The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872

by Ralston, Gary

  Rangers finally ran out of steam in a season that was also memorable for the first floodlit match staged at Ibrox, with the Scottish Corinthians (in effect, the Scottish national team) turning up for an exhibition under electric light in March. The gate receipts went to Govan charities as the Scots triumphed in the ‘sunlight fixture’, but the darkest season in the history of the Light Blues lay just around the corner. The statistics for season 1888–89 were, quite frankly, woeful: 39 games played, 19 lost and seven drawn, with 108 goals conceded as annual turnover dropped by £1,000. Rangers were knocked out of the Scottish Cup in a second-round replay after a 3–0 defeat against Clyde and in the third round of the Glasgow Cup Celtic came to Ibrox and won 6–1. At the start of the season Rangers had taken the innovative step of appointing the club’s first trainer, John Taylor, but he was struggling to make an impact.

  The club were toiling as much off the field as on it, as the committee structure was in chaos and even the omnipresent Tom Vallance was struggling to make his influence felt as one embarrassment followed another. On New Year’s Day 1889 Rangers were losing at Blackburn at the same time as Aston Villa arrived in Glasgow expecting to play their old FA Cup foes in a match they believed had been previously arranged. Nine men turned up for a game against Morton, the team lost 8–0 to Vale of Leven and even the much-heralded Ibrox Park was being criticised for a pitch that resembled a potato patch. Meanwhile, the concept of a capacity crowd similar to that which witnessed the opening of the ground against Preston was a dim and distant memory – only 500 fans could be bothered turning up for a match against Partick Thistle. One newspaper noted: ‘Such apathy and the name and fame of grand old Rangers will soon be but a distant memory.’ These were desperate times and temperatures were running so high that the club’s half-yearly meeting in November 1888 was adjourned for a week. Seven days later resentment was still simmering and after nine hours of debate it was finally agreed to extend the numbers on the committee from five to seven in a bid to widen the circle of experience and expertise. It also marked the end for the direct, decision-making involvement in Rangers of the gallant pioneers, as Vallance stepped down at the end of the season after six years as president to be replaced by John Mellish. Rangers were moving on. Indeed, stagnation was not an option and William Wilton was the man to take them into the 20th century. More than anyone it was his vision, passion and commitment at a crucial watershed in the development of Scottish football that relegated to the annals of history the internecine squabbles that had so characterised much of the 1880s for the Light Blues.

  Wilton was born in Largs on 9 June 1865, a son to James and Janet Wilton. William’s father, a stonemason, died aged 52 in Millport in March 1873 and soon after the family moved to Govan, where Janet set up home in Crookston Street with William and his brother Daniel, seven years his senior (they had at least one other brother, Charles). By the age of 15, William was working as an office boy at a sugar broker and he would later earn promotion to the position of mercantile clerk, thus setting out on a career path that suggested diligence and discipline, the very traits for which he would soon become so respected and cherished at Rangers.

  In his spare time, William was a member of the Glasgow Select Choir, a fine tenor by all accounts, and it is to the eternal benefit of Rangers fans that he could hold a tune better than he could his position on the football field. He became a member of Rangers on 24 September 1883 aged 18, but his skills as a player with the second team ‘Swifts’ were open to question. What could not be doubted, however, even at such a tender age, were his leadership abilities off the field and he was quickly promoted to match secretary for the second string. His responsibility stopped short of picking the Swifts’ team, but he organised fixtures and travel details and soon became an integral and influential figure behind the scenes at Kinning Park and Ibrox. In 1887 he argued successfully at a members’ meeting for an increase in the numbers making up the selection committee after that poor run of results at first-team level. In May 1889, at the age of 23, he was put forward for the key position of match secretary of Rangers and saw off the challenge of James Gossland, an experienced committee man who had been honorary secretary of the club as early as 1883.

  The promotion of Wilton was vital for several reasons, not least the drive and energy he brought to the club at a time in which the landscape of Scottish football was changing forever. The Football League had been established in England in the summer of 1888, the brainchild of a Scot, Aston Villa patriarch William McGregor, and a natural consequence of the move to professionalism south of the border in 1885. In total, 12 clubs started the first season in the Football League, all of them from north of Birmingham – Accrington Stanley, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. A structured set-up of regular fixtures was crucial, not least for the club moneymen, who were charged with turning over sizeable sums to pay the weekly wage bill. The new division was a roaring success and in its first season the English clubs attracted 602,000 fans to their games, an average of 4,600 per game. By the outbreak of World War One the Football League, by then 20 clubs strong, was attracting almost nine million fans a year, an average of 23,100 at every game.

  Inevitably, in 1890, Scotland followed suit, although professionalism would not be officially recognised in the game until 1893, in part to stem the tide of players travelling south to earn their riches legitimately, rather than under the table in their homeland. Peter Fairly, the secretary of Renton, set the ball rolling on a Scottish League on 13 March 1890 when he sent a letter to 14 clubs across the Clyde–Forth Valley, inviting them to send two representatives to Holton’s Commercial Hotel in Glassford Street, Glasgow, on Thursday 20 March to consider the question of organising a league for Scottish clubs (in effect, there was a central belt bias and the Dundee clubs, for example, would soon express fears over their inability to attract clubs to play them on Tayside). Mellish, as president, and Wilton, as match secretary, attended for Rangers. All but two of the clubs invited sent representatives: Queen’s Park and Clyde. Clyde would later be welcomed into the fold, but Queen’s Park were opposed to the new set-up as the avowed amateurs correctly foretold the arrival of a professionalism they considered elitist and selfish in what they had always considered a gentleman’s game. In addition to Rangers, the clubs who turned out for the meeting were Abercorn, Cambuslang, Celtic, Cowlairs, Dumbarton, Heart of Midlothian, Renton, St Bernard’s, St Mirren, Third Lanark and Vale of Leven. The proposal to form a league was given the backing by the majority of those present, but with conditions. Clubs were still keen to operate under the umbrella of the SFA and there was clearly further discussion to be held on the distribution of gate monies. The Scottish Sport newspaper admitted it was disappointed with the contribution of Mellish to the debate, chiding him for adding little that had not already been said previously. Journalist Number One went on: ‘Mr Mellish’s words…were few, but were those of a diplomatist. In conjunction with Mr Wilton, he had come there to listen and report. Provided the league was got up in a proper way and for the benefit and furtherance of Scottish football he could see no harm in the departure, but it must be strictly amateur and recognise the SFA as the governing body. He had no instructions to act definitely.’5

  A seven-man sub-committee, including Wilton, was formed to draft rules and a constitution for the fledging Scottish League and it was formally inaugurated on 30 April 1890, with 11 clubs competing (St Bernard’s were not elected by their fellow clubs in a dispute over professionalism, in addition to the no-shows from Queen’s Park and Clyde). As part of the new set-up it had also been agreed that League games should take precedence over all others, Scottish Cup ties excluded, and teams were forbidden from playing friendlies in a town or city where a Scottish League fixture had been arranged that day. The boot was now on the other foot and, almost two decades after Queen’s Park wrote to Rangers refusing their r
equest for a game because they had no private pitch to call their own, it was now the turn of the Light Blues to send a rejection letter to the amateurs. Along with every other club in the new Scottish League, Rangers politely declined a request from Queen’s Park in the summer of 1890 for challenge matches in the forthcoming months as they were already committed to the new structure. Wilton was to remain a key player in the new set-up, firstly as League treasurer and then, in 1895, as secretary.

  History records Rangers as the first champions of the Scottish League or, more accurately, co-champions as they shared the trophy with Dumbarton. In truth, the new competition at that stage was still considered a poor relation to the Scottish Cup and Glasgow Charity Cup, although that would soon change. Off the field, Wilton’s firm guidance was proving invaluable and on it the leadership of new signing John McPherson was to prove invaluable in the decade that lay ahead as a lynchpin of the first of the Rangers super teams. McPherson, a forward, was signed from Cowlairs in June 1890 and he went on to make a sterling contribution in almost every position for the Light Blues, particularly inside-forward. He scored the first ever hat-trick in the Scottish League, against Cambuslang in the first month of the new competition, and in total he won five championship medals, three Scottish Cup badges and 13 Scotland caps, in addition to seven Glasgow Cups and two Charity Cups. He retired in 1902 and became a director of Rangers in 1907, serving the club diligently until his death in 1926.

  Until the closing weeks of that debut League campaign Rangers had lost only once, against Dumbarton, and with three games still to play were just four points behind their rivals. Dumbarton had the chance to clinch the League title when they travelled to Ibrox for their last game of the season, although the Light Blues still had two further games to play. However, Rangers triumphed 4–2 in front of a crowd of 10,000, with such healthy numbers underlining the importance fans had already began to attach to the new competition. McPherson scored once in the hard-fought victory and Rangers knew three points from their last two games would clinch the Championship outright.

  They were not secured, thanks to the efforts of Celtic, who won 2–1 at Parkhead on the second last day of the season courtesy of a late winner from Johnnie Madden. Rangers were still two points behind Dumbarton as the final regular game of the League season approached and a 4–1 win over Third Lanark at Ibrox took the title to a play-off at Cathkin Park. Again, a crowd of 10,000 emphasised the importance of the occasion in the eyes of the fans and, although Rangers raced to a two-goal lead at the interval, with strikes from David Hislop and Hugh McCreadie, the Sons hit back in the second half with two goals as the game ended in an admirable draw and a title shared.

  Rangers had lost out in the Glasgow Cup that season in the quarter-final stages after three replays against Third Lanark (the free and easy way Third Lanark full-back Smith had used his hands to control the ball during these games was a major factor in the introduction of the penalty kick rule the following season). Rangers did not compete in the Glasgow Charity Cup as a result of pressure of fixtures on the back of the new League season. Their Scottish Cup campaign ended in the first round with a 1–0 defeat at Celtic and, although the season was considered a success, Rangers – and other clubs in the Scottish game – were becoming more and more mindful of the strength of the new team from the east end of Glasgow. The old order of the Scottish game was changing for good as the influence of Queen’s Park waned on the back of their stubborn yet noble support for amateurism. Fittingly, perhaps, they won the last of their 10 Scottish Cups in 1893 with a 2–1 win over Celtic, just weeks before professionalism was publicly embraced in the Scottish game.

  However, Queen’s Park survived into the 20th century and continue to survive to the present day. Within a decade of the establishment of the new Scottish League six standard-bearers had gone to the wall: Abercorn, Cambuslang, Cowlairs, Renton, Vale of Leven and Dumbarton, although the latter would emerge again. To think, as recently as 1888 Renton had been acclaimed champions of the world after the Scottish Cup holders thrashed the FA Cup winners West Brom 4–1 in front of 10,000 fans at Hampden and followed it with another victory against the Invincibles of Preston North End. Financially crippled, they tendered their resignation from the Scottish League five games into the 1897–98 season, with Hamilton Accies stepping in as replacements. A none-too-subtle shift was taking place as the early clubs from small towns and villages such as Renton and Alexandria gave way to sides from bigger industrial centres.

  Rangers were at the forefront of the changes, with Wilton the dominant figure as the endeavours of the previous two decades finally helped to deliver a sustained period of success on the field and startling progress off it. Before the decade was over they had won the Scottish Cup three times, their first success a 3–1 win over Celtic at Hampden in 1894, the Glasgow Cup four times and the Glasgow Charity Cup twice, to add to their earlier success in 1879. Rangers may have had to wait another eight years for their next League success after 1891, but it was worth it as they romped through the 18-game card without conceding a single point, a world record that still stands to this day. Business was booming, with the club’s annual turnover in that year an impressive £15,800. Wilton, as League secretary, sounded almost abashed as he praised his Rangers for their achievement, ‘Modesty, born of my close connection with the champions, hampers my eulogising them to the extent their great performance warrants. A world’s record, however, especially when it is an unbeatable record, is an achievement that will speak for itself as the years go by.’ 6 It was a watershed year in more ways than one as Rangers Football Club ceased to exist, replaced on 10 May 1899 by Rangers Football Club Limited. In total, £12,000 of shareholder capital was raised to fund the new Ibrox Park and secure still further the club’s long-term future, with Wilton appointed manager and secretary.

  The move to a second Ibrox Park had been on the cards for several seasons as the popularity of the team and the booming population of the south side helped push crowds ever upwards. As early as 1892 the club had been forced to extend the first Ibrox Park, including a new grandstand, but even a 36,000 capacity proved inadequate in the end. The arrival of the subway at Copland Road in 1896 added to the already existing railway station that served Ibrox on the Glasgow to Paisley line and made accessing the stadium even easier for fans from other parts of the city. Crowds of upwards of 30,000 for major matches were commonplace and there was another solid economic argument for a new ground as Rangers sought to keep pace with Parkhead and Hampden and attract major Cup Finals and international games to the area.

  A new era had been entered in the 1890s and the door to further prosperity had opened by the turn of the 20th century with the move to the new ground. Rangers have known hardships and heartaches since 1872, none more poignant than the memory of almost 100 fans tragically killed in two disasters in 1902 and 1971. All the while the team has carried the hopes and aspiration of millions of supporters at home and abroad onto the field of play wherever and whenever they have performed. There have been rich harvests of success and occasionally the barren crop of failure; however, Rangers have never stood as anything but their club to the proud people who have supported it since those earliest days on Glasgow Green.

  The gallant pioneers have long gone, their voluble chatter no longer echoing around West End Park as they discuss the formation of their infant enterprise. However, the passion remains, recorded in every hoarse shout and cry from supporters on a matchday at Ibrox. Moses and Peter McNeil, William McBeath, Peter Campbell and Tom Vallance were the standard-bearers. In their shadows, generation after generation have been happy to follow follow.

  Our Light Blues’ Legacy

  Heather Lang, a sprightly 80-year-old who lives near Glasgow, is sitting in the coffee bar at the Mitchell Library. Her drink has long since grown cold as she admits: ‘The news came as an absolute shock, a bolt from the blue. My sister was speechless on the telephone when I told her about our connection with Rangers. We didn’t know a thing
about it.’ By sheer coincidence, outside, through the floor to ceiling windows, a clear view is offered along Cleveland Street, where her grandfather Peter McNeil first lived when he moved to the city from Garelochhead in around 1870.

  Ibrox aristocracy…Heather Lang (left) and Doreen Holland, granddaughters of Peter McNeil and the closest known link to the founding fathers of Rangers in the 21st century.

  Beyond the formation of a great football club, the personal stories surrounding the four founding fathers cry out for a happy ending, and they find one in the shape of Heather and her sister, Doreen Holland, and the happy, prosperous families they have raised and whose branches have, in turn, spread out fruitfully across the UK, the US and even the Caribbean. The two daughters of Gertrude Grace and her husband William Chapman are the closest descendants, quite possibly the only descendants, of the founding four. It quickly becomes clear that the lineage of Peter and Janet McNeil has been in strong, firm hands these last 100 years.

  Sadly, their uncle John Fraser – Peter’s son, known in the family as Fraser – did not survive World War One. A second lieutenant with the Royal Field Artillery Regiment, he made it to within two months and two days of the Armistice before he died in France on 9 September 1918, aged 31. He is buried at the Ligny-St Flochel British cemetery in the town of Averdoingt, near Arras. Fraser was a keen golfer and his name is still acknowledged on the memorial board for fallen heroes at the local club where he was a member, Ranfurly Castle in Bridge of Weir. Heather said: ‘We knew about Uncle Fraser and his death in World War One, although little about his background and employment until that point. I’m rather pleased, knowing what we do now about the sad circumstances of my grandfather’s death, that Fraser did not seem to be affected by his father’s financial worries as he moved into adulthood.’