They used to say Dundee United fans were Celtic fans who couldn’t afford the train fare to Glasgow

I enjoyed the article about Celtic in 1961 from Matt Corr that was published on The Celtic Star earlier today (you can read that below).

Read it here…Celtic on the Road to Hampden but it’s Jock Stein’s Dunfermline who lift the Scottish Cup

The picture of the team coming out of the bus at Tannadice already “hooped up” is a fascinating one. They had changed 100 yards up the road at Dens Park!  Here is that photograph.

Tannadice was in the throes of development. Its old stand was literally falling apart with dry rot, and there was an ominous creak when you sat down. It could never have coped with a big Celtic crowd, and even struggled to handle Forfar and East Stirlingshire!

But it was a fascinating time in Tayside football history. I always felt that the rise of Dundee United owed a lot to two things – one was a superbly well run lottery called Taypools, and the other was that Celtic were so poor.

They used to say that Dundee United fans were Celtic fans who couldn’t afford the train fare to Glasgow!

But now they had a respectable team, and it is no coincidence either that Dundee FC won the League and did well in Europe at this time.

This was the first time that Celtic had played at Tannadice since 1949 when United put us out of the Scottish Cup.

Two pictures of Tannadice, neither involving Celtic. One is a precarious view of the new stand being built. You had to climb up a ladder to get in at one point! And the other is a picture of the old ramshackle structure, possibly on its last day before its deserved demolition.

David Potter

Matt Corr’s response to the Celtic Historian…

These are superb images, David. They would go down a storm on the site. I have never seen a photo of the old stand before. My dad had described it much as you have. Wonderful stuff. Cheers for that.

Matt Corr

* David Potter and Matt Corr worked alongside Liam Kelly on the quite wonderful Walfrid & The Bould Bhoys. We carried extracts from the new book over the past week, they are well worth checking out.