And they gave us James McGrory…and William Peter McGonagle…
In the first part of this article, I mentioned how the publication of my Copenhagen Diary on the Celtic Star recently had prompted an old pal, Paddy, to get in touch. He wanted to show me a couple of photographs, containing Celtic autographs of the past, which had been in his possession for years. Paddy was looking for some information, background or context for these items.
Part one of this story – A Celtic Mystery – ‘And they gave us James McGrory and Jackie Watters,’ Matt Corr – covered the autographed sheet from 1937/38, with the only question remaining as to how it had come about that the Celtic team, or representatives of the club, were in Kingussie, in the Scottish Highlands, at that time. I’ll revisit that specific point later.
Part two looked at the second photograph, an undated sheet containing the signatures of twenty men, some very famous and others unknown to me, however, all clearly associated with Celtic. This had also been handed to the lady whose family owned the Star Hotel in Kingussie. The mystery deepens.
I’ve reviewed the careers of thirteen of the twenty individuals on the second set of autographs and, by a process of elimination, I’ve managed to narrow the timeframe down to the first half of the 1930’s.
The next name I recognised on the list was Peter McGonagle, or am I thinking about Willie McGonagle? As it turns out, he was christened William Peter but used both at different times, ‘Peter’ taken from his father, who had been a Hamilton Academical player, back at the turn of the twentieth century.
Born in Hamilton on 30 April 1904, young McGonagle’s Parkhead career had commenced in October 1926, when Willie Maley signed him from Duntocher Hibs, Peter making his Celtic debut early the following season, in a 3-0 home win over Falkirk on Saturday, 27 August 1927, the goals coming from the attacking trio of Alex Thomson, Jimmy McGrory and Tommy McInally.
He had replaced Hugh Hilley at left-back that day, in one of the sadder stories of those times. The Garngad Bhoy had played over 200 times in the Hoops, since joining from Govan junior outfit, St Anthony’s in May 1921, when he ran out against Hamilton Academical the previous Saturday, on the day my mum was born, incidentally.
Always a player who gave everything and then some on the field, Hugh was helped off Douglas Park that afternoon suffering from exhaustion. Tragically, he would then suffer a nervous breakdown and would never wear his cherished Hoops jersey again. He was only 28 years old. Hugh eventually retired from football in 1930 to set up an ice-cream and catering business and would live a further six decades.
Peter McGonagle would remain in the Celtic side for pretty much the rest of that season, a member of the team who beat Dunfermline Athletic 9-0, on Saturday, 14 January 1928 at Celtic Park, Jimmy McGrory netting eight of those goals to create a British scoring record which stands to this day.
That run ended at Motherwell on Saturday, 7 April 1928, the left-back suffering an injury which finished his season, young John Donoghue drafted in for the remaining four games of the campaign, including the following week’s 4-0 defeat by Rangers in the Scottish Cup Final at Hampden.
McGonagle would return in August and would be a fixture in the team over the next six seasons, part of the Scottish Cup-winning sides of 1931 and 1933, Motherwell twice the beaten side, as mentioned previously. Between those two triumphs, he had also featured in the saddest day in Celtic’s history, Saturday, 5 September 1931, when John Thomson, the Prince of Goalkeepers, lost his life at Ibrox. And the Celtic family mourned.
Peter’s Celtic career would ultimately turn on two games against Rangers, played exactly one year apart, Ibrox centre-forward Jimmy Smith a key figure. On Tuesday, 1 January 1935, he took exception to Smith’s treatment of goalkeeper Joe Kennaway at the Govan ground, famously walking over to him to bounce the ball fiercely off his head, before receiving his marching orders from referee Craigmyle.
Celtic, already two goals down and reduced to ten men following an earlier injury to Charlie Napier, would somehow claw a goal back through George Paterson, the game finishing 2-1. Reports of the day suggest that the Celtic board would have taken a dim view of such events, even given the provocation. In any case, McGonagle remained a regular in the side until the corresponding fixture the next year,
There were 60,000 inside Celtic Park on Wednesday, 1 January 1936, to see the Hoops take the field with a young Irish goalkeeper, Jim Foley, deputising in goals in place of the injured Joe Kennaway. This would be just Foley’s third game for Celtic, having kept clean sheets in his two previous outings, against the Lanarkshire duo of Airdrieonians, back in October, and Hamilton Academical, three days before the Ne’erday clash.
The week before that victory at Douglas Park, on Saturday, 21 December 1935, Celtic had defeated League leaders Aberdeen 5-3 at Celtic Park, with Jimmy McGrory netting yet another hat-trick. As well as dragging Celtic within two points of the black-and-gold striped Dons, in a race the Bhoys would eventually win to secure a first title in a decade, these goals would be hugely significant, in two ways.
Firstly, they allowed Jimmy to pass Hughie Ferguson’s record of 364 goals in senior football, setting a new mark at 366. And his second goal that day remains one of the most iconic images in Celtic’s history, McGrory prostrate as he launched himself at Frank Murphy’s cross to head home. If, or surely when, the great man has a statue erected in front of the stadium he loved, and in which he created history, the greatest top-flight goalscorer of all time on this island, then that has to be the model pose for me. The Human Torpedo. An incredible moment, waiting to be made immortal.
As an aside, the story of Hughie Ferguson is both compelling and, ultimately, tragic. He would score 285 goals for Motherwell between 1916 and his departure to Cardiff City, in 1925, the local steelworks closing for an hour to allow the workforce to say goodbye to the man who remains their leading marksman to this day.
He would create more magic In South Wales, his season-record of 32 goals in 1926/27 standing until Robbie Earnshaw passed it in the third millennium. Hughie would also score the most famous goal in the Bluebirds’ history, the FA Cup Final winner against Arsenal at Wembley in 1927, as the trophy left England for the first and, to date, only time. With legendary status assured at Ninian Park, Ferguson returned to Scotland, joining Dundee in 1929, however, he would be plagued by injuries and sink into a depression. On 8 January 1930, aged just 34, two months before the birth of his son, Hughie Ferguson committed suicide, gassing himself after a training session at Dens Park.
As with Jimmy McGrory, in any other era Ferguson’s scoring record would have ensured his place as a regular Scotland internationalist. However, the first choice at that time was another Hughie, ‘Wembley Wizard’ Gallacher, of Airdrieonians, Newcastle United and Chelsea fame. Sadly, like Hughie Ferguson, Gallacher would suffer a tragic death, in his case many years later, on 11 June 1957, aged 54, throwing himself under a train the day before he was due to stand trial for allegedly assaulting his son, Matt.
Another of Hughie Gallacher’s sons, John, known as Jackie, had signed for his father’s boyhood club, Celtic in July 1943, despite his own allegiances apparently lying in the blue half of the city. Jackie would score a hugely-impressive 103 goals in 126 games for the Hoops over the next six seasons, albeit most were in the wartime Regional competitions, and thus excluded from official statistics. On Saturday, 2 October, 1943, in just his second appearance, Gallacher hit a hat-trick in a 3-2 win over Albion Rovers at Celtic Park, his direct opponent being a certain Jock Stein, and he bettered that by scoring five of Celtic’s goals in the 6-0 demolition of Partick Thistle in the Southern League Cup, forerunner to the current national tournament, the following April. Jackie netted another treble against Morton at Celtic Park on Saturday, 6 January 1945 and was part of the team which won the Victory in Europe Cup in May of that year, by courtesy of being awarded one more corner than final opponents, Queen’s Park!
Season, 1945/46, the last before the normal national League arrangements were re-introduced, would end disastrously for Jackie Gallacher. He had scored 26 goals in 30 games, including four in an 8-2 win over St Johnstone in Perth in the first round of the Victory Cup on Saturday, 20 April 1946, when Celts faced Rangers in the replayed semi-final of that competition at Hampden, on Wednesday, 5 June 1946.
Referee, Matthew Dale, would be the central figure as two Celtic careers were adversely impacted. The official had given Rangers the benefit of a series of controversial calls before, at one point, falling over. When Celtic wing-half, George Paterson, helped him to his feet, he caught a whiff of alcohol on Dale’s breath, immediately enquiring as to his wellbeing, for which he was rewarded with a caution.
At half-time, Celtic director Bob Kelly, made the club’s concerns known to the SFA chairman, George Graham, another man who was no friend of Celtic, as would later be witnessed by the ‘Irish Flag crisis’ of 1952. In any case, the awful Dale was again in place for the second half, both Jackie Gallacher and future Notts County supremo, Jimmy Sirrell, left lame by Ibrox challenges which had gone unpunished.
The nine-man Celts were then further outraged when Dale awarded Rangers a ridiculous penalty-kick, an incensed Paterson refusing to hand over the ball to the referee, an action which saw him dismissed. Whilst they had been in confrontation, Celtic left-back, Jimmy Mallan had removed the penalty spot with his boot, before kicking the ball away. He too saw red, leaving Celtic to finish the game with seven players on the field.
The SFA, in their wisdom, decided to punish the Parkhead club, both Paterson and Mallan receiving three-month bans, a decision branded by Kelly as ‘the most unfair punishment ever meted out’. A man of honour and integrity, having played in the top-flight for eleven seasons without as much as a booking, George Paterson took the outcome very badly, falling into a deep depression. He would never play for the club again, transferred to Brentford upon the expiry of his suspension.
Jackie Gallacher would be out of football for over a year, returning in the new League Cup competition in August 1947 but making just six appearances that season, as Celtic fought their one and only battle against relegation, the club going through a series of centre-forwards before striking gold with Jock Weir.
Gallacher would enjoy a last fruitful run in the side during the 1948/49 campaign, his 21 goals in 29 games including hat-tricks against Clyde and Falkirk at Parkhead, as a side energised by the arrival of Charles Patrick Tully improved its final League position from twelfth to a more respectable sixth, and, perhaps more importantly, won its first silverware since the war, by lifting the Glasgow Cup in September 1948.
Jackie had played his last match of that season in early April, against Motherwell at Fir Park, suffering a cartilage injury which would require surgery over the summer. He would make one final appearance in the Hoops, on Saturday, 17 December, 1949, typically scoring Celtic’s goal in a 5-1 defeat by East Fife at Bayview.
Having spent some time on loan at both Dunfermline Athletic and Falkirk, Jackie was freed by Celtic at the end of the 1950/51 season, ironically a campaign where the club had won its first national trophy since the 1938 League title, the Scottish Cup, a John McPhail goal enough to beat Motherwell in Scotland’s showpiece fixture for the third time in just twenty years.
Anyway, I digress. We were discussing Peter McGonagle, and those two fateful Glasgow derbies.
Back at Celtic Park in the Ne-erday fixture of 1936, the great McGrory was doing what he did best yet again, his first-half double and another from Jimmy Delaney giving Celts a 3-1 lead. But it would be downhill from there, braces from Bob McPhail and our old friend, Jimmy Smith snatching a 4-3 win for Rangers at the death.
A newspaper report of the time had mentioned that ‘McGonagle treated Smith in a way which caused some spectators to jump on to the track.’ One can only imagine what that was but the punishment was severe. Whatever transpired, Peter McGonagle did not play for Celtic again.
He was freed by the club in April 1936, then emulated his father by signing for Hamilton Academical that summer, linking up again with his old skipper, Jimmy McStay. The two old warhorses would face their former club together once, at Douglas Park on Saturday, 12 September 1936, a Johnny Crum double securing the two points for Celtic, despite excellent defensive performances from both men.
Peter McGonagle had lived the dream and he also died with it, being buried wearing his beloved Hoops upon his passing in December 1956, at the age of 52.
Following his death, tributes poured in, including one from the next name we will look at on our list, in the next part of the story, Jack Qusklay. The former Parkhead trainer was glowing in his praise of both the man and the player, saying that ‘it had been his privilege to have known him as a real friend.’
‘His loyalty to friends, club and country was outstanding. He would never let anyone down and, in a game, would play himself into the ground. His stamina was amazing. As a player, he had a wonderful positional sense, a great left foot and one of the best penalty-takers Celtic ever had.’
Whilst Jimmy McGrory summed up his own feelings as follows.
‘The death of Peter McGonagle means that I have lost a personal friend. Peter was one of the truly great Celtic players.’
In yet another of those strange twists of fate which football throws up, Peter’s cousin – yes you’ve guessed it, he was called Willie – was a few years ahead of the young McGrory at school and, being a centre-forward, was the reason that James Edward McGrory would play at inside-right all the way from primary school, through boy’s guild football to winning the Scottish Junior Cup, all with St Roch’s.
God bless you, William Peter McGonagle. Celtic to the core.
Thanks, as always, to the Celtic Wiki, a wonderful source of reference information.
Hail Hail!
Matt Corr
Follow Matt on Twitter @Boola_vogue
The article above is part 2 of 3. You can read part 1 below and part 3 will be published today on The Celtic Star…
A Celtic Mystery – 'And they gave us James McGrory and Jackie Watters,' Matt Corr…https://t.co/ntQGbtprHg @Boola_vogue @BroganRoganTrev @Highland__paddy
— The Celtic Star Editor (@CelticStarMag) March 6, 2020
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