FIERCE HOLY WAR IN A VIOLENT CITY
Glasgow thinks of itself as hard-faced and soft hearted. The judgment is at least a half-truth. Straddling the River Clyde at the western end of Scotland's narrow industrial belt, the city offers to the world the brazen, slightly battered aspect of an old booth fighter. It respects very little and fears less. It is a quick-witted, coarse-tongued tough nut of a town, whose most celebrated traditions are still shipbuilding, football (never to be called soccer) and fighting men. No one should be surprised to find that football and crowd hooliganism tend to go together in a place where anyone walking into a bar wearing a scarf of the wrong color can expect to "get the message." In Glasgow's own language, a harsh metropolitan corruption of lowland Scots studded with the shorthand of violence, getting the message is a procedure that may vary from a swift thumping to some impromptu facial surgery with a razor or a broken glass. The city's hospitals are called upon to do so much stitching it seems remarkable that they have never made a deal with the Singer organization.
Even an Edinburgh man would admit, of course, that it would be a monstrous injustice to present Glasgow in these terms and leave it at that. It is a great commercial and industrial center, world famous for the craftsmanship of its engineers and the shrewdness of its financiers. It has a great body of douce citizenry housed in douce suburbs of gray and red sandstone or behind fastidiously trimmed gardens in some of the better council estates. It has a reasonably lively theatrical tradition, a fine art gallery, a splendid university. It is clearly less Philistine than many cities of comparable size, compensating for certain deficiencies in formal culture with its sense of integrated identity, its own zestful folklore.
But all the pious imagemaking of the town council cannot hide the fact that this folklore is heavily laden with tales of squalid primitivism. The battling gangs of the Depression years have been replaced by equally boastful but less warlike mobs of youths, whose principal outlet appears to be scrawling their challenging slogans on the walls of public lavatories or on the sooty gable ends of tenements. Yet, essentially, Glasgow is scarcely less violent than it was. An accidental nudge on a pavement can still produce "a claim." Anyone who is claimed has the option of trying to put up a fight or taking what is coming to him and, whether it is the settling of an old score (vendettas are waged with Sicilian intensity) or a casual encounter, a claim may end in bloody death in the gutter.
Nevertheless, it is true that Glasgow's murder rate—only 14 in 1967—is low in proportion to the number of assaults. This probably is because shootings are extremely rare. Here violence is a personal thing, to be done with the hands, the head, the feet or, more likely, with a bottle, a bayonet, a hatchet, a chain, a knife or the sharpened ferrule of an umbrella.
In most of Glasgow's 1,000 public houses just about anything can start a fight—they are democratic that way—but nothing detonates trouble more readily than a confrontation of supporters of the two clubs that are in many ways the most remarkable in the whole world of football. Overall, Glasgow's record of dedication to the game surpasses even those of Rio, Madrid, Milan, Manchester or Liverpool. The city supports four teams in the first division of the Scottish League, but the real passion is concentrated on Rangers and Celtic.
This is a fervor that goes far deeper than any sporting enthusiasm, for it is rooted in the bitterest religious bigotry in modern Christendom. To the mass of their followers, Rangers are the chosen representatives of Protestantism and Celtic are as firmly identified with Roman Catholicism as the Vatican itself. Rangers wear shirts officially described as royal blue, and their supporters, often in an awesome choir of 50,000 and more, are in the habit of singing God Save the Queen as a gesture of loyalty to the Protestant monarchy. Celtic wear green-and-white hoops, and their fans, who can muster in numbers only slightly short of those that follow Rangers, take most of their considerable musical repertoire from the rebel songs of Ireland. In fact, the essence of the conflict is Irish in origin.
On a clear day it is possible to see the outline of Ireland from the shores of the Clyde estuary, and Irish immigrants had been entering Scotland by the boatload for generations before the two clubs were formed, Rangers in 1873 and Celtic in 1888. The Rangers (they insist on the definite article with a capital "T," even referring to their huge red-brick home near the river on the western outskirts as The Stadium) grew out of the excess energies of a group of oarsmen who used to get the ball out after dragging their boat from the Clyde at Glasgow Green.
Celtic Football and Athletic Club was established in the impoverished Victorian East End of Glasgow by Brother Walfrid, a member of the teaching institute of Marist Brothers, with the main object of providing food for "needy children in the missions of St. Mary's, Sacred Heart and St. Michael's." The charitable principle has been retained, and the club still donates substantial sums each season but, though Celtic's origins were more obviously religious than Rangers', the irony is that in Celtic teams the Protestants may outnumber the Catholics whereas Rangers will not consider a Catholic, regardless of talent. This was not always the case. One Catholic is known to have played for Rangers in the 20s. But in recent years if Rangers signed on "one of them" it was an error, and an error quickly rectified.
Critics are swift to point out that the powerful chairman of The Rangers Club, John Lawrence, a millionaire builder, must have a work force that is about 30% Catholic. It is certainly a logical assumption, because the ratio of Catholics to Protestants in the school population of Glasgow is something like one to two. Neither Lawrence nor any of his fellow directors will comment on the discrimination, but Rangers supporters have a simple explanation of the more liberal approach at Celtic Park: "Where would they find 11 good Catholics?"
The mixture of religions on Celtic teams has had amusing repercussions. John Thomson, the fine young goalkeeper who became a martyr when he was accidentally and fatally injured in a collision with a Rangers forward, is credited with coming in at half time in one match and complaining that an opponent had called him "a papist bastard." Jimmy McGrory, who was center forward on the same team, told Thomson not to worry, that he had been called that many times. "Aye," said Thomson. "But you are one."
Three years ago Celtic took a step that was massively embarrassing to The Rangers board: they appointed a Protestant to manage the club. Jock Stein, a big, intimidatingly sharp miner from Lanarkshire, was a highly competent but unbrilliant defender for Celtic, As manager, he has been miraculously successful. Last season Celtic won every competition open to them: the Scottish League Championship, the Scottish Cup, the Scottish League Cup, the Glasgow Cup and, finally and unforgettably, the European Cup, the prize in a tournament for the champion clubs of all the major football nations of Europe. No British club had ever gone beyond the semifinal in the European Cup. Manchester United, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Dundee, Hibernian and Rangers—with their best performance in six tries—all reached that stage. Celtic at their first attempt went through to the final, and in Lisbon last May they played magnificent attacking football at bewildering speed to shatter the defensive strategy of Inter-Milan, the Italian club whose negative use of superbly gifted players had given them the European championship twice and driven true lovers of the game to despair.
When Celtic won, the thousands who had followed them to Lisbon ("Every mass has been all-ticket since we came" was Stein's favorite joke before the game) took over the Portuguese capital and for days afterward British Embassy officials were frantically trying to cope with little red-eyed men in rumpled suits that contained neither money nor passports. "Every time we opened a cupboard a Celtic supporter fell out," one of them recalls.
The debris of anecdotes left behind by that carousal in Lisbon is monumental, and the most bizarre stories are the true ones. One man awoke with a start in an airport lounge, rushed out to a taxi and said, "Take me to Johnstone." Johnstone is a few miles outside Glasgow but the taxi was outside Lisbon airport, so the driver turned down the 2,000-mile ride. Nothing conveys the euphoria of the whole episode more accurately than the case of the fan who was swirled merrily aboard the plane with his friends, celebrated lustily all the way back, landed blissfully at Prestwick, then realized he had gone to Lisbon by car.
Even the victims could laugh about these incidents because for many of them that Celtic triumph was nothing less than the climactic experience of their lives. For tens of thousands of people, not only in Glasgow but all over Scotland and among Scottish emigrants as far apart as England, the United States and Australia, the first plank of identity is being a Rangers or Celtic supporter. At least one Rangers supporter has had his ashes scattered over the center circle at the stadium, and there are tales of Celtic men being given the last rites one day and getting up to go to a match the next. One of the consequences of such devotion is complete financial security for the clubs. The supporters who come to important games by coach and train from every part of Scotland and some towns in England, and by boat and plane from Ireland, swell the vast congregations of ardent Glaswegians. Meetings of the two are frequently watched by crowds of well over 100,000, and even when they are not in opposition their names can draw attendances almost as large. To the fortunes taken at the gate, Rangers and Celtic recently added the income earned by operating their own betting pools. Celtic's is an orthodox lottery but Rangers' is based on football and pulls in money from their admirers all round the globe.
But though they are bigger than ever, Rangers have not found success to match their growth in the last season or two. Throughout this century Rangers and Celtic have dominated Scottish football to an extent that made it freakish if another club butted in to win one of the major competitions. In the 21 seasons between the wars only Motherwell, with one victory, broke their monopoly of the league championship, and when other clubs emerged more forcefully after World War II it was Celtic and not Rangers who suffered. Rangers remained more than capable of fulfilling the old pseudomodest vow that they would go on "struggling along at the top." However, the advent of Stein at Celtic Park coincided with a lean period for Rangers, and their supporters found it intolerable after the decades of plenty.
At the beginning of this season Rangers, for the first time in half a century, had gone three years without winning the league title. The bitterness of the situation was fully exposed when Celtic went to South America in November to settle the so-called world club championship with the South American champions, Racing Club of Argentina. Their playoff in Montevideo was a sordid shambles, with four Celtic players and two Racing men ordered off the field for fouling and brawling. Unbiased evidence suggests that Celtic reacted to unbearable provocation, but it was inevitable that the more virulent Rangers fans should leap in to say that their old enemies had been shown up at last as the thugs they were. There were malicious phone calls, and one Celtic player had to listen to groups of men jeering and singing outside his house, which was splashed with paint as a bonus insult. Presumably that persecution was the work of Rangers supporters but, had the roles been reversed, there is little doubt that just as many Celtic hooligans would have displayed the same sick prejudice. Justice and objectivity do not come into it. It is simply a matter of the orange-and-blue against the green, them and us, us and them.
Many people trace the intensification of religious bigotry in Glasgow between the wars to the importing of Belfast shipyard workers during World War I. Belfast is the headquarters of the Orange movement, the agglomeration of fanatically anti-Catholic "lodges" committed to preserving the memory and significance of the victory won by William of Orange over the dethroned Catholic James II of Britain on the banks of the Boyne north of Dublin in 1690. (Most historians agree that what happened on the Boyne was engineered for his own devious purposes by Louis XIV of France, and it is certain that James II, asked to face 35,000 troops with 21,000, was not so much routed as obliged to make a quick getaway.) Among those shipyard workers from Belfast were men steeped in such traditions and others equally immersed in the Fenianism that provides a savage counterpoint in the Ulster capital. Whatever other factors were involved, the trouble between rival elements at Rangers-Celtic matches definitely increased in the '30s, culminating in the record number of 120 arrests in 1936. When the serious disturbances recurred after the second war, with instances of mass bottle throwing and widespread fighting, even the extraordinarily efficient Glasgow police felt they needed help. In 1953 the clubs met police and the city magistrates, and it was agreed that Rangers-Celtic games should be subject to special conditions: there must be prematch entertainment and entertainment to occupy the spectators during the 10 minutes or so of the half-time interval; the teams must always come from the dressing rooms together; and there must be no flaunting of banners (a ban that is virtually unenforceable). At the same time the Lord Advocate laid it down that anyone arrested for causing trouble at a football match would be dealt with in a sheriff court, exposing offenders to stiffer penalties than they had faced in the police courts.
Since then there has been a marked improvement in the conduct of spectators at the games and, surprisingly, the mounting hostility that came with Celtic's success has not altered the trend severely. But it was the New Year's match that many people looked toward with apprehension. A tribal rite within a tribal rite, it has produced some memorable violence in the past. The two groups long ago elected to segregate themselves at opposite ends of the grounds, but that has never prevented the real wild men from making bother before, during or after the play. And this year's event had all the makings of an old-fashioned stramash.
Early in the season Rangers, clearly aware that something dramatic was required, fired their long-serving and hitherto successful manager, Scot Symon, and promoted David White, who had been recruited from Clyde, a part-time club. White, in his mid-30s, is small and boyish, and he is sometimes less than prepossessing in public. But he knows what he is doing, and Rangers had not lost a match since he took over. They went into the New Year meeting two points ahead of Celtic in the league table. The tension generated by the possibility that Rangers were thrusting themselves back on top was tremendous.
The magistrates had switched the fixture from January 1 to January 2 to give the supporters a chance to sober up after bringing in the New Year, but that meant playing on a day when the public houses were open instead of on one when they were closed. In addition, the weather was fine though cold, dashing police hopes of a nice discouraging rain. "This could be one of the vicious ones," said a Glasgow journalist, watching whiskey being drunk from five-gill bottles in the hired buses easing along Gallowgate and London Road to Celtic Park. They passed dilapidated tenements, pubs as bare and uninviting as urinals and waste-lots alive with brash, bespattered children who looked like extras engaged for the filming of a Dickens novel. There was a sense that anything might happen, but as it turned out very little did, apart from some weird occurrences concerning John Fallon, Celtic's young reserve goalkeeper.
On a dead, muddy field before 75,000, Celtic, playing without four of the 11 who won the European Cup, were still generally too mobile and inventive in the first half for a Rangers' side that was ponderously physical in defense and had only Willie Johnston to suggest penetration in attack. John Greig, the Rangers captain, set a dubious example with repeated fouls on Jimmy Johnstone, Celtic's marvelously elusive right winger, and when Sandy Jardine chose to give Johnstone similar treatment the punishment was a free kick that led to a goal.
At the beginning of the second half Rangers appeared almost resigned, and the jubilant Celtic support were giving voice with "We're off to Dublin in the green, in the green...." They were silenced abruptly by the first of Fallon's moments of eccentricity. He contrived to permit a moderate shot to go through his legs, and at once Rangers found new vigor. Celtic began to labor, an unusual plight for a team considered one of the fittest in the world. Bobby Murdoch, a hero of Lisbon, brought reassurance when, with his back to goal, he controlled the ball in the air with his right foot and pivoted to hook a wonderful left-footer high beyond Rangers Goalkeeper Erik Sorensen. Still, Fallon was to have the final say. When Rangers Danish right back, Kai Johansen, moved up and mis-hit a shot from rather more than 25 yards it seemed that someone in the stands would have had time to get down and save the skidding ball. But Fallon, arching his body conveniently, dived over it and gave Rangers a draw. Two minutes later the match was over, and the red-haired goalkeeper was making an embarrassed sprint for the tunnel.
"Tonight he won't have a friend in the world," someone said solemnly in the press box.
He had quite a few friends in "The Snug" bar at Bridgeton Cross, where a bunch of Rangers fans were soon dancing frenetically in a circle like Indians who had just heard about their team's performance at the Little Bighorn. They were brandishing their scarves (Rangers and Celtic diehards are among the few people who wear woolen scarves all year round) and pint glasses crunched under their feet as they chanted, "Aye, aye, yippee, the Pope's a———-hippie."
Outside a news vendor was saying that it had been a quiet one. There were only four arrests in the ground. "Aye," said a customer in a green scarf, "I'll bet Fallon wishes there had been a break-in at half time."
PHOTO
GERRY CRANHAM
IN KILMARNOCK PUB BEFORE BUSING TO GAME, CELTIC SUPPORTERS TOAST THEIR TEAM
PHOTO
GERRY CRANHAM
WELL SATISFIED WITH THE TIED GAME, RANGERS PARTISANS CELEBRATE IN GLASGOW
PHOTO
GERRY CRANHAM
HERE MAKING SAVE, CELTIC GOALKEEPER JOHN FALLON LATER PERMITTED EASY SCORE