Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  These persistent and increasingly malignant attacks on Lennon and the continuing issues with religious bigotry surrounding Rangers and the club’s fans have recently led some to consider whether Scotland’s and Scottish football’s general widespread concern over ‘sectarianism’ should be rebranded and addressed in terms of the more specific problem of anti-Catholicism. Such a reclassification would of course immediately cast new light on the perennial debate about the ‘Old Firm’, the tag associated with Rangers and Celtic since the turn of the 20th century, with its inherent implications of how both sides are as bad as each other when it comes to these issues, effectively the two faces of the same coin, an argument which has been stridently propagated in certain quarters for many years.

  Needless to say, the suggestion that there may be an imbalance of blame and responsibility within Glasgow’s footballing duopoly has proved a particularly difficult nettle for some people to grasp, yet any putative notions of the reverse consideration, anti-Protestantism, existing as a malign force within Scottish society are not held to be widely credible. Accordingly the debate, led mainly by Catholic writers and academics, has recently begun to shift towards the particular problem of anti-Catholicism. In 2000, Patrick Reilly, the first Catholic to be named Head of English Literature at Glasgow University since the Reformation, wrote, ‘To ask if there is anti-Catholicism in Scotland is like asking if there are Frenchmen in Paris.’ The novelist Andrew O’Hagan agrees, ‘Scotland is a divisive, bigoted society.’ Reminiscing about his Catholic upbringing in Ayrshire, O’Hagan recalled, ‘The birds on the trees sang sectarian songs. The Catholics seemed out on their own somehow: a happy group for the most part, an irrational group sometimes, but a group nonetheless.’

  In a more subtle criticism, speaking of his childhood love of books, particularly Scottish novelists such as Stevenson, Scott and Gray, O’Hagan nevertheless lamented, ‘The truth is I never read a single scene in any of those books exactly like a scene from my own life… And though I knew it was nothing to do with discrimination – more like disadvantage – it added to my sense of Catholics being not altogether present in Scotland. It made me feel like we were outsiders, even to ourselves.’

  Similarly Joseph Bradley, head of the school of sport at the University of Stirling, has argued extensively in numerous academic papers about anti-Catholicism, particularly within the environs of Scottish football including fans, certain clubs and sections of the media, having a disruptive and deleterious effect on Scotland’s conduct of its public affairs. Perhaps the most celebrated intervention of recent years, however, came from the composer Sir James MacMillan, who, in a speech to the Edinburgh Festival in 1999, traduced the recent coverage of the incident with Donald Findlay earlier in the summer, highlighting the vociferous apologists of Findlay’s actions, particularly in notionally respectable media outlets such as The Herald, and spoke of the widespread nature of the problem of anti-Catholicism in modern Scotland, which he referred to as ‘Scotland’s shame’. ‘In many walks of life,’ MacMillan argued, ‘in the workplace, in the professions, in academia, in the media, in politics and in sport, anti-Catholicism, even when it is not particularly malign, is as endemic as it is second nature.’

  There are alternative views of course and other academics disagree, with some arguing that anti-Catholicism is a historical problem and not one that affects modern Scotland in any meaningful way, although even at the highbrow level, the splits tend to be along religious lines. Often the papers and articles of various scholars and writers are published together in anthologies and the reader, if he can decipher all the academic rhetoric, is left to make up his own mind. The issue will continue to be debated, but it undoubtedly remains the case that there is a significant body of opinion from within the Catholic community in Scotland which continues to feel the presence of an unwelcome threat to their identity and their culture, and, as has happened with other ethnic groups in the UK, it seems only right that their concerns should be acknowledged and treated as genuine.

  After all, we’re not talking about the grievances of the Green Brigade here or other youthful, radical groups, but professors and authors, knighted composers. If the most senior and respected figures within a community, the intellectual elite, continue to feel the need to articulate their concerns over perceived discrimination, even if it is only within the context of progress to a more pluralist society, then surely they deserve to be listened to and have their concerns taken seriously. Perhaps then, in this new light, the most persistent and objectionable of all faults with Scottish football might at last be effectually addressed.

  The signing of Maurice Johnston may not have been the seminal moment that many were hoping for in regards to the wider problem of anti-Catholicism at Ibrox and in the wider culture, but over the ensuing years, once Rangers had officially abandoned its dogmatic, discriminatory policies, it was as if the floodgates had been opened and a raft of Catholic players eventually arrived at the club, most of them foreigners, at a time when British football was opening up its doors to the world. Rangers have now been captained by a Catholic, and managed by a Catholic, an unqualifiedly welcome development, which has rightly exposed all the old lies and excuses about outsiders supposedly not being able to fully commit to the team’s cause.

  The new Ibrox club of today has no compunction at all about signing footballers from all backgrounds, including even players from the Republic of Ireland, something that would have been unthinkable in Souness’s day. And overall, it should be acknowledged that in spite of Neil Lennon’s one-man quest to adjust the statistics, incidents of violent and anti-social behaviour at football in Scotland have fallen in recent years, as they have across the UK generally. Your modern bigot, it seems, often prefers to hide behind anonymous social media profiles, a keyboard warrior out there in cyberspace, spreading abuse and his warped view of the world, but ultimately causing less physical damage.

  So, in the end, we got there with Rangers, even if at times it felt as though the old institution had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The extent of the club’s denials and equivocation down the years has inevitably left many observers unconvinced about the nature of the progress within Ibrox, with the glaring lack of contrition or humility, coupled with the ongoing problems among the club’s fans and even directors, suggesting that the changes at the club have been largely cosmetic and have been adopted chiefly for reasons of expediency. Regardless, what can be said with some certainty about the club is that Rangers lost the battle of ideas, in the present and in the past. From its very early years, the club seemed unable to grasp what sport, and football in particular, had the potential to achieve.

  Once the game acquired widespread popularity, football became an enervating force for good, strengthening communities in an otherwise harsh and troubled society, bringing people from diverse backgrounds together and making them realise that, regardless of differences in geography and culture, ordinary working people had more in common with each other than perhaps they realised. Instead, Rangers looked to serve themselves, first and last, and being so blinkered, poisoned the otherwise inspiring story of Scottish football with a version of febrile religious bigotry which exists nowhere else in the global game.

  Perhaps subsequent events off the field at Ibrox, as Rangers suffered a catastrophic financial collapse in 2012, would help to precipitate a reevaluation, on the part of the club and its supporters, of what the famous old institution stands for in the modern age, and maybe, in the midst of Rangers’ greatest humiliation, a new perspective and greater humility might be sought.

  Then again, perhaps not. As fans of Scottish football are wont to say, it’s the hope that kills us.

  PART TWO

  FALL:

  FINANCIAL

  MALPRACTICE

  8

  THATCHER’S MAN

  IN February 1986, Rangers’ chief executive officer David Holmes flew to Italy to finalise a deal that would bring the Sampdoria and Scotland midfi
elder Graeme Souness, then 32 years old and with an illustrious playing career already behind him, to Ibrox as the club’s new player-manager.

  Holmes and his fellow directors had identified Souness as the man to reinvigorate the ailing institution’s fortunes on the field, while behind the scenes, the board set about trying to implement their ambitious plans to take the club forward and restore its dwindling reputation within the Scottish game.

  It may have looked like a seamless transition, but the eventual appointment of the former Liverpool captain on 8 April, just a day after the sacking of Jock Wallace, was the culmination of a long and inevitably bitter process. Holmes himself had only been appointed to the Rangers board in November 1985, a few days after the club had suffered a demoralising 3-0 defeat at the hands of a resurgent Hearts at Tynecastle. A man with no previous connection to Rangers, Holmes was a joiner by trade, who had worked his way up through the ranks of the Lawrence Building Group, eventually becoming the firm’s managing director. Described by journalist Jim Blair as ‘a builder from Falkirk who thought he was a carpenter from Nazareth’, his appointment was seen by many at the time as the prelude to a boardroom power struggle.

  Holmes‘s boss in Falkirk was Lawrence Marlborough, owner of the Lawrence Group, a tax exile who had based himself in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, since quitting the Rangers board in 1983. Marlborough was the grandson of the former Rangers chairman John Lawrence, who had joined the club’s board at the end of the Struth era in the mid-1950s and had served as chairman for ten years until, in 1973, ill health forced his retirement. Lawrence’s building firm had flourished during the slum clearances and the subsequent housing boom of the 1930s, and by the 1960s his company and its subsidiaries had built over 70,000 homes across Scotland, including 30,000 council houses.

  When Lawrence died in 1977, he bequeathed a significant number of shares in Rangers to his grandson Marlborough, who, despite resigning from the board and moving abroad, appeared by the mid-1980s to be taking a renewed interest in his inheritance. Rangers’ losses, season after season, were becoming a constant drain on the Lawrence Group and, clearly unimpressed with what had been going on at the club since his departure, Marlborough was now determined to step up and take a controlling interest in the company.

  Marlborough’s plan was simple; gain a majority shareholding in the club, turn the ship around and then, ideally, sell at a profit. As always with Rangers though, it was going to be an acrimonious process and Marlborough knew that his intended acquisition would be opposed by many of his former colleagues, who had maintained their positions on the board. The club was still under the control of a small group of amateur, old-style custodian-directors with Masonic connections, high priests of the old methodology at Rangers, who ran the business almost as a hobby and who were determined to resist what they saw as a hostile takeover bid from people whom they considered outsiders. In response to the eyebrow-raising in the media on his initial appointment to the board in November, Holmes had moved quickly to calm any suspicions about his immediate intentions. ‘There is absolutely nothing sinister about what has happened. It’s all very simple, above board and I’m sure will benefit Rangers greatly,’ he announced at the time.

  Despite such reassurances, however, what soon followed was described as, ‘one of the most savage bloodlettings in the history of the Rangers board’, and by early in the new year, Marlborough, dubbed ‘the silent partner’ by chairman John Paton, had acquired 52 per cent of the shares in the company. Orchestrated by Holmes, the key was persuading small-time businessman Jack Gillespie, the owner of a Vauxhall dealership in Lenzie, to sell a significant proportion of his stake to Marlborough. As a result, in February 1986, directors Tom Dawson and Jim Robinson, the proprietor of a scrap metal firm who had slowly been building up his stake in the club since 1960, were ousted and replaced by Hugh Adam and Freddie Fletcher, men who would bring acknowledged commercial expertise to their new roles. Former chairman Rae Simpson, a Kilmarnock surgeon who had inherited his shares from his grandfather, James Henderson, the first chairman of Rangers following the club’s incorporation in 1899, also left his post, while Gillespie was reinstated as vice-chairman, following his removal in an earlier coup.

  On Valentine’s Day, Holmes was named the club’s new chief executive, when he told the press, ‘I’m no hatchet man. I did what I had to do, but I didn’t flinch from it.’ For the first time in its history, Rangers Football Club had a single majority shareholder and was now effectively under the control of one man, Lawrence Marlborough, the ‘absentee landlord’, who would act in Glasgow through his surrogate, Holmes.

  The new CEO’s immediate priority, once the dust had settled on the boardroom coup, was to deal with the situation regarding the position of team manager. Rangers at the time had been struggling for years, with the club’s last title success coming as far back as 1978, and if anything, things were even worse for the club than the slump it had endured during Celtic’s ‘nine-in-a-row’ years of the late ’60s and early ’70s. By 1986, Rangers, as a social institution as well as a football club, seemed to have reached the end of the road. The club was drifting with no sense of purpose or direction, going through the motions in terms of fulfilling its fixtures and meeting its obligations but with no apparent idea of how to extricate itself from the ever-deepening hole in which it was floundering. The popularity of the institution was at an all-time low, across many diverse sections of society, such as the Unions, once bastions of Protestant loyalty, and the Labour movement, where the club’s name was mud, all the way through to the chattering classes of respectable Protestant society, and even the Kirk had been a forthright critic in recent years.

  Needless to say, the exclusionary employment policy continued to be an albatross around the club’s neck, while on the field the team was struggling to cope with the threat not just from Celtic, but from Aberdeen, Dundee United and now Hearts as well, as the Tynecastle side topped the league and were heading for the final of the Scottish Cup, having already eliminated Rangers from the competition by the time of Wallace’s sacking.

  After a 4-4 draw with Celtic at Ibrox on 22 March 1986, the Rangers squad appeared to celebrate as if they had won the game. With the home team already well out of the picture, the best outcome Rangers could expect from the fixture was to put a dent in Celtic’s championship bid, which they had ultimately achieved by coming from behind to square the match. After the game, a clearly delighted Jock Wallace approached David Holmes in the boardroom, singing the Ulster loyalist anthem The Sash. Holmes, still a relative newcomer to the Rangers set-up and an outsider in terms of the club’s more contentious traditions, couldn’t understand either the joviality, after a home draw against a Celtic team reduced to ten men, or the sectarian singing.

  In a subsequent conversation with Marlborough, the CEO was given the go-ahead to push the button on the anticipated changes, and using a journalist, Ken Gallacher, as the initial point of contact, Holmes and chairman John Paton had already received some early encouragement from Souness. Meetings were subsequently arranged with the club’s putative new boss at the Mayfair Hotel in London and then in Milan to put the final touches to the agreement, all of which took place in secrecy and without the knowledge of Wallace, who was still the incumbent manager at the time.

  Several people have since claimed the credit for suggesting the name of Graeme Souness as Wallace’s replacement at Ibrox, with Holmes later maintaining that the idea to appoint the former Scotland international came to him in a dream. Souness himself had previously observed, in a television interview, that the man who turned Glasgow Rangers around would be made for life, and perhaps this inadvertent remark had struck a chord somewhere. Regardless, on Tuesday, 8 April, the new man-in-waiting was spirited into Ibrox via the back door, before he emerged into the Blue Room from the adjoining manager’s office to face the media. It was an act of pure theatre, designed to impress and, despite the denouement being somewhat spoiled when the story was leaked the previous day. Neverth
eless, the assembled gentlemen of the press were still astonished to see Graeme Souness, a genuine legend of the Scottish game, appearing in front of them.

  Holmes had pulled off a masterstroke, albeit an expensive one. His new manager still had over a year left to run on his contract in Genoa so the deal to bring him to Glasgow cost Rangers £350,000, a record fee for the club at the time, although not one that would last. Souness was an untypical Scotsman in many ways; a chapter of his ghost-written autobiography, published while he was still in Italy, was entitled Sometimes I wish I was English. And despite the revulsion felt across Scotland at the time towards many of her policies, including the poll tax, introduced a year early north of the border as a political experiment, and the widespread dismantling of the country’s industrial heartlands, he was very much a believer in Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies and in her political philosophy. Arriving in Glasgow at the height of the late-1980s boom, Souness seemed to personify the direction that British football would take over the ensuing decades. In true Thatcherite manner, he came sweeping into Ibrox, riding roughshod over the admittedly shoddy practices of the past, and proceeded to set up his new order based on ego, money and self-aggrandisement.