by Rikki Brown
Cranston and Ure were typical teachers of the corporal punishment days. In fairness to them they only resorted to corporal punishment because, lobby as they did, the authorities remained very much against their requests to introduce capital punishment as a method of class control in Glasgow schools. Their use of the belt was legendary and on one occasion Ure belted Jim Armour because when we were lined up being given instructions on tactics they asked him a question and he didn’t answer. They thought his name was McDonald and, as the question was addressed to a McDonald, Jim was oblivious. After he explained that he didn’t answer because he didn’t know he was being quizzed, Ure gave him the belt to teach him a lesson for not having the name Ure thought he had.
My school had an incredibly large P.E. department comprising of two indoor games halls, football pitches, two hockey pitches and a running track. It was way bigger than any other department because I’m assuming that the thinking was, ‘Well, how much education do they need to pack fags in the Wills Cigarette Factory on Alexandra Parade?’ Okay, almost everyone who left at fifteen did indeed end up working there but talk about pigeon-holing.
I was part of the last intake who could leave at fifteen but I didn’t and I stayed on. The Education Department had given us a lot of sports facilities but during a visit by a school inspector the P.E. department was criticised for not using them for any sport other than football. Even the hockey pitches were used for a kick about. So one day we all trooped out onto the sports fields and found Thomson and Urquhart standing there not with the usual bibs, usual ball and the usual look of utter contempt on their faces, but with javelins and discuses and the usual look of utter contempt on their faces. This is Easterhouse we’re talking about here, an area with horrific gang violence, yet the Education Department deemed it sensible to teach us how to throw spears. Why stop there, what about a few Kalashnikov AK47s, maybe teach us how to drive a fully armed Bren Gun carrier or send us on a two-day course on the correct way to handle a machete when shouting, ‘Come intae me, I’ll take you all on.’
As for the discus, the only reason I even knew what a discus was was because I’d seen one being thrown in the movie Jason and the Argonauts. The movie theme continued when we were all handed a javelin each because we started waving them up and down and chanting, ‘Zu … lu, zu … lu.’ Throwing a javelin is fun, for about five minutes. After five minutes, unless you are throwing them at something or, much better still, someone, it’s boring. And pointless, because really, how many Olympic javelin throwers have ever come from a Glasgow Scheme? Somehow don’t think we’ll ever hear, ‘And throwing now for Great Britain is Mad Shuggie McNulty from Easterhouse whose previous personal best is managing to hit a moving dog seventy-five yards away.’
The discus is even more boring and there was something wrong with the discuses anyway because they wouldn’t go any more than fifteen feet. The whole pointless exercise lasted about half an hour before the javelins and discuses were gathered in and we went back to football. We actually had a pretty good third-year football team and twice a year we had our grudge match with nearby St Leonards. My school was a Protestant school and St Leonards was a Catholic school so for us it was our Old Firm match. At that point in time religious rivalry was positively encouraged. So much so that at the ABC Minors on Saturday mornings at a cinema in Riddrie, before the big picture, there would be an Old Firm sing song. They’d put song sheets up on the screen with the words of ‘It’s A Grand Old Team To Play For’ for the Catholic kids and then ‘Follow Follow We Will Follow Rangers’ for the Protestant kids and the compere would come on stage with a pointer to highlight the words while challenging us to out-sing each other. In today’s completely over-legislated climate, he’d be up in court on a charge of inciting sectarian hatred.
Large crowds always gathered to watch the Westwood vs St Leonards matches, usually comprising of drunk men who only seemed to be there to shout, ‘Get intae these Proddy bastards,’ or, ‘Get intae these Fenian bastards,’ at fifteen-year-olds, or if they could get their drunken acts together they managed a few verses of ‘The Sash’ or ‘The Soldier’s Song’. I say managed a few verses but since neither of them knew the words past about half way through the second verses, there was a lot of mumbling and dee dee dees from that point on. On the upside, the bigoted abuse was balanced out to both sides, which I thought was quite fair-minded.
But there was one time I did hear something that made absolutely no sense. At half time we were given the obligatory half time quarter of an orange and one man who was more mental than most started shouting, ‘Oranges, aw that’s just fucking typical.’ An orange is a fruit, not a symbol of the Protestant faith. You do get King Edward potatoes, but you don’t get King Billy oranges. He obviously thought you did and the half time orange was part of a huge conspiracy by citrus fruit growers to subliminally support Protestantism.
The abusers would even be wearing Rangers or Celtic scarves and tammies, the only attire available at the time to show team allegiance. Football tops were only available to the players because it was long before Rangers and Celtic came up with the idea to make money from selling items of clothing which a) would make them a lot of money, and b) make their fans stand out and give them more of a chance to get themselves beaten up. Why anyone in Glasgow, which is a dangerous enough place, would want to wear a top that increases the dangers tenfold is completely beyond me. Many years later I’d arranged to play five-a-sides with Dominik Diamond, easily Scotland’s greatest DJ and talk radio host. Not only is Dominik both of these things, he’s also one of Scotland’s most famous professional Celtic fans. As I hadn’t played football in years I didn’t have a top so I went out and bought a generic one that wasn’t the strip of any team, the reason being that I didn’t want to show my allegiance to any club on health and safety grounds. It’s not healthy or safe to cut about in Glasgow in an Old Firm top.
As the five-a-sides were within walking distance of our houses, Dominik arranged to come and get me and we’d walk up together. He duly arrived in a Celtic away top. I asked him, ‘Are you mental?’ He was always complaining of getting hassled by Rangers fans because he just can’t keep his yapper shut when it comes to criticism of Rangers and its fans, and being six-foot-two with a distinctive goatee beard doesn’t exactly help him blend into the background either. And he blends in even less in a Celtic away top. So we walked to the pitches and he did get hassle but I didn’t hear what the hassle was because I made him and his Celtic away top walk a hundred yards in front of me.
In my opinion football jerseys are work clothing. Would people put on a Celtic top and hang around outside the City Chambers? Mind you if the rumours that Glasgow Council only ever employs Catholics are true then perhaps a Celtic top is the Glasgow Council staff uniform. The point is, do they think people will look at them, see a middle-aged man with a beer gut and say to themselves, ‘Hey look, he’s wearing a Rangers top, he must be one of the players.’ No, people look at them and think, ‘Aw look at that poor man, he thinks he’s a four-year-old.’ Kids wearing tops is fine, because kids are daft. They wear policeman and fireman outfits and footballers tops because when they grow up they want to be them, and they still might be. But when you’re forty-five you’ve grown up not to be a footballer so let it go, your life is what it’s become and you aren’t fooling anyone apart from yourself.
In the pre-sportswear decades you only wore sportswear if you could afford sportswear for sports. Now 99% of it is worn by people who not only look like they don’t do sport they look as though they’ve got absolutely no idea what sport is. I could be wrong though and maybe walking about Braehead shopping mall overweight and sweating while carrying more new sportswear that you won’t wear for sport in a Sports Division bag is indeed a sport. If it is a sport then I take back what I said and it’s nice to see so many Scots training in the hope of winning a gold medal for Fatty and Sweatyathalon at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014.
As for baseball caps, the police should
arrest everyone they see wearing one because if they aren’t on their way to committing a crime they are on their way back from carrying one out. Here’s a question: what’s more suspicious-looking in Glasgow than someone in sportswear running? What’s more suspicious in Glasgow is someone in sportswear tiptoeing. And for God’s sake don’t get an Old Firm tattoo. Don’t, just don’t. Having a Red Hand of Ulster or an 1888 Shamrock on your forehead is going to look pretty stupid when you’re seventy and down at the post office picking up your pension. Even more stupid than it looks now. Tattoos? I know a guy who’s got 1690 on one cheek, a union jack on the other cheek, a Red Hand on his neck and Rangers written down his nose. I asked him why his forehead was blank and he told me, ‘I was going to get Rangers Champions League Winners 2011/2012 on my forehead, but I wouldn’t want to get something I might regret in later life.’ That didn’t happen, I’m just illustrating the point.
And what about that poor guy who got Ally McCoist’s name on his leg and the tattoo artist spelt it Ally McOist. What did he learn from this? He learned from this that the tattoo artist he went to was a Celtic fan.
I digress. I wish I could remember how the matches against St Leonards finished but I can’t because the police were always called and the game became less about what was happening on the park and more about what was happening around it. You do tend to lose count of the score when there’s the hilarious distraction of grown men who really should know better being bundled into a Black Maria.
Not wanting to blow my own trumpet, but I was a pretty good player, I was a right-footed left winger to be exact. I played for my school, for the Boys Brigade and a local team called Lochbridge, and it was during a Lochbridge match that I was spotted by a talent scout from Celtic Boys Club, probably the best youth team in Scotland at that time. After a trial, I joined them and that’s when my problems really started. We trained Monday and Wednesday nights at Celtic’s training ground in Barrowfield near Parkhead. This might sound like a so what. Well the so what was that Celtic Boys Club had a dress code which meant I had to wear a green blazer with the Celtic badge on, tie and grey flannels, and I had to carry a Celtic bag. So my routine was leaving my house in Wardie Road, getting chased to the bus stop 800 yards away on Edinburgh Road, being verbally abused at the bus stop, verbally abused on the bus, and after getting off the bus being chased another 800 yards from Parkhead Cross to Barrowfield – a process that worked in reverse on the journey home. This might sound like an exaggeration but it isn’t.
As for Barrowfield – as God forsaken places go, God had forsaken it. Barrowfield was said to be worse than Beirut, and this was said by the people of Beirut. Even the police were afraid to enter the area. No one in Barrowfield had any electrical appliances because Hutchinson’s and Stepek refused to deliver anywhere near the place. And I had to go through this area twice a week and once at weekends if we had a home match. Ah yes, but Celtic’s training ground at Barrowfield had two pitches, one of which was grass and playing on grass made up for about 5% of what I had to go through to get there.
When you are fifteen, things don’t occur to you. Things like, why are some of the coaches taking the Catholic players to the pictures and not inviting me and the three other Protestant players in the team. Not that we were in the least bothered because none of us really fancied seeing The Sound of Music, like not fancied seeing it ever, ever. But there were other things too, weird things, but why I thought they were weird I just couldn’t put my finger on. For instance, being told that we couldn’t wear our underpants underneath our nylon shorts. This I ignored because we’re talking the seventies and the shorts were so thin that without the warmth of a pair of underpants your testicles would end up looking like the two tiny wee grapes that every bunch of grapes has, the two tiny wee grapes that for some reason haven’t grown like the others. Plus seventies shorts were so tiny you looked like a rent boy.
As it transpired, that was the last thing you wanted to look like at Celtic Boys Club. Also some coaches wanted to rub wintergreen on your legs in the winter to keep your muscles warm. An offer I always declined by saying, ‘Cold, naw, it’s phew, pure boiling out there.’ I didn’t at the time know why but I never stayed for a shower after a match. I’d just get my clothes on and go. It was many, many years later when the news broke about what it was that I couldn’t put my finger on. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but one of the coaches did put his finger on it, many times, and that was the reason he ended up in jail. My first reaction to the news was, well that certainly explains a lot, and my second reaction was, thank God my Protestant upbringing forbade me from ever asking to see The Sound of Music.
I do remember passing a cinema in Sauchiehall Street when The Sound of Music first hit the screens and the queue seemed to comprise entirely of Nuns waiting to get in. This led to me thinking to myself that the Little Sisters of the Poor can’t be that poor if they can afford cinema tickets, popcorn and a hot dog. To this day I still haven’t seen The Sound of Music and all I know about it is that it’s got something to do with a nun, a Nazi and the BBC broadcasting a very long series of adverts for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s West End production of it.
When what had been going on under my nose at Celtic Boys Club was revealed I was working on the TV show Only An Excuse, and being a comedy writer I thought why not write a sketch about it, which I did. Admittedly not the funniest theme for a sketch, but it wasn’t really about that, sort of …
The sketch was Johnny Watson in silhouette with the Celtic Boys Club crest in the background and it was Johnny saying, ‘What happened was I was sitting in the dressing room and, and [sobbing] no I’m alright … and the manager came into the dressing room and he sat down beside me [sobbing], sorry this is really hard for me [sobbing] … and he put his arm around me and hold on, give me a minute to compose myself, it was horrible so it was, sorry, right I’m okay. So he sat down beside me and put his arm around me and he … and he … and he … and he told me he was dropping me for Peter Grant.’
After much discussion between the show’s producer Phil Differ and worried BBC executives, Phil persuaded them to broadcast the sketch, and if you saw it and laughed at it, shame on you. But really, could you imagine actually being dropped for Peter Grant. You’d just never get over that would you?
All this aside, we did have a brilliant team who remained unbeaten during my time with them. We weren’t just unbeaten, we defeated every team we came across by a huge margin, and I played in every match, bar one. The one match I didn’t play in was against St Mary’s Borstal in Bishopbriggs. When we arrived it was snowing and cold. The snow and the cold I could deal with because I had my warm underpants on, but then I saw the St Mary’s Borstal team, probably the scariest looking mob I’d ever seen. That ugly scary thing some people have. You know when you go into a pub and you notice someone and you just know by their face that they are going to assault someone at some point in the night by either asking, ‘Whit you looking at?’ or, ‘Hey, are you looking at ma burd?’ or, ‘How come you’re no looking at ma burd?’ Well the entire team comprised of hims. Added to that, two of the inmates had the sticks with nails on that are used to prod holes in the ground to drain water away from the goal mouth and they were throwing them and trying to stick them in the cross bar above our goalies head during the warm up.
So, I think the phrase here is ‘I shat it’ and feigned the flu. I was only half believed and despite my very serious flu-like symptoms, which I’m pretty sure could have progressed into made-up double pneumonia, I was made a sub. I assumed that, given their violent appearance, one of our outfield players would be off injured within thirty seconds and I’d be sent on to die, or I’d end up in goals while our keeper is ambulanced off to the Royal Infirmary to have a stick with a nail in it surgically removed from the back of his head. But I was really lucky because the snow starting falling so heavily that the game had to be abandoned after fifteen minutes.
On a historical note, I was playing for Celtic against a Doctor
Barnardo’s Homes team on 23 October 1971, the day Celtic and Partick Thistle contested the League Cup Final. My dad, who was a Thistle fan, knew Thistle were going to win, claiming divine intervention by the Godlike Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Let me explain what my dad explained. Emperor Hirohito had only been in Britain on one previous occasion, which had been in 1921, and when he was here Thistle beat Rangers 1-0 in the Scottish Cup Final. The Emperor was visiting Britain again fifty years on and Thistle were in the League Cup final, therefore Thistle would win. And they did, which makes: ‘Why should Partick Thistle thank Emperor Hirohito?’ the ultimate pub quiz question. One of those ‘I’ll bet you a million pounds you’ll never get this’ posers. You will now, obviously because I’ve just told you about it.
At half time in my match the news filtered through that Celtic were 4-0 down going into the break. As Celtic were at their peak at the time everyone assumed that the radio announcer had made a mistake and Celtic were 4-0 up. When the truth became known the other three Rangers fans in the team and myself almost broke our faces trying not to grin, and we couldn’t speak either because there was no way we’d be able to say anything that didn’t sound like a gloat.
I eventually left Celtic Boys Club for a few reasons. On one particular Saturday I’d played early in the morning for the Boys Brigade, and mid-morning I played for the school and in the afternoon match with Celtic Boys Club I went down with cramp in the second half. As all the Celtic players were super fit, cramp shouldn’t have been an issue but as I was on my third game that day, plus having been chased to the bus and then chased to Barrowfield, it was. I was told I would have to give up my other teams, something I just wasn’t really prepared to do.