Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  Meanwhile Celtic, who had been unable to contact Johnston over the close season, were becoming increasingly aware that their putative deal for the striker was unlikely ever to be completed. Souness and McMurdo had turned the player and it wasn’t long before Johnston was privately threatening to quit football altogether if he was compelled to honour his previous commitment to his boyhood club. Despite the FIFA-endorsed agreement and with Nantes waiting expectantly for receipt of the £800,000 balance which would conclude the transfer, the Parkhead club, faced with the prospect of having an unhappy player on their hands, announced publicly that they were pulling out of the deal.

  At the time McNeill was still on holiday in Florida and he received his employers’ statement down the telephone, read out to him by a journalist. Had Celtic dug their heels in, they could have controlled Johnston’s future – even if he would never go on to play for the Parkhead club, they could have had a hand in his ultimate destination. As late as 2 July, McMurdo was still describing the rumours of a link with Rangers to the Sunday Mail as, ‘a complete fabrication – you can run that story for ten years and it still wouldn’t be true’. When the paper’s chief sports writer Don Morrison called Ibrox to try and get to the bottom of the matter, he was told by assistant manager Walter Smith, ‘Remember the traditions of this club and, if we were going to break them, it wouldn’t be for that cunt.’

  But with Celtic now officially out of the way, things moved forward quickly and the deal to bring Johnston to Rangers was finally concluded in a Paris café. It seemed inevitable that news would leak, despite all the mendacity and espionage, and by 9 July the Scottish Sun appeared to have the story, thanks to a 16-year-old trainee reporter who had noticed that Johnston’s name had mysteriously appeared on Rangers’ insurance documents, which were being handled by his girlfriend’s father. The young lad, having apparently unearthed the biggest story in the history of Scottish football, presumably with the help of his intended father-in-law, dutifully conveyed his information to the paper’s editor, Jack Irvine, who had just stepped off a plane after holidaying with Souness in Majorca. ‘Print it,‘ the Rangers manager said to Irvine, who went ahead and devoted 16 pages of Monday’s paper to their scoop.

  Still nobody could quite believe it, with the other papers, clearly paralysed with incredulity, refusing to run the story, even after early editions of the Sun hit the stands. It wasn’t until Johnston was unveiled as a Rangers player at a press conference, on the morning of Monday, 10 July that the rumours were finally confirmed. The striker, looking particularly sheepish and wearing a Rangers blazer that was at least two sizes too big for him, was ushered into the Blue Room at Ibrox alongside Souness, where he spoke, in more guarded terms this time, to his astonished audience of his ‘huge admiration’ for the Ibrox club, something he’d clearly managed to keep to himself up to that point.

  After Johnston’s signing some Rangers fans burned scarves, cancelled season tickets, and even laid wreathes at the gates of Ibrox, while others who had perhaps seen a move of this nature coming for some time were heard to observe, ‘It’s not that I object to us signing Catholics, I just didn’t want us signing that Catholic.’ Fan spokesman David Miller summed up the general mood when he told The Herald, ‘It’s a sad day for Rangers. There will be a lot of people handing in their season tickets. I don’t want to see a Roman Catholic at Ibrox. It really sticks in my throat.’

  Miller then went on to claim that signing a Catholic from the continent would have been easier to stomach. Within the club itself, opinion on Johnston’s arrival appeared to be divided; the English squad members, largely bewildered by all the fuss, agreed to attend a press conference, welcoming the new player to the club, but their Scottish counterparts declined the same request, and refused to be photographed with Johnston, while Ibrox kitman and bus driver, Jimmy Bell, snubbed the club’s new acquisition, preferring not to provide him with his playing gear and withholding chocolate bars from the striker.

  Over on the other side of the city, the Celtic fans reacted to Johnston’s perceived treachery with predictable fury. They might not have believed every word of the striker’s regurgitated platitudes, but the last thing they could have expected was that he was about to join their greatest rivals. The Celtic fanzine Not the View, perhaps reflecting Johnston’s penchant for hyperbole, captured the widespread sense of revulsion when they described the player as ‘the human incarnation of the contents of Beelzebub’s dustbin’. Others dubbed their former idol ‘Judas’, ‘le petit merde’ and during Old Firm games sang songs aimed at the forward, such as ‘Who’s the Catholic in the Blue?’ and ‘What’s it like to sign a Tim?’ At least they did for most of the game, until in November 1989 Johnston scored an injury time winner at Ibrox against his former club, silencing the Hoops faithful and precipitating something of a turning point in his acceptance at Ibrox.

  In the aftermath of the signing, the press lavished Murray and Souness with praise for finally allowing Rangers to employ a prominent Catholic footballer, often with far greater enthusiasm than they had criticised the club’s now former, unofficial policy, which, given that it had just been so spectacularly done away with, was now able to be openly acknowledged.

  The Johnston signing seemed to have a gradual, but nonetheless remarkable, transformative effect on the public discourse of questions surrounding religion and bigotry and how these issues pertained to Scottish football. The evolving issue of ‘sectarianism’, so long considered a taboo subject, was now well and truly up for discussion. A survey, conducted by Dr Joe Bradley of Stirling University, of the use of the term ‘sectarian’ in Scottish newspapers reveals the gradual change which occurred over the 1990s:

  Year

  Number of mentions

  1992

  93

  1993

  229

  1994

  481

  1995

  714

  1996

  1,021

  1997

  >3,000, and the same for each subsequent year

  A similar pattern emerges with the cognate term ‘sectarianism’:

  Year

  Number of mentions

  1992

  20

  1993

  63

  1994

  207

  1995

  325

  1996

  428

  2000

  1,308

  2001

  >3,000, and the same for each subsequent year

  In retrospect, however, the signing of Maurice Johnston can be seen as something of a missed opportunity in the fight against sectarianism in Scottish football; if anything it only seemed to exacerbate the issue. While it would not have been timely or appropriate, in the wake of Johnston’s arrival at Ibrox, to lambast Rangers for the policy which the club had only just dispensed with, the new era of openness which followed might have provided an opportune moment to reassess the decades of institutionalised bigotry at Ibrox and the fans’ continued airing of songs such as ‘No Pope of Rome’ and ‘The Billy Boys’. Instead, there appeared to ensue a period of equivocation, appeasement and ‘whataboutery’, where Rangers fans and their apologists in the press seemed more inclined to try to deflect the problem on to other clubs, rather than acknowledge or attempt to deal with the ongoing issue at Ibrox. Some even claimed that, with the Johnston signing, Rangers now occupied the moral high ground, and the label of sectarianism could no longer be applied to the club.

  From a purely footballing point of view of course, it was unarguable that Rangers had pulled off a terrific coup: the club had signed a valued striker, who had seemed destined to re-join their great rivals and, over the course of the next two years, before Johnston was transferred to Everton in November 1991, they would field the player against his former team and win trophies with him in their side. Souness was entirely candid about his belief that it would take the Parkhead club ten years to recover from the loss of Johnston to Rangers, as he later admitted to
the Daily Record, ‘There was an element of mischief. I believed we were hurting Celtic by signing him.’

  This was all perfectly fair and above board; Rangers at the time had gained the upper hand in the club’s unending rivalry with the Parkhead side, and the Ibrox boss was understandably keen to press home and extend his team’s advantage. However, there was more to this story than just football, and in terms of reducing sectarian tensions within the Scottish game and wider society, certainly in the immediate aftermath of the Johnston signing, it was as if petrol had been poured on the flames. Souness’s car was attacked even as he drove away from Ibrox after the press conference at which Johnston was unveiled and both the manager and the club’s controversial new striker had to be accompanied by bodyguards for the next six months.

  In the end, sadly, there was no cathartic moment, no admission of guilt, no humility or contrition, not even any acknowledgement of previous wrongdoing by Rangers after the Johnston signing. It was almost as if a switch had been flicked: the club weren’t employing Catholics before, but now they’ve bought one and they did it while managing to stick two fingers up at their rivals at the same time. If there was any hope of reconciliation with the Catholic community, Rangers could hardly be considered, by signing Maurice Johnston from under the noses of Celtic, to have extended the olive branch. Any notion of an apology, or even a statement of regret from the Ibrox club, either to Scotland’s Catholic community, whom Rangers had been discriminating against for decades, or to Scottish football as a whole, remains to this day no more than a pipe dream, and the club has at no point been held accountable for its policies down the years. Perhaps as a result of the insensitive way in which the Johnston signing was handled, Rangers continued to be dogged over the ensuing years by the issue of sectarianism, which has refused, even in more recent times when the club has been regularly fielding Catholic footballers, to disassociate itself from the Ibrox institution. In May 1999, after victory over Celtic in the Scottish Cup Final handed Rangers a rare Treble, the club’s then vice-chairman, Donald Findlay, was caught on camera going through the club’s sectarian repertoire, singing songs including ‘The Billy Boys’ and the loyalist battle anthem ‘The Sash’ at the Rangers Social Club later that evening. Findlay, an advocate known for his distinctive appearance – mutton-chop sideburns, pocket watch and pipe, like something out of a Sherlock Holmes novel – was forced to resign his directorship at Ibrox after footage of the ten-minute impromptu karaoke session was obtained by the Daily Record.

  Under the headline ‘Findlay’s songs of hate’, the paper subsequently reported, ‘Donald Findlay was secretly filmed bellowing songs full of bigotry and hate at the weekend… Flushed and sweating, the QC grabbed the microphone to launch into a poisonous musical medley… Findlay is seen punching the air as he sings and struts in front of hundreds of cheering supporters.’

  The lawyer, whom the paper alleged does not celebrate his birthday because it falls on St Patrick’s Day, was clearly no stranger to the dangers of sectarianism, as he had already in his career represented several serious offenders, including in 1996 one Jason Campbell, who despite Findlay’s undoubtedly capable defence was jailed for life for the unprovoked murder of a young Celtic fan, whose throat Campbell had slashed in a Glasgow street. Findlay subsequently had to face up to the loss of his position as Lord Rector of St Andrew’s University and he was also fined £3,000 by the Faculty of Advocates in the wake of his indiscretion, which later the same year prompted the composer Sir James MacMillan to observe in a famous speech to the Edinburgh festival on anti-Catholicism in Scotland, ‘The sanctimonious Scottish myth that all bigots are uneducated loutish morons from the lowest level of society was undermined at a stroke.’

  Findlay later admitted that he felt so ashamed of his actions that he contemplated suicide, telling BBC Scotland’s The Kirsty Wark Show, ‘I’ll never be free of it because the one thing that I know is that come the day when somebody writes my obituary, it will be there somewhere, large or small, and that is an appalling thought.’

  From the boardroom down to the fans, any notion that the signing of Maurice Johnston, and Rangers’ subsequent recruitment of other Catholic players and even coaches, might have brought about an end to the wider problems associated with the club has proved to be misguided. Rangers supporters in recent years have continued to sing sectarian songs from the stands at Ibrox, even inventing new ones, such as ‘The Famine Song’, which was first aired in 2008 and has been subsequently proscribed, and the particularly unpleasant chant ‘Big Jock Knew’, a reference to a child abuse case at Celtic Boys’Club in the 1960s, which was weaponised by Rangers fans and used as a stick to beat the Parkhead club and its supporters.

  As journalist Graham Spiers noted in The Times when the slogan was first heard at Ibrox, ‘I have to admit I never thought I’d ever see the day when Scottish football supporters sang a song about a child sex abuse case, yet Rangers have duly delivered. Even more amazing is Rangers FC’s on-going silence on the matter, as this cretinous chant builds up its head of steam among supporters.’ Spiers was correct about the increasingly frequent usage of the slogan and ‘Big Jock Knew’ or ‘BJK’ later migrated from the Ibrox stands to become a ubiquitous acronym graffitied around Glasgow as well as a salutation used by Rangers fans when they greeted one another in the street.

  In the end, rather than any domestic authority, it was the European governing body UEFA who took exception to Rangers’ sectarian songbook and sanctioned the club after a number of high-profile cases in the 2000s, including, in May 2006, a fine accompanied by a warning over any future misconduct after incidents of hooliganism and bigotry surrounding the club’s Champions League tie earlier in the year with Villarreal. Privately, UEFA were disturbed and appalled when they uncovered what was still going on at Ibrox in the 21st century, with one official telling Spiers, ‘Yes we have racism today in football and many other problems. But it is still shocking to us that, in the year 2006, we still have supporters in Glasgow shouting “Fuck the Pope” and such things. We thought the world had moved on from this.’

  Perhaps the clearest indication that anti-Catholicism continued to be a problem for sections of the Ibrox support came with the treatment received by the former Celtic captain Neil Lennon, who was signed by the Parkhead club in December 2000. Lennon is a Catholic from the Armagh town of Lurgan in Northern Ireland, who enjoyed a relatively unmolested career in England with Crewe and Leicester, during which time he appeared more than 30 times for his country, but his move north to join Celtic, the club he supported as a boy, precipitated a change in how the player was viewed and received in his religiously divided home province.

  After he was named captain of his country for a friendly game against Cyprus at Windsor Park, Belfast in August 2002, Lennon was forced to pull out of the squad on police advice and subsequently retired from international football having received death threats from loyalist paramilitaries. In Scotland, as if fans were taking their cue from the extremists, Lennon was the frequent object of abuse and, more seriously, the target of several attacks, which usually took place well away from the often hostile and partisan environment of the football field.

  In May 2003, Lennon was confronted and assaulted while driving home in his car by two students in Glasgow’s prosperous west end, suggesting once again that the ill-feeling towards Catholics in general and Lennon in particular wasn’t merely confined to the soft underbelly of society, but had penetrated the aspirational classes as well. The following February, a motorist swerved in front of Lennon on the M8 motorway near Charing Cross in Glasgow and subjected the player, who had a young child in his car at the time, to a series of obscenities and vulgar gestures. Lennon immediately pulled off the motorway and called the police, leading to the culprit later being convicted and fined £500, after admitting, ‘I did it because I’m a Rangers fan and he is a Celtic player, but I’m not a bigot.’

  This revealing attitude is often displayed by Lennon’s assailants, who, b
ecause they saw the player as an enemy of Rangers, seemed to be convinced that they had done nothing wrong in challenging or even attacking the footballer. It’s the ‘We are the people’ mentality, the mistaken, yet intractable idea, born of a sense of entitlement and standing, that an enemy of Rangers, an inappropriate description of Lennon in any case, is also somehow an enemy of the established order of things and therefore fair game.

  In May 2004, sectarian abuse and the words ‘you’re a dead man Lennon’ were daubed on the road near the player’s home in the west end of Glasgow. The fact that the perpetrators knew where he lived was clearly meant to intimidate Lennon, who nevertheless vowed to remain at Celtic for the rest of his career. Later, on the night of 31 August 2008, following a 4-2 win for Rangers at Celtic Park, Lennon, by now on the Parkhead club’s coaching staff, was attacked by two men in the west end of Glasgow near his home. He was assaulted and left lying on the ground unconscious, after his head hit the cobblestoned road in the fashionable west end drinking spot of Ashton Lane.

  At their trial the following January, two men in their 40s, who admitted to being Rangers fans, were found guilty of assault, although the words ‘aggravated by religious prejudice’ were deleted from the charge sheet by the jury. Sentencing the men to two years in prison, the judge remarked, ‘He [Lennon] was curled up, trying to protect himself and offering no resistance. The complainer was fortunate that he did not receive more serious injuries given the ferocity of the assault.’

  In 2011, post office workers intercepted a ‘viable explosive device’ which had been sent to Lennon through the mail. Other similar devices were also sent separately to Lennon’s lawyer, Paul McBride QC, and retired Labour MSP Trish Godman, who had worn a Celtic shirt to Holyrood on her last day in Parliament, as well as to the Glasgow-based Irish institution Cairde na hEireann (Friends of Ireland). Suspicion soon fell on two Ayrshire-based Rangers fans in their 40s, who, in March 2012, were found guilty on almost all the charges against them in relation to the devices, although the charge of ‘conspiracy to murder’ was reduced to ‘conspiracy to assault’. One of the men admitted that he was terrified of the other, telling police, ‘I know he’s got pure hatred and it seems to be aimed at Neil Lennon and anything to do with Celtic Football Club.’