The Official Celtic Opus – eBook Edition

By Opus

This giant volume tells the inside story of Celtic FC from its foundation in 1888, via Jock Stein’s heroes of 1967, to the modern-day successes of Martin O’Neill and Gordon Strachan.

More than four years in the making, this monumental publication takes the viewer on a journey way beyond the scope of previous history books on the club.

A selection of Britain’s finest sportswriters have contributed to this definitive volume on Celtic Football Club, ensuring unmatched originality and quality of content, The Official Celtic Opus brings the colourful history of one of Europe’s biggest clubs to vivid life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9780993387869

Book preview

The Official Celtic Opus

eBook Edition

First published in 2010 by Opus Media Group PLC.

Unless otherwise stated, copyright of all text is the property of Opus Media Group PLC © 2017.

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Contents

FOREWORD

THE CELTIC DNA: THE SEVEN STRANDS

IN THE BEGINNING

Birth of a dream

The ghost of Brother Walfrid

Man of the Celtic people

The joy of six

The wild rover

The mighty Quinn

HALL OF FAME

The Celtic Hall of Fame

BETWEEN THE WARS

The Tragedy of John Thomson

Days of McGrory

Patsy… was our darling

Celtic symphony

Brothers in arms

Rulers of the empire

THE OLD FIRM

A dance to the music of time

View from the blue

Cartoon cavalcade

Murdo and the 4-2 game

THE LOST TRIBE

Talent and torment

Divers dynasty

Dreams and songs to sing

The outcast

Bear with a sore head

THE POWER & THE GLORY

The first three cups

The road to Lisbon

Missing person

Dear Alexander

The eternal flame

Hail hail Cesar

Secrets of the Lisbon Lions

The princesses of Lisbon

Taking route one

The Fall of La Grande Inter

The battle of Montevideo

Auld spice

Journey to the heart of darkness

Lethal weapon

The man who made Celtic

Homage to the master

The passing of Jock Stein

The little prince

The Johnstone mysteries

The one I love

NINE IN A ROW

Nine years

Quality Street Gang

Kenny

The rise and fall of George Connelly

The prodigal returns

Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou

Seeing red

A portrait in courage

CELTIC IN EUROPE

European gold

Bobby and the Battle of Britain

The secret army

The first game with dad

Redemption

They came to the east end bearing gifts

LIFE AFTER STEIN

The shadows of the night

7: Provan

The good, the bad and the bubbly

Love Street, actually

THE AGE OF NINE BOSSES

The Celtic carousel

Feed the bear

The battle to save Celtic

Cometh McCann

Tommy twists…

Perfect Passing (Tommy Burns, 1956-2008)

On a Wim and a prayer

Stranger in paradise

The last straw

THE BLESSED MARTIN

Heart & soul

Big John

We.Were.There.

The European renaissance

The magnificent seven

Against all odds

Letter from Barca

GREEN & WHITE ARMY

I wore the hoops

Hoopy dreams

Inside view

We are Celtic supporters

MODERN DAYS

Walking in the footsteps of giants

Fitness regime change

A Pole apart

Kissed by an angel

THE LONG JOURNEY HOME

Seasons of uncertainty

Balancing act

My dear green place

Fit for purpose

Foreword

W

hen Fergus McCann called me in late 1994 to ask me to join the Celtic board, I was delighted and agreed to take up the appointment as non-executive director the day after my retirement date. In the 13 years that followed, I served as vice-chairman and then as chairman.

If the period Fergus served as chairman and chief executive was the phase of survival and recovery from the years that led to his rescue of the club, mine as chairman was the phase of development and re-emergence as the dominant football club in Scotland and as a genuinely serious European competitor. Of course, many others were a part of this journey, including most notably the other board members, the executive management team and, above all, the manager and players. But I took great satisfaction in helping steer the club to where it was when I stepped down in November 2007 and was succeeded by John Reid. The journey, as I call it, was not smooth and untroubled. There were periods when the finances of the club were stretched almost to crisis point.

Also, any club director will confirm that even the most tolerant of supporters operate on a short fuse if results are not going your way, and Celtic supporters are no exception. However, I do not complain about this. It goes with the territory and is the other side of the passion for which Celtic fans are famed.

What pleased me most during my time as chairman were three things: the gradual acknowledgment from supporters that success on the playing field cannot endure if the financial position of the club is not sound; the marvellous support for our efforts to restore the reputation of the club for religious tolerance and for charitable activities; and the professionalism of the way in which we conduct our affairs.

There were times in my early days when the fans were impatient of our efforts to avoid the dire financial position in which many clubs north and south of the border found themselves. ‘Speculate to accumulate,’ was the slogan among some of our supporters and at several AGMs the board heard this advocated from the floor. However, the presence of an experienced and professional board of directors ensured that a longer vision prevailed. The result is that Celtic are in a strong financial position and that underpins our success on the football field and in the transfer market. With few exceptions, the fans have come to appreciate this.

We also made great progress in eliminating the signs and symbols of sectarian prejudice from Celtic Park. It has taken time to bring some of our supporters to the realisation that not only is bigotry damaging to the club, but that it is offensive in itself to many of our most faithful fans.

The tradition of charitable giving is again flourishing and we have introduced many schemes directed at helping the disadvantaged in the area around Celtic Park. We have programmes that assist schoolchildren who are having learning difficulties, the long-term unemployed and those who are addicted to drugs. I firmly believe that football clubs have a capacity to do things that would otherwise never be done, and indeed a duty to do so, and I am especially proud that Celtic have been so active in this respect.

Finally, I believe we are now one of the best-run clubs in football. This may seem like a boast, but it is one that is borne out by not only the evidence, but also by comments from others in the game. Our corporate governance arrangements are fully compliant with the best standards in the business world, our reports to shareholders and supporters are as good as any to be found, our board is strong and independent in its judgments, and we have a togetherness that goes from the boardroom to the dressing room.

If I appear to be proud of our club, it is because I most certainly am. My own role was to lead the board in maintaining our reputation in all fields, and of acting as guardian of our legacy. I am privileged in having occupied that role during one of the most successful periods in our long history.

Brian Quinn, Celtic chairman 2000-07

The Celtic DNA: the seven strands

Who are Celtic? What makes it such a unique institution? What are its component parts? In the following essay, Brian Wilson reflects on what the club means to its supporters – and the wider world…

I

t is central to the beliefs of every Celtic supporter that they are, by wearing the green and white, committing themselves to something more than just the team on the park – though understandably the team on the park is, at any given point in the club’s history, the primary focus of their hopes and adulation. Ask those fans what else they are signing up to through their support for Celtic and you are likely to receive a wide range of well-informed answers but possibly also a few blank looks.

For much of the belief system that makes up a Celtic supporter normally requires no articulation. It is, in the old phrase, in the genes, and as such is passed on from one generation to the next. Just in case the process of genetic transfer failed, many of us were, in addition, subjected to the safeguard of heavy childhood conditioning. In my own case, one of my first memories is of being spoon-fed to the rhythm of old Celtic teams which I can recite to this day: the likes of Kennaway, Hogg and Morrison, Geatons, Lyon and Paterson; Delaney, MacDonald, Crum, Divers and Murphy. Exhibition Cup, 1938. Every meal had 11 spoonfuls, true, but it certainly achieves its aim.

However, science has moved on and now the talk is of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA as it is known, that intricate combination of genetic elements which come together to form the human personality. I first heard the DNA metaphor used in a football context by Adriano Galliani, the general manager of AC Milan, another club with a rich history which attracts fierce loyalty from its supporters. It was a formula for defining a football club’s make-up which seemed eminently applicable to the Celtic identity.

THE IRISH CONNECTION

So what are the constituent parts of the Celtic DNA? In the beginning, there was Ireland. Celtic’s links with the homeland of its founding fathers are fundamental to the club’s existence and play a significant part in the affinities of its supporters. They should never be denied any more than they should be distorted in order to fit any political or sectarian creed. It is a simple matter of historical fact that Celtic arose out of the Irish immigrant community in the East End of Glasgow for reasons of desperately needed charity and also as an expression of that community’s determination to achieve status, acceptance and excellence in its adopted land. That is what all immigrant communities aspire to.

The people who founded Celtic were not inward-looking or parochial. The connections with Ireland and Catholicism, which was the religion of the immigrant Irish, represented a straightforward reality which led to the club being created in the first place. The people involved were not against anyone or anything. Their task and the legacy that they left behind was the moulding of an institution in the image of the community from which it evolved. In that respect, the story of Celtic’s reasons for existing could not be more clear cut and if anyone, down to the present day, has difficulty with them, then it is their problem and not Celtic’s.

The Irish diaspora and its descendants within Scotland have always formed the great majority of Celtic’s support, even though most of them have long since been assimilated into Scottish society. They are augmented by large numbers of Irish people who share an empathy with the club from across the sea. In the present day, around eight per cent of Celtic season ticket holders reside in Ireland and the geographical proximity of Scotland and Ireland has made the maintenance of these close relationships relatively easy.

Perhaps if the political and religious context had been different, then the strength of Celtic’s identification with Ireland would have been diluted over the years. But Celtic represent only a small part of a much wider set of relationships which has reinforced the continuing desire on the part of the Irish community in Scotland to assert a distinctive identity. Celtic Football Club is seen by many as a symbol of this identity. The fact that divisions based on religion which exist within the island of Ireland have been reflected continuously in Scottish society over the past 120 years undoubtedly contributes to a form of tribalism of which football is merely one manifestation.

What this all boils down to is that Celtic and Ireland are permanently intertwined at every level – origins, supporters, identity. This relationship has extended over a large part of its history to ownership of the club, as personified in the present day by Dermot Desmond. It has regularly been reflected in the popularity of players who are identifiably Irish, such as Charlie Tully, Sean Fallon and Packie Bonner. It is the extra factor that, over and above his achievements, elevated Martin O’Neill in the affections of supporters. It is the reason they sing Irish songs. Occasionally, and invariably for the right reasons, the relationship has been defended by the club because to do otherwise would be to deny the proud and entirely legitimate realities of the club’s history.

Nobody who plays for Celtic or supports the club is in any way obliged to endorse or even understand these affiliations. There are a whole host of reasons that people choose to join the Celtic family and many of them have absolutely nothing to do with Ireland, either past or present. But that does not invalidate the fact that the Irish connection has been an integral part of the Celtic story from the first day of the club’s existence down to the current one – nor does it invalidate the fact that this is a connection which has played a major role within the club’s collective identity.

THE CHARITABLE ETHOS

The second strand in the DNA can be summed up by the word ‘charity’. That is why Celtic were founded in the first place – in the words of the inaugural notice seeking subscriptions to support the fledgling club: ‘The main object is to supply the East End conferences of the St Vincent de Paul Society with funds for the maintenance of the Dinner Tables of our needy children in the Missions of St Mary’s, Sacred Heart and St Michael’s. Many cases of sheer poverty are left unaided through lack of means. It is therefore with this principal object that we have set afloat the Celtic and we invite you as one of our ever-ready friends to assist in putting our new Park in proper working order for the coming football season.’

The good and great of Catholic Glasgow headed the subscription list, with Archbishop Charles Eyre’s name right at the top. The Archbishop of Glasgow explained that though he knew nothing of football [he] was always prepared to support any scheme that had, for its object, the welfare of the poor of his flock.

In those late Victorian times, it was by no means unusual for football clubs to be formed for charitable purposes. In Scotland, the particular model for Celtic was to be found in the Hibernian club which had been established in Edinburgh in 1875. The Hibs were both Irish and Catholic in origin and the purpose of the club was to raise money which was used to support a range of charitable purposes within the parishes where the Irish population was concentrated. When Hibs won the Scottish Cup in 1887, it was a triumph in which all of Scotland’s Irish Catholics shared. The post-match celebrations in Glasgow – indeed, in the St Mary’s Hall where Celtic were soon to be born – before the Hibs were allowed to return east, provided the final impetus for a parallel initiative in the East End of Glasgow. The Hibs’ secretary, John McFadden, addressed the gathering, recounted his club’s history and urged his audience to go and do likewise.

But the concept of football clubs as charitable money-raisers based on church organisations was by no means restricted to Scotland. Everton and Manchester City, for instance, were founded as church teams and Brother Walfrid’s perception of football as an excellent money-raising device for worthy causes in the days of the poor-house was by no means unique. What makes Celtic very unusual is that the charitable ethos has survived to this day and is, indeed, demanded of the club by a large proportion of its support.

The intensity of feeling on this issue has its roots in what many of the participants saw as a struggle for Celtic’s soul in the very earliest days. Most of its leading members believed that, if it was to survive, then the club had to be run on a commercial basis and as a limited company. In stark contrast to this, however, there was widespread support for Celtic remaining as a club in which all the members were equal. This division of opinion was reflected in attitudes towards the charitable imperative: the suspicion of the rank and file was that those in favour of turning the club into a company were anxious to rid themselves of the obligation to use the money raised through football for purely philanthropic purposes. And the suspicion was well justified.

There is no doubt that this was a bitterly contested issue in the early days of Celtic and that even after the battle had been won and lost, the scars took a long time to heal. The transition to a limited liability company eventually took place in 1897, but even before that, the fundamental issue had been contested and those who believed that charity had to take second place to commercial success had held sway. The history of St Mary’s School, which was published in 1963, recalled the conflict in starkly unequivocal terms: ‘Brother Walfrid, who had founded Celtic as a charitable trust, was changed by his superiors to London in August 1892 and the committee, freed from his restraining hand, ignored the end for which the club had been founded. The last contribution to the Poor Children’s Dinner Table was made at the AGM of session 1891-92. The committee, after a bitter struggle against the honest element among the team’s supporters, got their way at last and turned the club into a business with themselves as directors and shareholders.’

On any reasonable reading of history, the people who believed that Celtic could only survive and flourish as a business rather than as a charitable fundraiser were entirely justified in their analysis. There is no reason to believe that Celtic, any more than any other club that had charitable origins but then moved into a more commercial world, could have maintained its original objectives and survived, far less gone on to the great triumphs that lay ahead. When James Handley, aka Brother Clare, in his book The Celtic Story, published in 1960, described the outcome of these early debates as ‘this betrayal of a charitable trust’. Robert Kelly, then the Celtic chairman, felt moved to lay out the case for the defence. ‘We must come to the conclusion,’ he wrote, ‘that the club in its present form has over the years done more in the field of charity than it could have done had it remained in its original state’.

Nonetheless, the conflicting mind-sets have survived down to the present day. The club’s commercial operators insist that the charitable imperative has not been forgotten and that, as Kelly maintained, far more has been done for charity than could ever have been achieved by the club if it had remained on the original basis. Equally, the club’s supporters see themselves as guardians of the charitable ethos and will, when necessary, remind those who are temporarily entrusted with control of Celtic that they expect it to be maintained.

Fortunately, in recent times, there has been no need for disagreement on this point of principle. While the charitable emphasis has been stronger at some points in the club’s history than others, much of the credit for its reinvigoration in the present day must go to Fergus McCann. McCann restored it to a place of prominence in the club’s affairs and enshrined it in the formation of the Celtic Charity Fund, which raises and dispenses substantial sums through its affiliation to the club. The underlying commitment to charity is also spelt out in the club’s Social Mission Statement – in itself a rare document in the world of football.

SYMBOL OF PRIDE

Alongside charity, the primary reason for Celtic’s founding was to enhance the status of the Irish within Glasgow and the West of Scotland. They thus became a symbol of pride for a poor and, in many ways, oppressed community. The Irish influx into Glasgow in the 19th century probably had a bigger impact on Scotland than any other wave of immigration before or since. Not only did it add substantially to the population with all the associated implications for what was still a rudimentary social infrastructure, it also involved a profound cultural challenge based on the fact that the Irish immigrants were mainly of the Catholic faith.

Nineteenth-century Scotland took its religion extremely seriously and most of the divisions were the result of schisms within the established church based on the finer points of Calvinist doctrine. Prior to the 19th-century influx from Ireland, indigenous Scottish Catholicism was largely confined to some remote parts of the country that had not been reached by the Reformation of the 16th century. In the cities, the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ became virtually synonymous and the feuding Presbyterians could unite in their hostility to both. In 1867 Bishop John Gray, who led the Catholic mission in Scotland, advised an English visitor: The Scotch are animated by a strong hereditary hatred of Catholicity, nor is the feeling of the country favourable to Irish settlers… The religion, the history, the characters and habits of the two people show many elements not of difference but of antagonism.

The result of all this was that the immigrant Irish were, to much of the Scottish population, objects of fear, suspicion and downright hostility. Even before the famine which began in the 1840s, a higher proportion of Glasgow’s population than that of any other British city was Irish. It was not difficult for those who wished to encourage prejudice to create a hostile atmosphere when that influx accelerated in the years immediately following the famine. The Irish in Scotland, like any immigrant community, had created their own institutions and symbols of identity while also striving for status and acceptance within their adopted land. As Handley wrote: ‘The Catholic parish of those days was a self-contained unit, and in the work and leisure of that homogenous body the local teachers played an important role.’ At the same time, the more visionary leaders of the community aspired to integration into – and acceptance by – the society in which they now lived. A football club was ideally placed to fill both of these roles and the fact that Celtic enjoyed immediate success on the pitch meant that the club rapidly became the most prominent public expression of the Irish in Glasgow. By so doing, it also attracted some of the opprobrium that was directed against the Irish population in general.

At the half-yearly meeting in 1892, the pride in the achievement was ably articulated by Thomas Flood, who proposed the adoption of the secretary’s report. He declared: Irishmen in Scotland in past years have been made little of because they have few of their number in business or in positions of responsibility. But they have lately demonstrated that not only in commercial life can they be successful, but they have proved the possession on their part of an amount of pluck and perseverance by the manner in which they have risen to the top of the ladder in the football world. The Celtic team is the pride of the Celtic race in England, Ireland and Scotland. Flood’s seconder on that occasion saw Celtic’s success as proof of the ability of Irishmen to manage any concern in which they took an interest.

This position as standard-bearers for a poor, sometimes oppressed, community has never entirely gone away, largely because religious discrimination and prejudice in Scottish society have never entirely gone away. All of Celtic’s high points over the generations have, to some extent, been seen as triumphs over adversity and correspondingly as expressions of success and achievement not only for the club but for the whole community from whence they came.

Such sentiments undoubtedly reached a crescendo when Celtic won the European Cup in 1967. The tens of thousands who lined the streets of Glasgow to welcome home a group of players who had all been born within a 30-mile radius of the city were celebrating something utterly unique in football – but at the same time the near-unbelievable success of an institution which had its roots so deep in a community which was still characterised by hardship and was still familiar with prejudice and hostility.

OPEN-DOOR POLICY

But while Celtic’s origins were both Catholic and Irish, it is an equally significant part of the club’s make-up and pride that it was also, from the outset, open to all. Indeed, as the decades advanced, that became not only an essential, honourable characteristic in its own right; it was also the crucial distinguishing factor when comparisons were drawn with Rangers, the other major Glasgow club, which – right up until the mid-1980s – pursued a policy of religious discrimination in the employment of players.

Celtic’s decision not to set itself up as a Catholic exclusivist club was confirmed at a very early juncture. While the success of Hibernian provided much of the inspiration for Celtic’s founding, there were crucial respects in which the model that had been established by the Edinburgh club was not followed – not least of which was rejection of the name itself, which would have been a much more definitive statement of Catholicism and Irishness. In pursuit of their wider objectives, Celtic’s founders also assiduously resisted any direct association with either the Young Men’s Catholic Society or the Temperance Movement.

The origins of Celtic always meant that they were likely to have a preponderance of players from an Irish Catholic background and, by extension, that youngsters of that identity would have an ambition to play for the club. But the fact that the door was always open to others has in many ways been vital to the evolution and reputation of Celtic. For one thing, it has meant that people of all creeds – and none – could rationally support the club, whereas it would have been perverse for anyone to support a club from which their co-religionists were debarred from playing. In purely practical terms, it also meant that Celtic did not cut themselves off from the rest of society as a source of players. Indeed, Jock Stein once said that, offered two players of equal ability, he would sign the Protestant rather than the Catholic because he knew Rangers could not sign the Catholic! Celtic have never suffered from that self-imposed handicap and many of the club’s most distinguished sons down the years have come from religious backgrounds that are not that of the preponderance of the club’s support.

PARANOID? US?

Celtic’s detractors would certainly include paranoia as an element in the club’s DNA. This would be based on the charge that Celtic are prone to suspecting conspiracies and hostile intentions against them, when no such motivations exist. The use of the word ‘paranoia’ implies a degree of irrationality in such suspicions. On that basis, it becomes easy for the commentators who accuse Celtic of paranoia to thus categorise and dismiss each manifestation of the condition. There is a crucial difference, however, between such an irrational mind-set and the perfectly well-founded belief that there have always been individuals within football, and wider Scottish society, who have a significant bias against Celtic and all that the club is perceived by them to stand for.

The problem for those who prefer the paranoia theory is that, with some regularity, episodes occur which refresh the evidence of an institutional bias against Celtic within the affairs of Scottish football. One of the most striking of these in recent times led to the downfall of James Farry, chief executive of the Scottish Football Association, and long the object of suspicions among Celtic and the club’s supporters. Fergus McCann, when he became managing director in 1994, immediately recognised Farry as an individual hostile to his club, but any suggestions of this were met with the usual cat-calls of paranoia.

Ultimately, though, McCann was proved right when Farry was dismissed by the SFA after it emerged that he had deliberately delayed the registration of a Celtic player, Jorge Cadete, so that he would be ineligible to play in a Scottish Cup semi-final tie against Rangers, although some have attributed this more to personal animosity between Farry and McCann.

Until such times as episodes like this no longer have any place in Scottish football, everyone associated with Celtic will reserve the right to maintain a healthy scepticism about the decisions that affect the interests of the club, both on and off the park. To some, that will sound like paranoia, bordering on a persecution complex. To those who have followed the evolution of Celtic within Scottish society, it will appear as a statement of the blindingly obvious.

There is no immediate prospect of these two positions being reconciled so let us just say, in the interests of compromise, that both Celtic and their supporters will remain alert to the possibility of prejudice.

LOYALTY WITHOUT BOUNDARY

For all the reasons inherent in the club’s founding and subsequent development, Celtic have all along attracted an extraordinary level of commitment from those who follow their fortunes and so loyalty must be included as a vital strain in the DNA. In the good times, it is easy to forget that there have also been periods of famine when the team delivered little in the way of honour or glory. Not a single league title in the decade from 1926, the escape from relegation in 1948, the dismal Fifties, interrupted only by the Double of 1954 and the 7-1 rout of Rangers in 1957, the low years of the early 1960s before the arrival of Jock Stein. And then there were the upheavals of the 1990s prior to the arrival of Martin O’Neill. Through thick and thin, the Celtic support has remained constant and their love of the club has transcended the short-term disappointments.

Glen Daly’s ‘The Celtic Song’, in its pristine form, claims that Celtic supporters don’t care if we win, lose or draw. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet the belief in better things just around the corner has always transcended short-term pessimism – and has invariably been rewarded.

It has been a longstanding feature of Celtic’s make-up that they have often been able to pull rabbits out of the hat even when their fortunes were at a low ebb. The Coronation Cup victory of 1953 – with victories over Arsenal, Manchester United and finally a Hibs team at the peak of their powers – was improbable enough. A few years later, one of the most famous scorelines in Celtic’s history – the 7-1 victory over Rangers in the League Cup final of 1957 – was an even more unexpected bolt from nowhere. The Double of the Centenary season could have been scripted in Hollywood.

The loyalty of the Celtic support has, in more recent times, taken on an international dimension and has won recognition throughout Europe. Celtic probably carry the biggest travelling support of any regular participant in the European club competitions and this determination to follow the team wherever they play reached its crescendo in Seville when an astonishing cavalcade of 80,000 fans descended upon the Spanish city. Even in defeat, there was recognition of what the Celtic supporters had contributed to the occasion in the form of UEFA and FIFA awards for their extraordinarily loyal and sporting behaviour.

From a wider perspective than the one which culminated in disappointment over the narrow defeat by Porto, it was as significant an honour as any achieved in the club’s history – recognising Celtic’s ability to lead such a vast number of people to a European city and emerge from the experience with nothing but praise and goodwill. Crucially, the loyalty of the vast majority of supporters to the Celtic institution extends to pride in ensuring that its good name will not be besmirched, at home or away.

WINNING WITH STYLE

Success is a big part of the club’s DNA but so too is the Celtic way of playing the beautiful game. That is a term which encompasses a belief in attacking football, in entertaining the crowd, and including in every Celtic line-up at least a couple of pure virtuosos – the Tommy McInallys and Charlie Tullys of the past, the Shunsuke Nakamuras and Aiden McGeadys of more recent times. Celtic supporters will always judge teams and performances by more than just results. They also want to see the style of play with which the club has always been associated. It was uncannily appropriate that, in winning the European Cup, Celtic simultaneously exposed the dull limitations of catenaccio, the ultimate style of defensive football played by Inter Milan under Helenio Herrera. Before the game, Jock Stein had told Hugh McIlvanney of The Observer: We don’t just want to win this cup. We want to win playing good football, to make neutrals glad we’ve won it, glad to remember how we did it. His every wish was fulfilled and his objectives are reflected in the philosophy of every Celtic supporter past, present and future.

So there you have the seven main strands of the Celtic DNA – Ireland, charity, pride of a poor community, open to all, alert to prejudice, loyalty, and attacking and entertaining football. The research will surely continue and everyone who reads the Celtic Opus will have their own suggestions to add to the genetic mix. But the one thing we can all agree on is that – whatever the make-up of the DNA – the finished article, Celtic Football Club, is in turn a significant, influential part of our own lives, identity and outlook.

IN THE BEGINNING

Birth of a dream

19th-century Glasgow was a city in turmoil, but out of the struggle was to grow one of the world’s greatest football clubs…

I

n 1888, a few months after the establishment of Celtic Football and Athletic Club had first been mooted at a meeting the previous November, the magnificent new City Chambers of Glasgow were formally opened by Queen Victoria. The lavish internal decoration, imposing facade and marble staircases were meant to project an identity of civic success, overwhelming confidence and Glasgow’s status as the Second City of the Empire. In the same year, Glasgow’s first International Exhibition took place and attracted many thousands of visitors who marvelled at the cultural and industrial displays, all trumpeting civic progress and unprecedented economic achievement.

There was, indeed, much to be proud of. Glasgow by the latter part of the 19th century had become a global player in both trade and manufacturing. The city and its satellite towns in the western lowlands of Scotland produced half of all British marine engines, a third of all railway locomotives and rolling stock, a third of shipping tonnage and around a fifth of all steel in the UK. On the eve of the Great War, the Clyde shipyards launched a remarkable 20 per cent of world tonnage, a record significantly greater than all German construction at the time. At the heart of this heavy industrial complex was the huge range of engineering specialisms in pumps, marine engines, railway rolling stock and a host of other products for world markets. Glasgow built more locomotives than any centre in Europe, around 800 in peak years, destined for customers in India, South America and the Continent. In civil engineering, too, the city’s reputation was high and symbolised by the career of entrepreneurs such as Sir William Arrol, builder of the Forth, Tay and Tower Bridges in addition to many other projects worldwide.

Mirroring the city’s economic achievements was its extraordinary growth in population. Armies of men and women flooded into Glasgow from the farms and villages of the rural Lowlands, the Highlands and Ireland to satisfy the voracious appetites of the great staple industries for both unskilled and skilled labour. For despite the growth in mechanisation, human effort was still all-important in most economic sectors. In the 1830s there were already more than a quarter of a million Glaswegians. By 1911 the figure was around 784,000 – a threefold increase. In 1914, some 700,000 men, women and children were crammed into the city’s three central square miles. It was the densest concentration of people anywhere in Europe. Glasgow was also a city of migrants: in the 1880s most of those who lived and worked in the city had been born outside its boundaries.

This mighty industrial metropolis produced wealth on a scale never before seen in Scotland’s history. The primary manifestation of this was the revolution in the city’s architecture. A new urban form developed of suburban terraced villas interspersed with gardens, in middle-class areas, and imposing churches and parks. The city’s central core became renowned for buildings constructed on an increasingly lavish and sumptuous scale and remain to this day as wonderful monuments to Victorian architecture. The institutions of a vibrant and competitive capitalism were reflected in the grandiose head offices built for banks, insurance companies, legal firms and shipping corporations.

The rampant individualism and status-seeking ethos of this new urban society demanded more and more ornamentation, decoration and display. This was even reflected in death, as illustrated by the competitive tomb-building at the city’s burial ground for the families of the elite, the Necropolis. Modelled on Père-Lachaise in Paris, it stood beside the medieval cathedral.

THE OTHER GLASGOW

This was the Glasgow of the merchants, industrialists, financiers, lawyers and professionals who had reaped handsome rewards from the city’s economic miracle. But there was another Glasgow. The world of the artisan, the unskilled labourer and the domestic servant was inhabited by the vast majority of Glaswegians in the 1880s. This was a world where descent into poverty and destitution, even for skilled workers, was a constant threat and a reality for many. Glasgow was a city of profound paradox. The new affluence often existed cheek by jowl with appalling living and housing standards. A mere few minutes’ walk from the newly opened, majestic City Chambers could be found some of the worst slums in Europe.

The evidence of deep social and class divisions was everywhere. In Glasgow in 1886, a third of families lived in one room, many bereft of furniture. The living space the middle classes took for granted was impossible in such overcrowded conditions – no privacy, no room to play, work or escape the inevitable tensions of family life. It was no wonder that so much of working-class existence was lived on the streets or, for the menfolk, in the pubs. There was often not enough space even to die in dignity. One infant in every five born in Glasgow did not live until the end of their first year. As the city’s Medical Officer of Health reported grimly of what has been termed the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’: Their little bodies are laid on a table or a dresser so as to be somewhat out of the way of their brothers and sisters who play and eat in their ghastly company.

The truth is that Glasgow’s industrial success and the lot of so many of its citizens were two sides of the same coin. The city was a low-wage economy, dependent for many of its economic achievements on cheap labour as much as on skills and acquired expertise. It was reckoned that nearly 27 per cent of the male workforce earned no more than £1 per week, estimated to be the absolute minimum necessary for life. In addition, employment was tied in with the fluctuations of the global market place. In shipbuilding, for instance, volatile trading conditions became even more acute in the 1880s. Sickness, accidents at work and, above all, old age could all have a devastating impact on lives which even at the best of times were lived precariously at the margin.

Nonetheless, some relative improvements, even for the working-class masses of the urban population, should be noted. The age of the epidemics of typhus and cholera was over by the 1880s as a result of the provision of clean water and better sewage disposal. Here Glasgow had led the way and set a pioneering example to the whole of Britain with its spectacular scheme for drawing water from Loch Katrine, some 50 miles away in the Trossachs.

Then there was the fall in the price of basic food costs as cheap grain and meat imports from the USA and Australasia became more abundant. This in turn led to some increase in real incomes for the majority. Some workers, therefore, had a little more spare cash, but also the opportunities to spend it as shorter working hours became more common.

A major advance was the Saturday half-holiday which was becoming widespread by the 1880s and was the key to the development of football as a mass spectator sport. While the crisis in the city’s housing remained a scandal well into the 20th century, other aspects of the urban infrastructure improved dramatically. Glasgow forged an international reputation as the centre of municipal socialism. The city expanded ownership into gas supply, public lighting, tramways, libraries, museums, public baths, parks and art galleries. By the 1880s Glasgow had more municipal services than Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen combined and attracted a stream of admiring visitors (and potential imitators), especially from the USA where the Glaswegian approach was widely regarded as the model for urban development of the future.

But massive problems remained. The River Clyde was still an open sewer; one informed commentator described Glasgow as a semi-asphyxiated city as the smoke poured daily from its countless coal fires, furnaces and chimneys. Above all, slum housing and chronic overcrowding were still the norm.

Although the 19th century was an age of mass migrations throughout Europe, no other country could match the sheer scale of the exodus from Ireland. As one historian put it: Emigration became part of the expected cycle of life, growing up in Ireland meant preparing to leave it. While the Irish settled in virtually every English-speaking country in the world, Scotland attracted only a small minority – around eight per cent of all Irish emigrants in the 80 years to 1921. But their impact on Scottish, and especially Glasgow, society was nevertheless very significant. The Catholic Irish were Scotland’s main immigrant group before 1900, vastly outnumbering the Italians, Jews and Lithuanians (who together numbered around 40,000). Already by the 1850s there were around a quarter of a million Irish-born in Scotland, and the immigration continued on a significant scale until the 1920s, when it started to decline. Indeed, even in narrow numerical terms, the Irish migration to Scotland was more important than the movement to England. Only 2.9 per cent of the populations of England and Wales were Irish in 1851, compared to 7.2 per cent in Scotland. While Irish migration to England was dropping steadily in the years immediately before the First World War, in Scotland the tide of new migrants showed little sign of ebbing. In 1901 there were still 205,000 Irish-born, little different from the 207,000 who had settled in the years immediately after the Famine. One quarter of Glasgow’s population were first-generation Irish in that year.

The Irish who settled in Scotland in this period came overwhelmingly from the historic province of Ulster. It followed, therefore, that though most were Catholic, a substantial minority (about a quarter to a fifth) of all immigrants in the middle decades of the 19th century were Protestant, the direct descendants of those Presbyterian Scots who had settled in Ulster in the 17th century. For obvious cultural, racial and religious reasons, they were much more easily assimilated in Scotland than the Catholic Irish. The regional origin of the migrant streams was deeply significant because it meant that the tribal hatreds of Ulster were transferred to the industrial districts of Scotland and factional fighting between Orange and Green sympathisers became a routine feature of life in the west in the 19th century.

The Irish made a substantial contribution to the development of Glasgow’s economy. Friedrich Engels claimed in 1843 that the progress of the British industrial revolution would have been impeded but for the labour power of the immigrants from across the Irish Sea. Engels was talking particularly of the Lancashire towns, but his comment was, perhaps, even more valid for Glasgow, where the Irish made up a higher proportion of the population and where an abundant supply of unskilled and semi-skilled labour was crucial to its industrial success. They sometimes gained an unsavoury reputation as strike-breakers, hired by unscrupulous employers to break the unions in the first few decades of the 19th century. In the long run, however, they were complementary to the native labour force, willing and able to take on the menial and unskilled jobs vital to the development of industrial and urban society that were not always attractive to many Scots. Young Irishmen, some of whom were working in Scotland only to earn enough to cover their passage to the land of real opportunity across the Atlantic, formed a great mobile army of navvies, moving across the length and breadth of the country, completing the harbours, railways, canals, bridges and reservoirs which became the physical sinews of the new economic order.

At the time, however, the Irish did not receive much credit for helping to sustain the Scottish economic miracle. They were alien in terms of religion, speech and culture, massed at the bottom end of the labour market. They often attracted vociferous criticism for burdening ratepayers and the Poor Law with hordes of shiftless paupers, and the scapegoats for every conceivable social ill, from drunkenness to the epidemic diseases of the larger towns. Not surprisingly, many of the immigrants retreated into themselves, became introverted, pursued a separate identity in Scotland and warmly embraced the Catholic faith which alone provided them with spiritual consolation and a sense of social worth in a hostile land. They could not relate to a Scotland which, as a stateless nation, derived its collective identity from Presbyterianism, a creed whose adherents regarded Catholicism as at best superstitious error and at worst as a satanic force led by the ‘Man of Sin’ himself, the Pope.

Catholic identity was strengthened as never before in the half century after the arrival of the immigrants fleeing from the Great Famine. Even when they were virtually overwhelmed by the numbers under their care, the priests, who were also often from Ireland, continued to identify with the plight of the poor. The clergy considered it an obligation to visit the sick and provide the last rites to all who wished them, though some buckled under the strain of the task. From the pennies of the poor and eventually, by way of loans, from the tiny immigrant class of pawnbrokers, publicans, shopkeepers and ham-and-egg merchants, a formidable parish network slowly came to be established. By 1878 the number of priests in Glasgow had risen to 134 and further increased to 234 in 1902. The parishes expanded over this period from 60 to 84, and a total of 44 new chapels were also built. While some of the Protestant churches were arguably losing touch with the urban poor at this time, the Catholic clergy were forging ever closer contracts with them. A new social Catholicism was emerging which created almost an alternative community for the Irish immigrants and their descendants.

Intermarriage with Protestant Scots, the quickest way to assimilation, became less common than it had been earlier in the 19th century and was made more difficult still by the Vatican’s rigorous Ne Temere decree of 1908. Catholic social agencies, such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, created to help the poor, and the League of the Cross, established to combat the evils of drink, grew up in most parishes. It became common to open halls adjacent to chapels so that Catholic young men and women could find acceptable recreation in the evenings and mix only with those of their own faith.

As is well known, Celtic Football Club was first mooted by the Marist Brother Walfrid to help feed and clothe the poor of the parishes in the East End of Glasgow. But he was also worried about the dangers of young Catholics meeting Protestants after work and by the fear that Protestant soup kitchens might tempt them into apostasy. The new football club would not only help the poor but also keep young Catholics together in their leisure time.

NEW CATHOLIC SCHOOLS

A major effort was invested in the provision of Catholic schooling. The 1872 Education Act made education compulsory for all children; but the Catholic schools continued to rely mainly on voluntary contributions, which in turn led to an enormous and continuing fundraising campaign drawing on weekly offerings, collections, bazaars, fairs, concerts and soirèes. All of this also powerfully enhanced community pride and identity. By 1876 there were 171 certificated teachers and 357 pupil-teachers in 192 institutions serving over 20,600 pupils at day schools and a further 3,300 at night schools. It was a remarkable achievement by an extremely poor community. Yet even these sacrifices were not enough to prevent the Catholic schools sector lagging behind the public system in terms of quality of buildings, resources and numbers of teaching staff. This handicap, together with the constraints of poverty and discrimination in the job market, helps to explain why upward social mobility among the Irish-Scots was still very limited before 1914.

At the same time as the Catholic ethos was becoming more developed, the ‘Irishness’ of the community was also becoming more pronounced. At first sight this seems strange, because the proportion of new immigrants was steadily falling and many of the Irish-Scots, the second, third and fourth generations, had never set foot in Ireland. But they, like the rest of the global Irish diaspora, were influenced by the upsurge in Irish nationalism, culminating in the foundation of the Home Rule Movement in 1870 which campaigned for the repeal of the 1800 Act of the Union with Ireland and Great Britain and the creation of a parliament in Dublin. Branches of the organisation were soon established throughout the urban and industrial districts. Many of the Catholic clergy were also sympathetic to Home Rule and often spoke at Home Rule meetings. Until the 1850s the mainly Highland and north-east leadership of the Church was reluctant to accept too many Irish priests for fear of establishing an Irish clerical imperial ascendancy in Scotland. But the desperate shortage of priests after the Famine immigrations caused a change of heart and, by the 1870s, 20 of the 167 clergy in the western district in and around Glasgow were Irish, many of them with strong nationalist sympathies.

At the local branch level, the main function of the movement from the 1880s was to mobilise the Irish communities in general elections behind pro-Home Rule candidates. Usually the vote was placed at the disposal of the Liberal Party, which introduced Home Rule bills in 1886, 1892 and 1912, but on occasion those candidates regarded as at all lukewarm on this single issue did not receive endorsement.

THE IRISH INFLUENCE

By 1900, then, the Irish immigrants and their descendants seem to have developed as a distinct and introverted ethnic community in Scotland with their own chapels, schools, social and welfare organisations and political agenda. Links were further fostered with the old country via bodies such as the Gaelic Athletic Association, The Gaelic League and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Irish musical festivals, language classes and lectures on Irish history drew large attendances.

The immigrants also had their own football teams. The first, Edinburgh Hibernian, was founded in 1875 and was quickly followed by several ‘Harps’, ‘Shamrocks’ and ‘Emeralds’, each attached to a local area. The proudest sporting symbol of the community soon became Celtic which, after a string of early successes following its first game in 1888, went on to win an unprecedented six successive Scottish championships, from 1905 to 1910. The origins of Celtic were unambiguously Irish Catholic. The first patron was the Archbishop of Glasgow, Archbishop Eyre, while Michael Davitt, the Irish Nationalist leader, laid the first sod of Irish shamrocks at the new Celtic Park in March 1892 where several of the team’s officials were well-known supporters of the nationalist cause. Celtic, therefore, emerged out of this new community being forged in Glasgow, reflecting in its early years the characteristic mix of loyalty to Catholicism, Irish patriotism and ethnic solidarity.

The ghost of Brother Walfrid

A spooky encounter at Celtic Park provides an illuminating insight into the club’s origins…

H

e nearly got up to leave. And then he stayed. Got comfortable again. Spread himself out like a dead fish on a table. I’ve read Proust and poetry, says the old man, who seems to have absconded from another life, and none of ye will listen to a word I’m saying. You’ll just no’ listen.

It’s a bright and chilly autumn day. The old man, drowned in a gnarled suit that might have been sewn together from dead foxes, is now anchored on the steps of Celtic Park, beside the statue of Sligo-born Marist brother Brother Walfrid which has been there, bible in hand, since November 2005. Amid the bustle the old man pinches the front of his jacket. He takes off his hat and pats down his chest. Diabetes and a heart condition. A bottle of Asda’s fruit squash sits beside him.

His hair is dark as a Victorian chimney, but fine as rabbit’s fur His eyes are rheumy and the colour of sagebrush. He has a nose like a walnut whirl and an Old Testament beard – flecked with crumbs from a previous day’s supper – that warms his face. Muttering long, edgy monosyllables to anyone who might listen, though most don’t, he occasionally he adds a heartfelt sentence. He smells of deep fried fish and square sliced.

Minutes earlier I watched him place some daffodils – deep lines in large hands for every day he has lived – neatly around the plinth. A form of devotion. Making sure he gets the flower arrangement just right. Comports himself with dignity. You catch a scrap of conversation. He uses phrases like cold as a frigidaire. He’s been on the treadmill of worry for some time.

Comes up here every other week from Dumfries, he says. Where he’s buried, he says. Walks most of the way. I like walking, he shouts over to me. One day is pretty much like the other. Sometimes I sneak on the boats from Rothesay to Glasgow. Trips to Kinlochbervie too.

I nod my head.

But I leave my troubles at the bottom of the statue, he says, quick to open up when someone expresses interest in him. Touch the tips of it with both hands. We all have troubles, can’t help it, so I just hang them up on the statue every time I come here. Then when I leave I pick them up again. He looks at me. Funny thing is, when I wander round Celtic Park and then try to pick them up again there aren’t nearly as many troubles as I remember hanging up a few hours before.

I edge a little closer, listening while he tells his tale. You just know there’s a tale…

Watch, he instructs, before taking his hand and placing it on his knee. The hand seems to pass right through.

You don’t believe me? he asks, striking a pensive pose. I’m a ghost. The ghost of that fella over there. Brother Walfrid. Then he laughs. A squad of pigeons threaten overhead.

We sit for a minute saying nothing, like two men tied to a post waiting on a firing squad. The sun and wind has changed him, he says. The sparkle that used to be in his eyes has been taken away leaving them empty. The red has gone from his cheeks. He is thin as spaghetti. It takes a lot to make him smile. Once, a long time ago, people could see him. When he held their conversations it was like a fire embering inside him. He used to love the sound of his own laughter.

Nice and straight. He still has his teeth. Rough hands, though, rough and hard like pre-stressed concrete. Got them from his father, a crofter. He uses them to write with – two Mondays, a fortnight apart. A pair of spectacles hangs over a pocket. He has no use for sympathy and doesn’t offer explanations. Then he talks, doesn’t grunt. Ask me anything.

Let’s start with your real name? Hardly the most fecund line of inquiry, I admit.

Andrew Kerins, he replies. I was born in the village of Ballymote in County Sligo, the west of Ireland.

You look well, I tell him. For a fella born in 1840.

Not that many people even knew I was alive.

He sips tea from a polystyrene cup, then pulls at a sleeve. His feet shuffle on the ground. Funeral black brogues, three sizes too big. Both left feet. Got another pair of shoes hidden in a bag nearby. He talks excessively, like a child. Not through absence of life, but an abundance of it. The old man, spookily ageless, has lived through many melancholic seas.

Well, I feel okay. I’m 168 years old, give or take a few months. Born on May 18. I’ve been around here so long I’m like a bit of furniture. Forgot to pay the mortgage, you know. We laugh a little. A little self-advertising spin on your own story, I think, we’ve all done it.

Okay, old man, I say, you’ve got my attention. Tell me something about you.

For a few minutes, as if in penance, my companion talks of his parents, his father, John, and his mother, Elizabeth. Stalwart crofters, he says, raised Catholic in the faith of their ancestors. My childhood was The Famine, he says, when Sligo was fated to endure the bad times. My teens were poverty. We all knew great vicissitudes. But we were never embarrassed to be poor because everyone was.

Long before this Sligo had many contacts with Glasgow, with small vessels ferrying goods and people across the sea to and from the Broomielaw. Irish men seeking casual and seasonal work were regulars on the cheap ferries.

So you’re a ghost?

An uprooted Irishman, he mutters, his breath like a Clydesdale, but not by choice. Ireland is like a ghost in my life. Call it what you will. Call me Andrew. Call me a ghost. Nobody sees me anyway. A ghost is fine. Look around you, at all these people. Do you think any of them can see me? He grins again. Why can’t I be a ghost? My life is a bit like living in eternal limbo. His words ricochet through a fog of old Holborn.

Well, I say, if you are a ghost, then you’ll know when my grandmother died? He extends a concrete hand.

Jane or Elizabeth?

THE IRISH INFLUENCE

During the Great Famine of the 1840s, he tells me, many of the Irish population had fled to Britain, and a great deal of those who arrived in Scotland tried to begin new lives in the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Those that didn’t went to places like Liverpool, Manchester and London, where some of their kin were already scattered.

The majority of the incomers were Irish Catholic who were quickly alienated by the predominant Protestant majority. From a different culture, wearing different clothes and different voices these Irish people – alienated by customs, nationality, politics, religion and status – took any job they could find.

Self-sufficiency quickly became part of our armoury, he says, touching memories the way a child touches hedges as he walks down the street. The incoming people spoke in a tongue that was both ancient and unwelcome. They told stories of children, born at night, in peril from birds. They read lives in tea and foretold death in cups. To the Scots we were strangers. Itinerants and misfits. There were children arrived here so young they still had the blood on them.

Jobs were already scarce and insecure in a changing industrial society. What better