The Ghosts of Cathkin Park E-Book

Michael McEwan

• Herausgeber: Arena Sport
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 447

Beschreibung

The summer of 1967 was Scottish football's finest hour. Celtic won the European Cup. Rangers reached the final of the European Cup Winners' Cup. Kilmarnock got to the semis of the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup. Scotland defeated world champions England at Wembley. It was the best of times. With one exception. Third Lanark Athletic Club, one of the country's oldest and most successful football teams, a founder member of the Scottish Football Association, and to date one of only four teams to defeat both Rangers and Celtic in the Scottish Cup Final, played its final game. And hardly anybody seemed to notice. Why? Michael McEwan brings rich archival research together with interviews with the key surviving players in the Third Lanark squad from that final season, as well as opposition players and other relevant figures from the era.  Over 50 years on, the demise of Third Lanark remains one of Scottish football's darkest hours – and, by ludicrous coincidence, it occurred in the midst of one of its brightest. 

Leseprobe

THE GHOSTS OF CATHKIN PARK

THE GHOSTS OF CATHKIN PARK

THE INSIDE STORY OF THIRD LANARK’S DEMISE

MICHAEL McEWAN

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2021 by

ARENA SPORT

An imprint of Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.arenasportbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Michael McEwan, 2021

ISBN: 9781909715981

eBook ISBN: 9781788853149

The right of Michael McEwan to be identified as the authorof this work has been asserted by him in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without theexpress written permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Designed and typeset by Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh

www.polarispublishing.com

Printed in Great Britain by Clays, St Ives

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PROLOGUE

1: BUSBY’S GONNAE GET YE!

2: LA VIE EST BELLE

3: HARMONY AND GOODWILL

4: NO CONFIDENCE

5: GOD HELP THEM

6: PAINT IS CHEAPER

7: DOMESTIC ABYSS

8: BACARDI AND COKE

9: A MOST ELEGANT DEVIL

10: WE MAY NOT HAVE EUSEBIO

11: THE DAY OF THE HURRICANE

12: THEY’LL HAVE A GOOD SEASON

13: A SOUND YOU NEVER FORGET

14: WHAT ARE WE LIKE?

15: WE’RE NO’ PLAYIN’

16: DISMAL JIMMIES

17: GOOD OLD BOBBY

18: HE COULD BARELY WALK

19: GROWN MEN HUGGING AND KISSING

20: FOOLISH TO SAY ANYTHING

21: THE WHITE KNIGHT

22: HELP FROM THE DEVIL HIMSELF

23: HOW

24: A COMPLEX AND STRAIGHTFORWARD MAN

25: WHY

26: HINDSIGHT

27: HI-HI, THEY’RE SHOUTING

28: WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX D

APPENDIX E

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For Juliet and Sadie.

“Life is short,art long,

opportunity fleeting,experience treacherous,judgement difficult.”

Hippocrates

“Some people think football is a matter of life and death.I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”

Bill Shankly

FOREWORD

Glasgow has long been divided into colours. Appropriate, really, when you consider the literal translation of its name: Dear Green Place.

In the east end of the city, you’ll find its green-and-white contingent courtesy of the so-clad Celtic Football Club. Over in Ibrox and on the opposite side of the Clyde – the serpentine river that snakes through the city centre – the dominant colour is the royal blue of their bitter Old Firm rivals, Rangers.

Partick Thistle have provided lashings of red and yellow since 1876, first in their eponymous home district and, since 1908, in Maryhill, just to the north of the city.

Then there’s the monochromatic black and white of Queen’s Park in the south-side, the oldest football club in Scotland. The oldest in the world, in fact, outside of England and Wales.

Mix in the colours of clubs in the outlying suburbs of the city – the red and white of both Clyde and Airdrieonians, for example, or the red and yellow of Albion Rovers – and you have a truly kaleidoscopic palette.

Since 1967, however, it has been without a hugely significant swatch: the deep, rich scarlet of Third Lanark.

One of the founder members of the Scottish Football Association, Third Lanark have fascinated me ever since I moved to Glasgow in the mid-nineties as a football-crazy 12-year-old. My interest deepened when I discovered that its ground, Cathkin Park, remains in place to this day, maintained by the local council as a designated piece of green-belt open space in the otherwise concrete and red sandstone jungle that dominates the city’s south side.

For a while, the club’s story existed as little more than a curiosity in the back of my mind. That is until the collapse of Rangers in 2012 prompted me to take a deeper look at the city’s original ‘ghost club’. On further investigation, I discovered an intricate tale that bore some remarkable parallels to the demise of the Ibrox giants. But there was more. The wider context of Thirds’ untimely death revealed quite a staggering juxtaposition. The summer of 1967 was, by common consent, the finest few months in the history of Scottish football. People talk of ‘golden ages’ to describe special moments in time. That doesn’t do justice to what that year meant for football in Scotland. Platinum: that would be much more like it.

Celtic winning the European Cup. Rangers reaching the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Kilmarnock making it to the last four of the other Continental competition of the day, the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup. And, of course, Scotland beating the ‘Auld Enemy’ and reigning world champions England at Wembley. For the vast majority of fans in this fitbaw-daft wee country, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times, however, for the loyal but long-suffering followers of Third Lanark, a proud and once successful club.

There are several excellent books that document the history of Thirds, but what has been missing, until now, has been a thorough and detailed account of how and why the club died. Or, as some people put it, was murdered. Questions abound but answers have been in short supply. That was the starting point for The Ghosts of Cathkin Park. A desire to find out more. An urge to give some kind of explanation for why and how the ‘Hi-Hi’, as they were known, are no more.

Over the past two years, I’ve researched Third Lanark’s story as thoroughly as possible, conducting countless hours’ worth of interviews with former players, those who played against them, fans, journalists and more. Also, for the first-ever time, you will get to read thoughts and opinions straight from the family at the heart of the club’s quietus.

Above all else, what follows is a cautionary tale that football fans everywhere ought to pay close heed to. We all like to believe that our clubs are invincible institutions, impervious and invulnerable to whatever toxic forces might try to storm their gates.

That’s the idea, right? The reality is much different. The truth is that the sanctity of most, if not all, football clubs exists only as an idea, a quixotic, rose-tinted vision that blinds the capacity for rational thinking among their followers. What most fans fail – or choose not – to see is the constant threat of jeopardy. Football is more than sport. It’s business, and big business at that. As such, its clubs are as exposed to the same peculiarities and market fluctuations as any other organisation. They operate underneath the continuous, menacing presence of the sword of Damocles. The question isn’t if the hair will ever break. It’s when.

The fate of Third Lanark could realistically befall any club, no matter how big or small, rich or poor, successful or not. Both of Glasgow’s footballing giants, Celtic and Rangers, have had well-documented fights for survival in the last 30 years. Clyde and Partick Thistle, too. Peril is ubiquitous. You never know the day when the goals will dry up and the singing will cease, leaving in their place nothing but echoes and memories and relics and ghosts.

It is indeed a beautiful game but, like all beauty, it exists in the eye of the beholder. Ugly influences are scarcely ever more than a brushstroke away.

Enjoy the book.

Michael McEwanSeptember 2021

PROLOGUE

IT’S QUIET. THAT’S the first thing you notice. Less than four miles from the centre of Glasgow on a sunny summer’s Saturday afternoon, but it might as well be midnight on a winter’s eve in St Kilda. It’s hidden, too. Largely obscured from view by tall trees, high-rise flats and the invisible, indomitable cloak of time.

How did it get so late so soon?

It wasn’t always this way. Every other Saturday, little over half a century ago, this place, Cathkin Park, bulged and rocked and rolled with supporters cheering on Third Lanark Athletic Club. “Hi! Hi! Hi!” they would chant in glorious, guttural unison, the song itself a throwback to a bygone era. According to club legend, it was during a match in the late 1890s that one of Thirds’ defenders kicked the ball so high out of the ground that the crowd started to scream “High, High, High!” The cry endured and, in time, became an anthem, an exaltation, a paean of sorts to the players who punctuated Glasgow’s green and blue divide with lashings of red.

Make no mistake: Third Lanark AC were a hugely important part of the city’s footballing fabric. They predated Rangers by ten months and Celtic by 16 years. They were old before the Old Firm was new. And this place, Cathkin Park, was their home.

Was.

Today, large chunks of crumbling, dilapidated terracing are almost all that remains of the club. Trees have grown through what’s left of the stands. Moss and muck cover the concrete steps like propagated gift wrap. Vines and weeds have coiled around the metal crush barriers, constricting them as they continue to stand in defiant guard over an empty pasture of a pitch.

A field of dreams reduced to nothing more than a meadow of memories.

And yet Cathkin Park is no footprint in the sand. The tides of time can’t take it out. They’ve tried. Oh, by goodness, they’ve tried. But to no avail. The ground has lasted rather than survived but it is still there, abandoned but unyielding, a curious link to Scottish football’s most fertile age.

There is something undeniably eerie, spectral even, about this place. It is as though the goals, the songs, the agricultural tackles and the improbable saves fill the air around you, hiding in plain sight, suspended in perpetuity on some parallel existential plain. They can’t see or hear us, nor us them, but they are there and they are real. Or so it seems. So it feels.

It’s haunting all right, a place once full of passion and glory and fight and fury, now withered and weathered and worn.

A police car pierces the silence, the shrill note of its siren bending and blaring as it tears along Prospecthill Road. Other sounds soon follow. A dog yelps impatiently as its owner, just coming into view at the far end of the pitch, prepares to hurl a tennis ball for it to chase. This particular ball won’t go high, high, high out of the ground, though. No, those days are past now.

Skulking around the corner of the old terrace, a group of teenagers are going nowhere fast. One of them is clutching a smartphone blasting out the tinny, high-pitched tones of the latest Sam Smith track. A different anthem for a different time and a different crowd; a crowd seemingly indifferent, oblivious to the sacred soil beneath their feet.

This is what it must feel like to be extinct.

Across the city, Rangers have just put a fourth goal past ten-man Dundee. Glenn Middleton has scored and it’s easy street on Edmiston Drive. It’s less than 24 hours since Celtic have been held to a goalless draw in Paisley by newly promoted St Mirren. They’re calling it the ‘Steven Gerrard Effect’ and, for some at least, it feels as though football in Glasgow – Scotland, even – is in the early throes of a resurgence.

But not here.

Not in this place.

Not in Cathkin Park.

Third Lanark is long since dead. Murdered, some say, by one of its own and mourned by far too few.

How did it get so late so soon?

ONE

BUSBY’S GONNAE GET YE!

DREW BUSBY SCORED goals.

That’s what he did and he did it well. Very well. Prolifically, even. In a career that spanned more than two decades, ‘The Buzzbomb’ found the net over 140 times. Partick Thistle, Airdrieonians, Heart of Midlothian and Barrow; Greenock Morton, Vale of Leven and Queen of the South; even a Canadian outfit by the name of Toronto Blizzard. Busby played and scored for them all.

For Hearts fans who are old enough to remember, his goal in a 4-1 trouncing of Edinburgh rivals Hibernian in September 1973 is still a popular topic of conversation in the Tynecastle Arms. So, too, his winner ten days later against Everton at Goodison Park in the Texaco Cup. And that’s saying nothing of the brace he bagged in a 5-1 demolition of Lokomotive Leipzig in a European Cup Winners’ Cup tie at Tynecastle in 1976, a night regarded as one of the greatest in Hearts’ history.

For his predatory instincts in front of goal and his no-nonsense, tough-tackling commitment to the cause everywhere else on the pitch, Busby was rewarded with the ultimate endorsement from his teams’ supporters – immortalisation in song.

“His name is Drew Busby, the cock of the north.

He plays at Tynecastle, just over the Forth.

He drinks all your whisky and Newcastle Brown.

The Gorgie Boys are in town!”

Refrains of “Busby’s gonnae get ye!” would also ring regularly around the terraces. Some particularly imaginative Hearts fans even inserted his name into their own version of ‘Ballroom Blitz’ by the British rock band The Sweet. “Jimmy Cant at the back / Said everyone attack / And it turned into a Busby blitz.”

He was a cult hero, a blue-collar warrior, a hard-working fan’s hard-working man. And he scored goals. Headers, volleys, tap-ins, the lot.

Of them all, the fifth and final strike of his short spell with Third Lanark was both the most and least remarkable; the most instantly forgettable and, by perverse chance, the most memorable. It has left an indelible mark on Scottish football and been memorialised in quiz questions posed in pubs from Wick to Wigtown, Thurso to Thornhill, Lybster to Langholm.

Who scored Third Lanark’s last-ever goal? Drew Busby was that man.

Although ‘man’ is a stretch. Busby wasn’t more than a boy back then, a mere slip of a teen with enough energy to power floodlights through the darkest of winters.

For Busby, like almost every young kid who grew up in post-war west of Scotland, football was life. So much so that he and some of his friends divided up the names of the clubs in the old English First Division and wrote to half a dozen each to request a trial. Coventry City were on Busby’s mailing list and, to his surprise, they replied. Down he went and well he did, catching the eye of manager Jimmy Hill with a handful of goals for the youth team. But he got homesick and returned to Scotland soon after he left.

Successful spells in junior football with Vale of Leven Academy and Dumbarton Castle Rovers caught the eye of Third Lanark, who offered him his first senior contract. He joined towards the end of 1966 at the age of 19. “They paid me £18 a week and I felt like a millionaire,” he smiles.

Although he preferred to play in the inside-forward position, Busby found himself playing as the main target man for Thirds, the consequence of a long-running salary dispute between some of the club’s more senior players and its owner.

“Some of the guys were dropped for the last few games and, next thing I knew, I was starting matches up front,” he says. “The thing about me was that I wasn’t too bothered about the money stuff that was going on behind the scenes. There were weeks when I didn’t get paid on time and, in those days, if you didn’t get your wages on a Friday, you were entitled to a free transfer. But I wasn’t fussed. I was just a young lad running around in a dream. I would have played for nothing.”

The final day of the 1966–67 season saw Third Lanark make the short journey down the River Clyde to play Dumbarton. To all intents and purposes, the match was pointless. A dead rubber. For both sides, it was game number 38 of a long and gruelling season in the old, 20-team Scottish Second Division. Neither was challenging for promotion, nor were they in any danger of finishing bottom of the pile. Mid-table mediocrity had long since been secured.

On a sunny summer’s evening at Boghead, in front of a sparse crowd of just under 600 hardy souls, the hosts opened the scoring in the first minute. By grim irony, former Thirds man Harry Kirk got the goal. It set the tone for an emphatic 5-1 victory, in which Busby’s second-half strike was nothing more than a consolation for the visitors.

“It was a terrible goal,” he laughs. “Nothing special whatsoever. I remember the ball coming to me inside the box and I just hit a drooler of a shot that dribbled underneath their keeper’s body. It was a shocker, the sort of thing that goalies today would get strung up for. It didn’t matter a single bit either. We got battered. It was a rotten way to end the season. It was a miserable experience all round. The pitch was heavy and showing all the wear and tear of a long campaign, and I got dog’s abuse from the home fans for the whole 90 minutes. They knew I was from Dumbarton and they let me have it the whole game. ‘Busby, ya diddy.’ Stuff like that. Nah, it wasn’t the best night.”

Drew Busby scored goals all right. But after that day, he never again scored for Third Lanark, and neither did anyone else.

It was 28 April 1967.

* * *

15 APRIL 1967. Four hundred miles from Boghead, Scotland’s Jim Baxter is risking the wrath of tens of thousands of England fans by performing keepy-uppies on the pitch at a packed Wembley Stadium. Legend has it that ‘Slim Jim’s’ pre-match preparation consisted of little more than a scan of the Sporting Life in the dressing room. That day, having been encouraged to get up and get ready by the coaching staff, he first stretched out his left leg, then his right. “That’s me warmed up,” he told them, his eyes never leaving the newspaper.

Such nonchalance seemed foolhardy given the calibre of the opposition he would soon face. Just nine months earlier, on the same pitch, England had beaten West Germany to win the World Cup for the first time.

Now, their auldest rivals were in town but were refusing to bow at their polished feet. Rather, they were mischievously, arrogantly skylarking at their hosts’ expense, with Baxter the rascal-in-chief.

It was the final match of that season’s British Home Championship. To the victor, the spoils. A win for England would confirm them as outright champions for the third year in a row and extend their unbeaten streak in all competitions to a formidable 20 matches. A win for Scotland would deny their hosts on both fronts. The managers’ team talks, you suspect, wrote themselves.

Denis Law – who couldn’t bring himself to watch England win the World Cup and played golf on the day of the final instead – fired the Scots into an early lead. Bobby Lennox doubled it. Bobby Charlton replied only for Jim McCalliog to re-establish Scotland’s two-goal cushion. Geoff Hurst, the hat-trick hero in the World Cup final less than a year prior, netted late on to give Alf Ramsey’s men a glimmer of faint hope, but it wasn’t to be. No “they think it’s all over” drama on this occasion. Full time. England 2, Scotland 3.

The blast of the referee’s final whistle awakened an almighty fervour among the tartan-clad fans in the stands, who lay jubilant siege to the Wembley pitch. Turf was hoiked from the ground by the handful as supporters snatched grassy mementoes of a momentous day. It was reckoned to be the first Wembley pitch invasion since the 1923 FA Cup final.

Bobby Brown’s Scots – Blasé Baxter and Co. – returned north of the border as de facto world champions, with the praise of England coach Sir Alf Ramsey ringing in their ears.

“I always said it would take a great team to beat England,” said the great man. “And it did.”

* * *

24 MAY 1967. Forty miles from Boghead, Malcolm MacDonald watches on helplessly as his Kilmarnock side struggles, ultimately in vain, to overturn a 4-2 deficit to Leeds United.

It’s the second leg of their Inter-Cities Fairs Cup semi-final and Killie have a mountain to climb after the teams’ first encounter at Leeds’ Elland Road ground five days earlier.

Ultimately, the match finishes in a goalless draw and ends Kilmarnock’s sojourn into Europe. It was an adventure that saw them batter Belgian side Antwerp 8-2 on aggregate, as well as claim the notable scalps of Gent and Lokomotive Leipzig en route to the semi-finals of an event that, in time, became the UEFA Cup and, later, the Europa League.

Italian giants Juventus and Napoli could only make it as far as the last eight that year. Likewise, Eintracht Frankfurt, runners-up in the European Cup just seven years earlier.

In reaching the semi-finals, Kilmarnock punched well above both their means and weight, and prepared the stage for something even more special just 24 hours later.

* * *

25 MAY 1967. Almost 2,000 miles from Boghead, captain Billy McNeill leads from the front as he and his Celtic teammates stride into football history.

With bus drivers and conductors refusing to work overtime for fear of missing the match, Glasgow grinds to a halt as Jock Stein’s men metamorphose into ‘Lisbon Lions’. They beat Internazionale of Italy 2-1 in the Portuguese capital to become the first British team to win the European Cup, Stevie Chalmers scoring a late winner after Tommy Gemmell had cancelled out Sandro Mazzola’s early penalty.

As ecstatic Celtic supporters congregate for celebrations in Glasgow’s George Square, congratulatory messages start to flood through on the wire. Sir Alf Ramsey communicates a note from Vienna to say that both he and his English players are “delighted” by the outcome of the match.

Mr William Ross, the Secretary of State for Scotland, sends a telegram offering his “heartiest congratulations to Jock Stein and his team on their magnificent victory”.

Glasgow’s Lord Provost John Johnston risks rebuke from the Labour Party when he uses the win to make a political statement against Harold Wilson’s government. “Celtic have beaten the central government,” he says, “in that they have taken Britain into Europe.”

Even Scot Symon, manager of Celtic’s city rivals Rangers, hails the win as “a wonderful achievement and a great climax to a tremendous season”, with Stein himself adding: “We won and we won on merit. This win gives us more satisfaction than anything.”

* * *

31 MAY 1967. Over 1,000 miles from Boghead, Rangers are in Nuremberg to play a star-studded Bayern Munich in the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Less than a week after Celtic’s landmark triumph in UEFA’s flagship competition, Glasgow is bracing itself for another night of football celebrations and bus service cancellations.

It’s not to be.

Despite enjoying the best of the possession and the chances, Rangers’ forwards spurn numerous opportunities to break the deadlock. When they finally do, Roger Hynd – controversially chosen to make just his fourth appearance of the season ahead of the free-scoring Alex Willoughby – has his effort disallowed.

The match finishes goalless after 90 minutes. In the 19th minute of extra time, Rangers are made to pay for their profligacy in front of goal when Franz Roth lobs Norrie Martin to score what proves to be the winner.

It is Rangers’ second Cup Winners’ Cup final defeat in six years and, as he watches Franz Beckenbauer, Sepp Maier, Gerd Müller and Co. take it in turns to first kiss and then lift the trophy, a despondent Hynd throws his runners-up medal into the crowd.

The only happy man in Govan that night is bookmaker John Banks. “I don’t want to sound unpatriotic,” he tells the Glasgow Herald, “but it was a very good result for us. I estimate we have won around £30,000, which goes some way to making up for the £60,000 we lost when Celtic won their game.”

Rangers manager Symon, who will leave the club just a matter of months later, is magnanimous in defeat. “Our players all fought hard,” he says. “We had our chances but we were just not quite sharp enough to take them.”

* * *

ON EVERY CONCEIVABLE front and in every conceivable way, that ‘golden summer’ of 1967 was Scottish football’s apogee, the zenith of the sport in a nation obsessed by it, beguiled by it, utterly consumed by it.

And yet amidst it all, almost unnoticed, one of the country’s oldest clubs – a founder member of the Scottish Football Association and, to this day, one of only four teams to have beaten both Celtic and Rangers in the Scottish Cup final – was allowed to die.

Third Lanark’s drubbing in Dumbarton proved to be the club’s final game. Over the summer, the shutters came down at Cathkin Park and the lights in the famous old ground went off for the last time.

As he sits in a corner of the Waverley Bar in Dumbarton, barely a mile from what used to be Boghead, and where his name has hung above the door for over 30 years, Drew Busby considers it all for the first time in a long time.

He smiles ruefully, glances at the floor and shakes his head.

When he speaks, his voice is barely louder than a whisper.

“It should never have happened,” he says. “Never.”

TWO

LA VIE EST BELLE

AS ODD AS it may sound, it is unlikely Third Lanark would ever have existed had it not been for France. It is, in fact, with Napoleon III that the club’s story begins. Or, to be more specific, the British government’s deeply entrenched fear of him.

The first elected president of France in 1848, Napoleon III seized power of the country just three years later after his efforts to change the constitution of the National Assembly in order to allow him to stand for another term in office were defeated. He reasoned, not unreasonably, that four years was an insufficient amount of time for any head of state to implement a political and economic vision for their country. The National Assembly countered, not without some countenance, by laying out their concern that longer terms would lead to abuse of the presidential office and power. With president and parliament diametrically opposed, an impasse was reached.

In the end, the matter was put to the Assembly’s members in July 1851 for them to decide. The majority backed their leader, just not in sufficient enough terms – 446 in favour, 278 against – to reach the two-thirds majority required to trigger constitutional reform.

Still, the outcome did little to weaken Napoleon’s resolve. If anything, it strengthened it. Believing he had the support of the people – and why not, given that he had won the presidential election in 1848 with 74.2% of the public vote – he rallied his closest and most trusted allies, including Major General Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud, a former captain from the French Foreign Legion. Together, they quietly organised a coup d’état.

It began on 2 December and was over within a matter of days. French politics, it turned out, was no match for its own head of state and his powerful friends.

Napoleon quickly dissolved the Legislative Assembly and decreed a new constitution, which included the restoration of universal suffrage. A plebiscite approved the constitution. A further referendum, in November 1852, officially ended the Second Republic and ushered in the Second French Empire, with Napoleon III – hitherto Louis-Napoleon – as its Emperor.

Le jour de gloire était arrivée.

The day of glory had arrived.

As well as being a charismatic and shrewd political operator, Napoleon III was a staunch patriot and man of the people. He promoted public works and the construction of railroads. He took a personal interest in the rebuilding of modern Paris and supported French inventors. He established boards of arbitration and set a new lower price for bread. And that was just for starters.

However, his ambition extended beyond the French borders. He made no secret of his desire to reassert his country’s influence in Europe and around the world, and he was, in his own words, quite prepared “to take the initiative to do everything useful for the prosperity and the greatness of France”.

Unsurprisingly, this position made his neighbours nervous, not least those on the opposite side of the English Channel in Great Britain. Those fears intensified in 1858 after the Italian revolutionary, Felice Orsini, tried and failed to assassinate the French leader. As the Emperor and his wife Eugénie de Montijo made their way by imperial carriage to a production of William Tell at the Salle Le Peletier – the home of the Paris Opera – Orsini and his accomplices threw three bombs at the procession. Their motive? Napoleon’s perceived attempts to block the unification of Italy, or Risorgimento. The attack claimed the lives of eight people and wounded over 140 others. Napoleon and his wife survived. Orsini was found and arrested by police the next day.

The attempt on Napoleon’s life failed in its primary objective but was unintentionally successful in two other respects: it increased his popularity amongst his own people and swelled the tide of French nationalism. That patriotism intensified when it was established that the explosives used by Orsini – who was subsequently sent to the guillotine for his crimes – had been manufactured in England. Outraged, some high-ranking French officers openly called for retaliation.

The furious voices boomed all the way from Paris to London. Fearing an invasion, the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, wasted no time in bolstering the country’s defences. For example, huge new forts at key strategic points on the country’s south coast were built at great expense – as much as £520 million in today’s money.

In May 1859, with tensions still simmering and under increasing pressure from the media, Palmerston’s government sanctioned the formation of a new line of defence called the Volunteer Force. A forerunner to today’s Army Reserve (previously the Territorial Army), the Volunteer Force was largely what you would expect: a citizen army of part-time rifle, artillery and engineer regiments stationed in counties across Great Britain.

Most parts of the country were quick to form their own battalions. Indeed, within months, in October 1859, volunteers from the south Glasgow corps provided a guard of honour for Queen Victoria at the opening of new waterworks at Loch Katrine – the first public appearance of any Scottish volunteers. The following year, on 7 August, over 21,000 Scottish volunteers took part in a Royal Review in Edinburgh.

The day after that, the south Glasgow corps merged, becoming the 3rd Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, or 3rd LRV for short. The regiment was based in the south-side of the city, close to the weavers’ village of Strathbungo, where it stayed for a number of years.

The 3rd LRV developed a reputation for its marksmanship, with two of its members winning the Queen’s Prize, the highest and most prestigious national accolade in shooting and which, incidentally, is contested to this day on a quadrennial basis courtesy of the Commonwealth Games.

That’s now. Back then, the prize was awarded at the National Rifle Association meeting at Bisley in Surrey. It was won by Private Malcolm Stark Rennie in 1894 and, four years later, by Lieutenant David Yates, both members of the 3rd LRV. Rennie, it is said, returned to Glasgow to a hero’s welcome and was carried in a chair, through a thronging crowd, from Central Station to the Drill Hall in the city’s Coplaw Street, over a mile and a half away. His achievement even made it onto the pages of the world’s first comic strip, Ally Sloper.

It was on St Andrew’s Day in 1872 that members of the 3rd LRV joined more than 4,000 others in attending the world’s first-known international football match. Contested by Scotland and England at the West of Scotland Cricket Club in Partick, the match was prompted by a letter from FA general secretary Charles Alcock which was published in the main Glasgow and Edinburgh newspapers. Alcock offered a team of 11 English footballers to challenge a team of Scots to a match. It was left to Queen’s Park Football Club – Scotland’s oldest football club, founded in 1867 – to take up the challenge. They provided the entire Scottish team, which caught the attention of the 3rd LRV, many of whose members – amongst them Billy Dickson, Joseph Taylor and Billy MacKinnon – played for Queen’s.

In drab, muddy conditions – a consequence of three days of constant rain in the build-up – a stale match ended in a goalless draw. These days, it would have been kindly referred to as “one for the purists”. Even so, many in the crowd left inspired by what they had seen.

Twelve days later, on 12 December 1872, the men of the 3rd LRV met in the Regimental Orderly Room in Glasgow’s Howard Street, where they discussed the possibility of forming their own team. The group had been playing football for some time but mainly as a ‘divershun’ from ‘serious military manoeuvres’. Seeing some of their friends and fellow riflemen take on the best that England had to offer was all the persuading they needed to take their pastime a little more seriously.

At the meeting, a private in the regiment, identified only as ‘Broadfoot’, proposed the team’s formation. Private Taylor, who had played in that first match, seconded the motion.

A Sergeant Wilson then moved: “That we, the Members now assembled, should form ourselves into a club to be called the 3rd Lanark Rifle Volunteers Football Club.” The motion was again seconded by Private Taylor.

In that instant, the ‘3rd LRV Football Club’ was born. The majority of officers and other ranking members also pledged their support. A commanding officer by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Crum-Ewing was appointed the club’s first president.

The next item on the agenda? Choosing a uniform. It was quickly decided that it should consist of four main items: a blue and yellow head cowl; a scarlet jersey; blue trousers or knickerbockers; and blue stockings. It was agreed that fitting the team in the colours of the regiment might make them both more attractive to prospective recruits. The fact it also cast a colourful shadow over the monochromatic styling of their neighbours over the hill, Queen’s Park, may also have contributed to the decision-making.

Whilst geographically joined at the hip, Queen’s and Thirds were, in the early days at least, otherwise juxtaposed in almost every sense. As Queen’s increasingly came to be viewed as somewhat elite and, in football if not military terms, higher ranking, Thirds were adopted as the ‘soldier’s side’, a feeling reinforced by the integration of the number three into the fledging club’s crest.

Initially, the ‘3rd LRV FC’ played its games on the drill ground at Victoria Road, situated close to the regimental headquarters. Indoor training sessions occasionally took place at the Drill Hall in Coplaw Street before the club moved to a new home in March 1875.

By then, the Scottish Football Association had been formed in order to provide better structure and governance for the rapidly growing sport. Queen’s Park had taken the lead, placing an advert in a Glasgow newspaper early in 1873 for other clubs to join them in creating a new organisation. Seven replied: Clydesdale, Vale of Leven, Dumbreck, Eastern, Granville, Kilmarnock and Third Lanark. At a meeting on 13 March 1875, those eight clubs brought the new body into being.

“The clubs here represented,” began their joint resolution, “form themselves into an association for the promotion of football according to the rules of The Football Association and that the clubs connected with this association subscribe for a challenge cup to be played for annually, the committee to propose the laws of the competition.”

The 3rd LRV’s new ground was gifted to the regiment by Dixon’s Blazes, a well-known ironworks based out of Cathcart Road in Glasgow. The regiment had grown concerned that it was handing momentum – and key players – to Queen’s and other clubs on account of the drill ground’s poor playing surface. Dixon’s stepped in to offer them land between Boyd Street and Dixon Road, which the regiment’s men flattened, filled and cultivated to their liking.

They called it Cathkin Park and, for almost 40 years, they called it home.

In 1903, when Queen’s Park moved into ‘New’ Hampden Park in the Mount Florida area of Glasgow, they gave up the lease on their previous Hampden Park home, little more than 100 metres away on the opposite side of Prospecthill Road. Sensing an opportunity, the 3rd LRV took over the lease and renamed it New Cathkin Park.

Something else significant happened that year. The club became a limited company and severed its ties with the 3rd LRV. It re-registered with the Scottish Football League as the ‘Third Lanark Athletic Club’ but, sentimentally or otherwise, opted to keep the scarlet colours of its Rifle Volunteer forebears.

Later in 1903, the newly named club won the Glasgow Cup, contested by all of the city’s football teams, by virtue of a 3-0 demolition of Celtic in the final.

The following season, 1903–04, Thirds were the toast of Scottish football when they won the national league championship – what we now know as the Scottish Premiership – for the first-ever time.

Twenty-six matches produced 20 wins, three draws and only three defeats. Sixty-one goals were scored and just 26 conceded. It all added up to a four-point margin of victory from runners-up Heart of Midlothian, with city rivals Rangers and Celtic a further point adrift in a tie for third.

It was a triumph that Napoleon III himself would have been proud of. Unlike their French raison d’être, however, Third Lanark could not capitalise on their success nor use it as a launch pad for further, greater glory.

The opposite, in fact, proved true.

THREE

HARMONY AND GOODWILL

ROBUST. THAT’S PROBABLY the best way of summarising Third Lanark’s title defence in 1904–05. They finished a respectable third in Division One, behind champions Celtic and runners-up Rangers, and comfortably ahead of fourth-placed Airdrieonians.

In their trophy cabinet, the space vacated by the Division One trophy was taken by the Scottish Cup, a 3-1 replay victory over holders Rangers delivering Thirds’ second win in the competition.

It would prove to be the Hi-Hi’s last major domestic honour.

Over the next 11 years, the best league finish they could muster was seventh. They finished in the bottom half of the table seven times in the same period.

However, it wasn’t until after the Great War that the club’s problems accelerated. In 1925 – two years after an eight-match tour of South America, which included a remarkable 1-1 draw with the Argentine national team – Thirds suffered the ignominy of relegation for the first time in their history. They, Ayr United and Motherwell all ended the season with just 30 points from 38 games. However, with the worst goal difference of the trio, Thirds were consigned – along with Ayr – to Division Two.

By coincidence, this was the same season that Dumbarton Harp Football Club went out of business. Established in 1894 by Irish Catholic immigrants – similar to the way in which Celtic and Hibernian were formed in Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively – Dumbarton Harp spent the majority of their existence in lower local leagues, such as the Glasgow and District Junior League and the Inter County Football League. They joined the Scottish Football League in 1923 when it expanded to a three-division set-up, finishing tenth that first year. However, they were forced to withdraw midway through the 1924–25 season when they were unable to meet their financial commitments. They went to the wall as Thirds went down. A macabre coincidence or a chilling portent of things to come?

Thirds spent three years in the second tier of Scottish football, finishing sixth, fourth and finally second behind Ayr United to return to Division One in time for the start of the 1928–29 season. Most people agreed that a corner had been turned.

The trouble with corners, of course, is that you can rarely be sure what’s on the other side. And so it went that Thirds continued to straddle Scotland’s two divisions – the Division Three experiment was shelved for two decades at the end of 1925–26 – for years to come, predictable only in their own unpredictability.

Down in 1929–30. Up in 1930–31. Down in 1933–34. Up in 1934–35.

Coincidentally, in 1928, a Filipino immigrant to the United States by the name of Pedro Flores launched the Yo-Yo Manufacturing Company in California. Within a year, it was producing 300,000 of the toys every single day. One can only assume Third Lanark’s bosses took one look and concluded that having a product that principally went down and up was great for business.

The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 caused the suspension of the Scottish Football League and Scottish Cup. In lieu of these, regional competitions were established, including the Southern League, Glasgow Cup and Southern League Cup, as well as the Summer Cup and Renfrewshire Cup.

Post-war reforms saw the league resume with three divisions, renamed A, B and C, with the third of these featuring reserve teams for the first time. This new era for the game in Scotland also appeared to herald an age of mid-table Division One mediocrity for Thirds. A ninth-place finish here, an 11th or 12th there. On the pitch at least, things seemed fine. Not great. But good enough.

Off the pitch? Another story altogether. For one thing, Thirds employed 11 different managers between 1920 and 1953. George Morrell gave way to Alex Bennett, who was replaced by John Richardson, who preceded Russell Moreland, who was succeeded by Tom Jennings, whose place was taken by George McMillan . . . it’s a wonder nobody thought to install a revolving door on the manager’s office.

Such perpetual change may not seem of any note in today’s age of impatient club owners whose trigger fingers are in a permanent state of itch. Back then, however, it was far from regular. From 1897 until 1978, Celtic had just four managers. Between 1899 and 1969, Rangers had just five. The same number managed Aberdeen in the years spanning 1903 to 1965. Hibernian? Between 1903 and 1964, they changed their manager seven times – but two of those changes were by necessity rather than design when the incumbents died in office. Thirds’ behaviour was clearly atypical of the time.

The club’s ground posed another problem. By the time the Second World War ended, most people agreed that Cathkin Park was in a sorry state. The grandstand, composed of wood and iron, was 40 years old and showing plenty of signs of wear and tear. The terraces, meanwhile, were uneven, slippery embankments, peppered with wooden crush barriers. Simply put, it was unfit for purpose and in desperate need of a large injection of cash.

Two problems with that. One, where was the money going to come from? Since its incorporation as a limited company in 1903, Third Lanark had attracted plenty of investors from Glasgow’s wealthy middle class but very few of them were business people or entrepreneurs. That created a large and diverse ownership base. Who, in their right mind, would stump up any of their own money when they could, in theory, be ejected from the club’s corridors of powers at any given time? “Give us your money with no guarantee that you’ll be allowed to stay to see how it gets spent” – it’s not the most compelling sales pitch.

Nonetheless, the club was able to cobble together a reported £5,500 to make some of the most urgent repairs. And that’s when they encountered the second problem.

Glasgow Corporation’s Housing Committee rejected the club’s application to make its renovations, arguing (not unreasonably) that the labour required should be used for housing instead. Prior to the outbreak of war, Glasgow’s urban footprint was in a permanent state of sprawl. The Second World War saw house-building grind to a halt and, by the time the conflict ended in 1945, overcrowding, poor hygiene and damp, squalid conditions were at an all-time high. Urgent action was needed.

In response, Clement Attlee’s Labour government developed an ambitious ‘after war’ housing programme, which, for Scotland, called for at least 50,000 new homes to be built every year to get people out of the slums.

Investing precious man-hours in the redevelopment of a football ground at a time when many of the city’s residents were living in destitution was never going to fly, no matter how loudly Thirds’ chairman, former fish merchant William Unkles, protested.

Work finally got underway in the late 1940s on an ambitious, radical renovation project designed to increase the stadium’s capacity to almost 56,000. With attendances soaring in the post-war period – for that, you can thank six years of being largely starved of entertainment – Thirds intended to capitalise and expand its fan base.

An excited editorial in an August 1949 matchday programme proclaimed: “Soon, there will be many Third Lanark followers growing up who did not know of the wooden crush barriers [and] the awkward slope of the terracing. It is a changing world and football clubs must move with the times. It won’t be long before the old Cathkin Park is but a dim memory.”

The same piece described the club’s directors as ‘men of vision’. Too bad that vision didn’t extend to foreseeing the trouble brewing in their own boardroom. The decision to significantly increase the authorised share capital of the club, taken in 1923, invited investment from outside the club’s core fan base. In its early years, Thirds had been supported, in the main, by those from Glasgow’s Southside. Third Lanark was their club and so the residents of affluent areas, such as Newton Mearns, Giffnock, Busby and Clarkston, didn’t think twice about dipping into their pockets to support them. What this increase in share capital achieved was to dramatically dilute the club’s ‘local’ ownership and make it, in theory at least, vulnerable to the advances of knavish outsiders.

On 5 April 1950, a board meeting was called by the club’s five directors: William Unkles, William Milne, John Marshall, William Cowan and George Jamieson. At that meeting, more than 5,500 new ordinary shares were suddenly and surprisingly allocated, including: 1,500 to the then proprietor of the Barrowland Ballroom, Sam McIver; 2,500 to Lenzie-based businessman John Lawson; and 500 to another businessman by the name of Peter Fleming. This had the effect of almost eliminating any power wielded by the Third Lanark Social Club, the representative body of the club’s ‘ordinary’ fans. The principal shareholders in the club when it was reincorporated in 1903, they now owned just 245 preference and 230 ordinary shares.

By August of 1950, trouble was beginning to brew. Representatives of shareholders owning at least 10 per cent of the club threatened to go to court in a bid to have the issue of the shares to McIver and Lawson annulled. They believed that the move – pursued in the main by Milne, Cowan and Marshall – wasn’t taken in the best interests of the club. You could understand their concern. Neither McIver nor Lawson had ever been connected with the club at any point in the past and it wasn’t as though the club was in dire financial straits and in need of their support. Besides anything else, the proper procedure for issuing new shares would have been to give existing shareholders first refusal. That hadn’t been done. Instead, McIver and Lawson were given a huge stake in the club, with Lawson immediately nominated to join the board.

Having gained the support of Unkles – one of two directors to vote against the allocation of the shares – as well as several other influential figures, the requisitionists called an extraordinary general meeting. They contended that if the directors had decided to issue these unissued shares in order to, in effect, take control of Third Lanark, then they were doing so contrary to the wishes of the majority of the existing shareholders, and were therefore acting illegally.

“If necessary,” a spokesperson declared, “the requisitionists will not hesitate to ask the Court of Session to pronounce a decree to the effect that the directors’ decision to issue these shares was ultra vires.” Outside their right, in other words.

Chairman Milne was unmoved. In a letter he sent to shareholders, he called for “harmony . . . in order that the old club might be given a chance under its new manager of reaching the heights which it is capable of reaching”. He added: “I should like to draw your attention to the Articles of Association, which state that the directors ‘may allot shares as and when they think proper’. The issue under dispute was agreed by a majority at a full board meeting.” A 3-2 majority, to be clear, but a majority nonetheless.

Milne continued: “My sole aim for the club is to have a permanent board, which shall be given a period of years to fix a policy of team building and ground improvement and to carry out that policy. This cannot be done with a board which is subject to change at every annual general meeting. Help me to attain that stability, help me to achieve harmony and goodwill and put an end, for good, to this squabbling.”

Read between the lines and Milne’s intention was pretty clear: the establishment of an oligarchy at Cathkin. Nonetheless, it’s not as though the minority shareholders hadn’t been presented with the chance to prevent this scenario. Back in 1947, existing shareholders were given the opportunity to apply for additional shares. Some 8,000 were made available. Little over 1,000 were bought.

The meeting called by the requisitionists went ahead on 9 August 1950. By a majority of 1,864 votes – 8,976 to 7,112 – the rebels were defeated. Milne, Cowan and Marshall remained on the board. A move to increase the membership of the board from five to seven was also defeated.

True to their word, in February 1952, the requisitionists took the matter to the courts and, in October of that year, after months of ongoing bitter battles in the boardroom, it went in front of Lord Sorn. Eleven days of evidence later, the verdict came down in favour of the defence. The requisitionists were defeated. Again. Illegal issue of shares? What illegal issue of shares? Nobody knew it at the time but the fate of the club had just been sealed. Lord Sorn’s judgement effectively enabled one or two individuals to control the club without having to pay much heed to the views, needs and wants of the minority shareholders.

On 21 December 1954, ill health forced John Marshall to resign from the board. Co-opted in his place was a Glasgow glass merchant and businessman who, as a young boy, had been a season ticket holder at Cathkin and who, just weeks earlier, had acquired a sizeable stake in the club as part of a release of over 1,000 preference shares.

His name was William Crawford Hiddelston.

Bill, for short.

FOUR

NO CONFIDENCE

TONY CONNELL SITS in Café Roma on Cathcart Road in Glasgow’s Southside, just a few miles from what remains of Cathkin. He’s a regular here and on first-name terms with most of the staff. They greet the former full-back warmly as he arrives.

He has a neatly clipped white beard that matches his well-groomed hair but it’s his cerulean eyes that are most striking. They’re wide, expressive and you know just to look at them that they’ve seen plenty. Both good and bad.

He’s stirring his coffee when the name of Bill Hiddelston comes up. Connell’s gaze shifts away from his cup and into the distance as he reaches for the right words. Finally, they come.

“Of all of the people I’ve met in my 75 years,” he says slowly, “he was absolutely the worst. He thought he was an American gangster and that he could do whatever he wanted. I don’t know of anybody who was ever associated with Third Lanark, outside of the boardroom, who had a good word to say about him.”

Mike Jackson agrees. The mere mention of Hiddelston’s name makes the former inside-forward wince. He flinches as though listening to nails being dragged down a blackboard. Through gritted teeth, contempt contorting his forehead into a frown, he hisses his indictment of Thirds’ former owner.

“He was a fucking disgrace. A complete and utter fucking disgrace.”