THIRD LANARK
The demise of the Scottish club
LOOKING back, 1967 was a singularly memorable year for Scottish football and Glasgow clubs in particular. A rampant Celtic won every competition they entered and became the first ever British team to lift the coveted European Cup.
Rangers came within a hair’s breadth of further European glory before losing to Bayern Munich in the Cup Winners’ Cup final in Nuremberg. Unfashionable Clyde finished third in the First Division, Queen’s Park celebrated their centenary whilst Partick Thistle were as predictably unpredictable as ever.
The whole country rejoiced when reigning world champions England were teased and tormented by a Jim Baxter-inspired Scotland at Wembley.
But it was also the year that Third Lanark AC, one of the founder members of the Scottish League and the oldest professional football club in the country, went out of business.
The end came on Friday,
June 7, 1967 by order of Lord Fraser in the Court of Session in Edinburgh following a petition to wind-up the club being granted in favour of a company who were owed money for work carried out on Thirds’ ill-fated stand project.
In an impassioned plea, counsel for the club, Mr
Archibald Bell QC, asked for a fourweek continuation to be allowed so that discussions could continue in the hope of securing financial help from a property company. That application was refused and there was to be no way back for the club which had been formed in the previous century in the Regimental orderly room in Howard Street, Glasgow, by the 3rd Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers to “elevate the mind, educate the temper and exercise the toes”.
The court seemed to take the view that this was just another failed business and gave no regard to the grave sociological consequences in its heartless and hastily considered judgment.
The question to be asked is how could a club which had finished third top of the First Division only six years before, scoring 100 goals in the process, go to the wall in such an inglorious manner? Thirds’ problems began in 1961, which was ironically their most successful season for 57 years. They boasted the highest scoring forward line in the league, which comprised Jimmy Goodfellow, Dave Hilley, Alex Harley, Matt Gray and Joe McInnes.
A hat-trick from Harley in the very last match of the season, a 6-1 demolition of Hibs, who had none other than Thirds old boy Ronnie Simpson - a double FA Cup winner with Newcastle and later European Cup winner with Celtic - in goal, bringing their
goals for total up to the magical 100.
The manager at the time was George Young, the former Rangers and Scotland star, who himself was something of a living legend.
Young had won honours galore as a player. He held a record number of Scottish caps and was respected throughout the game. At 6ft 3ins and weighing in around 17 stone, his was a powerful physical presence.
Throughout the 50s, the Cathkin Park boardroom had been a hotbed of unrest. Changes in personnel were frequent and more than one Extraordinary General Meeting had been called by digruntled shareholders in attempts to clear the air. That unrest had carried on into the 1960s.
Young had been used to the very best at Ibrox and he decided from the outset that Thirds should be run along similar lines to Rangers, in the hope of emulating their considerable success. From now on, second best wasn’t good enough.
He managed to persuade the Board that the club should convert from part-time to a full-time set up. He took the team on a tour of the United States and Canada which took in nine cities in a hectic 25-day schedule.
For years there had been talk of building a new stand at Cathkin but that had never gotten beyond the talking stage. Young – the big man, with big ideas – used his, by now, considerable influence to get this project off the ground, bringing in his former team-mate Willie Rae’s company – but it was to have disastrous consequences.
With building costs spiralling wildly out of control and two of their three stars – Hilley and Harley – already sold (the former for £30,000 and the latter for £17,500) to finance this grand folly, the situation finally exploded at the club’s Annual General Meeting in December 1962.
On learning that a former director and honorary manager named Bill Hiddleston had won his long fight to get back onto the Board from which he had been unceremoniously removed some six years earlier, manager Young, chairman Willie McLean
and club secretary James Murray all sensationally resigned.
Hiddleston, who had been buying up shares on the quiet for some time, revealed that he had been asked to stand by two prominent shareholders. Those two turned out to be the club’s remaining directors George Foster and Robert Spence, who were strongly opposed to McLean, Young and Co.
In the event, a well-engineered coup had taken place and Thirds’ rapid slide into oblivion had begun. Their remaining prime asset, Matt Gray, was soon sold to Manchester City for £30,001 (note the extra £1!), results began to suffer, crowds fell away sharply, the new stand which was never completed brought with it a huge burden of debt which could not be serviced on a rapidly diminishing income, and the rest, as they say, is history.
A Board of Trade report later laid most of the blame for the club’s demise at the door of Hiddleston, who had seemed hell-bent on wreaking revenge and destroying the club following his publicly humiliating removal in 1957 but had they themselves acted sooner, when they were first alerted to the serious concerns raised by shareholders way back in January 1965, the club may well have survived.
It was not until June 15, 1966 that the Board of Trade finally appointed an inspector, by which time the till was empty and the famous old club was well into its death throes.
The over-ambitious Young and the Board members who backed him, Hiddleston, who was to die of a heart attack at the age of 47, and the Government Department who sat on their hands whilst Cathkin ‘burned’ must all be held to account for the demise of a club who were formed in 1872, won the Scottish League Championship in 1904, the Scottish Cup in 1889 and 1905, were League Cup finalists in 1959 and had a notable part to play in the birth and history of the game.
AT THE time of writing, it looks as if Notts County, the oldest professional association football club in the world, founded in 1862, may be in danger of dropping out of the Football League for the first time. Let’s hope not, or, if they do, let’s hope they get back where they belong quickly. Football needs its history because football is history.