'Charlie Gallagher? What a Player!' It was a bad time to be a Celtic supporter – but Gallagher decided to plod on

Summer 1962 saw Gallagher, as he did most summers at that time, spending his holidays in Ireland. Pat Crerand was there as well. There they played some illegal professional football. There was an unofficial competition going on there, and Charlie and Pat were given a game for one of the teams and were duly paid for it, secretly and illegally. Had news of this got back to Scotland, there would have been a great deal of trouble, and it is hard to imagine Mr Kelly defending this!

On one occasion Pat and Charlie’s team were playing a team from the North, and there were one or two sectarian overtones to this, but it was only when the other team came out that they saw that their captain was none other than their old friend Bertie Peacock! It was, they kept telling each other, a good way of keeping themselves fit for the new season! And there was also some money!

Summer 1962 with a new pop group called the Beatles now beginning to appear was an optimistic one. The World Cup was being played in Chile but as Scotland were not there, and there was no great TV coverage, little interest was paid to it. Now, more and more it was beginning to be felt that this season coming up was to be Celtic’s big breakthrough. Crerand was a superb player, and he and McNeill were now serving Scotland with distinction, and it was felt that if Celtic could just get a break, glory would soon follow.

Mr Kelly was not slow to tell the Press that his youth policy was now maturing and that his Celtic team had “arrived”. As if to prove this point that they were now fit to be ranked with the best, Mr Kelly had arranged a friendly with Real Madrid. Some called that optimism, other would describe it as “temerity”.

Alas, 1962/63 was another of Celtic’s horror stories where poor management was the order of the day in the shape of the selling of their star man (whom they did not replace) and constant, baffling and unnecessary ringing of the changes, particularly in the forward line with Gallagher frequently the blameless victim of irrational and ill-thought out decisions.

The League Cup sectional draw could hardly have been tougher for Celtic. True, Rangers had been avoided but Celtic had been paired alongside Hearts and the two Dundee teams. Dundee were, of course, the Champions of Scotland in 1962 and Hearts had been Champions in 1960 and 1958. The Edinburgh side had won the League Cup on three occasions in recent history, and Celtic fans still recalled with a chill of horror the Scottish Cup final of 1956 when a curiously lacklustre Celtic team had been paralysed into catatonic inactivity by Bauld, Wardhaugh and company.

Dundee United were the new kids on the block. They had been promoted from the Second Division in 1960, they had prospered on the back of the success of their neighbours from across the road and they would always put up a good fight, especially at home in front of a passionate and noticeably young support.

It was this young generation which was lost to Celtic in Dundee. In previous decades the descendants of the Irish immigrants who had come to settle in Dundee, working in the whaling industry and then the jute factories which took over after the end of the American Civil War in 1865, would have naturally drifted to Celtic. Dundee United were a poor Second Division team. But this was all changed by the rise of Dundee United (founded in 1909 specifically as the Irish team in Dundee and known until 1923 as Dundee Hibernians) who had been in the First Division before but now showed a desire to stay there with the building of a new, bizarre looking stand that turned a corner. They were also well financed by a lottery called Taypools. This new arrival on the First Division scene gave the Dundonian youngsters of Irish extraction an option, other than the under-performing Celtic, in the Jute City’s boom years of the early 1960s.

It was anybody’s section, but Celtic must have fancied their chances with a home tie against Hearts for their first game. Charlie did not think he would be playing, but he was part of the squad, and he suddenly found himself in the team, owing his advancement to some quixotic happenings concerning fellow inside forward John Divers. The forward line for the first game against Hearts on the sunny, but windy, day of August ought to have read Lennox, Divers, Hughes, Murdoch and Byrne. Bobby Lennox had played a few games last season, but it was to be the debut of Bobby Murdoch at inside left.

Divers set out from his home in the west of Glasgow driving his car in loads of time. He suddenly remembered that he had left his boots at home. Normally, of course, they would have stayed at Parkhead but John had taken them to Hampden on Wednesday where he was playing in a Charity Cup game for Glasgow against Manchester United before an astonishing crowd of 82,000 – such was Glasgow’s love for football in 1962. He had scored for Glasgow but Manchester United had won 4-2.

Naturally he took his boots back home with him, but now he had left them there. He turned round and went back for them, but by then the traffic had increased. He was caught in traffic jams and failed to reach Celtic
Park by the appointed time.

In truth he was not all that late. He certainly could have stripped and played, but Mr Kelly was a stickler for things like that and John found himself replaced by Charlie Gallagher. There was no official suspension or anything like that – merely a statement that lateness would not be tolerated, nor was John’s name mentioned in the statement. The 42,000 crowd were of course unaware of all this, but were very impressed by young Murdoch who scored in the 6th minute and Gallagher who scored with a fine drive early in the second half in what was generally a good 3-1 victory over Hearts in typical Glasgow summer weather of hot sunshine punctuated by heavy showers.

This was a good start to the season, but then followed a trip to Dens Park, Dundee to take on the League Champions. Dundee had lost to their local rivals United at Tannadice on the Saturday. Dundee provocatively decided to unfurl the League flag on that occasion and got what they deserved in terms of audience reaction with the laughable spectacle of Dundee’s Lord Provost Mr McManus, ironically himself a crypto-Celtic supporter but frequently suspected of some dodgy deals of the kind for which Dundee City Council became infamous, going red in the face trying to make himself heard over “Sure It’s A Grand Old Team To Play For”. Mr Kelly, as Chairman of the SFA was in the platform party and hung his head in embarrassment – but there always is something hilarious about officialdom making a fool of itself. Clearly Dundee had chosen the wrong game to unfurl their flag.

The game itself was a cracker of the type for which Dundee v Celtic games enjoyed a good reputation. Two good attacking teams, two rivals for the Scotland centre half spot in Billy McNeill and Ian Ure, two Yogi Bears (for Ian Ure shared John Hughes’ nickname) entertained the 20,000 crowd but it was Dundee who edged it 1-0. Gallagher had a great game teaming up well with Pat Crerand, and had real hard luck with several shots which hit the bar or went past the post. Dundee’s goal was scored by Gordon Smith, a man who had now won three Scottish League medals with three separate clubs – Hibs, Hearts and Dundee – and now in the veteran stage of a great career. He took advantage of a Jim Kennedy slip up to score half way through the second half, and then spent the rest of the game defending desperately against waves and waves of Celtic attacks which lacked only luck, as was the way of things in those days.

This was a disappointment but not a disaster and most Celtic fans left Dens Park optimistic about what the future could bring to Celtic this year, for Celtic had clearly been the better team. The Evening Times the following night singled out Gallagher saying that “Charlie was the darling” of the Celtic support, but admitted that Ian Ure got the better of John Hughes and that Lennox and Murdoch were a little out of their depth. However, as Hearts beat Dundee United at Tynecastle that night, the section was all square and still very open.

In the meantime, Dundee FC made the sort of decision that would guarantee their repeated bankruptcies in future years. The pitch had been invaded by youngsters (mainly Celtic ones) at the end but it was merely enthusiasm and no harm was intended. Rather than simply tightening up their policing and stewarding or erect a fence – these things cost money! – Dundee used this as an excuse to close the Boys Gate which gave admission at half price! This compelled, for example, youngsters who supported Hearts to pay the full price for admission at the next game on the Saturday, and alienated their own boys as well. It fooled no-one either.

Dundee were simply trying to cash in on their success, and although public pressure eventually compelled them to rescind their decision, it was typical of Dundee’s thinking at the time of going for short-term financial gain without thinking of the long term effect on their supporters. It would become a great deal more obvious in future years with the transferring of their star players, as Dundee FC’s prolonged suicide began. For Celtic, there then followed a strange game at Parkhead against Dundee United.

The continued exclusion of Divers was raising a few eyebrows although the club were at pains to stress that he was not suspended. It was just that Gallagher and Murdoch were playing so well in the inside positions that John was going to have to play for his place. Divers was a player who aroused strong emotions. Some thought that he was a crafty inside man with a keen positional sense and an eye for goal. Others thought him slow and even lazy and compared him unfavourably with his father, John Divers senior, who had of course played in the Empire Exhibition team of 1938. In fact John suffered from a rare blood disorder which often made him give the impression that he has not trying as hard as he could. But he was a talented player.

The forward line saw only one change – Chalmers for Lennox – for this game on a pleasantly warm day at Celtic Park before a crowd of around 35,000. The team won 4-0, but there were undeniable sounds of booing, a half-hearted slow hand clap and chants of “Divers! Divers!” in the first half before Celtic scored on the stroke of half time. Much of this was because of a good chance missed by John Hughes, and it was only the goal scored by the same player on the stroke of half time which defused the protests.

In truth there was little for even the most inveterate of Celtic moaners to be unhappy about. In the second half Celtic took command against a Dundee United team who in the past and in the future would tend to freeze at Celtic Park, however well they could play at Tannadice. Pat Crerand scored a penalty, the much maligned John Hughes scored a marvellous goal and then Charlie Gallagher headed home a Byrne corner.

Those who had been vocal in their criticism of their team in the first half departed homewards convinced that, Divers or no Divers, this was a great Celtic team. Such was the fickleness of those who wore the green and white colours. But as Hearts had beaten Dundee at Dens that day, it was clear that next Saturday’s game at Tynecastle was going to be a very important one indeed.

But before that could happen there was a midweek League match to be played at Brockville, Falkirk. There was a very poor crowd here with Celtic fans staging some kind of half-hearted boycott in protest at the way they had been treated by Falkirk FC and Falkirk Police in the past.

Coincidentally, this game saw Gallagher and Murdoch dropped to allow in Jackson and Divers. Possibly this was a sop to the protests on Saturday, possibly it was just a device to give everyone a game at this early stage of the season, but Charlie would have had cause to feel badly treated, even though Celtic won 3-1 against a dreadful Falkirk team who had now lost all four games this season. The crowd cannot have reached 10,000 because Falkirk fans too were staging their own boycott about their team’s dreadful start to the season. In the past crushing and hooliganism had been a problem at this fixture. This game passed with hardly a whimper.

Celtic then made a decision that had their fans and the Press scratching their heads. Divers and Jackson who had played well in midweek were dropped for the game at Tynecastle, and Gallagher and Murdoch were re-instated! What made this worse was that a decision was made and announced on the Friday morning, which gave everyone loads of time to speculate about really was going on at Parkhead. “Horses for courses” was one way of putting it, and a less charitable way was “musical chairs” – but the whole thing seemed so arbitrary and whimsical and lead to humorous speculation about whether Divers had lost his boots again, having left them in the Falkirk dressing room. It was strange. It must also have been very unsettling for the players concerned, particularly as it was so obviously the wrong decision as, for this trip to Tynecastle, surely the experience of Divers would have been preferable to young Murdoch. Yet this sort of team selection was typical of the disorganised chaos that reigned at Celtic Park at the time.

The game at Tynecastle saw some strange refereeing by Mr McKenzie of Coatbridge, mainly to the benefit of Hearts who won 3-2. But that was not the whole story either. Hearts were 2-0 up at half time and then were awarded a penalty kick which mystified the Press. It was duly scored but then Celtic came back into the game and were awarded a penalty kick which Pat Crerand unfortunately missed. The game now seemed over and the Celtic fans trudging disconsolately to the exits clearly thought so, but the team rallied again and scored two goals within the last 10 minutes. With a little luck, better penalty-taking and better refereeing, they might have had an equalizer or even gone on to win, but 2-3 it was and a major blow to Celtic’s chances of qualification. Gallagher did not have one of his better games, it would have to be said, but he did have several good shots which might just have sneaked in.

But then on the Wednesday, the picture changed dramatically again. Hearts surprisingly blew up at Tannadice at the same time as Celtic showed their fans the football of which they were capable with a 3-0 win over Dundee at Celtic Park. This time it was Charlie Gallagher who put Celtic ahead in the very first minute with a fine shot from a Hughes pass, and the score stayed like this at 1-0 for the next 80 minutes until at last Hughes broke free of the shackles of Ian Ure and scored two fine late goals to make the score 3-0. Gallagher had a good game that night, passing sweetly and not being afraid to shoot when the chance beckoned.

The goals scored were significant because it meant that Celtic now had the advantage over Hearts on goal average, both teams having six points. For their final game, Celtic had to travel to Tannadice Park to meet a Dundee United team who had won both their home games (and lost their away games) whereas Hearts had a home fixture against Dundee who had as yet failed to reproduce the form that had won them the Scottish League last season. Any sort of win was likely to be enough for Celtic, but it was certainly very close.

The crowd at Tannadice that fine afternoon of September 1 1962 clearly exceeded Tannadice’s then official capacity of 20,000. They saw (and Celtic fans clearly were in the overwhelming majority) an entertaining game but one of the most frustrating and unlucky in Celtic’s 74-year history. The records will show that the game finished 0-0, but that does not tell of the times that Celtic hit the woodwork – at least four times with Gallagher hitting the post in one half and the bar in another, and then one of the biggest outrages in Celtic’s history when a ball was a good two feet over the line and was fished out by Dundee United’s left back, but the goal was not given!

It happened at the “Shed” end of the ground where were concentrated the Celtic fans. They clearly saw the ball over the line and voiced their displeasure volubly and loudly, but laudably, the Celtic players accepted the decision of the match officials and played on. One says “laudably” but it was one of those decisions or non-decisions which would have changed the course of Celtic history at least for the rest of the season, and possibly for several seasons after that. And it involved Charlie Gallagher intimately.

The game had gone 30 minutes with Gallagher playing superbly. HarrymAndrew of The Scottish Sunday Express says “inside right Charlie Gallagher was a superb inside forward combining elegance with more strength that I thought he possessed” and that was in the context of how he thought that this was “sustained high class football” from the whole team. The details of the controversial incident remain vividly in mind some 54 years later. Gallagher shot from about the six-yard line to the right of the goal. Goalkeeper Donald MacKay got a hand to it, and the ball then grazed the thigh of Doug Smith before crossing the line by nearly a yard as left half Stewart Fraser hooked the ball out.

The “Shed” claimed “Goal”, but our hearts sank as we saw Referee Hugh Phillips look across to his linesman. This meant that he had been unsighted and could not give the goal. The linesman on the open terrace side of the ground had not pointed to the centre line nor had he run up field. It meant that the goal could not be given. Photographs appeared in the Sunday papers and in the Monday ones (even The Dundee Courier) which showed that the ball was over the line, but what could they do? The lessons were threefold for Gallagher and the young Celtic team – there is injustice in the world, you sometimes don’t get the luck that you deserve, and there are times when you simply have to shrug your shoulders and move on. But it was a significant moment in that season.

The rest of the game was almost a rerun of the 1961 Cup final with poor finishing, an inspired and lucky goalkeeper and sheer bad luck, almost as if some divine power has decreed that you are not going to get a goal. It was anguish. Goalkeeper Donald MacKay had just joined United from Forfar Athletic in the summer. It was the best game of his career but – as with Eddie Connachan in April 1961 – there was a considerable amount of luck as well. It recalls how men like Julius Caesar and Napoleon always looked for commanders to work for them who were “lucky”.

That massive Celtic crowd – as large as had been seen in the city of Dundee since the boom days of the late 1940s – roared on their team with their vast repertoire of chants and songs including their new one called Sean South of Garryowen and the old one about how they beat the Rangers in the Cup 5-0 in 1925, but eventually when Mr Phillips pointed to the pavilion, the heads went down. But then, just as the teams were leaving the field shaking hands (it had been a very sporting and civilised encounter) a cruel rumour spread that Dundee had beaten Hearts at Tynecastle and that Celtic had qualified after all. For a while cheering, dancing, hugging and slapping each other’s backs was the order of the day until the Tannadice PA system, obviously enjoying the discomfiture of both Celtic and Dundee, announced brutally that Hearts had in fact beaten Dundee 2-0.

The blow was severe, and although one cannot travel in time and change history, it is nice occasionally to indulge in “what if” speculation. The reality was that Hearts went on to win that trophy in October beating in the final an outraged Kilmarnock. Kilmarnock thought that they had equalised through Frank Beattie at the very end only to have the goal disallowed by referee Tom Wharton. The controversy about this goal, incidentally, would have been much greater if this game had not coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis which was reaching its height at that time and threatened the world, apparently, with nuclear war! But nuclear war or no nuclear war, BBC’s Sports programme that night featured Andy Stewart singing “The Heart of Midlothian”, and oh, how jealous we were of the Hearts! Yet, had we known what the future was bringing to the men from Edinburgh (they did not win another trophy for 36 years, they would transfer Willie Wallace to us, they would go bankrupt, they would be relegated, they would lose Scottish Cup ties to teams like Forfar and of course, there was Albert Kidd in 1986!), then we would have realised that jealousy was a redundant emotion.

But to return to “what if ”, Celtic could have won the League Cup that year. They would have faced Morton in the quarter finals, then St Johnstone in the semis (Kilmarnock beat Rangers at the equivalent stage) and we would have faced Kilmarnock on the day that John F Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev’s itchy fingers were being tempted by the nuclear button. Had we won that game, (and always assuming that no nuclear holocaust happened) we would have faced the rest of the season with our supporters celebrating, the League Cup bedecked in green and white, and the real horrors of 1962/63 would not have happened. Pat Crerand, for example, would almost certainly have stayed with his beloved Celtic.

But in the reality of early September 1962 (Glasgow’s tram lines were being dismantled at that time) Celtic simply had to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, take the blow on the chin and come back fighting. On a personal level, Charlie Gallagher had done more than enough to prove himself worthy of a green and white jersey. His passing had on occasion been a sight to behold, and not for the last time the word “silky” was applied to him. He also had a phenomenal shot. Although he lacked the speed of Lennox or Chalmers, he was no slouch either and had a surprising ability to resist a tackle, something which his slender frame would not have indicated. The club’s decision to persevere with him, after the horrors of the 1961 Scottish Cup final seemed justified.

The support, although clearly devastated by the events of Tannadice, were still optimistic, for their team had played some good football, but the John Divers issue would not go away. Someone would say “Divers lost a lot of money by forgetting his boots” and another would say “Aye, but Celtic lost a lot more” as if Divers might have made a difference to Celtic qualifying for the League Cup quarter finals. He might have, of course, for every game would have been different, but it is hard to imagine that he would have been a lot better than Gallagher. The problem did not lie

in creating goal scoring opportunities – the traditional role of an inside forward – it lay, as Tannadice had painfully highlighted, in actually scoring them. John Hughes had his moments. There was no doubting his potential or indeed his achievements. It was just that he seemed to find it difficult to do it every week.

The defence was good. Frank Haffey, that great character, would never play for Scotland again after his Wembley fiasco in 1961, but his cheerful extroverted nature hid a very good goalkeeper indeed. And even in our misery at Tannadice that day, he had endeared himself to the support by his clear identification with the cause, talking to supporters and asking how long to go as Celtic mounted attack after attack on the distant Arklay Street goal. Full backs MacKay and Kennedy were experienced and competent, and in Billy McNeill, there was as good a centre half as you would find anywhere in the British Isles. Wing halves Pat Crerand and Billy Price were excellent players with Crerand in particular, apart from his unfortunate tendency to miss important penalties as good a passer of a ball as had been seen since Peter Wilson in the years before the war.

But the team was poorly led. Training was still haphazard and disorganised with emphasis on running round the track to the expense of ball control. This was no real problem to Gallagher with his innate ability to pass a ball, but he still could have done with some coaching, not least so that the other forwards could read his intentions. Charlie himself was always a great “reader” of a particular game and could take into account ground conditions, the fitness of his team mates, the abilities of the opposition defenders and even the way that referees and linesmen would react to certain given situations. He was a very thoughtful player. But, like everyone
else, he needed encouragement.

The Manager of course was the great Jimmy McGrory. Benign, pipesmoking, modest, charming and of course in 1962 the greatest football player still alive, McGrory, however, was no real Manager. Frankly, he was too nice a person. He lacked the ability to bawl someone out, to turn nasty or to even pretend to be angry, and Celtic would suffer for those deficiencies. But McGrory was only a front man for Chairman Bob Kelly, who was a different kind of person altogether.

Bob Kelly was the son of James Kelly, the man who was brought from Renton in 1888 to launch this new venture called the Celtic or the Keltic. Bob Kelly could not therefore have been more anchored into the concept of Celtic. He had never played football himself – his withered arm put paid to that – but he had nevertheless dedicated his life to the club. His problem was that he seemed to take everything personally. There were several players – Neil Mochan, Bobby Collins, Bertie Auld, for example – that he simply did not like and this had nothing to do with their undoubted footballing ability in all three cases. He therefore wasted no opportunity to keep them out of the team even when, for footballing reasons, they should have been included. And of course, he picked the team. As someone put it rather accurately, the club was firmly led, but not necessarily in the right direction. He was virtually a dictator.

However, that may be, Kelly decided that the same team that failed so narrowly and so heartbreakingly at Tannadice should play in the first Old Firm game of the season when Rangers came to Parkhead on Saturday 8 September. A couple of days after that, on the Monday, Celtic had their friendly against the prestigious Real Madrid, for it had been one of Mr Kelly’s brighter ideas to invite them back to Glasgow, a city which still talked in glowing terms about their performance against Eintracht Frankfurt in the European Cup final of 1960 at Hampden.

But Rangers came first. They had qualified for the League Cup quarter finals, but not without a struggle and not without a few performances that were tactfully described as “indifferent”. But an Old Firm game has a momentum of its own, and a 70,000 crowd assembled on a warm sunny day to see the two Glasgow rivals. Charlie Gallagher’s direct opponent that day was no less a person than Jim Baxter, and it would be fair to say that honours were equal in that particular competition with neither Baxter nor Gallagher being able to impose himself on the play. But for Celtic it was another heartbreak.

The game hinged on a penalty awarded to Celtic on the half hour mark. Pat Crerand had been fouled and it was Pat who decided to take the kick. He allowed himself to get involved in some badinage about where the ball should be placed with Baxter and some other Rangers defenders. Crerand even at one point invited the Rangers players to place the ball on the spot for him. He then had the mortification to see goalkeeper Billy Ritchie save his kick. It had been the second crucial penalty kick that Pat had missed in two weeks.

But even at that, Celtic were still fractionally the better team until very late in the game when Willie Henderson shot for goal and Jim Kennedy in trying to clear simply knocked it into the net. It was another galling way in which to lose a game, and particularly after last week, it was simply too much to take, especially when Celtic supporters knew that the talent was there. Some call it professionalism, others call it luck. Whatever it was Celtic did not have it. Rangers on the other hand had both.

The Real Madrid game was a happier one, even though Celtic lost 3-1, for it was a fine game of football with Gallagher’s passing by no means out of place in such distinguished company. Ferenc Puskas went out of his way to praise the Celtic fans for their enthusiasm and the atmosphere that they produced. It was noticeable that when Celtic were allowed three substitutes at half-time (such things were only permitted by negotiation in Friendlies in 1962), Gallagher was not one of the three men taken off.

September saw Gallagher play in a good game against Clyde at Shawfield but then he was dropped for the game against Aberdeen when the Dons, by no means a great side in 1962, hushed a large Parkhead crowd by winning 2-1. But then he went to Spain to play against Valencia in Celtic’s first ever European adventure – a 2-4 defeat, as it turned out, but very much a learning experience.

Charlie has some vivid but not too happy recollections of his time in Spain “For some reason we were staying in what I can only describe as beach huts or cabins down next to the beach. The night before the game, there was quite a bad storm and the entire place was flooded. I don’t know why we were staying where we were, but we were effectively evacuated in the middle of the night. We had to change accommodation and to this day I don’t know if it was a bit of gamesmanship from the locals or not.

Put it this way, the weather conditions must have been forecast so why we were based there I just don’t know. I’d say I probably remember all of that more than the game itself…It was a big round stadium, like a bullring actually, and we were the bulls being intimidated by the matadors. It was a really intimidating venue. In fairness, we weren’t used to it. It was obviously our first European tie and we really didn’t know what to expect. It was like an adventure for us.”

As autumn and winter descended in 1962, Celtic fans were increasingly baffled by team selections and team performances which sometimes seemed to lack any kind of logic. A new player called Bobby Craig was signed from Blackburn Rovers and he more or less got off the train at Glasgow Central, was taken in a taxi to Celtic Park and then played in the second leg of the European tie against Valencia a few hours later! Hardly surprisingly, this was less than a total success and that night saw Celtic’s first exit from a European Cup competition, the quaintly named Inter Cities Fairs Cup. Valencia went on to win the trophy that year.

Yet Celtic then turned it on – beating Airdrie 6-1 and St Mirren 7-0 with new boy Bobby Craig playing at inside right and Charlie Gallagher at inside left and playing splendidly. The corner seemed to have been turned, but
then Celtic blew up again by losing to, of all people, an incredulous Queen of the South at Parkhead. Similarly, a very hard working performance in the Glasgow Cup gave Celtic a deserved but rare win over Rangers one foggy Wednesday afternoon at Parkhead, but then the team blotted their copy book against Partick Thistle three days later and lost 0-2 to kill off what little chance there was of a League challenge that year.

It was a terrible performance from Celtic in front of a big crowd, and Gallagher seemed to be made the scapegoat. He was moved about the forward line during the game, and was dropped for the next few games. He returned to play against Third Lanark on December 15 at Cathkin. Celtic lost 0-2 in what would be the last time that they would ever lose a League match at Cathkin.

1962 thus came to an end with the Scottish Cup the only realistic prospect of a major honour in 1963. 1962 had been no better than 1961, or 1960 for that matter. What was as disturbing as anything was the constant chopping and changing of the team at the whim, apparently, of Chairman Bob Kelly, with no discernible policy in view. If the fans were concerned at all that, it must have been a great deal worse for the players, not least a man like Charlie Gallagher who was as much a victim of this inconsistency in team selection (and therefore inconsistency in results) as anyone else.

Valid questions might have been asked about his future at Celtic Park. But the team also depended rather too much on Pat Crerand, Charlie’s cousin. Crerand was a brilliant player “the best passer of a ball since Peter Wilson” in the words of one veteran supporter, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that Pat was unhappy and disillusioned at Parkhead. He had cause to feel this way, of course, for the team was going nowhere, and maybe he had been feeling this way since the Scottish Cup final of 1961.

More importantly, it was also becoming increasingly obvious that he was none too popular with Bob Kelly. Maybe Kelly disapproved of his friendship with Jim Baxter (they both wrote a ghosted column in The Evening Citizen every Saturday night and had obviously met on International duty) or maybe Kelly simply did not like his attitude. Pat, for his part, was beginning to entertain previously heretical thoughts that perhaps his career might be advanced at somewhere other than at Celtic Park. He was certainly aware that quite a few English teams had their eye on him, following his performances for Scotland and the Scottish League.

Yet he was Celtic through and through. Celtic had limped to the end of 1962 with a couple of narrow and unsatisfactory wins over Dunfermline Athletic and Queen of the South, but the crisis came on New Year’s Day at Ibrox. It might have been better if the game had been called off. Indeed, the pitch was hard, for a severe frost had hit Scotland on Hogmanay and would not really lift until early March. But the pitch passed the morning inspection, but the conditions were hardly ideal for Gallagher.

The game was a total Celtic disaster. Some historians rate the year 1963 as the worst in all Celtic’s history – certainly it was their 75th anniversary of their first game, and no-one made any great effort to celebrate it –
and if this is so, it certainly began appropriately, for Celtic went down 0-4 to Rangers on a very cold day. But within a few days everyone, in the gossipy city that was Glasgow, knew that Pat Crerand had fallen out badly with Sean Fallon, the Assistant Manager. Where was Jimmy McGrory, it might have been asked?

Celtic were down 1-0 at half-time. The game was by no means lost, especially on the hard pitch where anything could have happened. But when Sean Fallon suggested that Pat might try a little harder and that Celtic should make an immediate onslaught on the Rangers goal, Pat demurred suggesting instead that Celtic should try more containment to limit the damage, then try to hit them on the break. Voices were raised and before anyone could stop them, a full blown argument was going on.

No blows were struck, but Pat, allegedly, invited Sean to do something unlikely with his Celtic jersey. Eventually they calmed down and Pat was persuaded to go out for the second half. Had substitutes been allowed, Pat would probably not have taken the field. (One recalls a similar incident involving Mark Viduka in 2000 in the infamous defeat to Inverness Caledonian Thistle). As it was, Pat hardly kicked a ball in the second half, and made no impact on the game as Celtic collapsed to a 0-4 defeat. Gallagher had a poor game but so too did everyone else. Crerand, on whom so much depended, would never play for Celtic again.

The broken green and white brigade made their way home through the ice and the frost for their consolation New Year drinks, but they could not figure out what was going on. It was well that the game against Clyde on 2 January was indeed called off, and the only thing that saved the next game on 5 January was the fact that it was at distant Pittodrie where the proximity to the east coast made the temperature a degree or two milder.

Those who made the journey north were not many in number, nor were they in good heart as they set out but they returned home delighted with a fine performance from their favourites. Crerand was dropped as he had to be after his half-time behaviour, and the forward line was totally rejigged with Gallagher back in his 1961 position of the right wing. At full back in came Ian Young and Tommy Gemmell. Tommy was so unfamiliar to the writer of The Evening Times that he was called “Peter”. He was making his debut although Ian Young had played a game or two before then. The two of them with the enthusiasm and the fearlessness of youth, tackled like tanks that day.

Celtic turned it on and beat Aberdeen 5-1, John Hughes scoring a hat trick and Bobby Craig getting two. It was an astonishing reversal of form from New Year’s Day and the small band of diehards made the most of it with an accordion helping supporters with their songs. Charlie played well that day, having a part in most of the goals, and it would have been nice to see how the team would have performed in the next few games with this formation. Sadly, however, it was only a temporary respite in the bad weather and the only other game to be played in January was the victory in the Scottish Cup at Brockville.

On other occasions this might have been a real banana skin for an unwary Celtic, but on this Monday night of January 28 before a small crowd on a heavily sanded pitch, Celtic won comfortably over a poor Falkirk side. The
game was threatened with ice, snow and then fog, but at 5.00 pm the referee Mr Barclay of Kirkcaldy declared the pitch playable. Once again there was no Pat Crerand but his replacement John McNamee played splendidly and
Celtic ran out 2-0 winners, the second goal coming late in the game from a Gallagher shot after a fine move involving several Celtic players.

This victory put Celtic into the next round with a game against Hearts at Parkhead. It was a potential thriller but the big freeze meant that it could not be played until March. By this time, things had changed totally with the transfer of Pat Crerand to Manchester United, a move which caused tremendous distress to all concerned, not least one feels to Pat himself. It happened on 6 February. There had been some speculation for some time, particularly when Crerand was not in the team for the Falkirk Scottish Cup tie. Sources disagree about who approached who first, but on Wednesday 6 February Pat flew to Manchester, met Matt Busby at 10.00 am and was a Manchester United player by 10.30 am.

This meant that Pat’s last game had been the tragic New Year Day game at Ibrox. Gallagher was sad about all this, because even if Celtic had won two games since then without Crerand, only a fool would argue that the team did not suffer because of the transfer of a player of Crerand’s undoubted ability. As well as being cousins through marriage, Pat and Charlie, both Gorbals boys, were good friends, and it hurt Charlie that Pat would no longer be around.

The support was totally devastated. Pat Crerand had been the hero. Pictures of him, usually one from The Evening Citizen in black and white, but with green stripes painted on amateurishly so that the newspaper could claim that this was a “colour” photograph, adorned the walls of all supporters. These were now torn down with ferocity and anger by tearful fans to the bafflement and disquiet of their mothers. His name was now not to be mentioned – and yet it was, with the picture in The Scottish Daily Express of Pat leaving Celtic Park, head bowed with a holdall in his hand, trying to tell everyone how sad he was to leave. It was presumably staged for the benefit of the camera, but it remains an iconic image of this particularly desolating time of Celtic’s history.

And yet, a more detached look at things might have presented a more favourable picture of Pat. He was no “Judas” in the sense that Maurice Johnston would be. He was more like Kenny Dalglish or Charlie Nicholas who, quite simply, wanted to sample life in England. The difference however was that both Dalglish and Nicholas had experienced success with Celtic, in Dalglish’s case a considerable amount of success, whereas Crerand had won nothing. He was fed up of being the star man in a good team.

He also saw that Celtic were heading absolutely nowhere under Bob Kelly. There was a death wish about the club with no great or obvious ability or even (at Director level) desire to overtake Rangers Had Crerand stayed around until Jock Stein came back in 1965, it would of course have been a totally different story, but as it was, Pat went on to win trophies for Manchester United, playing for Matt Busby. Both Busby and Crerand on a Saturday after a game would ask each other “How did Celtic do today?” as all Celtic supporters did!

None of this excuses in any way Crerand’s behaviour on New Year’s Day. Clearly some disciplinary measures needed to be taken against him, but as far as Celtic were concerned, accepting 55,000 for their star player (and not replacing him with the money) betokened a miserable lack of ambition at the club. The bitter harvest of this move would be reaped on the lonely, empty, desolate East Terracing of Hampden on the night of May 15. All that was missing that night was the tumbleweed of the ghost towns that we saw on the American cowboy movies!

Celtic were able to play a few games in February in Ireland where the weather was not so bad, but they only started playing serious football again when the thaw came with devastating speed causing landslides and flooding throughout Scotland in early March. Gallagher was not listed either at outside right nor inside left when football restarted with a game against Airdrie on 2 March. Presumably this was because of a belief that the ground would be too heavy for Charlie’s delicate touch, but his next game was against, of all teams, Gala Fairydean in the Scottish Cup at Parkhead on Wednesday 13 March after Celtic had beaten Hearts in the same competition the previous Wednesday.

‘Charlie Gallagher? What a Player!’ It was a bad time to be a Celtic supporter – but Gallagher decided to plod on

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