CELTIC AND DUNDEE…Yesterday on The Celtic Star we recalled an incident a year ago when an Irish flag was sneakily stolen and removed from view at Dens Park and the remarkable efforts of the Celtic fans involved to recover the flag and in doing so joined a decades old narrative where we’ve had to stand firm to defend and display the Irish tricolour.
Then one of the posters from Celtic Noise who is a proud Dundonian followed up on The Day Dundee FC Snatched our Flag – ‘So they started Celtic Football Club and they raised the flag up high’, with a more general look at the relationship between the City of Dundee and its Irish immigrate population.
Celtic Historian David Potter, a proud Fifer, wanted to add a few words himself to the subject of CELTIC AND THE CITY OF DUNDEE…
Any examination of the relationship between Celtic and the city of Dundee must begin with the realisation that Dundee is a very complex city indeed. It is commonly described as “the city of laughter and tears”, and there are plenty of both these qualities in evidence there.
It is the city of the famous Victorian poet William Topaz McGonagle (not to be confused with Celtic’s “Peter” McGonagle) the man whose reputation is built on bad poetry and sheer doggerel – “This is Dundee without a doubt, I see the Albert Instituout! “The Tay, the Tay the silvery Tay, it passes the Tay Bridge every day” “Is that a boat I hear colliding against the pier? No, no, no – aye but oh, it is so!” and so on.
It is the city of the DC Thomson Press. Every household more or less reads The Courier and The Sunday Post, newspapers which have often read like party political broadcasts for the Conservative Party, and yet the Tories have singularly failed to win seats. Dundee was staunch Labour, but has now changed to Scottish Nationalist, and it has never been Conservative. It did have Winston Churchill once as an MP, but he was then a Liberal and they voted him out in 1922, voting instead for Neddy Scrimgeour, a Prohibitionist!
Even the drunkards staggered out of the pub, they said to vote for Neddy. The aggrieved gentleman departed Dundee, apparently expressing the hope that it would be washed down the Tay! But his cause had hardly been helped when his wife turned up outside a jute factory for an election meeting in a chauffeur driven car and wearing pearls!
And then there was Mary Deacon of Horsewater Wynd, who was born in 1850 and was registered in the 1861 Census as a 10 year old with an occupation as “Factory worker”. Incredible but true! And who was Mary Deacon? My great-grandmother!
And then, my grandfather told me, Dundee had two Irish full backs called Philip McCupp and Philip McCann, and in the song Bonnie Dundee, that was why there was the line “Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can!” And I believed him! The same Bonnie Dundee was a Jacobite and well known hater of William of Oranje. As I say, Dundee is a complex place. They all say “eh” rather than “I”, there is no finer delicacy that a “peh”, and Dundee supporters have been heard to describe themselves as a “Dee” singing “Eh’m a Dee, eh’m a Dee, until the day that eh deh”
It was all about jute. Jute and the Irish immigrants arrived at about the same time in the 1850s. Dundee FC and Forfarshire Cricket Club were often nicknamed as “the jute”. The Irish tended to live in the Lochee area of the city, but there is no great evidence of any great religious intolerance or social divisions.
Dundonians tend to be kind hearted, tough as nails and very welcoming. But there were quite a few Irish teams – Lochee Harp, Dundee Celtic and of course Dundee Hibernians, who were founded in 1909 and changed their name in 1923 to Dundee United.
The change of name is a story in itself, and had a great deal to do with distancing themselves from the Irish troubles of the early 1920s. They changed from a green shirt to a black and white one, and decades later, went the whole hogg by changing to oranje (or tangerine, to be precise). I recall the day in about 1954 when I attended one of my first games at Station Park, Forfar to see Forfar Athletic play Dundee United, and I was amazed to hear an older man shout “Come Away the Hibs!” when everyone knows that Hibs play in Edinburgh!
But Dundee United were never a great side. They did put a poor Celtic team out of the Scottish Cup in 1949, but until 1960 they tended to be a Second Division team, and a poor one at that. But 1960 changed all that. Financed by a succesfull lottery called Taypools, they built a new stand and stayed in the First Division.
Now it so happened that at that particular time, Celtic were going through their lean years. Suddenly, Dundonians with Celtic and Irish sympathies, suddenly found that if they could not afford the train fare to Glasgow one Saturday, they had a respectable team on their doorstep that they could support. Celtic lost a lot of Tayside supporters at about that time, and that is another thing that we must blame the awkward and prickly Bob Kelly for.
Dundee reached their first ever Scottish Cup final in 1925 and duly lost it to Patsy Gallacher. They had in fact met Celtic several times in the Scottish Cup previously, having on one famous occasion in 1895 defeated them at their first ever ground of Carolina Port.
Patsy’s son Tommy played for Dundee in the late 1940s and early 1950s, took up journalism after retirement and got a job with The Courier. From then on there was a markedly pro-Celtic strain to be noted in The Courier, but he was only adding to something that had been there before, for The Courier was always careful not to upset Dundee’s Irish readership.
1962 saw Dundee crowned Champions of Scotland. It was deserved for Dundee had a fine team with Alan Gilzean, Ian Ure and Alan Cousin and they earned the respect of Celtic supporters, not least for the fact that if Dundee were the champions, Rangers weren’t.
In 1963, Dundee reached the semi-final of the European Cup, and came as close as anyone else to winning it before Celtic did. But their success did not last long for their Directors pursued the “fiscally wise” policy of selling their best players when they didn’t really need to.
For a while a few, a pathetic few, Dundee supporters began to wave Union Jacks and call themselves the Dundee Derry, something that was really pathetic in the context of Dundee history. Whether this was aimed at Celtic or at Dundee United, one cannot be sure, but it was no coincidence that this happened at the time when Dundee were beginning to shrink into insignificance.
They had one moment of glory in December 1973 when they won the Scottish League Cup with Tommy Gemmell on board, and of course we remain grateful to Albert Kidd (a Celtic supporter, I believe) in 1986.
Bad management has forced both Dundee clubs close to extinction in the past. Much has been the talk about amalgamations over the years. It might have been a good idea, one feels, and it will certainly happen if both clubs get into financial trouble at the same time. But there will always remain a strong Celtic support in the city of Dundee, as indeed there is in the surrounding areas of Angus, Fife and Perthshire.
David Potter
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