Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  But there can be no question of the conduct of the crowd being to blame for what happened; there was no uncontained hooliganism, no frenzied whirlpool of departing spectators rushing to return and colliding with other fans. It’s likely that at least one person stumbled and fell forward, perhaps carrying a friend on his shoulders in celebration, and then, as one witness described, ‘The crowd caved in like a pack of cards, as if all of them were falling into a huge hole.’ The steel barriers, which divided the stairway into seven lanes, buckled and gave way, and, as the FAI more prosaically concluded, ‘The downward pressure of the crowd above, forced other persons to fall or collapse on those who had fallen first and as the downward pressure continued, more and more persons were heaped upon those who had fallen or were pressed hard against them.’

  For all the uncertainties in the detail, the primary, root causes of the disaster remain clear: the unsafe, ‘waterfall’ design of passageway, or stairway, 13, which had been the location of several previous incidents in the preceding ten years, after one of which, a fatal crush in September 1961, it had been poorly redesigned and was now arguably an accident waiting to happen; a huge, teeming crowd in full celebration of an unexpected result, with many people already on the stairway who, not having witnessed Rangers’ equalising goal, added to the numbers by not continuing their departure in the usual fashion towards the coach parks and the nearby underground station on Copland Road, which stairway 13 was the closest exit to; someone falling forward, perhaps losing his balance with a friend or a child on his shoulders.

  Witnesses at the FAI testified that it was not uncommon to leave the stadium via stairway 13 without your feet touching the ground. To that extent, the finger of blame should, if anywhere, be pointed at the elderly, out of touch and aloof Ibrox board of directors, whose grasp on reality was limited at the best of times, and whose inaction and incompetence resulted in a failure to heed the warnings from three previous incidents in the same stairway. These earlier accidents had caused a total of 85 injuries, including the fatal crush in September 1961, again following a late equalising goal against Celtic, which left two people dead.

  Had these warnings been properly addressed by the time of the 1971 match, many lives could have been saved. Meetings were arranged and advice was sought from the police, but in 1971 the role of the police at football matches was very much directed towards targeting hooliganism, with spectator comfort and safety not featuring prominently on their list of priorities. As Graham Walker acknowledges, ‘The events of 1971 demonstrated that neither Rangers, nor the police, had absorbed the lessons of the 1961 tragedy, even after the further warnings of 1967 and 1969. The two parties evidently did not purposefully combine to address this specific problem, although relations between them were mutually acknowledged to be excellent.’

  The original inquiry, completed by the end of February, criticised Rangers for their oversight and maladministration, but ultimately exonerated the Ibrox club of all blame for the disaster. It’s a conclusion which still shocks to this day. How could Rangers and its directors have escaped the charge of negligence, when the warnings of so many repeated incidents in the same location had not been heeded or acted upon?

  The minutes of board meetings, which were produced at the inquiry, confirmed that no effective action had been taken after the 1961 tragedy, and instead, the half-hearted adjustments, including the installation of high perimeter fences either side of the stairway, had only made things worse ten years later by preventing people from escaping. In addition, by the early 1970s, spectator safety at football grounds was a live issue across Britain following the publication of a series of reports into the relationship between the game and its public; the Chester inquiry, commissioned in 1966, looked at every aspect of football administration and how ‘the game may be developed for the public good’; the Harrington report of 1968 advised all clubs to pay more concern to public safety and comfort within stadiums; and the following year, on the back of Harrington, a working party chaired by Sir John Lang made 23 recommendations designed to improve spectator safety and comfort at football grounds. It’s not clear to what extent the Rangers directors had taken on board, or were even aware of these reports’ recommendations, but it’s not as if they hadn’t been warned.

  However, in a private prosecution brought against Rangers in October 1974, Margaret Dougan, a disaster widow who lost her husband Charles, a boilermaker from Clydebank, on stairway 13, was awarded damages of £26,261 by Sheriff James Irvine Smith. In reaching his verdict, the judge was scathing of the board’s failure to act on the previous incidents in the same location, and in a note attached to his findings which ran to 27 pages, Sheriff Irvine Smith effectively accused former director David Hope and former manager Davie White of lying under oath during cross-examination at the civil suit. He also berated the other board members for trying to pass the buck on to another former director, Ian McLaren, who had since died and was therefore unable to defend himself.

  Among many other criticisms, Sheriff Irvine Smith concluded that the accident was caused by ‘the fault and negligence of the defenders’, and he condemned a Rangers board which had apparently ‘proceeded on the view that if the problem was ignored long enough, it would eventually disappear… Certain of their actions can only be interpreted as a deliberate and apparently successful attempt to deceive others that they were doing something when in fact they were doing nothing.’

  The findings of the civil suit judge were reported in Foul, an early football fanzine put together by budding journalists and writers from Cambridge University. Inspired by Private Eye, the aim of Foul, which ran to 34 issues between 1972 and 1976, was to produce more in-depth coverage of the game as well as lengthier pieces focused on stories often ignored by the mainstream media, and, as Foul noted in an article on the disaster published in October 1976, ‘The ruling of Sheriff Irvine Smith and its staggering implications were relegated to page five of the Daily Record and page eight of The Scotsman. This sycophancy [towards Rangers] has even spread to the BBC, who had to send a man up from London on the day of the disaster, because they could not trust their man on the spot to ask the right questions.’

  Under the heading ‘Falling Masonry’, the article by contributing editor Alan Stewart, later a TV producer, went on to effectively claim that the original FAI was a Masonic cover-up and that Sheriff Irvine Smith’s conclusions were a far more reliable and accurate account of the disaster’s causes. ‘Freemasonry is a strand that is woven so deeply into the history of Rangers that the two are inseparable,’ wrote Stewart. ‘The club celebrates the Masonic ideal and a brotherhood whose secrets are too precious for public knowledge.’

  Stewart also accounted for the testimony to the civil case of former manager Davie White, who was accused of perjuring himself on behalf of a club which had ruthlessly sacked him a few years earlier, by alleging, ‘The secret society had reached out and put the finger of loyalty on his lips.’ If true, the implications are stunning: Rangers, through backdoor deals conducted beyond the reach of public scrutiny, escaped almost all responsibility for the unprecedented disaster, which, according to a later judge, had been caused by the club’s own failings, and at which 66 of their own fans had perished. It certainly wouldn’t be the last time in Rangers’ history that a court had initially looked favourably on their case, only for the original decision to be later called into question when scrutinised again by a different set of judicial eyes.

  In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy messages of condolence and support flooded into Glasgow from across the world, including from President Nixon’s office in America, and from Sir Keith Holyoake, Prime Minister of New Zealand. In Rome, Pope Paul VI lamented, ‘We have in our hearts the dead and injured in the terrible disaster in Glasgow,’ and from across the football world there were offers of assistance and availability of players for victim support matches.

  Within Glasgow itself, from every side of the community, there was a tremendous amount of sympathy and gene
rosity extended towards Rangers, and, as the city came together in grief, manager Willie Waddell acknowledged, ‘The show of goodwill has broken all barriers of nationality and creeds.’ On 5 January, at St Andrew’s Catholic Cathedral in Glasgow, Archbishop James Scanlon said Mass before a congregation of 1,200 who had come to pay their respects. In his sermon he stated, ‘In offering this Mass today, we of the Catholic community are paying the highest tribute in our power to the victims of Saturday’s appalling disaster.’ Folk singer Matt McGinn, himself a member of the Catholic community, composed a song in tribute to the victims which spoke of Scotland coming together in grief and of the Old Firm united in prayer.

  By the end of the month, a tribute match between a Rangers/Celtic select XI and a Scotland XI had been organised, with guest appearances made by Peter Bonetti, George Best and Bobby Charlton. The match was played at Hampden on 27 January and refereed by the same officials as on the fateful day, with proceeds going towards the Lord Provost of Glasgow’s disaster relief fund, which both Rangers and Celtic had already given generously to.

  Ultimately, over the years ahead, Rangers would squander much of the sympathy and goodwill that was being expressed towards them at this time, and in particular, the problems associated with the exclusionary signing policy and the club’s sectarian stance could have been dealt with at this opportune moment, but instead they were left unresolved, with the manager and directors refusing even to address the issue. As journalist Graham Walker noted, ‘Waddell could have used the latitude his powerful personality afforded him to bring the club truly into a new era… The times could not have been more propitious in view of the impact of the tragedy. However, Waddell chose to behave as defiantly over the issue as the Rangers directors then and before. He denied that sectarianism was practised by the club and concentrated instead on eradicating the problem of hooliganism which he regarded as a separate matter. In this he failed. The hooligan behaviour actually worsened.’

  Nevertheless, the disaster would leave a lasting legacy on Rangers Football Club. Manager Waddell, standing in as spokesman for the elderly and confused directors, who seemed paralysed by events, initially claimed that Ibrox Park was one of the best-maintained stadiums in Britain. This was clearly far from the truth, and Waddell knew it. There had been multiple recent incidents on the same stairway, and as recently as December 1970, club physiotherapist Tommy Craig had described the stadium to Waddell as a ‘death-trap’, although after the accident, Waddell and Craig agreed never to mention publicly that they had ever discussed the condition of the ground. In addition, according to veteran sports journalist Rodger Baillie, who was working at the match on the day of the disaster, the old Ibrox press box, accessible only via a spiral staircase, was a fire hazard.

  Bill Struth’s stadium development of the 1920s might have afforded Ibrox the appearance of grandeur, but by the 1970s it was clear that the old stadium was beginning to show its age. The initial adjustments and improvements to the terracing following the disaster, as with the incident in September 1961, were largely superficial. After that first fatal accident ten years earlier, a central wooden barrier, which had shattered in the crush, was removed and replaced with steel tubes which divided the steep stairway into seven narrow lanes, and the wooden stairs were concreted over. On either side of the exit, reinforced high wooden perimeter fences were also installed, which safety officers had vainly urged the directors to remove after the incident at the Ne’erday game in 1969, and which tragically, exactly two years later, many people had been crushed against. Too late, they were taken down after the disaster and replaced with handrails, and a sign was placed over the precipitous stairway 13 which read, ‘Caution. First step down’.

  Waddell soon came to accept, however, that wholesale changes were required at the ground and he appointed himself as the man to take charge of the new stadium project. In June 1972, he resigned as team manager and moved into the position of general manager, where he could concentrate his efforts on the task of rebuilding Ibrox. Setting out on a tour of the modern arenas of European football, Waddell eventually selected Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalen Stadium, one of the venues for the 1974 World Cup in West Germany, as the blueprint for Rangers’ new ground. The plans were announced in 1977, which would see only Struth’s grandstand remain from the original stadium, and two years later, in August 1979, before the first ‘Old Firm’ fixture of the season, the new Copland Road Stand was opened, replacing the old east terracing where stairway 13 had been located. An identikit stand at the opposite end of the ground, the Broomloan Road, which housed away supporters, was unveiled the following summer, and in December 1981, three days before Christmas, the Govan Stand, renamed in 2014 as the Sandy Jardine Stand following the death from cancer of the legendary full-back, was opened before a friendly against Liverpool.

  Later additions and improvements were added over time, such as seating in the corners of the Govan, which brought the capacity up to 50,500, and with undersoil heating and computerised ticketing, the new Ibrox was later awarded five-star status by UEFA. Along with Pittodrie Stadium in Aberdeen, Rangers’ rebuilt home became one of the first ‘all-seater’ grounds in Britain, so that when another, equally appalling disaster struck British football, at Hillsborough in April 1989, and the requirement for all-seater stadia was set out in the subsequent Taylor Report, which the SFA agreed to adopt, Ibrox Park was already in place to meet all of the new criteria.

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  During Willie Waddell’s two and a half years in charge of Rangers, rivals Celtic had continued to dominate domestically, including a remarkable sequence when the Parkhead men secured three victories at Ibrox in the space of four weeks at the start of the 1971/72 season. In the first game, a sectional League Cup tie moved to Ibrox due to renovations at Celtic Park, a young Kenny Dalglish played in his first Old Firm derby and showed great calmness under pressure to score from the penalty spot.

  In the wake of their Lisbon success, Celtic at this time were nurturing an extraordinary batch of talented youngsters, known affectionately as the ‘Quality Street Kids’, some of whom, including the jewel in the crown, Dalglish himself, had grown up supporting Rangers. Over at Ibrox, of course, they were still unable to reciprocate in kind and bring to the club young players who had grown up in a Celtic-supporting environment, as Rangers’ ongoing refusal to sign footballers from a Catholic background, a policy which director Matt Taylor had recently claimed was a source of strength to the club, continued into the new decade.

  Rangers’ poor form at the start of the season carried over into the championship campaign, as the club lost four of their opening five league games in 1971/72, effectively putting themselves out of the title race by the beginning of October. Waddell seemed to have lost the magic touch that he had displayed previously in his spell in charge of Kilmarnock, but there were other factors affecting the team too by this stage, less tangible social and cultural influences, which were adding to Rangers’ troubles at this time. Quite simply, Celtic, so long considered the black sheep of Scottish football, were by the early 1970s very much seen as the cool club, the place to be, the team that had dazzled Europe with their scintillating attacking football in Lisbon and which Rod Stewart would sing about, memorably, in his ballad ‘You’re In My Heart’. The idea of a glamorous rock star being moved to compare Rangers, a club still seen as representing the vested interests of a dour establishment, to a beautiful woman at this time was a risible, absurd notion.

  Out of touch from the boardroom down, with the reputation of their fans plummeting in Britain, and eventually across Europe too, and clinging to an out-of-date, sectarian signing policy that was insular and regressive even when it was implemented in the early part of the century, Rangers were now being viewed with growing suspicion and even hostility by sections of a newly emboldened and critical media, who for so long had considered the club untouchable. The Ibrox institution was increasingly being forced towards the fringes of polite society, an embarrassment even to the Prot
estant middle classes, their diminished status in the national consciousness reflected painfully in dwindling success on the field.

  The club eventually ended the season by winning only two of their final seven matches and finished third with a total of 11 defeats, their most since the war, a distant ten points behind runners-up Aberdeen and fully 16 points off Celtic. It was a difficult time for everyone associated with Rangers, with midfielder Alex MacDonald, who had grown up supporting the club, later reflecting on this period, ‘When you are not doing well as a Rangers player, the postman tells you, the grocer tells you, the street-sweeper tells you, your granny tells you. Half of Glasgow is angry with you, the other half is laughing at you. It can be painful and we were coming near the end of our tether.’

  With his last act as team manager, however, Waddell secured a notable success with victory over Dynamo Moscow in the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup in Barcelona in May 1972. Rangers had only qualified for the tournament as lucky losers after defeat to Celtic in the Scottish Cup Final the previous year, the third time in successive seasons that the club had been beaten in the competition by their old rivals.

  Despite an equalising goal in the final from youngster Derek Johnstone, who repeated his heroics of the 1970/71 League Cup Final when he came off the bench to tie up the game at 1-1, Rangers lost the subsequent replay 2-1, but nevertheless qualified for the Cup Winners’ Cup due to Celtic’s involvement in the European Cup.

  The club’s passage through to the Nou Camp final was tortuous and eventful; in the first round, Rangers were paired with the French side Rennes, whose main threat Waddell identified as coming from their quick and technical forwards. The manager instructed his full-backs to man-mark the wingers, and with MacDonald taking care of the number ten, Waddell used his own strikers to close down the spaces and harry Rennes’ ball-playing defenders. With Johnston providing the only outlet on the counter attack, the match served as a good early indication of how dogged Rangers were prepared to be in pursuit of European success, perhaps as an antidote to their domestic tribulations, but Rennes manager Jean Prouff was not impressed. ‘That was not football, it was anti-football,’ he complained after the 1-1 draw. ‘They came here only to stop us playing football.’ Maybe Prouff was being naïve, maybe Waddell’s cynicism was ahead of its time, because the tactic worked and the draw in France was followed by a 1-0 win at Ibrox, which allowed Rangers to progress.