration at Celtic’s late goal; but, when the equaliser was scored, ‘the relief and joy were overwhelming. I have never been part of
such an intense goal celebration, even when the goals were match and trophy winners.’ Strathclyde Police’s chief superintendent concurred when he described the scenes at the subsequent Fatal Accident Inquiry in February 1971, ‘The excitement was tremendous, jubilation, they were singing, shouting, they were jumping up and down, waving their arms, hugging their friends, the terracing was in uproar. I would say it was football mania at its highest.’ Also at the FAI, local residents testified that they saw people stop on the stairway to join in the celebrations, and that the late Rangers equaliser complicated the situation with the crowd.

  Recent attempts to play down the late, dramatic action in the match as a factor in what followed seem to be a well-meaning attempt to exonerate both goalscorer Colin Stein, who many years later was still lamenting his role in what happened, and the fans themselves, particularly in relation to their conduct on the day. Rangers supporters, and the club itself, have in modern times developed an over-sensitivity to criticism regarding their reputation for sectarianism and other, more general forms of antisocial behaviour, and this perhaps explains some of the revisionism.