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A History Of Bigotry At Ibrox: Revelations From Stephen O’Donnell’s Tangled Up In Blue.

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Last month I did a piece on how Stephen O’Donnell’s fantastic book Tangled Up In Blue was so close to the knuckle, and did such a job of challenging the long held media narrative on what happened at Rangers, that mainstream media sites refused to review it.

The book is an astonishing read, not only charting the downfall of Rangers but actually taking you step by step through the sordid history of what was, at times, a loathsome institution, and I do not say that lightly.

No neutral could fail to be astounded, and appalled, by the role they played in Scottish society; it is not the positive one many would have you believe.

It was the late Ian Archer who once said they were “an occasional embarrassment and a permanent disgrace.”

Few ever recount the words he said next, but they were even more damning and deserving of mention.

“This country would be a better place if Rangers did not exist.”

Few could read Stephen’s incredible book, brilliantly written and researched, and not wonder if the great journalist had a point. Because the book is filled to the brim with stories about the shame and disgrace that club has heaped on football and society in Scotland as a whole.

It is no wonder that our journalistic class did not want to review it.

The book does not pull its punches, not even in the opening lines.

“This is not a fairy story,” is how he chooses to begin. “Of the four teenagers who founded Rangers Football Club … one was drowned, another declared insane, yet another was an accused fraudster, a bigamist and a ‘certified imbecile’ who lived out his days in a poorhouse, while the fourth was comparatively lucky – he died a lonely old man.”

Right there Stephen lays out his intentions; to give an honest accounting, without fear or favour.

To peel off the lid of the whole can of worms and dig around in there for meat.

There is plenty of it, believe me.

This article will go over some of the most astonishing revelations from the book … and it doesn’t even scratch the surface.

Rangers Was Always A Club With A Hooligan Following

Growing up in Glasgow gives you a perspective on football violence that most cities don’t come close to.

But we tend to think of it as a modern concept, when actually it isn’t.

In fact, as grounds have gotten safer these kind of problems are less prevalent than they used to be.

But it’s definitely true that down through the years some clubs have had a bigger problem than others, and that was certainly true in the case of Rangers. Their hooligan element has always been there, from their earliest days. Stephen O’Donnell’s book is replete with examples.

The first recorded mention of crowd trouble at one of their games – although it almost certainly wasn’t the first example of it – is in the Scottish Cup Final of 1877, just a handful of years after their founding. Rangers, as usual, were complaining about decisions that hadn’t gone their way, and the crowd was so incensed that they invaded the pitch and started a riot, causing the game to be abandoned. By 1888, a former player was describing their fans as “the worst in Scotland.”

It was a reputation they were to build on down through the whole of their history, culminating, perhaps, in their shameful destruction of Barcelona on the night of the greatest triumph they would ever enjoy, the Cup Winners Cup win in 1972.

The re-write of history over that event has been so astonishing and pervasive that even Wikipedia blames the Spanish police for the riot inside the ground; this is miles from the truth. As the book makes clear, Rangers fans invaded the pitch after every goal, and then again just minutes before the match ended with the score 3-2 after the Russians had scored their second.

The Scottish media mounted a token defence of the fans at first, with the old “Franco’s fascist police were to blame” argument being made by almost all in the press corps. In a sense you can understand that; a club from this country had just won a European trophy and their fans responded by tearing the ground up.

The reputation of the game here had to be salvaged.

But look down through the history and you see the same pattern; it arose most clearly at Manchester, another European final notorious for their rioting, and for which the press laboured mightily to blame someone else.

Yet exonerating them completely was not in the gift of the press up here, and there were some who were not going to lie on the club’s behalf.

It was Alan Herron, of The Sunday Mail, who made the most salient points about Barcelona; he noted that even if you could excuse what happened in the ground, there was no getting away from the chaos and mayhem they unleashed in the city itself.

“Let there be no excuse; the fans were to blame for what happened in Barcelona … What provoked (them) into wrecking hotels, throwing bottles from balconies, smashing cars, tearing restaurants and floral displays apart?”

I guess it never dawned on him to blame Chelsea fans.

Rangers And Celtic Once Behaved Like Neighbours And Friends

As difficult as this will be for people to believe, it wasn’t always the way it was until 2012 and the end of the first Ibrox club.

The current incarnation is almost completely consumed by hatred.

But Rangers didn’t start out like that, and their relationship with Celtic was once good.

The Ibrox club were our very first opponent; think about that for a minute.

That match was not set up to start a rivalry that would last over 100 years and become marred with sectarianism and hatred.

It was a gesture of friendship and goodwill, with their established club providing us with a good curtain raiser. As time went on, the rivalry grew … but for a long time it was exactly that, a sporting rivalry like any other, although it would gradually be swallowed up in the bigotry.

I’ll discuss the origins of that in another section … but just know that Celtic and Rangers treated each other with a lot decorum and more than a modicum of respect deep well into the 20’s, even as the religious and social issues surrounding the fixture becoming more intense.

When the Ibrox club won the 1928 Scottish Cup, beating Celtic 4-0, our club did not react with frustration or anger but warm congratulations. The Celtic chairman, Tom White, is reported to have said to his Rangers counterpart “I was very glad to have lived long enough to see you lift the Scottish Cup. We at Parkhead are delighted that Rangers have won. It is their turn.”

And their chairman was just as gushing in his own remarks. “The cup is fuller because we have beaten the Celtic. It was a grand game and determined struggle between giants. These encounters do much to popularise the game. Long may the friendly rivalry continue.”

So what changed? The book suggests that it was the incident on 5 September 1931 which cost John Thompson his life. Neither club held Sam English accountable for what happened, but a perception was created that Celtic felt some bitterness over it because of an innocuous remark Willie Maley made at the fatal accident inquiry. “I hope it was an accident,” he is reported as having said, “but I did not see enough of it to form an opinion.”

Maley had been asked a direct question under oath by a judge; he had seen the incident from a distance, in the blink of an eye, and therefore couldn’t ascertain what had happened and what had not … what he did was give a factual, albeit dispassionate, answer … which certain elements were happy to magnify into something more.

Relations between the clubs grew frosty after that, and never properly recovered.

It is difficult to conclude that the friendlyness would have lasted anyway … darkness had already overtaken the fixture to some extent.

And you might not be surprised to learn that one of its primary sources was the media.

Sectarianism At Ibrox Was Fed And Nurtured By The Media

Over the last few years, this website and others have lamented the way the so-called “Glasgow derby” has been pushed on the basis of hate.

It was always like this, as far back as I can remember.

The promotion of it as a derby “like no other” is built on the idea that here are two clubs and two fan bases that loathe and despise each other to an epic degree.

It is one of the most disturbing, and shocking, ideas in football on this island and we can’t escape from it.

The media simply won’t let us.

The real irony is that the media are the causes of our current dilemma anyway.

As they have promoted the Sevco rivalry as one based on hatred, so too they played a key role in making the old Rangers rivalry into one.

It was a paper called The Scottish Sport which first referred to Rangers as “Scotia’s darling club” as a naked reaction to the dominance of the game by Celtic and Hibs … the “Irish clubs”.

It was the press which first pushed the idea that these two clubs were interlopers, outsiders who could not be allowed to dominate the game.

A hero was needed and the press took a side for the first time.

In the midst of the First World War, when the Irish had launched the war of independence, in keeping with the old maxim that “England’s misfortune is Ireland’s opportunity”, things naturally got worse. At that point, anti-Irish sentiment was being pushed heavily in the press and the football press knew exactly how to drive the point home with a sledgehammer.

This stoked the bigotry which was already bubbling away to ever greater heights.

Stephen describes cartoons of that time which depict Celtic’s players as if they had “crawled out of the bogs” whilst Rangers players were drawn as smart, upstanding citizens.

There are some in the press who still think of us this way.

The Sectarian Signing Policy May Have Come From An Unusual Source

Rangers’ sectarian signing policy – which many of their fans deny even existed – really took root in the 20’s and 30’s and was actually formalised and nailed down by their directors.

Part of this was political; they understood the value of being seen as the polar opposites of the “Irish clubs” and part of it was financial.

The roots of this are actually somewhat surprising.

For openers, Rangers were the darlings of a lot of Scottish businessmen, married to the club via the lodges both Orange and Masonic.

But there was another source of cash which surprised Stephen when he was researching the book; the notorious anti-Catholic shipyard firm Harland and Wolff, who had opened up in Scotland and imported many of their Ulster workforce with them.

It was, at one point, one of the most virulently bigoted employers anywhere … and in 1912, shortly after their arrival in Glasgow, they loaned the Ibrox club £90,000.

Now, let’s be clear … that is an astronomical sum of money.

One of those websites that tells you how the value of money has changed through the years reckons that’s the equivalent of around £7 million in today’s money. Not a lot for a football club … but back then that was the equivalent of 270,000 working men’s salaries.

And what was the quid-pro-quo? That the Ibrox club follow Harland and Wolff’s own employment practices and thus remain pure to the fans who would be following the club having come across the water to work in the yards themselves.

As unbelievable as this sounds, Stephen actually found the information in Rangers’ historian Robert McElroy’s book The Spirit of Ibrox, one of the early club histories and what was meant to be a flattering portrait of them.

Not only was it not exactly a secret, but there was a time when they were kind of proud of the sectarian singing policy.

Those trying to pretend it never existed are rewriting their own history books, not ours.

The Newspapers Ignored The Inquiry Into The Causes Of The Ibrox Disaster

People often refer to the Ibrox Disaster, but in reality there were three separate fatal events at the ground over the years, and the one which most people refer to was the last of them. The first was the collapse of a stand at a Scotland-England game, a stand constructed so that they keep up with the size of Celtic Park, and which the media had written was safe for such a high profile game in spite of never before that being more than half full.

The second was on the infamous Stairway 13 itself, which club officials knew full well was a potential death trap.

And the third, of course, killed 66 people.

The media pushed a lot of varying narratives on that disaster over the years, but they went out of their way not to cover either the fatal accident inquiry or the private prosecution which the wife of one of those who died brought against the club.

There was a good reason for that; they might have had to ask some very hard questions.

Witnesses at the first hearing testified that the area had long been deadly; some described games where fans leaving could get all the way down those stairs “without their feet touching the ground”. Several previous incidents – including the deaths of two fans in 1961 – had not resulted in wholescale changes as the club continued to gamble with the safety of fans.

And yet the Fatal Accident Inquiry was not terribly tough on the club.

On the back of two major reports into crowd safety in the years before the Ibrox Disaster, 23 separate recommendations were made to protect fans. The Ibrox board didn’t particularly bother with any of them, and the results are a matter of historical record.

At Margret Dougan’s private prosecution, for which she was awarded more than £26,000 in damages, the judge wrote a scathing verdict, slamming the club and its board in an astounding 27-page summary judgement and even accused people inside Ibrox of lying under oath.

Others had – as amazing as this will sound – tried to pass the blame to a director who had since died.

“Certain of their actions can only be interpreted as a deliberate and apparently successful attempt to deceive others that they were doing something when in fact they were doing nothing,” he wrote of the board’s efforts to evade the safety recommendations.

The only publication in the country which covered the matter properly was a fanzine – I am sure that will amaze you as it did me. In an article entitled Falling Masonry (and yes, the dark pun was intended as you’ll see) the fan publication Foul covered the verdict in exhaustive, and eye-popping detail. Accusing the original Fatal Accident Inquiry of instigating a “masonic cover-up” to protect the Ibrox directors, many of whom were in “the Brotherhood.”

How accurate was that suggestion? Well, The Daily Record relegated the public prosecution to page five of their paper. The Scotsman put it on page eight. And the BBC sent a reporter up from London because they simply didn’t trust the Scottish office to “ask the right questions.”

The more things change …

But For Sectarianism, Alex Ferguson Would Have Been Manager There

Here’s a terrifying thought.

The whole history of football on this island might look very different, and the respective strengths and weaknesses of the clubs at Parkhead and Ibrox right now may be entirely upended but for the obvious stupidity of the Ibrox club’s sectarian policies.

Not only did they miss out on some fantastic players – like Danny McGrain and Kenny Dalglish – but they also missed out on the single greatest manager of the modern era, Alex Ferguson. Because back shortly after he won the Cup Winners Cup with Aberdeen, the Ibrox club wanted him.

Why wouldn’t they? It was readily apparent that he was a top class manager.

That he was to work such miracles at Pittodrie proves it even if he’d never gone onto even greater heights in Manchester. And you know what? As a former player of theirs and someone who understood what the club could be with the right man at the helm he was tempted.

He was very tempted indeed, tempted enough to have discussed his dilemma – and his doubts – with a number of close friends, including Archie McPherson.

It is from McPherson, as quoted in Stephen’s book, that the true source of Ferguson’s anguish and doubts came, this and the way he was treated at the club for having married a Catholic girl and being determined not to exclude her from his social life.

“How could I go back and not sign Catholics?” he asked. “What would I tell my friends who are Catholics? ‘You lot aren’t good enough for us’? I just couldn’t do that.”

You would assume that as he was their number one target they would have talked to him about the signing policies, and although the club had vowed, in public – but mostly, as Stephen makes clear for the benefit of UEFA – to actually sign Catholics the willingness to give Ferguson the latitude to actually do it clearly didn’t exist at all.

The media has never acknowledged the role sectarianism at Ibrox played in Ferguson’s decision, but it was crucial to it.

Even in 2001, a Herald article on the reasons he never went there doesn’t even mention sectarianism at all … the headline claim is he didn’t want to “stab Willie Waddell in the back”, which is a fine excuse on paper … but doesn’t stack up when you look at it.

Nothing the board said to Ferguson could convince him that they were ready, at that time, to take the step he wanted them to take most.

He stayed with Aberdeen and shortly thereafter headed for Manchester.

I wonder what ever became of him?

There Are Parallels Between The Way The Authories Handled Two Hampden Cup Final Riots

As most Scottish football observers will be aware, there have been two major Hampden riots in the modern era, and as Stephen’s book points out, there are amazing parallels between both of them. The causes were the same, they were sparked in the same way, and the reaction at the SFA and in the media was so similar it was if they all borrowed the playbook they had used in the first one as a means of getting through the second.

It’s quite incredible.

Aberdeen were league champions at the time and Dundee Utd had won the League Cup, so the Cup Final of 1980 offered Celtic and Rangers their sole chance to win something. The match finished 0-0 and went to extra time, where, in the second period, George McCluskey scored the only goal at the start of the second period, getting his head on a shot from Danny McGrain.

What happened next is a source of controversy, but only for those who want to overcomplicate it. Celtic players went over to their fans to celebrate the win, some of the Celtic fans invaded the pitch in celebration to join their players. In response, Rangers fans invaded the pitch ripe for a fight.

That’s it. It’s as simple as that.

Celtic fans went on to have a party, Rangers fans poured on to start a battle.

Even if you accept – as we all do – that Celtic fans ought not to have been on the pitch, their presence on the pitch would not have ended in disorder.

Rangers fans started the 1980 Hampden Riot. That’s the fact of it.

But the police blamed the Celtic players and the SFA blamed the Celtic fans.

The media wholeheartedly blamed both fans and players and still do to this day.

The argument that the Ibrox fans were “provoked” into a riot was still being made when Tom English did a Scotsman piece on the 30th anniversary of the game.

“At the same time, down the other end, a young supporter, clad in green, ran to the Rangers goal, produced a ball and fired a shot into their net,” he wrote. “It was a slight too far.”

The provocation excuse was to be deployed even more scandalously when Hibs fans invaded the Hampden pitch in 2016, to celebrate their sides first win in the Scottish Cup for over 100 years and Sevco fans poured on to basically have a punch-up, scunnered that a late winner had taken away their day from them.

This time the lie was that their fans ran on to protect their players, all of whom were off the pitch inside a minute. Once again, Ibrox supporters poured onto the pitch to attack rival fans … and in the aftermath the blame for the whole sordid event was heaped on Hibs.

There was also a suggestion that their fans were “provoked” into sectarian singing that day … and one Ibrox official actually said he’d rather have fans who were doing that than those who attacked rival players.

No evidence of a mass assault on their players has ever been produced, in spite of one newspaper claiming that every single one of them was … providing an alibi for the thuggish behaviour of their fans.

Rangers Had A Long History Of Cheating The Game And Dodging Taxes

Even before David Murray took the club down the road of using EBT’s they had history of tax dodging.

The book contains many examples, including a reminder that the man Murray bought the club from – Lawrence Marlborough – had been running it as a tax exile. The book lays out the groundwork that was put into the EBT period and Murray’s willingness to embrace it.

But more devastatingly, perhaps, is that he book makes it clear that at Ibrox there was a long history of cheating and fraud involving player contracts and the SFA, as well as a casual disregard for the rules and regulations of the game so ingrained in the club that it’s no wonder the board in the Murray era was so ready to embrace a wholescale defrauding of the sport.

Even as far back as 1884, they were threatened with the termination of their SFA membership for fielding an ineligible player.

The circumstances involved the signature of a T Cook, who they’d brought to the club in July but didn’t register until October.

In order to get around this problem they changed the T on the match document to a J, because they did have a J Cook eligible to play in their team although he wasn’t the player who took the field that day.

Had the SFA decided to proceed – which they didn’t – it would almost certainly have meant expulsion from the Scottish Cup at the very least … a proven case of forgery being, as it was later described, “one of the biggest scandals that ever disgraced the annals of football.”

And even as they were breaking the rules, they were extreme sticklers for making sure other clubs stuck to them.

Their officials once took a measuring tape to a pitch because they had lost a game 4-3, and when they found it eleven inches short raised a mighty hue and cry until the match was replayed.

This is an Ibrox club at its finest.

The Church, The Lodge, The Club And The SFA.

The book lays bare the links between the Church of Scotland, the Lodge, Rangers and the SFA.

This is not speculation as Stephen has laid down all the supporting evidence.

Back then all of this was so open that the SFA’s chairman would publicly acknowledge his membership of a certain lodge and the Ibrox club itself was involved in a fund raising event for the Grand Lodge of Scotland at around the time Harland and Wolff were giving them money.

Rangers drew a lot of its early support from the upper crust, and especially those who saw the Irish as the enemy.

The book does not paint a flattering picture of the business class.

What it reveals is that until the 70’s and 80’s the upper ranks of business were an insular wee world where memberships of the lodges both masonic and orange were the keys to opening every door and it was from this “business community” that the SFA and the Ibrox club drew its leadership.

That those organisations were entirely hostile to Celtic hardly needs saying.

These were the heady-days when the first question many people were asked when they went for a job was the old “what school did you go to?” question.

It’s not for nothing that George Galloway remembers the day everyone in his school was given the afternoon off to commemorate the first Catholic in his town to get a job working in a bank.

Stephen’s book has taken a look into dark corners which have never been explored before, and these particular dark corners have needed cleaning out for years.

Those who tell us we were once – and still are – paranoid are largely ignorant of a lot of Scottish football history or go out of their way to be, because the simple truth is that anti-Celtic sentiment has always been there in the background, right up to the very top of the governing bodies themselves.

Stephen’s book reveals all of this and more. It is an exceptional read … and a real eye opener.

You can purchase it at this link.

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