Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang (2 page)

We stood and fought. And we didn’t give a fucking inch, despite the constant waves of attacks. All around me boys were going down; some got a right kicking, one was slashed across the back. But we didn’t retreat; we didn’t let them push us back. It seemed to go on for a lifetime, much longer than any fight I have ever been involved in. That reflects the danger we faced; if we had been pushed back the rest of them would have joined in and we would have been annihilated. It was vicious, no-holds-barred stuff, with both sides fuelled not only by drink but also by naked sectarian hatred. One of our mob, Rico McGill, later told me that he will never forget the terrified look on a traffic officer’s face when he saw what was unfolding; understandably, the cop made himself scarce.

We were close to exhaustion when the main body of police arrived and separated us. They escorted us down Springfield Road, where the Celtic fans continued to pelt us with an array of missiles. The cops would never admit it but I believe they were impressed by our audacity, by our willingness to do whatever it took to get at Celtic.

When the game kicked off the atmosphere inside the ground was poisonous. Later my Celtic pals told me that what we had done swept through their support, ratcheting up the tension to a degree I have never experienced before or since. It caused, I have no doubt, the trouble inside the stadium, which erupted after Celtic’s Stephane Mahe was sent off in the forty-first minute for a second bookable offence. Mahe was outraged and angrily confronted referee Hugh Dallas, before being persuaded to make his way down the tunnel.

Cue mayhem.

A few minutes later Dallas was struck on the forehead by a coin thrown by a Celtic fan and, in pictures that flashed round the globe, was
left bleeding and disorientated on the Parkhead turf. As the game boiled over two more Celtic players, as well as Rod Wallace of Rangers, were dismissed, while a number of Soap Dodgers entered the playing area in an attempt to get at Dallas. A Celtic fan, in fuck-knows what circumstances, fell forty feet from the upper tier of the stands and almost killed himself. At the final whistle, as Rangers players celebrated a 3–0 win and regaining the league championship, the so-called greatest fans in the world, ‘sportsmen’ to the last, pelted them with coins and spat on them.

The fun didn’t stop with the final whistle. In Duke Street, minutes after the game, Rangers scarfers taunted the Celtic hordes about winning back the league, which resulted in a full-scale riot. Later that night, Hugh Dallas, relaxing at home with his family, had his windows smashed by a Celtic-supporting neighbour, someone he had known socially for twenty years. As passions ran high in the wake of the most explosive Glasgow derby for decades violence erupted across the west of Scotland, with police reporting more than a hundred arrests, including many serious assaults and several stabbings.

In the wake of the match our rivals went into, what to me and most Rangers fans, was full paranoia mode. Celtic employed the services of a psychologist to examine Dallas’s performance during the game and duly presented his findings to the SPL’s commission of inquiry.
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Maybe that is one reason they got off so lightly; the £45,000 fine for ‘on-field disturbances’ was a slap on the wrist for a club with their resources. Referee assaulted; the opposition abused, attacked and spat on; three players sent off. What do these cunts have to do to get a real punishment?

That game changed football forever. Never again would the Old Firm be allowed to play a title decider. Never again would the two sides meet in the early evening on a Saturday or a Sunday. For its part the Scottish government, disturbed by what had taken place, also got involved, demanding an urgent report on the debacle from the SFA and SPL. That ninety minutes also made Hugh Dallas the most famous, and controversial, Scottish referee in history, prompting many Rangers fans to have ‘DALLAS 12’ sewn onto the back of their replica strips.

Not that any of us in the ‘famous fifty’ were concerned about the historical implications. That night in the pub we toasted the greatest feat of arms in the history of the ICF. We had marched into the middle of enemy
territory, outnumbered but never disheartened, and stuck it to them. The players had done their jobs on the field of play and we had done ours off it.

Football doesn’t get any better than that.

As a boy I was a Celtic fan.

There, I’ve admitted it. People who know me as Billy Britain will be surprised but, unfortunately, it’s true. My only defence is that I was a victim of circumstance. You see I grew up in the Gallowgate, in Glasgow’s east end. The Gallowgate – an area strongly associated in the popular imagination with Glasgow’s Irish Catholic community – is a stone’s throw from Celtic Park but about three miles from Ibrox. So if I was going to the football, which I did from the age of seven, the Piggery was the logical choice.

Like many boys I was attracted by the sights and sounds of the professional game and, let’s face it, Celtic Park was a very atmospheric ground in those days. One day my brother Christopher, who is four years older than me, took me to watch an Old Firm game there. He lifted me over the turnstiles and into the Jungle, the area occupied by the hardest of hardcore Celtic fans, while he went into the traditional Rangers end without me in tow. At that first game Celtic won 1–0 and the passion exhibited by the supporters was overwhelming. I was hooked. I think I also supported Celtic to wind my brother up. At the age of eleven he was already a committed Rangers fan and in our bedroom his wall would be covered in Union Jacks and Red Hands while mine was festooned with Irish tricolours.

My childhood infatuation with the Hoops was short-lived. I was becoming more and more aware of what was happening in Northern Ireland and it slowly began to dawn on me that most Celtic fans identified with the Irish Republican Army. They would belt out songs like the ‘Soldier’s Song’ and vile ditties like ‘Ooh Ah, Up the Rah’. I knew British troops were being murdered by the IRA and as my ambition at the time was to join the army I began slowly to turn against the Republicanism that
infected Celtic Park. By the age of eleven I was a fully fledged Rangers fan and have been ever since.

I was born in Rottenrow, Glasgow’s famous maternity hospital, in 1972. It was a good year to make my entrance. Just three months earlier, Rangers won the European Cup Winners Cup by beating Moscow Dynamo 3–2 in Barcelona’s Nou Camp stadium. For good measure the Rangers fans also gave the Spanish police a fucking good hiding at the end of the game, of which more later.

We weren’t the typical nuclear family and that’s putting it mildly. As well as Christopher I have a sister, Carolyn, who is twelve years older than me. The three of us have different fathers and although my father’s name is William McDonald I was given the surname of my sister’s dad, Chugg, a moniker that has caused me a little local difficulty over the years.

My family are all Protestants, but not churchgoing, and, like most people in the Gallowgate, we loved going along to watch the Orange parades that are such a feature of Glasgow life in the summer months, the traditional marching season. Despite the fact that many of our Roman Catholic, Celtic-supporting neighbours enjoyed the colourful spectacle and the music there was nearly always trouble. However, my abiding memory of the parades is seeing people pissed out of their minds at seven o’clock in the morning.

I use the word ‘family’ advisedly. The truth is that my father left the family home when I was five and after that I never saw him. He was already married with children when he met Mum and eventually he got an ultimatum from her and my sister along the lines of ‘come home now or it’s all over’. Clearly, the pull of his other family was too strong. I only have a couple of vague memories of him: once when he picked me up from nursery school; the other when he gave me a Tonka truck for Christmas.

It is only in the last few years that I have realised just how traumatic that breakdown was for me. I was always a quiet child, especially in comparison to Christopher, who was very outgoing, but my parents splitting up pushed me further into my shell. I found the only way to compensate for the lack of a secure family life was to become part of a group. Having pals I could rely on became incredibly important; it gave me a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose. Having read a number of books by people involved in football violence it is clear that many of them also came from broken homes of one kind or another. They, like me, were seeking some kind of consolation for whatever had happened to them at home. That will sound like psychobabble to many people; I don’t think it is.

Everyone knows about Glasgow’s gang culture from books like
No Mean City
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. Although it came out more than seventy years ago there are probably as many gangs in the city today as there were then. The place is full of them despite the best efforts of the authorities to break them up. Hardly a week goes by without Glasgow being named in this crime survey and that as the murder capital of Britain or the place in which young men are most likely to carry a blade. Like it or not gang members are prepared to fight, and often to die, to protect their little patch. Given my family background, my personality and where I lived it was inevitable that I would join a gang and when I was seven I became a member of the Young Gallowgate Mad Squad. It was far from kid’s stuff: if you got caught by a rival mob you ended up with a sore face or worse. Sometimes the pain was self-inflicted: I remember chasing a rival gang with a bottle in my hand and tripping over on the pavement; my hand was cut by the broken glass but instead of telling Mum I applied a bandage and tried to keep out of her way for a few days.

We weren’t short of rivals. The east end is awash with gangs, including legendary outfits like the Bridgeton Derry and the Calton Tongs, both of which we had run-ins with. But our closest and most bitter rivals were the Spur and the Torch, whose members hailed from Barrowfield. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Glasgow’s geography, Barrowfield is within spitting distance of Celtic Park and has a reputation for being the toughest scheme in a city full of tough schemes. Strangers who ventured there would, if they were lucky, get a kicking; if they were unlucky they would not only get a kicking but would also be robbed of their money, their clothes and their shoes. As well as fighting outsiders the Spur and the Torch would fight each other. The dividing line between the two gangs was Stamford Street, nicknamed Nightmare Alley. Such was Nightmare Alley’s reputation that it featured in a 1970s documentary on urban deprivation aired on the BBC.

The YGMS was outnumbered by both Barrowfield gangs and they would often give us a chasing. The turning point came this day – I was around ten years old – when the Torch turned up in Slatefield Street in the middle of our estate. They knocked fuck out of a Gallowgate boy who was on his own at the time, which enraged the whole scheme. Within minutes the YGMS mobilised, helped by a number of grown men and a
well-known boxing family from the area. There were twenty of us against thirty Torch but helped by a fearsome array of weapons, including baseball bats, we chased the cunts down Slatefield Street and right out of the Gallowgate.

That little incident gave the YGMS no end of confidence and from that day on we took them on as equals, even when the Torch and Spur merged into one big gang. Parkhead Forge – once home to one of the biggest steelmakers in the world but by then a vacant industrial site – was our battleground. We came at each other armed to the teeth; it wasn’t just fists and feet but also machetes, coshes, knives and bats. There would be a fight almost every day and the rate of attrition was frightening, with boys regularly getting carted off to hospital suffering from stab wounds and head injuries.

The respectable middle classes often wonder why guys like us are so drawn to gang culture and thousands of bearded academic types have researched and probed and analysed the ‘problem’ until they are blue in the face. I could have saved the taxpayer a fortune. Young men are naturally territorial and when you add in the boredom that comes with living an urban desert with fuck-all in the way of facilities it’s easy to work out why it kicks off. Of course cheap drink, like cider and super lager, plays a part, as does glue, the drug of choice for skint inner-city youth. But they are symptoms, not the cause. We had one red-ash football pitch in the Gallowgate, not exactly ideal when you live ten floors up in a multi-storey block and never get to see a lawn. I guess that around half the boys in our area were in gangs and you couldn’t blame us.

My mother did her best to keep me on the straight and narrow. From the balcony in our multi-storey flat in Whitevale Street she would often see me having a square go and give me a telling off. I could not have wished for a better mother or a more loving upbringing. The problem was she had to put in long hours in her job as a barmaid at the Drum in Shettleston Road and so for long periods I was left to my own devices. I was the typical latchkey kid, hanging about the house on my own for hours, jealous of my pals who were at home with their mums and dads. In his formative years Christopher had the benefit of being under the watchful eye of Carolyn. She really kept him in line and my abiding memory is of her chasing him round the house after he had pulled yet another stroke. By the time I was at the age when I needed a firm hand she had upped sticks and emigrated to Canada, where she is now happily married to a
business executive. Had she stayed I am sure I would have turned out to be a different person.

I was also getting the piss taken out of me because of my surname. ‘Chugg’ is a slang word in Scotland for masturbation and older boys would never let me forget it. I well remember my tormentor-in-chief, who was about four years older than me and lived in the same high rise. That boy teased me mercilessly about my name, often throwing in a hiding for good measure. He died at the age of eighteen, in the early Eighties, which was very good news for me because I might well have murdered the cunt.