Pirates have sailed high over the decades
With the future of Paisley Pirates currently hanging in the balance due to the uncertainty surrounding Braehead Arena, club stalwart and media guru Bill Elliot has produced a two-part feature looking back on the history of the club. This first installment looks back on how the small team fast became a Paisley institution.
The second half will be published in next Wednesday’s paper.
Paisley Pirates are one of the oldest ice hockey teams in the United Kingdom, having been founded shortly after the end of World War 2 in 1946, making 2021 the 75th anniversary of their inception.
In the beginning, a number of their players came from demobbed members of the armed forces from North America, many of whom had been based locally and who settled here after the end of the war.
But their ranks were soon bolstered by local players who put on their skates and played their home games at East Lane in Paisley.
The site of the old rink has, for a number of years, housed a local supermarket and, indeed, several food outlets have been sited there over recent decades.
The Pirates were the most successful of the local teams who played during this era, the Buccaneers and the Mohawks also taking to the ice, and in 195354 they had a particular affinity with silverware.
They won the Autumn Cup, the Scottish Cup, and the Canada Cup during that trophy-laden season.
Perhaps their most well known player, and later coach of that time was Billy Brennan.
His brother Ally was also a player of considerable note, and both went on to represent Great Britain during what was a golden age for the sport in the area.
However, with the number of teams playing competitive ice hockey diminishing, they found the costs of competing increasing to a point where they could no longer afford to take part.
At the end of the decade they were obliged to pull out, although the Mohawks did remain in competition at Glasgow Crossmyloof for some time.
Billy still keeps in touch with the Pirates and, indeed, has seen them playing in the Scottish National League in Aberdeenshire, where he has been resident for some time.
The ice rink did not immediately close when the Pirates pulled out, as in the 60’s there were several notable events staged there.
One being a professional tennis tournament, in the days when players were split into ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ categories, featuring the likes of top players Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall, while the great Mohammed Ali boxed a few exhibition rounds at the venue around 1965.
As mentioned earlier, the Mohawks continued to play out of Glasgow Crossmyloof until the 1980’s, and a few diehard Paisley fans continued to follow the sport there.
But crowds were minimal, although they did keep the name of Paisley going for a good time.
Indeed, in the early days of the new Lagoon Leisure Centre ice rink, which opened at the turn of the 90’s, a few friendly matches featured several former Mohawks such as Billy Miller.
And so the link was maintained right up to and beyond the start of a new ice hockey era in Paisley on December 20, 1992 when the new look Paisley Pirates defeated a strong looking Scottish select side 7-4.
That match signalled the beginning of a new age for the club which so far has gone on for 29 years.
The opening of the Lagoon certainly heralded a growth in ice-related activities in the centre of Paisley.
The rink was easy to reach by public transport, the car park was always full, and on match nights featuring the Pirates the queues stretched back as far as the car park.
Often every seat in the building, and the standing areas too, were filled to overflowing with local people, many of whom were discovering ice hockey for the first time.
In the years following 1992 Pirates grew and consolidated as a well-respected club in the British League.
They had won the Scottish League in their first season by a country mile and their sell-out crowds, plus obvious growth potential, earned them an invitation to the bigger league which was itself in the throes of expansion.
Notable results were achieved against the likes of Edinburgh Racers, who were one of the top teams in the whole of the UK.
The very same consortium of owners in charge of the side from the east took over the club following the demise of the Racers in 1996, and Pirates went on to win the Scottish Cup for the first time in this era with a memorable 8-4 win against Fife Flyers in early 1997 in Kirkcaldy.
However, this marked something of a peak for the club as for the next few seasons they tended to tread water and, but for the perseverance of the late Allan Maxwell who kept faith with the club when others did not continue, they might not have survived.
He, too, eventually found the task of running the club on his own to be too much and at the turn of the millennium it passed into the hands of a group of supporters who tried manfully to keep the club going at a professional level.
However, they also found it to be a stage too far. The club entered the amateur Scottish League at the beginning of season 2001/02 and began with a flourish within several months when they won the Autumn Cup, beating Murrayfield in a penalty shoot out.
While they were unable to add to their collection of cups for a few seasons they were able to work comfortably within their new environment, with new, young players coming through and a flourishing Junior Development club run by parents and volunteers.
At one time the development club had 150 youngsters playing the game competitively every week, ensuring that future Paisley Pirates teams would have a conveyor belt of talent coming through.
It became something of a regular occurrence for players in the older under age teams to ‘double up’ for the Pirates.
Indeed in their Scottish Cup winning run of 20045, 15-year-old Chris Wilson scored the winning goal in the quarter final against Kirkcaldy Kestrels, before helping his team mates lift the trophy when they beat Murrayfield 5-0 in the final later that same season.
After winning the Scottish Cup in 2005, the club seemed set for another successful spell, but was hit by a hammer blow at the end of the very next season.
During the year in question there had been concerns that the ice surface at the Lagoon was becoming increasingly uneven, to the point when there had been some doubt that the World Curling Championships due to be held there would actually be able to take place.
Eventually, the surface was repaired to the extent that they were able to go ahead, but this was a temporary solution and less than a week before the start of the new ice hockey season the club received the disastrous news that the scale of the problem had become so serious that it would not be possible to continue ice sports on the surface.
That left the Pirates, and indeed all clubs relying on it for their activity, without a home.