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.