Silversmith (eBook)

CHAPTER ONE

A MAN IN THE CROWD

‘This club is different. This is Rangers Football Club’

Long before there came Heysel or Hillsborough with their relentlessly grim television images, incongruous floral tributes and uncomprehending vales of tears, there was one Saturday evening in Glasgow on which mothers and fathers, sons and daughters and many friends of friends clung anxiously to the hope that their loved ones would eventually make it home, and confirm that they had escaped the Ibrox Disaster. The majority did come home, and others such as Walter Smith, Alex Ferguson and Andy Roxburgh clambered around the mangled heaps of bodies and stricken souls, the emergency workers and Old Firm volunteers on Stairway 13, and thanked their lucky stars before absorbing the enormity of what had transpired. For 66 other families there was the spectre of a long night’s journey into the void, and recognition that the catastrophe which engulfed Ibrox stadium at the end of the New Year match on 2 January 1971, had snatched away their menfolk, and in Margaret Ferguson’s case, her daughter.

Decades on, pictures from the newsreels reflect collective mystification and bewilderment, accompanied by a sense of futile anger at the casual fashion in which so many lives were sacrificed. But beyond that is a numbness among the grieving families, possibly reflecting their feeling that such hackneyed phrases as ‘Time is a great healer’ and ‘They’re in a better place now’ are but platitudes for those fortunate enough never to have been obliged to identify relatives with faces blackened and life squeezed out of them. Talk to men such as Smith, Sandy Jardine or John Greig – hard-nosed artisans from an industrial background – and you will not hear easy sentiments, but rather hushed voices and instinctive sympathy for victims who, in other circumstances, could have been their very selves. Then prod them gently on their memories of that ghastly event, and they will relate their accounts of a tragedy which, all too fleetingly, tore through Glasgow’s sectarian curtain and saw Orangemen shed tears in the company of priests throughout the west of Scotland and yonder into Edinburgh, before snaking across the Forth Bridge to the Kingdom of Fife and the community of Markinch, where Peter Easton, Richard Morrison, David Patton, Mason Phillips and Bryan Todd, schoolboys who lived within a few hundred yards, perished together on that stairway, which had witnessed an accident in 1961 and near-disasters in 1967 and ’69.

Sandy Jardine, one of the celebrated ex-players who still walks the corridors of Rangers FC, describes the terrible events:

‘In these days, this was probably the biggest fixture of the season, considering that the Old Firm clubs only met twice a year, but it was dreadfully ironic that what had been a fairly good-natured occasion, with neither trouble on the terraces nor on the pitch, should develop into a waking nightmare for so many people. Everybody knows the circumstances whereby Jimmy Johnstone sent Celtic in front with a minute to go. The ball got centred, we equalised at once [through Colin Stein] and the referee blew full-time immediately. So you had Rangers supporters who thought: “Oh, that’s the game over” when Jimmy scored turning to go down the big staircase, then turning back when they heard the huge roar which greeted Colin’s strike, and that coincided with a massive number of spectators making their path towards the exit and the subway. Then suddenly somebody fell, and the whole terrible business began.

‘The thing is that I was on the ground staff, I had actually swept these stairways, and they were huge, really solid objects, so I could never understand how they could get mangled so badly by any number of human beings. But they were. Just think of it: the pressure of all those bodies cascading over one another and the panic which must have spread . . . Ach, there are no words in the dictionary to describe adequately what happened during those next few minutes. But you have to realise that we as players were completely unaware anything was wrong at that stage. We were in the dressing room fairly happy to have managed a draw, just sharing a few laughs together before getting into the bath. Well, I was one of the last guys to climb out, but as I re-emerged the order came that there had been an accident, and we all had to leave the room as quickly as possible. It could have been a fire alert or anything, but while we started putting our clothes on as fast as we could, the authorities started to bring some of the dead bodies into the place, and as you can probably imagine, everybody turned grey at the sight of them. But even then we had no real idea of the extent of the fatalities.

‘As I drove back to my home in the east end of Edinburgh, I heard there were two dead, but soon enough the figures mounted up. It was 12, then 22, then 30, then 44 – I don’t know why, but that number sticks in my mind – and finally it climbed to 66 as the news filtered out to all the parents and kith and kin of the folk who had attended the match, and then gone to pubs or restaurants or picture-houses afterwards. I have spoken to hundreds of fans since 1971, and they have told me of how vast crowds assembled at all of the drop-off points for the buses to find out whether their loved ones were okay. The telephone lines were jammed, Glasgow was in turmoil, the hospitals were all packed to overflowing. Anxiety, terror, pain, sadness, horror . . . a blanket of all these emotions was draped over the whole country that night, but there was nothing remotely comforting about it.’

Amid this hellish vista, Willie Waddell, the Rangers manager, somehow offered a semblance of sanity. It was significant that he and Celtic counterpart Jock Stein had observed casualties in other spheres, whether in battle or at the coal-face, and the pair constantly emphasised the desperate need for entrenched communities to pull together, and for religious tribalism to be cast aside. Sadly, but perhaps inevitably given the illogical nature of the positions adopted by extremists on both sides, the so-called healing process proved little more than a nine-day wonder. Yet in the longer term, the calamity yielded some benefits. Waddell, for example, vowed that the scenes he had witnessed would never be repeated at Ibrox, and before his death in 1992 that objective had borne fruit in the creation of a magnificent new stadium. Not that anybody connected with 1971 would forget the condition of the old edifice. ‘It’s strange what comes into your mind, but when I first went to the top of the steps and gazed down on the pile of bodies, my initial thought was of Belsen, because the corpses were entangled as they had been in the pictures which came out of the concentration camps,’ Waddell told The Scotsman newspaper’s illustrious football correspondent John Rafferty. ‘But my God, it was dreadful: there were bodies in the dressing rooms, in the gymnasium and even in the laundry room. My own training staff and the Celtic boys were working flat out at the job of resuscitation, and we were all trying everything possible to bring breath back to those crushed limbs. Honestly, I will never forget the sight of Bob Rooney, the Celtic physiotherapist, with tears in his eyes giving the kiss of life to innumerable victims. He never stopped, nor did the Rangers doctors, nor the nurses and ambulance staff who flocked to join them, and we will never know how many lives were saved in there in that frenzy of activity.’

Nearby, the Southern General Hospital was under siege, their switchboard of only 35 lines, plus a single police short-wave radio, jammed by a crescendo of panic-stricken calls. But by midnight a worse task was in prospect for the likes of Jardine, Waddell, Greig and Colin Stein, who seems troubled to this day by the notion that his goal might have been a catalyst for such carnage: the funerals. And the subsequent protracted search for answers allied to the quest for apportioning responsibility which, despite lengthy inquiries, discovered little beyond the tinder-box of ingredients that would also bring death and destruction to the environs of Heysel and to Bradford and Hillsborough as much as 18 years later.

Inside Ibrox, one fellow had stood intently throughout that Old Firm encounter transfixed by proceedings that were typically pulsating and frenetic. As a registered professional player with Dundee United, Walter Smith would not have been anywhere near Glasgow, let alone Govan, but for his acceptance that he was not good enough to merit inclusion in the Tannadice side’s festive plans, and was therefore free to travel to the ground he regarded as his spiritual home, the place where his grandfather had taken him to behold what old Jock had considered the best team in the world. At 22 years of age, Smith strode into Ibrox that afternoon with hardly a care. He was a phlegmatic individual, a young man of substance with a trade as an electrician already acquired, just in case football work proved to be in short supply, and even in those formative days he had started to appreciate that, irrespective of the fact that as a player he would never join the likes of Jim Baxter, Jimmy Johnstone and Billy McNeill in the Scottish Football Association’s Hall of Fame, he might have a part to play for his country further down the line. Indeed, Smith’s recollection of the Ibrox Disaster epitomises many of the core values that have shone through his ascent to the summit of soccer management:

‘I can remember leaving the stadium with my brother at the finish of the match. I was on Dundee United’s books at the time, but because of my lack of ability they had omitted to select me...