The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872 (20 page)

  Rangers and Chalmers did eventually kiss and make up – he had returned to the club by the start of the following season, though could have been forgiven for wishing he had stayed away as Preston North End rattled eight goals past him to mark the opening of the new Ibrox Park. However, even that was not as bad as the 10–2 defeat Rangers suffered at snow-covered Kinning Park in February 1886 against Airdrie. That scoreline still stands as the Light Blues’ heaviest defeat and Chalmers was also pilloried after that one for refusing to dive around his icy goalmouth. Rangers’ relationship with the FA Cup ended for good at the end of the 1886–87 season as the SFA finally forbade its clubs from competing in the Cup south of the border. Their reasons were straightforward and justified: not only did their members’ appearances in the FA Cup undermine their own Scottish Cup competition, they also ran the risk of losing control of football in their own backyard. It was inconceivable to the SFA that if two Scottish clubs met in the FA Cup and came to loggerheads, the association in London could argue for the right to resolve the dispute.
  The Scottish Athletic Journal had argued as much in a stern editorial when it said: ‘It does rile us to see England thus claiming a jurisdiction over Scotland…How can the SFA prevent this assumption of a British jurisdiction by the English association? Easily enough. It only has to pass a rule at the coming annual meeting that no club under its control can take part in any Cup competition, save that of the Scottish Association or one of its affiliated associations. At the same time, the Scottish clubs are to blame. What has the Queen’s Park gained by competing for three consecutive seasons for the English Cup? Nothing, save disappointment and humiliation…The Rangers, with more than ordinary luck in the ballot, are now in the semi-final and were they even twice as good as they are they could not win the Cup. If they do, they deserve a public banquet.’26
  They never were so fêted. However, Chalmers appears to have eaten on behalf of the whole team anyway.

Tom Vallance

Former Rangers manager Graeme Souness surely never had Tom Vallance in mind when he memorably opined that one of the biggest problems in Scottish football was the presence of too many hammer throwers. Vallance, dubbed ‘Honest Tom’ throughout his glorious, one-club career with the Light Blues, could lob 16 pounds of solid steel with as much aplomb as he could run, jump, row or play football. Of all the gallant pioneers, he clearly boasted the richest and most varied talents. This lad o’ pairts from the Vale of Leven was a champion athlete and skilled oarsman, international footballer, successful entrepreneur and such an adept artist that his work was exhibited in the Royal Glasgow Institute and Scottish Academy. He would have needed a wide canvas indeed to reflect in oils on all he had achieved. Sport, especially football, coursed through his blood and that of his offspring – his son was first-team coach at Stoke City and his grandson played for Arsenal and even his granddaughter married one of the greatest of them all, Sir Stanley Matthews.
  Tom Vallance was not present at the conception of Rangers in West End Park, nor its birth shortly afterwards against Callander, but he quickly developed a bond with the infant club that would remain virtually unbroken until his death from a stroke in February 1935, aged 78. He nurtured its development to such an extent that he was club captain for nine seasons from 1873 and president for six years from 1883. He represented Scotland seven times, with four caps won against England in 1877, 1878, 1879 and 1881. Not once did he finish on the losing side against the ‘Auld Enemy’. Four men are correctly identified with the formation of Rangers but a fifth, Vallance, was also a towering influence – and not just because the powerful full-back stood 6ft 2in tall, a veritable giant of the age on and off the park.
  Vallance was born at a small farmhouse known as Succoth, near Renton in the parish of Cardross, in 1856. His father, also Thomas, was an agricultural labourer from Lesmahagow and his mother, Janet, came from Loudon in Ayrshire. They were married in Glasgow in December 1842 and by the time Tom was born there was already a large Vallance family, including Ann aged 12, James 9, Robert 8, and Margaret 2. The family unit would increase still further in later years with the birth of another two boys, Alexander (who also gave sterling service to Rangers) and Andrew (who went on to become head gardener in Helensburgh for Neil Munro, the novelist best known for his ‘Para Handy’ tales). When Tom was still young the family moved to the Old Toll House at Shandon, north of Rhu on the Gareloch, and in all likelihood crossed paths with the McNeil brothers for the first time. After all, the new Vallance residence was only a short distance south of Belmore House, where John McNeil, the father of Moses and Peter, was employed as head gardener. Tom Vallance senior is listed in the Helensburgh Directory of 1864 as a ‘road man’ – in effect, a toll collector for a stretch of highway that once hugged the shore of the Gare Loch between Shandon and Garelochhead, but which has long since been swallowed by the naval base at Faslane.
  On the athletics field in his youth, Vallance was a regular prizewinner at the annual Garelochhead Sports, while his love of rowing was nurtured and developed initially on the local regatta circuit. Newspaper reports from the 1870s and 1880s confirm his domination of the local sports scene. For example, on Ne’erday 1878 he competed in the annual Garelochhead Amateur Athletics sports meeting and promptly won the champion mile race for the parishes of Rhu and Rosneath, the 150 yards and 200 yards sprints, as well as the hurdle, ‘hop step and leap’, and the hammer throw. Three years later, at the same Ne’erday meet, he won the 160 yards and 200 yards races, the steeplechase, the triple jump, another hammer event and the long jump. To rub salt into the wounds of the defeated and dispirited, his team even won the tug-o-war.
  By that stage in 1881 Vallance, then aged 25, was at his athletic peak, underlined when he jumped an astonishing 21ft 11in (6.68 metres) at the Queen’s Park FC sports. The leap pre-dated the formation of the Scottish Amateur Athletic Association (it would not be established for another two years) but was still passed as the initial Scottish record. It was no fluke either, as Vallance also leapt 21ft 6in and 21ft exactly at two other sports meetings that year. Amazingly, Vallance’s Scottish record stood until 1896 when Glaswegian Hugh Barr, another athletic all-rounder, beat it by two inches.
  Keeping pace with Vallance was younger brother Alick who, like Tom, was also a Rangers stalwart and an athlete of some renown. In addition to their membership of Rangers, the siblings were also long-standing members of the Clydesdale Harriers from its formation in 1885. Golf was another passion and Alick was one of the founder members and the first captain of Garelochhead Golf Club in 1895. He was also Scottish 120 yards hurdles champion in 1888 and he played over 100 times for the Light Blues in a career spanning 12 seasons from 1877–88. Like Tom, he was a defender and, although he had a lighter physique than his older brother, he was every bit as gutsy. They played together in the Glasgow Charity Cup Final in 1879 when Rangers beat Vale of Leven 2–1 to win their first piece of silverware as a club.

The land of the founding fathers…the Gareloch, from above the village of Clynder.

By 1871 the Vallance family had moved to Hillhouse in Rhu, where 14-year-old Tom was listed in the census as a ‘civil engineer’s apprentice’. If the work was not directly with his father at that time, it was almost certainly a position gained through his influence. However, with a restricted economy based on farming, fishing and the infant industry of tourism, the Gareloch proved inadequate to satisfy the career interests of Vallance and, like the McNeil and Campbell boys before him, he headed to Glasgow where he quickly found work as a mechanical engineer in the shipyards.
  Schoolboy friendships formed would be cherished in the new, alien environment, so it was no surprise when Vallance teamed up with his Gareloch chums soon after his arrival in Glasgow to boost their fledgling football enterprise, nor would it have come as a shock to see the teenager seek out a rowing club at which to continue the pastime that had so captured his interest. According to the Scottish Athletic Journal1 he chose Clyde Amateur Rowing Club – and therein lies a story. For decades the Clydesdale Rowing Club, neighbours and friendly rivals of Clyde, believed Rangers were formed as an offshoot of their club, but there is no evidence to support their claims beyond anecdotes passed on by members through the generations. Clydesdale generously opened up their minutes and membership lists dating from soon after their formation in 1857 for the research purposes of this book. Unfortunately, none of the names on the membership lists (which are extensive) from the period 1865–1900 match the gallant pioneers, other players or committee members from the earliest years of Rangers. Of course, that is not to say Tom Vallance, the McNeils or the Campbells never splashed a ripple in the colours of Clydesdale but, more likely, it was Clyde, who were formed in 1865. The reported evidence of the time in relation to Vallance apart, there is another strong clue – the blue star on the shirt of the 1877 Scottish Cup Final team, the earliest known picture of a Rangers squad. It has baffled the unknowing for years, but the puzzle is surely solved moments after stepping through the front door of the Clyde HQ at the boathouse on Glasgow Green when visitors are confronted by the club’s motif on the wall – a light blue, six-pointed star, identical to the one on the shirts worn by the Rangers team over 130 years previously, which suggests a close relationship between the two clubs. (In the 1877 picture, however, Tom Vallance is pictured with a lion rampant on his shirt, symbolising his status as a Scottish international that season.) Unfortunately, absolute verification of the Clyde link is impossible, not least because their earliest records, unlike those of Clydesdale, were lost long ago.
  John Allan’s first great history of Rangers paints a somewhat romantic picture of ‘lusty, laughing lads, mere boys some of them, flushed and happy from the exhilaration of a finishing dash with the oars…seen hauling their craft ashore on the upper reaches of the River Clyde at Glasgow Green.’ The truth of the rowing exploits of Vallance and Co. was likely to have been somewhat more prosaic. Firstly, opportunities to row would not have been so plentiful, not least because boats would have to be hired from specialist agents on the south of the river at Glasgow Green or loaned from the Clyde or Clydesdale clubs themselves. As recently as the 1960s, as many as six crews would share the use of one four-man boat. Members of each ‘four’ would be under strict instruction to return to the boathouse within half an hour and only if there were no crews waiting on the bank for their slot could the time on the water be extended. Furthermore, rowing on the Clyde for much of the latter half of the 19th century often involved a lengthy game of patience. Until 1887 there was a weir on the Clyde at Glasgow Green and, while it helped to hold a high tide longer that usual, it was impossible to take to the water at low tide as the river resembled little more than a narrow stream between two substantial mud flats.2

Captain Fantastic: Tom Vallance, the first great Rangers skipper, who set the standards for many more to follow in the subsequent 130 years.

For the most part, four-man teams on Glasgow Green raced a 1,000-yard course upstream between the Albert Bridge and St Andrew’s Suspension Bridge, while single rowers favoured longer distances of up to four miles. The demographic make-up of the Clyde and Clydesdale clubs at the time was white-collar – doctors and lawyers, but the gallant pioneers were aspiring middle class, serving professional apprenticeships. Peter Campbell may have been a shipyard worker, but he was from entrepreneurial and privileged stock and he and his brothers, as well as the McNeils and Tom Vallance, would have felt at home on Glasgow Green, not least because rowing was such an integral part of their upbringing on the Gareloch. The clubs may have been perceived as elitist, but the sport was not. Employees of each shipyard on the Clyde, for example, designed, built and rowed their own boats under the auspices of the Trades Rowing Association.
In truth, it is more than likely that the founding fathers of Rangers were social rowers in Glasgow rather than competitive, not least because their new football team took up so much of their time and attention. The highlight of the rowing season in the city was undoubtedly the Glasgow Regatta, and it is astonishing to think in the 21st century that as many as 30,000 spectators would cram the banks of the Clyde in the 1870s to watch the best rowers in the country. There is no evidence to suggest that any of the club’s founding fathers, even including Vallance, took part in the main event on the Clyde, not least because it was generally held on the first or second weekend in September, when the football season had just got up and running. An examination of newspaper reports of the event throughout the 1870s failed to throw up the names of anyone connected with the Light Blues although, intriguingly, one ace rower was a Gilbert McNeil, while the regatta’s energetic secretary was a certain John Banks McNeil. The latter was the owner of the Clutha Boathouse and one of the principal hirers of small craft on the Clyde, not to mention the founder of the Glasgow Regatta itself. However, no connection between John and Gilbert and the McNeils of Rangers fame could be established.
  As a footballer, Tom Vallance was without equal in the Scottish and English game in the latter part of the 1870s, with the skipper, like his teammates, first shooting to prominence in the memorable Scottish Cup Final ties against Vale of Leven in 1877. He played the Final against the same opposition two years later and, although the Cup would leave the city in controversial circumstances on both occasions, the Charity Cup success of 1879 made some amends for the earlier disappointments. Vallance was revered by commentators at the time, with respected football analysts such as D.D. Bone arguing that ‘for several seasons, but more particularly that of 1879–80, none in Scotland showed better form. His returns near goal were neat and clean, and without being in any way rough with an opponent Vallance’s length of limb and good judgement often saved his club from losing goals.’3 The Scottish Athletic Journal reckoned: ‘He was worshipped by a very large section of the football community, and that worship at times had in it all the fire and enthusiasm which are commonly bestowed on a hero.’4