The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872 (8 page)

This image is looking west across Burnbank in the 1870s. Who knows, that may even be a Rangers game going on in the foreground. The land has been dominated by tenements for well over a century.

Nevertheless, there was further cause for optimism as Rangers headed into season 1876–77 and a campaign that would not only underline their new-found reputation as a club of substance, but would also earn them their ‘Light Blues’ moniker that stays with them to this day. Firstly, they secured a 10-year lease on a ground at Kinning Park that had recently been vacated by the Clydesdale club, who had first played cricket on the site in 1849. The cricketers originally rented fields next door from a Mr Tweedie for up to £9 per annum but they were evicted within a year (after playing only two matches) when they literally refused to allow the grass to grow under their feet, thus denying his herds valuable nutrition. The Clydesdale lads had better luck when they approached a Mr Meikelwham for permission to build a club on the fields he was leasing in Kinning Park and the precious acres were to remain dedicated to sport until Rangers moved to the first Ibrox Park in 1887. Land which, less than 125 years ago, was given over for agricultural use and sporting prowess now forms part of the M8. It is something for present day fans to think about as they crawl towards the Kingston Bridge from Ibrox in their cars and supporters’ buses at the end of every matchday.
  Rangers’ move to Kinning Park in the summer of 1876 took them to the south of the city for the first time and it has remained their spiritual home ever since. For their part, Clydesdale had located to a new ground for their favourite pastimes of football and cricket further south at Titwood. Memories of football at Clydesdale have long since faded, although they boast the honour of playing in the first Scottish Cup Final in 1874, a 2–0 defeat to Queen’s Park. The crack of willow on leather can be heard at Titwood still. The reasons behind Clydesdale’s desire for a new home away from Kinning Park have never been recorded, but the creep of industrialism and demand for space across the south side of the city in the period is likely to have been a factor. As late as the 1860s, the eminent Scottish sportswriter D.D. Bone reckoned: ‘Kinning Park was…a beautiful meadow surrounded by stately trees and green hedges, a pleasant spot of resort for the town athletes, away from the din of hammers and free from the heavy pall of city smoke.’6 In 1872 it sat in splendid isolation, but within 12 months the Clutha Ironworks had been constructed on its doorstep and by 1878 a depot for the Caledonian Railway had been built across the street. The dimensions of a cricket field being considerably larger than a football pitch, maps of the time show that Rangers occupied only a portion of the land originally allocated to Clydesdale.
  Rangers had been boosted in the summer of 1876 by the arrival of several new players, most notably George Gillespie. A former player with the Rosslyn club based in Whiteinch, he was a back who later converted to goalkeeper and went on to win seven caps for Scotland between the sticks with the Light Blues and Queen’s Park. He was never on the losing side in an international and luck appeared to be on his side in his debut season with his new club. Rangers also strengthened their youthful squad with the addition of goalkeeper James Watt and forward David Hill and there were also two new additions to the forward line, William ‘Daddy’ Dunlop (of True Blue fame) and Sandy Marshall. Watt and Dunlop came from the Sandyford club (Gillespie is also credited with once being a member). Players at Sandyford were well-known to founders of Rangers as they were part of the same community on the western fringes of the city centre. The prospects for Rangers never looked better, particularly when they opened the new ground on 2 September in front of 1,500 fans, again with a match against Vale of Leven, and this time the boys from Dunbartonshire were defeated 2–1. Of the 16 challenge matches Rangers were acknowledged as playing that season they lost only three and their form in the Scottish Cup won them a new army of admirers among the Glaswegian labour class that they still maintain to this day.
  Rangers could certainly not be accused of lacking enthusiasm, which endeared them to an audience that had been growing since those early kickabouts on Glasgow Green. Scottish football was frightfully territorial in the 1870s. The club with greatest mass appeal, Queen’s Park, had secured a fan base on the back of their all-conquering success of previous seasons, but at heart they were considered a club for the wealthy and their cloak of on-field invincibility was also beginning to slip from their shoulders as the decade drew to a close. The time was right for a new challenger. Other clubs drew their audience from the immediate areas in which they played – Pollokshields Athletic, Govan, Whiteinch, Parkgrove, Partick and Battlefield to name just a few. To some extent, the nomadic status of Rangers in their early years worked to their benefit, as they moved from the east of the city to the west and then on to Kinning Park, representing no particular district but winning an audience with their exuberance on the pitch. Such was the dedication of the players to their new home that stories abounded in the local community of eerie sounds and peculiar sights coming from the ground during the night. Soon, there were whisperings the place was haunted. In fact, it was the zealous Light Blues, whose dedication to the new game and their new environment saw them consult astronomy charts to train late into the night under the full moon, leading to the nickname the ‘Moonlighters.’ It highlighted the tremendous commitment to their new club and the new sport by the young amateurs. The picture that emerges of the time is of football as a thrilling new adventure for young men on the cusp of adult life. Moses McNeil fondly recalled ‘tuck-ins’ of ham and eggs and steak at a local eating house every morning after a 6am rise for a 10-mile training walk or a 90-minute session with the football in the build up to the 1877 Cup Final. Up to 11 plates were laid out for the famished players, with John Allan poetically recalling in his jubilee history: ‘It happened frequently that only six or seven players were able to sit down to the feast; still, the waiter never took anything back on the plates except the pattern.’7
  Rangers were fortunate to have huge personalities in their squad to match their appetites. Gillespie, for one, was a renowned practical joker. In April 1879 Rangers accepted an invite to play a match at Dunoon to celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria, but the players were ordered back to the city on the Thursday evening to prepare for a Glasgow Merchants’ Charity Cup semi-final tie against Dumbarton at Hampden 48 hours later. All the players took the last steamer home, with the exception of Gillespie, Archie Steel and Hugh McIntyre. Blatantly breaking curfew, they booked into the Royal Hotel for the night instead. Steel and McIntyre, who were sharing a room, were awakened from their slumbers by a loud banging on the door and the frantic order from Gillespie to follow him to the pier as they had overslept and were about to miss the first boat across the Firth of Clyde. Steel and McIntyre dressed at speed and dashed along the pavement outside their lodgings before they realised it was still the middle of the night. Gillespie had earlier returned to bed, where no doubt he chuckled himself back to sleep. The rude awakening did not perturb Steel too much, as he scored on the Saturday afternoon in a 3–1 victory. Steel, writing in 1896 as Old International in one of the first in-depth histories of the Scottish game, 25 Years Football, also fondly recalled Rangers teammate Sandy Marshall. He was tall and thin as a rake and it was claimed John Ferguson ran under his legs during one of the games in the 1877 Final when the Light Blues player took a fresh air swipe at the ball. Training at Kinning Park frequently ended with a one-mile run around the ground, after which the players were treated to a ‘bath’ of a bucket of cold water poured over their heads by the trainer as they stooped double, their fingers touching their toes. One evening Marshall took up his usual angular pose and jokingly warned the bucket holder ‘see and no’ miss me,’ and his comments induced such fits of giggles the water went everywhere except over the player’s head.8
  The majority of the Rangers team were barely out of their teens when they kicked off the Scottish Cup, hoping for third time lucky, with a 4–1 defeat of Queen’s Park Juniors at Kinning Park on 20 September 1876. Defender George Gillespie was just 17, while James Campbell, the only goalscorer from that match to be officially recorded, was 18. His older brother Peter and friends Moses McNeil and Tom Vallance were all 20 years old and William Dunlop was the oldest at 22. Towerhill were swept aside in the next round 8–0 and Rangers also travelled to Mauchline and Lennox and won comfortably 3–0 on each occasion. Surprisingly, even though fixture scheduling can charitably be described in the 1870s as haphazard, Rangers were given a bye at the semi-final stage. The kids from Kinning Park had made the Scottish Cup Final for the first time in their short history – and Vale of Leven lay in wait.
  The club from Alexandria is long gone as a senior outfit – they withdrew from the Scottish League in 1892 and limped on at various levels until 1929 – but Rangers still owe them a debt of gratitude, in part for their Light Blues nickname, which first came to the fore around the time of the Final. In his history of Rangers, written for the SFA’s annual in 1894, a scribe operating under the name of ‘Obo’ claimed Rangers had been known as the Light Blues for the first 22 years of their existence as a result of the colour of their shirts. However, his claims do not stand up to scrutiny when compared against the evidence provided by club officials for the earliest SFA annuals. All teams were required to list their colours and Rangers’ shirts were frequently listed as blue (1876 and 1878) or, more commonly, royal blue (from 1879 onwards). Light blue was never mentioned. They also wore white knickerbockers and blue and white hooped socks.
  It has been argued, with some merit, that the Light Blues refers not to the colour of the shirts but the dash of performers such as Moses McNeil and Peter Campbell when they pulled the cotton kit, most likely provided by H. and P. McNeil, over their youthful shoulders around the time of the 1877 Final. The Glasgow News of Monday 19 March references the ‘light and speedy’ Rangers, while Archie Steel makes a compelling case for the Light Blues to be considered in the context of the tradition of Oxford and Cambridge universities. Vale’s colours were a very dark blue, almost black (although they wore plain white in the second of the three epic matches) and he claimed Vale were similar to the Dark Blues of Oxford in their appearance, while Rangers, in a hue of kit not as powerful, resembled the Light Blues of Cambridge.
  To describe Vale of Leven as favourites to win the Scottish Cup on Saturday 17 March 1877 is as much an understatement as saying football had caught the imagination of the general public ever so slightly. True, the Vale had never lifted the trophy, but the previous season they had been considered unfortunate to be knocked out of the competition at the semi-final stages following a narrow 2–1 loss to Queen’s Park, prompting the editors of the Scottish Football Annual that summer to conclude that the rest of the Scottish game, in particular Vale of Leven and Third Lanark, were quickly catching up with the Hampden giants. The men from Alexandria had caused a sensation in the fifth round by handing Queen’s Park their first defeat on Scottish soil after a decade of existence. Furthermore, experienced players such as Alex McLintock, John McGregor, John Ferguson, John McDougall and John Baird had already been capped for their country – Moses McNeil and Tom Vallance were the only two Scotland players in the Rangers team at that time and the latter had only won his first two caps in the fortnight before the Final. Vale of Leven had age and physical presence on their side, not to mention that morale-boosting win over the greatest club of them all. The rain had fallen ankle deep on the Hampden playing surface that historic Saturday afternoon of 30 December 1876 as the men from Alexandria celebrated their 2–1 win over Queen’s Park to take them into the semi-final. However, subsequent events threatened to dampen the feelgood factor of their sensational victory.
  The following Tuesday, several Queen’s Park members were strolling over the playing surface and noticed suspicious marks in the turf that looked as if they had come from spiked boots, which were strictly forbidden at the time. As a result, Queen’s Park wasted no time in dispatching a delegation of two men to the lodgings of various Vale players with a request to see the footwear worn three days earlier. They first called upon the home of John Ferguson and although he was out, his wife invited the visitors into their home and produced her husband’s boot bag. As luck would have it – or, from the point of view of Queen’s Park, bad fortune – the bag also contained the boots of teammate Bobby Paton and there was not a spike in sight. Undeterred, they marched on to the home of another player, John McGregor. Initially, he mistook their arrival as a show of bonhomie to welcome the New Year and uncorked a bottle as the three men toasted the arrival of 1877. However, when the true nature of their business became clear McGregor threw his unspiked boots at their feet in disgust and swore bitterly that he regretted ever proffering a dram in the first place. He was not alone in being incensed. The Vale committee pointed out that the holes on the Hampden pitch were various sizes and more consistent with marks from the tip of a shooting stick or umbrella, which had been carried by at least one umpire. One newspaper correspondent mischievously suggested the markings were made by crows, which thrived in the district, and the game was forever after known as the ‘Crows’ Feet’ match. There was no replay and Vale went on to meet Rangers following a 9–0 demolition of Ayr Thistle in the semi-final, adding to victories in the earlier rounds against Third Lanark, Vale of Leven Rovers, Helensburgh and Busby.