Even in the war years and certainly in the years immediately afterwards, football boomed in Glasgow. Junior football was not really affected too much by the war and continued unabated, and even senior football, although unofficial and without tournaments like the Scottish Cup, provided much needed solace for the population who needed something to take their minds off the horrors of war.
There were of course many young men around Glasgow at the time – soldiers on leave, men in the munitions industry and loads of English servicemen based temporarily on the Clyde – so that the availability of players and spectators was not a problem. The only real problem was transport. Celtic could not, for example, play against Aberdeen or Dundee very easily, but there was no problem with teams in the Glasgow area. It is a major mistake to assume that war-time football was not taken seriously. It most certainly continued to be the major pre-occupation of the Scottish working class , although it had to compete for attention in the newspapers, and was subject to so many limitations and problems including, for example, the basic ones of finding equipment, in particular the ball!
The impression is often given by historians that people didn’t really care about football during the Second World War. They most certainly did! There were of course a few people who objected to football being played at this dire time of history when civilisation itself was in the balance, but they were countered very easily by the beneficial effect that the game had on morale. In any case after 1942 it became more and more obvious that that the war was going in the right direction and that the nation was going to survive. War time International games between Scotland and England, in particular, were looked forward to with great anticipation both at home and overseas.
The problem for the Irish community in Glasgow was that their team was going through a prolonged slump with the suspicion that the Directors of the club were not really interested in war-time football. Yet in 1938, Celtic had quite clearly been the best team in Great Britain when they won the Empire Exhibition Trophy at Ibrox beating Everton 1-0 in the final with Johnny Crum’s Highland Fling of celebration after he scored the only goal of the game, much talked about and indeed imitated by the support.
But Celtic had a poor season after that in spite of having some great players like Jimmy Delaney and Malky MacDonald, and in early 1940 after a particularly poor run in the wartime regional League, Willie Maley “the man who made Celtic” resigned, retired or was sacked, depending on one’s take of the situation. Maley, now in his 70s had in a real sense created and maintained Celtic, and his loss was not easily repaired.
Jimmy McStay was Manager but was never given a chance by the Directors who did not work as hard as their Rangers equivalents did to keep their men out of the forces, nor as hard as Maley himself had done in the Great War for the same purpose. Nor did they take advantage of the “loaning” or “guesting” of players which was very prevalent at the time. Matt Busby, for example, the Celtic-daft star of Manchester City was frequently in Scotland and awaited the call. It never happened. As a result Celtic won only two Glasgow trophies in World War II, and one particular game at Ibrox on New Year’s Day 1943 saw Celtic go down 8-1. It was perhaps just as well that wartime football was considered unofficial!
The drought continued for a long time after the war, even though Jimmy McGrory took over in 1945. Relegation came perilously close in 1948 and it would be 1951 before a national trophy was won. Thus Gallagher’s formative years were spent with Celtic in the doldrums. The problem was that Celtic never really EXPECTED to win very much. They seemed to be content to play second fiddle to Rangers, and there was even a time in the early 1950s when Hibs seemed to be taking over as the main rivals with many Celtic supporters not afraid to sing the praises of the “famous five” forward line of Smith, Johnstone, Reilly, Turnbull and Ormond, comparing them favourably with what was happening (or not happening) at Celtic Park.
At least if Hibs won the Scottish League, Rangers didn’t! This may well have had an effect on talented youngsters like Charlie Gallagher who would naturally have expected to gravitate to Celtic Park. “Many are called but few are chosen” was as applicable to Celtic Park in the 1950s as it was to the New Testament, but eager youngsters would go to the ground in awe of men like Jimmy McGrory, but with no great expectation of the team becoming consistently successful.
There had been triumphs “isolated but spectacular”- not least the Coronation Cup of 1953 – and there had been no lack of superbly talented players like Bobby Evans, Willie Fernie, Bobby Collins, Charlie Tully and Bertie Peacock, but the sad fact remained that until 1966, Celtic had won the Scottish League only once since 1938 – and that was in 1954. They had a superb captain that year in centre half Jock Stein.
Mediocre Rangers teams were allowed to rule the roost with such challenges as there were coming from the east, for both Hibs and Hearts did Edinburgh proud in the 1950s, but when Gallagher arrived at Celtic Park, consistent success from Celtic (of the type that had been seen by Celtic fans in the distant days of before the Great War) seemed a long way off, and there did not seem to be any great hope that it would arrive any time soon.
Leadership was lacking. But talented players were arriving, one of them a relative (in a sense) of Charlie. Clydebank was badly bombed in March 1941, and in that blitz, Pat Crerand’s father was killed. Pat’s mother subsequently married Charlie’s uncle, and thus Charlie and Pat became cousins through marriage. Pat of course grew up to be a brilliant right half, arguably one of the best that Celtic have ever had, but grew frustrated by the lack of progress made by the club in the early 1960s, had an argument with those in authority and departed to Manchester United in the middle of the big freeze-up of February 1963.
All this was in the future though for Charlie as he went to school at St John’s Primary in 1945 and then on to Holyrood Secondary. This has nothing to do with the Palace or indeed the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, but was a well-established Catholic school not all that far from Hampden Park on the south side of Glasgow. It had been founded in 1936, and was, when Charlie went there, considered to be one of the better schools in the city.
