Paddy Crerand: Never Turn the Other Cheek

Celtic’s ground, Parkhead, was a twenty-minute walk away and I would go with my mates for matches and wait by the turnstiles until someone lifted us over. I never went to games with my mum, that wasn’t the done thing. The ritual of being lifted over the turnstiles was one that every Glaswegian kid went through. It was accepted that if a man arrived at a turnstile with his boy he was allowed to lift him over and they both got into the match for the price of one. The turnstile attendant could hardly ask the man to prove that the boy was his son. Most supporters, therefore, were willing to lift a boy over if he asked them. So before any game you would see dozens of boys running alongside the grown-ups as they approached the turnstiles, shouting the immortal phrase: ‘Gonny gie’s a lift o’er, mister?’

Until I was too old, or too heavy, I had many a lift, and one of my earliest football memories is of getting into Hampden Park at the age of ten and seeing a fabulous Great Britain team with a forward line of Stanley Matthews, Wilf Mannion, Tommy Lawton, and Billy Liddell beat the Rest of Europe 6–1. I can also remember seeing Tom Finney play for the first time in 1952 when England beat Scotland 2–1. Even though he was wearing the white of England, I knew I’d seen a great winger. The Scots didn’t know what to do with him because, being so two-footed, he could beat them any way he wanted. Later I saw Finney play in quite a few internationals. I saw Stanley Matthews, too, but Finney was clearly the better of the two. The one thing I liked about Finney is that he bowed out at the top. Most good footballers refuse to admit when their best playing days are over, and they go on and play for as long as they can for the sake a few more pounds when they have already made a lot of money in their career. I think this spoils them in the eyes of the public because they are remembered as failures with an expanding waistline instead of the brilliant performers they were before. It says much that Finney was prepared to step out of the limelight when he had the slim build and was still in his prime.

I went to Parkhead for most of the home games. It was so huge that despite the big crowds it was rarely full to its 80,000 capacity. I don’t think I ever had a penny in my pocket but I always got into the ground and stood on one of the vast sweeping terraces that made up three-quarters of the stadium.

Charlie Tully was a Celtic player who became my childhood hero after the war. He was signed from Belfast Celtic in 1948 in the hope that he would stop a decline at the club. He never trained well but he had so much ability. I loved him and he was a big star, just like George Best was to become. He once scored direct from a corner kick against Falkirk. The referee blew his whistle and made him take the corner kick again. Nobody could believe it when he re-took the kick and scored for a second time.

Playing for Ireland at Windsor Park in 1952, he scored from a corner again, this time in a 2–2 draw with England. However, he’s more remembered for his pre-match chat with his marker Alf Ramsey that day.

‘What’s it like to be an automatic selection for your country, Mr Ramsey?’ he asked him.

‘It’s an absolute privilege, Mr Tully,’ Ramsey replied.

‘Good, because you won’t be one after today.’

Charlie, nicknamed ‘The Clown Prince’ because he used to torture opposition right-backs and make clowns out of them, was a cult hero in Glasgow. There was even a green flavoured ice cream called ‘Tully’.

Celtic didn’t win the league between 1938 and 1954 – Rangers were a much stronger team in those days – but they did win the 1951 Scottish Cup at Hampden against Motherwell 1–0 thanks to a John McPhail goal. I went to that game along with 131,392 others.

My memories are not just confined to football in Scotland. I remember listening to the 1948 FA Cup Final on the wireless. A family who lived near us had a radio and I was amazed at how it worked and how words could come out of it direct from Wembley Stadium in London. I listened to the game and I wanted Manchester United to win for two reasons. The first was because they were losing 2–1 at half-time and I liked the idea of a team coming from behind, no matter who they were. The second was because United had Jimmy Delaney, an old Celtic player, in the team. Yet if Blackpool had been losing 2–1, I’d have wanted them to win.

In later years, Duncan Edwards, the Manchester United great who died in the Munich air disaster, was a hero of mine. I liked half-backs. He scored the winning goal for England against Scotland at Wembley in 1957. I took an interest in Manchester United because they were such a young team. The Busby Babes they called them. Most teams seemed to have an average age of twenty-eight – but the Busby Babes’ was about twenty-two.

During the school holidays – Easter, summer and Christmas – we’d head back to Ireland to visit my grandmother in Gweedore. We’d get the Anchor Lines boat to Derry from the Broomielaw in Glasgow and I’d spend all my free time in Donegal. It always felt like home and I would cry my eyes out when it was time to leave. I’ve now lived in Glasgow for over twenty years and Manchester for over forty, but I consider Donegal home, even though I wasn’t born there or have never lived there for more than four months. When I met someone in Glasgow, they would ask when I was going home for a holiday.

I was so excited when we travelled to Donegal. We’d get the boat at 5.30 pm and would arrive in Derry at 9 o’clock in the morning. The journey would be horrendous as the boat chugged along and we travelled third class. I can remember sitting there alongside cows, which travelled in the same compartment. There was a bar on the boat though. The owners knew what they were doing, keeping the masses half pissed that they wouldn’t care about being treated like cattle.

The boat arrived in Derry and we had to cross the border between the six counties and the rest of Ireland, where the controls were very strict. We would try to bring chickens and eggs back from Ireland because they were scarce in the Gorbals. The B-Specials, who were a branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), would come onto the bus and treat us very badly because we were Catholics. They would get us off the bus and search it. When we re-boarded everything would be gone. If you said anything to them they would hit you with a rifle.

The situation made me very angry and I started to become more politically minded when I was a teenager. I read a lot about Irish history and formed the opinion that the British policy in the north of Ireland amounted to dividing and conquering. My father’s side of the family had been hard-line republican. When revolutionary leader Michael Collins wanted to come to an agreement with the British for an Irish Free State in 1921, with the six counties in the north being worked out later, my family were against it and accused Collins of selling out. They wanted all of Ireland or nothing. They didn’t want a Northern Ireland and didn’t recognize the new border. The British, in their wisdom, knew that partition would split the republican movement and civil war ensued. Collins should be remembered as one of the greatest ever Irishmen, but I wouldn’t have voted for him because he compromised and split the country. He did this because he believed he could make further progress with the British in the future. But he was killed in an ambush in August 1922.

Gweedore is officially the largest Irish-speaking parish in Ireland – Gerry Adams learned his Irish there – and, despite only having a population of 5,000, has some notable former residents. Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll was born there and was related to my family. He left Gweedore at an early age and became an enforcer for the mafia in early twentieth-century New York City. He grew up on the streets of the Bronx, where he joined a street gang and befriended the gangster Dutch Schultz. As Schultz’s criminal empire grew in power, he employed Coll as an assassin. During the 1920s, Coll developed a risky but lucrative scam whereby he would kidnap powerful gangsters at gunpoint and extort a ransom from his captive’s associates before releasing them. He knew that the victims would not report it to the police, especially because, being criminals, they would have a hard time explaining to the authorities how they happened to have such huge supplies of cash in order to pay for their release. Coll is one of the villains depicted in the film The Untouchables.

Coll is distantly related to former Northern Ireland MP Brid Rodgers, who is also from Gweedore. She became the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and was involved in the Irish Civil Rights Movement from 1965.

Another son of Gweedore is James Duffy, an Irish recipient of the Victoria Cross. He was 28 years old, and a private in the 6th Battalion of the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers during the First World War, when he was awarded the VC for gallantry in Palestine.

The musical heritage of Gweedore is very rich. Clannad and Enya are from there. A lot of my friends from Glasgow moved back to Donegal and still live there. If I go to Glasgow these days I have to get a hotel room and that seems strange.

In 1949 there was a change in our family life. My mum got married again to a fella called Charlie Duffy. He was a great man who was also from Gweedore. It was a big burden for him to take on a woman with four kids. They went on to have another two girls. I used to see Charlie as my mate. He never hit me once in his life when it was the done thing to give a kid a smack if he stepped out of line. Mum would hit us and it never did me any harm, but Charlie didn’t. I’d walk with Charlie on his way to work just so I could be with him. He would wind me up by pretending to be a Rangers fan.

Me and my brother John used to argue about Celtic and Rangers, too, but we were very close. We played together all the time and he was a good footballer. John told me that he wanted to be a priest. He became poorly when he was twelve with rheumatic fever and I went to see him in hospital. Everything seemed all right because he was talking to me.

But everything wasn’t all right. I was sitting in the house one Saturday evening listening to the football results on the radio when we were told that John was dead. I couldn’t understand it because I had been to see him a few days before and he seemed fine. I was too young to properly understand what death was, but my mother was heartbroken. You don’t expect to outlive your kids and she was crying all the time. They brought the coffin to the house because there was nowhere else to take it. It wasn’t a big coffin, just a small thing. He was buried in the Catholic cemetery next to Celtic Park, not in the Protestant graveyard behind the jungle stand (the name Celtic fans gave to the covered terrace where the most vocal Celts stood because they said it was full of animals). Billy Connolly used to joke about those graveyards. ‘Why don’t they get buried together? Are they going to get up and fight with each other?’

All the relations came over for John’s funeral. A lot of drink was taken. It’s an old standing Irish joke that the only difference between a wedding and a wake is that there is one less drunk at the wake. It’s a great way of getting over things and I think the drink helped the adults.

I missed John terribly. When I wanted to play with him he wasn’t there. I missed talking to him about football and helping mum do household chores with him. I cried a lot and felt very alone. The adults could speak about it, but I couldn’t. When I did try to talk about it with mum she said that John wouldn’t be coming home again. The mood in the house was awful, but the adults tried to be normal with me.

When you are that young you can be resilient to almost anything and you adapt quickly. You just do. I had so many friends that before long I was immersed in football again and life continued as normal, only John wasn’t there. I never spoke to my mum about John in later years. I find death very hard to accept and I think she did too. My sister Bridie lost her husband when he was quite young and then lost her son in a car crash. He was returning from a Simple Minds concert in Dublin and driving back to Donegal. So what happened to my mum also happened to my sister.

Not long after John died, I did well in my exams and attained a very high pass mark to go to Holyrood, a school with a good reputation. They had their own red shale football pitches. Scottish international Alan Brazil went there, as did Eddie Gray who played for Leeds United. One of my schoolteachers, Mr Murphy, was the announcer at Celtic Park. Our school had a good team and we won the final of a schools’ competition at Hampden Park in 1955.

I read newspapers a lot more as I entered my teenage years and became very left wing. I still am today, but I’m much milder than when I was younger. I started becoming more politically aware in 1951 when Churchill got into power again. The war had been over quite a while but there was still rationing for people who had no money.

The political situation in Ireland was always pertinent for me. I came from a family that wanted a united Ireland and I still believe in that. I have never accepted the violence and, hopefully, we have seen the last of The Troubles. I’m pleased that there has been a lot of political progress in the last decade. People have realized that you get progress by talking and not by shooting each other and I’m more optimistic about the future of Ireland now than I have ever been.

The problems affected football as well of course. I was indifferent to Glasgow Rangers until I was about thirteen when I found out that they didn’t sign Catholics. The discrimination enraged me, yet it was something Catholics were used to.

I never had a girlfriend. If you had one aged fourteen in Glasgow then you had to fight everybody because you were considered a softie. Besides, I couldn’t go out on a Friday night because I always played football on a Saturday morning.

As I got older, I’d cross the River Clyde with my mates and go into the centre of Glasgow. It was an adventure going into town and seeing different types of people for the first time in my life. I looked in the windows of shops and marvelled at all the things that people could buy and we couldn’t. Plenty of my mates went stealing but I was never tempted. I had that Catholic mentality in my head that if I committed a sin then I’d go to hell. That, and the prospect of having to face my mother, who would have killed me.

On the football field my life was progressing well. Up to the age of fifteen I was a prolific centre-forward. I was stronger than most of the other players and found scoring goals easy. I wasn’t quick, but I could brush players off and I had a hard, accurate shot. My reputation was growing locally and I was approached by a man called Hugh Wiseman. He ran a football team called RanCel, short for Rangers and Celtic. He wanted to get Celtic and Rangers fans closer together and asked me to play in his team on a Saturday afternoon. But I just wanted to watch Celtic, especially as I had just joined a Celtic supporters’ club and travelled on a bus with them to matches. They used to subsidize the travel for the young fans and that meant I could go to away games, loving the experience of travelling with my friends. My mother got the needle with me and told me that I couldn’t let Mr Wiseman down. Everyone knew him because he used to keep the toilets clean on Cumberland Street. So I didn’t let him down and played. He got me my first pair of football boots. Mr Wiseman encouraged me to play in midfield rather than up front. I could hit the ball a considerable distance accurately and he thought that I was better suited to playing in the middle.

After playing with RanCel, I was told that Duntocher Hibs, one of the junior sides, wanted to sign me. I was still just sixteen, but within the space of a few weeks I went from going to watch Celtic to playing in front of 3,000 most Saturdays in Duntocher, close to Clydebank where my dad had a job.

I still needed to work, and while I’d done well at school it was hard getting a job with the blatant sectarianism that existed. Newspaper adverts declared: ‘No RC (Roman Catholics) or Irish may apply.’ There was always a feeling that the Irish immigrants were taking jobs away from the homebred Scots.

I got a job in Fairfield’s shipyard on the River Clyde, where I was taught to prepare the steel plates for the welders. I was up every morning at six to catch a lorry which came by Gorbals Cross half an hour later. We’d stand in the back of the lorry in all weathers and started work at ten to seven. I earned £2 10 shillings a week, but I loathed every minute of it. You were outside all the time, it was cold and miserable. I used to ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ It wasn’t living, it was surviving, but rather than becoming disillusioned, it made me determined to get out and be a footballer.

The best thing about work was the great camaraderie among the workers, but there was always a divide between Celtic and Rangers supporters, a real ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality. If someone said that they supported Partick Thistle we thought that was just an excuse for being a Rangers fan. It was ridiculous. Men were working together, helping each other make the same ship, yet basically hating each other because they supported different teams. You never knew when an argument might get out of hand. I became a target for the Rangers followers because in their eyes Duntocher was just a junior Celtic team. In the yard, as at home, I had to be ready to hit back. It was a return to the law of the streets.

My week would come alive on a Saturday. I’d catch a red bus from Glasgow to Duntocher. The standard of football at Duntocher was very high, the games ultra competitive. I loved every minute playing for that club and stayed for two years. A lot of people who lived in Duntocher were Catholics who had come from Donegal. All the top scouts were constantly coming to watch us. When Duntocher Hibs became defunct Drumchapel moved into their ground and they have stayed there to this day. The Drum are still one of the top amateur teams in Scotland and many big names in professional football have started out there, including Sir Alex Ferguson, David Moyes, Andy Gray, Archie Gemmill, Asa Hartford, and John Robertson.

I got to know a lovely man called Jimmy Smith at Duntocher. He had been a great player for Rangers before the war and was acting as a scout for them after it. He frequently said to me, ‘I’d love to sign you for Rangers, Paddy.’ But he couldn’t because I was a Catholic. Again, I considered that ridiculous. Jock Stein, when he became Celtic’s first Protestant manager, was asked in his first press conference: ‘If there was a Catholic and Protestant of equal ability, which one would you sign first?’ Jock replied straightaway: ‘The Protestant. Because it would stop Rangers getting him. And then I’d get the Catholic anyway.’

My football was going well and the papers began to talk of senior clubs being interested in me. In fact, I think the Manchester City scout was the most persistent but Jimmy McLean, who ran Duntocher, never allowed any of them to speak to me because he knew that one team dominated my thinking.

It was a bright summer’s day in August 1957 when I found out that Celtic were keen on me. Jim, a Rangers supporter, met me coming off the pitch at Ashfield away one day. He kept laughing and saying, ‘You’re going to enjoy this.’ We went through the dressing room, then into a side room where he introduced me to a complete stranger.

He was Teddy Smith, Celtic’s chief scout, but I didn’t know that until he asked, ‘How would you like to sign for Celtic?’ I remember those were his exact words. A pretty ordinary sentence, but to me they were the greatest words in the world. I was stunned and just said, ‘Yeah.’ He told me to go to Celtic Park the following Monday evening. I went home straightaway, my head buzzing and full of thoughts. I ran into our house and told my mum. She put her arms around me and hugged me tight. I felt like the proudest man alive. As I pulled away, I saw that mum was crying. It was the best present I could have given her.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.