CHARLIE GALLAGHER’S PRE-CELTIC CAREER…

Charlie left school in 1956 and began an apprenticeship as an electrician in a firm in London Road, but he was determined that he would like a career in professional football. Which young boy does not entertain
fantasies of that sort? The difference was that Charlie was good. Some felt that he lacked the “devil” for the tough world of professional football, but no-one could deny his skill, in particular his passing ability and his
tremendous shot. In the meantime, while he naturally hoped that he could make the grade as a professional and play for the team that he and the rest of the Irish community adored, he would continue to play football
as often as he could, for he possessed the one thing that is more essential than anything else – namely the desire to play the game.

There was a team called the Rancel. Bright people could work out that this was a combination of Rangers and Celtic, and they played at juvenile level. He had a few games for them. But he also played for Kilmarnock Amateurs. He was very impressed by the set-up at Rugby Park and he thus came into contact with Willie Waddell. Waddell had of course been a highly successful winger for Rangers in the late 1940s and 1950s, but after his retirement from the playing side of football, became the Manager of Kilmarnock in 1957. Gallagher and Waddell soon developed a mutual admiration for each other, even though both were aware that there was only really the one senior football team that Charlie wanted to play for – and it was the direct antithesis of those whose jersey “the Deedle” (as Waddell was nicknamed) had graced for so long.

What Charlie particularly liked at Rugby Park was the training. For youngsters, this was every Tuesday night. It was very well organised by Waddell himself, his assistant Malky MacDonald (a Celtic legend from the 1938 Empire Exhibition trophy days) and Walter McCrae who would in time become Scotland’s trainer. Everything was arranged so that everyone got a reasonable chance at everything with loads of practice at a variety of things like dribbling, shooting, tackling, passing, taking free-kicks, corner kicks ets. and it was an enjoyable experience which contrasted starkly with the training set-up that Charlie would encounter at Celtic Park in the future. Loads of eager youngsters would turn up and do little other than run round the park.

Kilmarnock would, of course, be a consistently good side in the late 1950s and early 1960s, winning the Scottish League in 1965 and having several near misses, losing two Scottish Cup finals (1957 and 1960) and two
Scottish League Cup finals (1960/61 and 1962/63). They did this on a modest budget and with a fairly small fan base – their play certainly deserved more attention – and one of the reasons for their success would certainly be the fact that their players like Frank Beattie, Davie Sneddon and Jackie McInally were always very fit and very well trained.

Willie Waddell remained a great admirer of Charlie Gallagher (something that was apparent ten years later when Waddell was writing for The Scottish Daily Express and continually purred his admiration in match reports for Gallagher’s silky play) and on more than one occasion before Gallagher joined Celtic, Waddell offered him professional terms at Rugby Park. Had Gallagher not retained such a great sentimental attraction to
Celtic, he might well have joined Kilmarnock there and then. Indeed, he sometimes still wonders what might have been had he done so, but his regrets are minimal, for Celtic had a spell over him, he felt! But in any
case, he was still young.

Times were changing in the 1950s. Prosperity was in the air in a way that it hadn’t ever been before. It was an era of virtually full employment, and the reforms of the Welfare State and the National Health Service were now gradually beginning to make an impact in the shape of healthier, fitter youngsters. More and more attention was turned to the horrors of the Glasgow slums and the Government, both national and local, were shamed into doing something about them. But it was a slow process.

The Government was Conservative, but a far more benign and enlightened form of Conservative in comparison to what they had been in the 1930s or what they would become again in the 1980s. They accepted Labour’s Welfare State, which was the most important thing. Admittedly they made a fool of themselves over Suez in 1956, but Harold McMillan took over after that. He believed in progress and rightly could he claim that “we
have never had it so good”. It was a benign aristocracy, but many people felt that change wasn’t coming quickly enough.

A new large box began to arrive in people’s living rooms. This was something called a television. BBC Television had opened in Scotland in 1952 and had slowly expanded as people wanted to see the Coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II in 1953, for example. By 1957, the BBC had competition in the form of commercial TV, and advertisements emphasised the point that this was now a consumer society and that people now had enough
money to buy nice things.

TV had its effect on football. Already some football had been shown live. The 1954 World Cup, for example, had been beamed from Switzerland. Scottish people wished it hadn’t, because one of the games was a 7-0 defeat of Scotland from a virtually unheard of country called Uruguay.

Worse still for Celtic fans had been the 1955 Scottish Cup final when Clyde equalised with a corner kick late in the game when the game seemed won. It was the first ever Scottish game to be televised live, and was a Celtic horror show.

Highlights of English games were shown in a programme called Sports Special on Saturday night or sometimes Sunday afternoons, and there was a regular Sportsview programme on a Wednesday night. Horizons were
being opened, but the down side was that television was showing that there was another world somewhere other than the narrow one of football.

Attendances at football matches had not yet begun to drop as they would a few years later, but people were slowly beginning to realise that there were options to a Saturday spent watching football. Arguments raged about whether more football should be shown live, but the SFA with men like Bob Kelly and George Graham in charge
were totally opposed to it. These men, sworn enemies in some respects, nevertheless were in agreement that television would stop people going to see football matches. So only very occasionally was a match allowed, and
normally that was an International game.

But this was still a golden age for Scottish football. Granted, there did seem to be a problem with beating England. At Hampden, 1956 saw Scotland very unlucky with a late Johnny Haynes goal denying victory, but
1958 was a shocking 0-4 defeat, and both 1957 and 1959 had seen narrow but deserved victories for England at Wembley – but the team qualified for the 1958 World Cup in Sweden and tended to beat Wales, Northern
Ireland and continental opposition more often than not. The country was not yet the worldwide laughing stock that it would become 50 years later.

Domestically, as we have seen, Celtic were more than a little disappointing, but Rangers at least were challenged by Hearts in the League, the Tynecastle side winning the League in 1958 and 1960. The Scottish Cup was very competitive with Clyde winning it twice in 1955 and 1958, Falkirk in 1957 and St Mirren in 1959. Clyde, indeed had a remarkable four years. Between their two Scottish Cups, they were relegated to the Second Division and then promoted back again to the First!

Floodlights began to appear at a few grounds enabling teams to play in the evenings on a winter’s night, and allowing games to start at 3.00 pm on a Saturday afternoon even in the darkest of December days. Celtic had never really challenged for the Scottish League after 1954, although they had been a good second to Aberdeen in 1955. An astonishingly bad team selection and performance on the field cost them the Scottish Cup in 1956 to Hearts, but better times were forthcoming in the Scottish League Cup, this new tournament which had only arrived on the scene after World War II. In Celtic’s first League Cup final in October 1956, they were lucky to survive the first game against Partick Thistle, but then delighted their fans with an impressive 3-0 win in the replay.

Charlie enjoyed that, but enjoyed the following season’s Scottish League Cup even more, for that was the occasion that Celtic walloped Rangers 7-1 – and it should have been a lot more! But one event dominated football more than anything else in the mid 1950s. Snow was beginning to fall in Glasgow on the afternoon of
Thursday 6 February 1958 when stories began to spread about an air crash at Munich affecting the Manchester United team which was returning from a successful European Cup tie in Belgrade. In tune with the grim news which grew worse every hour, the weather got worse and worse so that by Saturday 8 February, not a single game was played in Scotland.

The games might have been off in any case to mourn the devastation of Manchester United. Matt Busby, the Scottish Manager, survived after a prolonged fight for his life, but men like Duncan Edwards, Roger Byrne
and Tommy Taylor were never seen again. The whole business raised many questions about air travel to European Cup matches, and it was a long time before anyone could fly to a game without serious apprehension.

However, money would eventually talk rather more loudly than concerns for public safety, and the European
Cup was not postponed, being won again by Real Madrid for the third year running.

The snows of 8 February did have one beneficial side-effect for Charlie, however. The Scotland Youth International team were due to play their Ireland counterparts on that day. Charlie was not selected for that game – he would have been the travelling reserve – but by the time that the game was rescheduled for 12 April 1958 at Stair Park, Stranraer, Charlie was in the team!

The legendary Willie Maley of Celtic had died some 10 days previously at the advanced age of 90, and on this very day that Gallagher was playing for Scotland Youth, Hearts were winning the Scottish League for the first time since 1897, by an odd coincidence the year that Maley had become the Manager of Celtic! The Evening Times of that day has a small snippet of information to the effect that Jock Stein “who now looks after youngsters at Parkhead” was going to Stranraer to see the Scotland Youth game – “not talking, just watching” said Jock.

The game finished 2-2, and Press reports say that Ireland were the better team. The Scottish team was Neil, Provan and Lynch; C. Brown, McConnachie and Nicol; H. Brown, McCulloch, Lochhead, Gallagher
and Burns. The team was interesting for the future of the game. Apart from Charlie, there was Ian Lochhead, also destined to become a “Kelly Kid” (albeit a very unsuccessful one), Davie Provan at right back who went on to play for Rangers in the early 1960s (not to be confused with Celtic’s Davie Provan of the 1980s) and the right half was no less a person than Craig Brown who would become the Manager of Scotland after a less than totally successful playing career with teams like Dundee. The team may have only drawn 2-2 with Ireland, but they did a great deal better than their senior counterparts a week later who managed to go down 0-4 to England at Hampden in one of the worst of their many thrashings from England at that time. A week after that Clyde won the Scottish Cup for the second time in four years by beating Hibs 2-0.

Charlie’s father Dan was proud of his son representing Scotland in the Youth International. Dan, like many Irishmen, was no great football fan and seldom went to games, but he did keep a scrapbook of the games
that Charlie played in, and he knew enough about the game to know that Charlie was doing well, and continually teased him. If Charlie’s team had won 3-0, he would say that it should have been 4-0 and things like that,
but it was all good natured.

Round about this time in 1958, the current obsession in Scotland was the trial of a serial killer called Peter Manuel who had committed several murders in North Lanarkshire. He was eventually found guilty and went to the gallows on 11 July 1958. The trial at Glasgow High Court was a remarkable one. Manuel, born in America in 1927 but of Scottish parents, was by no means unintelligent, and at one point sacked his lawyers in the middle of the trial and conducted his own defence. It was generally agreed even by Lord Cameron, the Judge, that his defence was nothing short of brilliant with several plausible theories being produced as to how else the murders could have happened.

At one point, he questioned a witness who had been brought in on a stretcher and almost convinced the jury that the injured man had murdered his wife and members of his family. Though clearly a sadistic psychopath, Manuel almost became a Scottish cult hero, for such murder cases were exceptionally well received and read avidly in the Scottish press. But the balance of evidence was too much, and guilty was the verdict. Some people were beginning to feel that the death penalty was not the best way of dealing with such criminals, but Manuel’s execution was duly carried out as sales of newspapers soared.

He was third last man to be hanged in Scotland.

We next find Charlie Gallagher playing for the Scottish Amateur League against the Airdrie and Coatbridge League at the odd venue of Cowal Park, Dunoon on the equally strange date of 28 June 1958. But then
again, in the same way that they say that the city of New York never sleeps, the Scottish football season never really stops either. Indeed, the full Scotland team had just returned with their tails between their legs
from the World Cup in Sweden after three awful performances against Yugoslavia, Paraguay and France.

The failure to appoint a Manager for Scotland betokened the amateurish approach to all this. Effectively the team was run by senior players like Tommy Younger of Hibs and Bobby Evans of Celtic – fine players both, but something more was required. The good side of the 1958 World Cup however was the fact that it was shown on TV (something that more and more people now aspired to owning) and we were able to see the fabulous Brazilians including the emergence of a superbly talented youngster called Pele, Older Celtic supporters scoffed however and said “You never saw Patsy Gallacher!”, but it would have to be admitted that Pele was not a bad player.

But returning to this game “doon the watter” at Dunoon, Charlie Gallagher starred, sending a nice through pass to Ian Lochead to score the first, then he scored himself before contributing to the third goal scored by Robert Burns of Drumchapel. The team won eventually 5-2, and Gallagher’s performance was noted, not least by those in important places at Celtic Park.

Charlie was lucky in one regard in his private life. He was just young enough to avoid National Service. Following the end of World War II, the Government (a Labour one, to its shame) decided that young men should be conscripted into the Armed Services for a limited period of time (usually 18 months to 2 years). This involved training in England usually and then often a posting overseas to Aden or Cyprus or Singapore, for example.

There were good things about it in that it allowed young men to see a bit of the world, and there are even those today who say that it would be a good thing to instil discipline etc. There were exemptions if you worked in
various jobs, and you could always apply for a deferment, a postponement of the inevitable, so that you could finish an apprenticeship for example.

But behind all the guff about “making a man out of you” “defending the realm” and “serving the Queen”, the fact remained that it was compulsory and looked upon with dread and horror by those who were taken away from their comfort zone. It played havoc with careers and romances, and frankly, it became harder and harder to justify every year that passed. It would finish altogether in the early 1960s, but in 1957 it was decided that all those born on or after October 1 1939 would not necessarily be called up. The sigh of relief was audible throughout the land, not least from young men like Charlie Gallagher.

In 1958, the Army did not as yet engender the same feelings of hatred in the Glasgow Irish community as it does today, but it is hard to imagine a peaceful man like Charlie Gallagher enjoying life in the Army. On the other hand, the Army did encourage football and would often stretch a point or two to allow a soldier home for the weekend to play in a game, for example. Men like Ronnie Simpson, Steve Chalmers and Jim Kennedy all served their time in the “sodgers” and claimed that it had benefitted them.

On the other hand, very few men evinced any desire to stay on after their period of compulsory service had expired.

In August 1958 Charlie signed for Yoker Athletic, a Junior team based at Holm Park, Clydebank. They played in the Central League and various Cup competitions against teams like Johnstone Burgh, Vale of Leven,
Petershill, Port Glasgow and Ashfield, and Charlie distinguished himself, so much so that a month after the start of the season, he was signed for Celtic on a provisional basis in October 1958, something that allowed him
to continue to play for Yoker. He played in several positions during the 1958/59 season – at outside right, inside right and inside left.

He was already a Celtic provisional by the time that he played his best game for Yoker, and that was in the Dunbartonshire Charity Cup final at Holm Park against Vale of Leven. Vale of Leven is of course a name
embroidered on the very fabric of Scottish football, for they were very much involved in the early years of the game. A good quiz question would be “What have Vale of Leven done with the Scottish Cup that Celtic
haven’t?” And the answer of course is that they won the trophy three years in a row – 1877, 1878 and 1879 – something that Celtic have yet to achieve (at the time of writing in 2016). Celtic have come close. In the early 1970s they won it 4 years out of 5, and in 1909 only the Hampden Riot prevented them, but they have
yet to win the Scottish Cup three years in a row (Puts a Quadruple Treble into some context too, folks).

All this was in the dim and distant past as far as Vale of Leven were concerned in 1958, when they were ripped apart by Charlie Gallagher in a 5-2 defeat. The Scottish Sunday Express is quite emphatic in its admiration “Star of the Dunbartonshire Charity Cup final was Yoker’s teenage right winger, Charlie Gallacher (sic – wrong spelling!). Lucky Celtic – they have him already signed. Gallacher scored two snappy goals in the first half and was always a menace to the Vale of Leven defence. He formed a tip-top right wing with Bobby Dougan, playing his first game for Yoker.”

He also starred as Yoker beat Rob Roy 5-0; “a powerful shot from 18 yards” helped Yoker beat Ashfield (who were without their bright star that day – one Stephen Chalmers); equalised with a “rocket shot” against Renfrew, and “headed an equaliser” against Johnstone Burgh – all this was enough to convince the Glasgow journalists that there was future in this boy. Less creditably, he picked up what he claimed to be his first and only “booking” in his career at Junior or Senior level when he deliberately tripped up a Petershill player.

Playing a season in Scottish Junior football is character building for anyone. The term itself is misleading. A “junior” need not necessarily mean a young man. Some gnarled old veterans plied their trade in the
junior ranks. Often the players were young men, as Charlie Gallagher was in season 1958/59, but sometimes “juniors” were men who had not made it to the senior ranks, or sometimes men who had been seniors and had
returned after perhaps an injury or simply not managing to fulfil their potential.

It is generally agreed that Scottish Junior football is tough. Pitches are not always great with a marked lack of grass on occasion, crowds are small but rabid with every team having its own band of enthusiastic supporters.
Tackles are hard and winning is as important as it is to the full-time professional, maybe even more so, for there is not the consolation of the money – at least not a great deal of money. Paying players is generally
frowned upon, but it does happen!

There is also the factor of weather. Seldom in a Scottish winter does one get an ideal day for a game of football. Either the pitch is bone-hard, or the opposite is the case, where the pitch resembles a quagmire – but tough
players are happy to play on any surface. There was also in Glasgow in the 1950s in particular, an additional problem which has now diminished – that of fog or “smog”. Fogs and mists do still happen today of course,
but before governments got concerned about clean air, an Atlantic mist could join forces with the polluted air of Glasgow’s industrial waste and cause a fog that could last for days, bringing untold misery and loads of
health problems.

A thick skin is necessary in Junior football, for players hear every word hurled at them. In a large crowd, individual comments can be drowned in a wall of sound. In a crowd of a couple of hundred, every insult direct by some cretin at your father, your girlfriend, your religion is heard! And it is often claimed that the bravest men in the world are those courageous enough to referee such games. A crowd at a Glasgow Junior game is far more intimidating than Celtic v Rangers, for there a referee has a couple of linesmen to help and a huge amount of policemen. At a Junior game, anything can happen – and the referee is on his own.

That, incidentally, was the opinion of Jack Mowat, arguably Scotland’s best ever referee. He was in charge of many Cup finals in the 1950s, including famously the European Cup final at Hampden in 1960 between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt to which, it was claimed, that he walked from his house in Rutherglen! Jack would always say that once you have done the Glasgow Juniors, you are afraid of nothing!

Charlie Gallagher thrived in this atmosphere. He did not look the toughest of characters, and boasts of his virtually unblemished record as far as referees and discipline went. He was able to ignore provocation and
nasty tackles from the likes of Bobby Shearer of Rangers, and he learned this in his year with Yoker Athletic. Above all else, he continued to enjoy his football. He was interested in very little else and lived for his next
game. He was happy enough to play wherever he was put. Modest and unassuming he may have been, but he knew that he had a certain amount of talent, and he always enjoyed the chance to put it to the test.

David Potter

From David Potter’s 2016 biography, Charlie Gallagher? What A Player!

To be continued…