The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872 Read Online Free Page B

would subsequently flock to watch Celtic when they were formed 15 years later. Is that not a thought to ponder? There are no direct links between the Rangers of 1872 and now, save the famous name. However, if you look closely you can still connect in the 21st century with the spirit of the McNeils, McBeath and Campbell in the attitudes and outlook of present-day Rangers such as Walter Smith and Ally McCoist. For the most part, the ghostly whispers of the founding fathers of yesteryear are but breezes blowing on the wind, from Flesher’s Haugh up and over the city centre to Great Western Road and Burnbank, swirling across the Clyde to Kinning Park before moving on towards Copland Road, the site of the first Ibrox Park. This early year history is an attempt to present the formation of a great football club against the backdrop of almighty social change in industrialised Glasgow. Rangers survived and prospered, but not all those teenagers who took it upon themselves in the spring of 1872 to form their very own club would, unfortunately, be able to say the same.

The Birth of the Blues

    Journalist John Allan may have had the clasp of a loyal Ranger, as Bill Struth once noted, but the strength of his grip on historical reality has always been a bone of contention to many among the Light Blues’ legions. Allan was a former editor of the Daily Record and wrote the three most authoritative tomes on the club he had followed since his childhood in Kinning Park, where he was born in 1879. These days, with the aid of hindsight, The Story of the Rangers, Eleven Great Years and 18 Eventful Years, which cover much of the club’s story until 1951, read like romanticised works of fiction from the empire of Mills and Boon, not Wilton and Struth. Nevertheless, they still carry significant weight, although in relation to the year that should be acknowledged as the birth of the club, The Story of the Rangers does not appear to be accurate.
  Even in the 21st century, there are journalists from a bygone era who still recall Allan, who died in April 1953, less than 24 hours after attending his beloved Ibrox for the last time for a Scottish Cup semi-final replay between Aberdeen and Third Lanark. He wrote under the pen name of ‘Brigadier’ -– literally too, for he refused to use a typewriter and filed all his copy via sports desk copy takers from notes on which his pencilled scrawl was illegible to all but himself. He joined the Daily Record as a sportswriter at the turn of the 20th century, although he also contributed a weekly column in the Athletic News and Sporting Chronicle under the name Jonathan Oldbuck.
  Allan was renowned for his photographic memory, his patience – and his love of Rangers. The legendary Willie Gallagher, who wrote for decades as Waverley in the pages of the Record, noted that his colleague’s ‘admiration for Rangers was not permitted to interfere with his written views. These were completely unprejudiced and at times he was the Ibrox team’s severest critic.’1 Others, politely, declined to agree. In his book 100 Years of Scottish Sport, written for the Record when he rode side saddle with Alex Cameron as two of the country’s foremost tabloid tale gatherers, Rodger Baillie dusted down the archives to recall the famous 1928 Scottish Cup Final, which Rangers won 4–0. Unsurprisingly, it is remembered as one of the most significant victories in the history of the club as it was the first time the Light Blues had lifted the old trophy in 25 years. Baillie wrote: ‘“Brigadier” was in the Rangers dressing room at the end. It was the nom de plume of John Allan, who was later to have a spell as the editor of the paper. Other executives of that pre-war era believed he tilted the paper’s coverage too much towards Ibrox. Still, he obtained a series of quotes – unusual in those times when players were seen but rarely heard, as the journalists of the day tended to give maximum space to the views of