Celtic great, Charlie Gallagher, passes away

Everyone at Celtic Football Club is extremely sad to hear of the death of Charlie Gallagher, who has passed away at the age of 80, and the thoughts and prayers of the whole Celtic Family are with Charlie’s wife, Mary, his children and grandchildren, and all his family and friends.

Charlie’s contribution to his beloved Celtic over 12 years was immense, and having joined the club in 1958, he would become an integral part of the squad which achieved great things both in Scotland and in Europe under the stewardship of Jock Stein.

He made his debut on August 22, 1958 in a League Cup tie against Raith Rovers, a match that Celtic won 1-0, and it would be the first of 171 appearances he would make for the Hoops, scoring 32 goals in the process before he left in 1970.

Celtic FC Statement

David Potter wrote Charlie Gallagher’s biography Charlie Gallagher? What a Player! which I was privileged to publish. The book was a great seller and if you have a copy treasure it. I got to know Charlie and his lovely wife Mary and both were great company, humble and delighted with the success of the book, which afforded them a wee opportunity to take a well deserved holiday to Italy. I visited Charlie shortly after the news of his illness was diagnosed and while he knew that time was going to be short he was still full of chat about what was going on at Celtic, eager to know if there was any news!

The night Leicester City won the Premier League he was at my home doing a Q&A on a Celtic site and enjoyed the   banter with the supporters immensely. Charlie joined Tommy Gemmell and John Hughes as guests of honour at our Celtic Supporters club – the Tommy Gemmell CSC Dunblane – anniversary dinner shortly before Brendan Rodgers was named as the Celtic manager and just after that semi-final defeat in the Scottish Cup. Charlie that night said that he was a fan of the forward pass, something that he reckoned was missing from the side that season as Ronny’s side lost its way somewhat amid dressing room disharmony.

He’d often be seen outside Celtic Park with his pal John Fallon holding court before the game. One day a wee boy asked if he was famous, Charlie replied “I used to be, son'”  A Celtic legend is how he’ll be remembered and when asked about Charlie Gallagher those who saw him will say: “Charlie Gallagher? What a Player!”

Here is David Potter’s account of Charlie’s early years, with more to follow over the next few days..

Charlie Gallagher? What a Player! – The Beginning

Charles Gallagher was born on 3 November 1940 in the Gorbals in Glasgow, the middle of three children born to Dan and Annie (nee Duffy) Gallagher both of whom had been born in Donegal. The family hailed from near Megaraclogher and Gweedore area of Donegal near Mount Errigal, and Charlie was frequently taken there for his summer holidays. His brother was called Dannie and his sister Eileen. There would be no lack of Gallaghers in that part of Donegal. Everyone seemed to bear that name!

The spelling is Gallagher, not Gallacher which is considered the Scottish spelling. Gallacher was the name of the great Wembley Wizard and ultimately very tragic figure Hughie Gallacher of Airdrie and Newcastle United. Patsy Gallacher of Celtic, on the other hand, really should have his name spelt Gallagher. He was born Gallagher in Donegal in 1891, but when the family moved to Clydebank a few years later, the name was changed, almost by accident, to Gallacher. The story goes that when they arrived and a nameplate had to be put on the door, it was Gallacher. Either Patsy’s parents (they were illiterate) did not notice the mistake made by the Scottish workmen, or they chose deliberately to become Scottish by calling themselves Gallacher.Charlie however is undeniably Gallagher.

The Second World War had been going on for 14 months when Charlie was born. Great Britain had just been saved, temporarily at least, from invasion by the RAF in the skies over Kent in what history has named the Battle of Britain, but the blitz was in full swing in London with the Londoners subjected to nightly bombing raids in an attempt to force the country into submission. It was widely believed that it would only be a matter of time before similar treatment was meted out to Glasgow, although Glasgow was just a little out of range for any sustained assault. This did not, however, save Clydebank in 1941.Charlie’s father Dan was a general labourer, what is called with a touch of condescension perhaps a “navvy”. He worked all over Scotland working on roads in the Highlands, for example, and in the chaotic circumstances of World War II it was never easy to predict where he would be or what he would be doing at any given time.

Charlie’s mother Annie was, like many women of the time, a housewife, feeling that when her children were young, she had enough on her plate to keep them well clad and well fed. She did on occasion do cleaning jobs on a part-time basis, and for a spell was a cleaner in West Nile Street in the offices of Fred Donovan, Secretary of the Scottish Football League. The young Charlie would sometimes go with her and read his books!

The Gorbals is in central Glasgow to the south of the River Clyde. In recent decades, there has been much redevelopment of the area, although some would argue that still more redevelopment is required. It would be fair to say that when Charlie was born there and for a long time after, the Gorbals had a bad reputation, being looked upon in polite genteel society as almost a byword for crime. The 1930s until the early 1950s was the heyday (if that is an appropriate term) for the razor gangs which thrived in the Gorbals and indeed in other parts of Glasgow as well, until the stern policing of Percy Sillitoe, aided by the draconian Scottish justice system, managed to get on top of that particular crime, if not wipe it out altogether.It was in the 1950s and 1960s no uncommon experience to find oneself beside a man at Parkhead or Hampden with a huge scar running down his face.

Some of these were war wounds honourably sustained at Anzio or El Alamein, or even at the Somme or Loos if the man were a little older, but most were the victims of the razor gang culture so prevalent in the Gorbals and other areas of Glasgow.The Gorbals teemed with humanity. It was described as one gigantic slum, and that description is often acknowledged as being none too wide of the mark. Large families would live in one or two rooms of a flat or sometimes even a “single end” which was only one room!

There were no indoor toilets, just outside ones shared by many families, and not even running water in most flats. In these scarcely believable living conditions, the wonder was that people actually put up with it without any great political movements demanding extreme measures like revolutions as for example happened in Russia in 1917. It is no surprise that every social evil that can be imagined could be found in the Gorbals.

Filth, illness, childhood mortality, drunkenness and crime all thrived. In vain did the Churches and other moral guardians thunder against “the demon drink”. Alcohol, readily available, for there were very few streets which did not have at least one public house, was there for those who wished to forget the pointlessness of their existence or the sheer squalor which surrounded them.The phrase “The Boy from the Gorbals” was frequently used of Benny Lynch, the boxer who was born in the Gorbals in 1913 and became World Flyweight Champion in 1936 before lapsing into alcoholism and drinking himself to death in 1946.

He had been a strong Celtic supporter and had always been welcomed at Parkhead by Willie Maley, the Celtic Manager. But there was also a play called “The Boy From The Gorbals” screened by STV in August 1959 about a well-meaning but naïve middle class family who took a boy from the Gorbals with them on holiday. The boy stole from them, got drunk, seduced the daughter and fought with the son and the play was about how the family coped with this intruder into their cosy, sheltered lives. It stigmatised the Gorbals even more than previously, and did the image of the place no good. And yet, that is not the whole story either.

The stereotypes in drama and literature, particularly the classic novel No Mean City by H Kingsley Long and Alexander McArthur, did exist but were not universally true. Many respectable families grew up in the Gorbals and survived. It was a major benefit if the man of the household did not drink. For one thing, there was more money and for another, there was a great deal less of the violent behaviour towards the women and children. Many organisations made a determined effort to help – this was, after all, one of the raisons d’etre of Celtic football club in its early days – and religion too flourished, giving the lie to the commonly held belief that Churches, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, were the province of the well-to-do or the middle class.

The other good thing about the Gorbals at the time of Charlie’s birth and early childhood was that it was definitely multi-racial and multi-ethnic with people of Irish, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Italian and Jewish extraction all living there in reasonable social harmony. The Clyde with all its jobs had meant that Glasgow, even as early as the 18th century had been a cosmopolitan city. It was to Scotland’s credit that there has never been documented any large scale or organised persecution of its Jewish minority – and that could not be said of very many European countries – but of course the two historical events that caused the massive population invasions of Glasgow were the Highland Clearances of the 1820s and the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.

The Potato Famine in Ireland was a catastrophe of unimaginable magnitude and severity. And yet, although the actual disease of the potatoes could not have been foreseen or forestalled, its consequences could have been greatly lessened if prompt and effective action had been taken by the two bodies to whom the Irish would have reasonably looked to for succour, coincidentally the two richest organisations on earth at the time, the British Empire and the Roman Catholic Church.

Little if anything was forthcoming from the Vatican, and the Great Britain (of which Ireland was a part since the Act of Union in 1801) saw only a belated and half-hearted effort by Prime Minister Robert Peel (a man with some sort of conscience) who repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 but was thrown out of office by his own party for so doing!

As large areas of west Ireland, particularly Donegal, starved, the Irish had little recourse other than emigration. Some tried the long and dangerous crossing of the Atlantic, a few even went further to Australia, (some, like the fictitious Michael in The Fields of Athenry were forced to go there!) but many came to Liverpool, London and Glasgow. There was usually a job for them in Scotland – ill-paid, filthy, difficult jobs in Scotland’s burgeoning Industrial Revolution for which they had been ill-prepared by their agricultural background in Ireland – but it was at least a job, and provided some kind or relief from starvation. Many of them found a home of sorts in the Gorbals.

Their religion, that of the Roman Catholic Church, set them apart of course to a certain extent but there were some benefits of living in Scotland and Glasgow. Scotland had always been strong on education and children usually went to some kind of school even before 1872 when the Education Act made it compulsory, and thus illiteracy was gradually addressed.

And of course from 1888, they had their own football time to provide a rallying point for the community and to give them something to cheer about. Frequently they needed it, for as late as 1900 we find an outbreak of medieval plague in the Gorbals! In the same year, large numbers of young men would try to enlist for service in the Boer War, but were rejected simply because they were not fit enough or well enough fed! Such was the malnutrition and lack of proper nourishment in many areas of Glasgow.

Charlie grew up in Salisbury Street with loads of people of Irish descent around him. The Second World War was obviously a difficult time for anyone, with an added dimension for the Irish, who had only recently, 20 years ago and as a by-product of another war, gained some sort of independence in the Irish Free State which defied Great Britain in 1939 and announced its neutrality.

It is to the credit of De Valera that he managed to do that without provoking a violent reaction from either the Allies or the Axis powers. In particular, he might have been tempted to follow the old adage of “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” and to make an ill-advised attempt to seize the Six Counties while Britain was otherwise engaged, but he resisted that as well. Indeed, on two occasions, De Valera was, if we may believe some historians and biographers, offered the Six Counties by Churchill in return for full participation in the Second World War.

The second such offer was accompanied by the emotive phrase “a nation once again” and was made in the wake of the entry of the USA into the war in December 1941, something that would have struck a personal chord with De Valera, for he himself had been born in the USA. (Indeed some think that he owed his reprieve from execution in 1916 to this very fact.) But De Valera would not take the bait, and continued to stay neutral during what was known in Ireland as “the emergency”.

For the Irish community in Glasgow and indeed throughout the Irish diaspora, it was of course very tempting to “enjoy” the discomfiture of Great Britain, so often the tyrants and bullies in Ireland. On the other hand, there could be little doubt that in comparison with the odious Adolf Hitler and his grizzly henchmen, Winston Churchill and the British Empire were undeniably the lesser of the two evils. Support for the British war effort may have been grudging in the Glasgow Irish community, but it was real. I

n Dublin, de Valera himself had come to the same conclusion that he wanted the Allies to win, but he did not announce it publicly until the war was virtually over. Even then he tried to sign a Book of Condolences at the death of Adolf Hitler! Indeed, historians are often surprised at the lack of any opposition to the Second World War in Glasgow – something that was in stark contrast to the Great War where there had been a Rent Strike, many labour problems on the Clyde (“Red Clydeside” as it was called) involving men like John McLean, Jimmy Maxton and Manny Shinwell, l and of course a major disturbance in George Square in January 1919. The Second World War contained very little of this, possibly for two main reasons – one was that the Labour Party happily in 1940 joined Churchill’s coalition government, and the other was that everyone realised that the Nazis were irreconcilably evil and simply had to be removed from the face of the earth, no matter what the cost would be.

Glaswegians, of course, are famously cheerful and supportive people. They helped each other get through it all. And in addition, the horrors of war with its rationing, the nightly fear of aerial bombing (although Glasgow itself escaped virtually unscathed) and the depressing news of casualties were alleviated to a certain extent by the three traditional Glasgow forms of entertainment – dancing, cinema and football.

Charlie recalls that even from an early age he played football in the streets and the backyards of the Gorbals. Every boy loved football. It had the great advantage of not being too difficult to organise as long as one had a ball. Goalposts, pitch markings, referees were all superfluous luxuries which one might graduate to at a later stage, and even injuries were things to be despised. Anyone who didn’t want to play because of a “sore leg” or some weak excuse like that would be rightly mocked and scoffed at. Scottish football never has been a place for softies and certainly was not in Glasgow in the 1940s.

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.

One of his teachers there was Bob Crampsey who would become a TV presenter, pundit and general football expert in later years. Another teacher was called John Murphy, and he was the loudspeaker announcer at Celtic Park. Both these men would have a great effect on Charlie. Crampsey in particular knew what he was talking about.

Keen on cricket, music and many other things like the American Civil War, he won the Brain of Britain radio quiz in 1965 and became Headmaster of St Ambrose High School, but was best known for being one of the three anchors of STV’s Scotsport when it started in 1957. Alec Cameron and Arthur Montford were the other two.

Crampsey was a true polymath and became an excellent writer and commentator on the Scottish game. While he was at Holyrood, football flourished and was much talked about. Charlie Gallagher, a bright boy who did well enough academically as well, took to playing football in the same way as a duck takes to water. Schools Football in the 1950s was big. It is a shame that the teachers’ pay dispute of 1984-86 severely curtailed teachers’ involvement with their pupils on a Saturday morning.

Schools Football has taken a huge dip, and this is a great shame for so many young players used to learn their craft at school under the guidance of enthusiastic and dedicated teachers who were doing it all for the love of the game. In Charlie’s day, more or less every blade of grass in Glasgow (sometimes not even grass, more often sand!) would be covered by a school football match on a Saturday morning.

The games would be played at all levels from 1st year to 6th year, and for every youngster it was a great honour to be playing for the school team. The “home” school would supply the referee, and every game would attract a fair amount of parents, some of them fiercely committed to the cause of their son’s school. Occasionally, hysterical things happened.

A father of a goalkeeper was standing behind his son’s goal. The son was beaten and the ball was trickling slowly, held back by the mud, but inevitably to the goal line. There was no goal net, however, and suddenly the father ran out and kicked the ball clear! At another game, a mother (an even more hysterical breed of people than fathers) saw fit to criticise the referee and was not shy of using foul language. At one point, when the referee awarded a throw-in in what she saw was the wrong way, she exploded and said “Screw me!”. The referee, who was only a couple of yards away replied “No thanks, ma’am, I’m rather particular” and charged up the field.

A teacher of a defeated team in a Scottish School Cup game objected on the grounds that one set of goalposts was smaller by 3 inches than the other. The Headmaster went out one wet Thursday afternoon with a tape measure and discovered that both sets were exactly the same!

On another occasion, a real thug of a boy was being excluded by the Headmaster for a rather nasty piece of violence and vandalism in the toilets. The teacher in charge of football, realising that the suspension would rule the boy out of a vital Cup tie, intervened on his behalf, using the immortal phrase that on the field he was “a gentle giant”.

More seriously, Schools Football was an avenue for a talented boy to earn himself a chance to play a Schools representative game at the ground of a top team. There were even Schoolboy Internationals against the other three British nations, and these games were great showpieces for the youngsters to show off their talents and attract the attention of top teams. Even the run of the mill Saturday morning games were covered by the Press now and again – annoyingly not comprehensively for you could not guarantee that any given game would get a mention, nor necessarily always very accurately – by reporters calling themselves scholastic names like “Prefect” or “Inspector” who used educational imagery like “six of the best” or “teaching lessons in the football classroom of the field” and so on.

In Glasgow and the surrounding district, there was the added element of religion. Everyone knew which school was a “Catholic” school, and what was not. There is the true story of a Rangers scout who turned up to watch a Lanarkshire School Cup final in the hope of spotting some talent. On discovering that the final would be contested by two Roman Catholic schools, he went way home, knowing that his club would not be interested in signing any of the 22 players, no matter how good they were!

Charlie would often find himself playing two games on a Saturday – for the school in the morning and the Boys Guild in the afternoon. This left very little time for him to go and watch the team that he loved and whom everyone in the Gorbals talked about. In any case Celtic Park was a little too far from his house, but he does recall occasionally going to see Clyde or Third Lanark whose grounds were nearer. Clyde played at Shawfield, the dog track, before they moved to Broadwood in Cumbernauld, and Third Lanark went bankrupt and folded in 1967.

Their ground was called Cathkin Park and was situated not far from Hampden. Indeed until 1903, Cathkin had been Hampden until the new Hampden was built. Charlie does remember however the great occasion in his childhood on May 20 1953 when Celtic won the Coronation Cup and when there was dancing in the streets of the Gorbals on a fine spring evening.

They had beaten Hibs in the final, the heroes being goalkeeper John Bonnar and centre half Jock Stein. This had been an all-British tournament to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and it remains a source of great irony that the two finalists were not the establishment teams of Rangers and Arsenal, but the two Scottish teams of Irish origins, Celtic and Hibs! Celtic scored first, then survived a momentous barrage as Hibs “Famous Five” of Smith, Johnstone, Reilly, Turnbull and Ormond threw everything at them but simply could not get one past “that bugger Bonnar” as he was lyrically described by Willie Ormond.

Charlie was only 12 at the time. The Celtic open-topped team bus was driven through the streets to show off the Cup to their adoring fans (it was only their second major trophy since World War II, along with the Scottish Cup of 1951) and Charlie recalls everyone rushing to see the bus passing the pub now called The Brazen Head, (it was then called incongruously The Granite City!) which was near where he lived. Little did he think that less than 12 years later he himself would be on a bus showing off a trophy to a similar bunch of delighted fans!

He also recalls being a ball boy at Celtic Park on 16 April 1956 in a game played between Celtic and Manchester United in a benefit games for Cheshire Homes. The game finished 2-2 in pouring rain. Manchester United, for whom Duncan Edwards was outstanding, had just won the English League and were given a great reception from the Parkhead crowd that Monday evening. Matt Busby was of course the Manager of Manchester United and an unashamed lover of Celtic as well. Celtic, for their part played well, but it was possibly a blessing that the Parkhead crowd, eagerly looking forward to the Scottish Cup final against Hearts on Saturday, did not know what horrors lay in store for them in that particular game.

The fact that he was given the job as ball boy made Charlie think that Celtic had their eye on him and it was at Holyrood Secondary School that people first noticed that there was something special about this lad who played at inside left. He had a certain control of the ball which was by no means usual at that age, and certainly passed with astonishing accuracy and knew exactly the amount of “weight” to put on a pass.

On one occasion he inspired Holyrood to beat Greenock High School 12-1, and he played a series of good games against teams like St Gerards and Govan High School. Such performances drew the attention of selectors and on Wednesday 4 January 1956, we find him playing for Glasgow Schools against Edinburgh Schools at Tynecastle before a huge crowd of 4,000, and it was largely due to the talented Gallagher that Glasgow beat Edinburgh 6-2.

The Daily Record goes into overdrive about his performance talking about a “young man with a famous football name” (a reference to Patsy of Celtic and Hughie of Airdrie and Newcastle United) who “walked jauntily out of Tynecastle with a big beam on his face…Charlie Gallagher a dark-haired handsome youngster with golden feet.

In the school-boys inter-city match, Charlie showed like a twinkle-toed beacon” Praise indeed! The Daily Record, one has to admit has been known to practice more than a little rhetorical exaggeration from time to time and to “lay things on thick”, but other papers agreed with their assessment, albeit a little less lavishly.  He scored one goal and played a part in all of the other five, and heads were turned. But he was still only 15.

On another occasion when he was still eligible for the Under 15 team, he was moved up to play for Holyrood’s Under 18 team against Govan High School. Against him was another chap in a similar situation, also playing for the bigger boys. This fellow was called Alex Ferguson! Sir Alex recalled this game at a Dinner once when he was the guest speaker and Charlie was in the audience. His recollection was correct but perhaps for understandable reasons, he failed to add that the game was won 4-1 by Holyrood, the game was played at Dixon Park and that Charlie Gallagher scored all four goals for Holyrood.

Details are sparse, but the first goal was from a penalty kick and the second is singled out as being a “magnificent second goal” and Gallagher is the “personality of the match”.T

he teams were:Holyrood: Duffy, Connolly and McCoy: Connelly, Hoey and Burke: O’Donnell, Cuddihy, Murphy, Gallagher and MallanGovan High: Barron, McLean and Wood: Jardine, Crichton and Reid: Bowie, Cullen, Murray, Ferguson and Burt.

David Potter

An extract from David Potter’s fine book Charlie Gallagher? What a Player! More to follow on The Celtic Star as we remember Charlie, a friend  and of course a Celtic legend, on this saddest of days. Requiescat in pace, Charlie.