The Long Read: Men of the Clyde
The 1960s were a strange decade for Scottish football, with unprecedented club success but also disaster for a couple of its clubs. Here are the stories of ES Clydebank and Third Lanark.
This week we're going back to the 1960s and to Scotland, where a most unusual decade of football was taking place, with spectacular highs and a couple of terrible lows. We're going to look at perhaps two of the lowest points of all for Scottish football during that decade.
The 1960s were an unusual decade for Scottish football in several different ways. They began with Hearts winning their last league title to date in 1960, whilst Dundee and Kilmarnock would also go on to win their first, and for the foreseeable future only, Scottish League championships in 1962 and 1965.
Despite having a strong on paper looking squad, the national team failed to qualify for the World Cup finals in 1962, 1966 and 1970. In 1962 they were knocked out on goal difference by Czechoslovakia. In 1966 they were brushed aside by Italy in their final group match in Naples, although the real damage had been done a couple of months earlier with a home defeat against Poland. In 1970, Scotland were unfortunate to be drawn in the same qualifying group as West Germany, with only one qualification place available.
They did, to their credit, draw with West Germany in their home match against them at Hampden Park in 1969, but ended up four points adrift of the previous tournament's runners-up nevertheless. And the decade ended under the iron grip of Celtic, who by the start of 1970 were halfway towards their record nine consecutive Scottish League championships. Celtic also became the first British club to win the European Cup in 1967, when they beat Internazionale 2-1 in Lisbon. A mixed bag then, and part of that mixture were two stories, one of merger, one of dissolution, both of them controversial and both of them preventable.
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East Stirlingshire FC’s official date of formation is 1881, but the club's origins can be traced back to the previous year, when a local cricket club called Bainesford Bluebonnets formed a football team under the name of Britannia. Based in Falkirk and having changed its name to the altogether more sensible East Stirlingshire, the club was elected into the Scottish League in 1900. The feeling, however, long seems to have been held that Shire might not be a big enough club to survive on their own.
In March 1905, a proposal was made that they should merge with neighbours Falkirk, with the aim of creating a bigger and more financially stable club for the town. Falkirk accepted the merger after a vote. East Stirlingshire's, however, was not in favour, and the club rejected the proposal.
East Stirlingshire became a stalwart of the Scottish Second Division, spending one season in the top flight before the start of the Second World War in 1932-33 after winning the Second Division title the previous season. However, the club was denied re-entry to the Scottish Football League Division 2 at the end of the war, along with six other small league clubs. As a result, the clubs competed in the newly created Division C, along with the reserve teams of some of Scotland's bigger clubs.
In their second season in Division C, East Stirlingshire won the league title and were promoted back to Division 2, which by now had been renamed Division B, but finished last after one season in 1948-49 and were relegated back to the C Division again.
These divisions, however, were abolished in 1956 and East Stirlingshire were placed back into the second division. The following year, two brothers, Jack and Charles Steedman, acquired a 51% shareholding in the club. The Steedmans were car dealers, and their plans for East Stirlingshire bore certain resemblances to their other business interests.
They intended to make East Stirlingshire, who were already on its uppers and near the bottom of the Second Division with crowds of barely more than a couple of hundred, profitable again by lifting and shifting players from the junior leagues and selling them on. Amongst the players that they turned a profit on was Eddie McCready, who they sold to Chelsea in 1962, and who would go on to make more than 300 appearances for the London club, as well as 23 appearances for Scotland.
Under this new ownership, the club's fortunes initially started to improve, and in 1963 they were promoted to the top flight of Scottish football for the second time in their history, after finishing as runners-up to St Johnstone. Life in the First Division, however, was always going to be difficult for a club of this size.
And a few weeks into the 1963-64 season, the Steedmans made a decision that would go on to have long-lasting consequences for the club. They turned it full-time. It didn't work. East Stirlingshire only won one more match throughout the remainder of the season and were relegated back in bottom place in the table.
The full-time experiment also had unintended consequences. The club's players found that suddenly transitioning to a full-time training schedule required considerable adjustment on their part, while they weren't even necessarily getting paid any more than they were before. At the end of the season, the entire squad was put up for sale by the Stevens.
By this point, however, decisions had already been made that would irrevocably change the future of the club. Attendances had vastly improved at Firs Park since the Stephens took it over, but their own projections had estimated that they needed crowds of around 5,000 to break even in the First Division. They'd only been able to muster crowds of around 3,000. The decision to move East Stirlingshire away from Falkirk was taken during the 1963-64 season. The Stephens looked at several different towns, but Clydebank immediately stood out.
Their business plan had already given them strong links with several junior clubs, and Clydebank were not only a reasonably sized club with a reasonably sized ground, called Kilbowie Park, but they were also located conveniently close to the Stephens' other business interests.
In April 1964, following votes at each club on two consecutive days, the merger of Clydebank Juniors and East Stirlingshire was confirmed. The new club would be called East Stirlingshire Clydebank, the name subsequently contracted to ES Clydebank as a nod to the exotic team names of European club football, and it would be based at Kilbowie Park in Clydebank.
The decision was met with approval in their new hometown. After all, there was no automatic route into Scottish Football League at the time and the arrival of the Steedmans had propelled their club into it without anyone having to do a single thing. The reaction in Falkirk, however, was unsurprisingly apoplectic. A public meeting was held, to which the Steedmans didn't attend, at which it was confirmed that the supporters club would take on the fight to keep the club in Falkirk.
However, the tone of language used at the meeting with regard to the brothers put their noses out of joint, and an Extraordinary General Meeting which had been due to be held a few days later was cancelled by the owners, who did at least offer seven days for anyone who wished to make an offer to buy the club to do so.
A hastily formed consortium did exactly that. It was rejected. The first supporters' meeting had raised questions about whether the club's constitution even allowed the Stevens to act in the way in which they had done, and this may have even been an influencing factor in the speed with which the merger was completed.
The first supporters' meeting was held on 21 April 1964. Within less than a month, and with the Scottish League having confirmed that there was nothing in their rules preventing it, the merger was complete and the club started dismantling parts of Firs Park to start moving them to Clydebank. Desperate supporters groups sent letters pleading for help to every Scottish Football League club but barely received any replies.
Anyone turning up at Kilbowie Park for the start of the 1964-65 season would likely have been broadly unaware of the trouble behind the scenes. Crowds were healthy, and the team, almost made up entirely of the East Stirlingshire team from the season before, which the Stevens had not been able to sell, were winning matches.
The most significant battles that ES Clydebank faced throughout the 1964-65 season, however, came in the courts rather than on the pitch, with the East Stirlingshire Supporters Club asserting that share transfers carried out by the Steedmans just prior to the rushing through of the merger had been against the club's constitution.
One shareholder, James Middlemass, had contended that he had been detrimented by the nature of the share transfers, and in court, the Stevens admitted they had transferred shares to employees of Milngavie Motors, but denied that the transfer had been against the company's constitution.
The judge ordered a full inquiry to begin in March 1965, brought forward out of recognition that this matter needed to be resolved well in advance of the next football season. he inquiry lasted for ten days. Middlemass and other significant shareholders in East Stirlingshire contended that the Steedmans had acted unlawfully in transferring shares. The Steedmans responded that the club was being run profitably and successfully in Clydebank and that no rules had been broken in terms of the club's articles of association.
It took six weeks for the judge's ruling to be made, during which time ES Clydebank, who had been in a good position to end their first season with promotion to the First Division of the Scottish Football League, tailed off to finish off in fifth place instead. Each court case brought throughout the season seemed to have further insinuated that the tide was starting to turn against the Stevens.
At the start of May 1965, the judge announced his verdict, and it was very bad news for them indeed. The judge found that, the transfer of shares which resulted in the move of East Stirlingshire to Clydebank was invalid and should be cancelled. The Stevens had a motive, a closer geographic location to their business to support the merger with Clydebank that had little to do with the best interests of East Stirlingshire FC.
Company directors not acting in the best interest of the business itself, of course, is illegal. The Steedman's assertion that East Stirlingshire were otherwise facing financial catastrophe was based on previous company accounts and wildly over-exaggerated. With the issues relating to the shares now back to square one, another EGM was called in Falkirk for six days after the hearing.
At this meeting, everything that the Steedmans had attempted was reversed. They were pushed out of their positions within the club, and it was decided that East Stirlingshire would return to Falkirk and First Park for the start of the following season. James Middlemass was named as their new chairman. The Stevens, meanwhile, decamped back to Kilbowie Park, joining the directors of Clydebank, who now found themselves without a league instead. Clydebank decided to apply to join the Scottish League instead.
They'd had good crowds at Kilbowie, they had the facilities, and the 2nd Division of the Scottish League at the time had an odd number of clubs, so it made sense to add another. Their application, however, was unsuccessful, and they had to spend a year treading water in the Combined Reserve League before having a fresh application approved in 1967.
Almost six decades on from it all though, neither East Stirlingshire or Clydebank are still members of the Scottish Football League. East Stirlingshire stayed at Firs Park until 2008, when the decision was taken for the club to leave and ground share elsewhere. They moved to Stenhousemuir in that year, with the intention of building a new stadium in Grangemouth, but ended up staying at Ochilview for a decade before moving again, this time to ground share with Falkirk.
East Stirlingshire finished in the bottom two of the Scottish League third division for five consecutive years before promotion and relegation into the league was introduced in 2016. At the end of the first season, the club finished bottom of the table and had to play a two-match play-off against Edinburgh City to save their place. A 2-1 aggregate defeat meant relegation to the Lowland League and the end of 60 years unbroken in the Scottish Football League.
But will East Stirlingshire ever return to a home of their own? Clydebank, if anything, have fared even worse than East Stirlingshire. Initially they were more successful, spending two periods in the Scottish Premier Division, the latter of which only ended in 1988. Following the introduction of the Safety of Sports Grounds Act in 1975. To avoid having to apply legislation affecting stadium safety which only applied to grounds of a capacity above 10,000, the club installed wooden bench seats that reduced the capacity conveniently to 9,950, becoming in the process the UK's first all-seater football stadium.
By the middle of the 1990s though, the curse of the Steedman Brothers struck again when they sold Kilbowie Park to developers. Land was purchased on the outskirts of the town to construct a new stadium, but the necessary planning permission was never obtained to build one there. Instead, the club groundshared at Greenock, Morton and De Barton, but without the new home, this time the decline seemed terminal. The Steedmans sold out to expat businessman John Hall, whose main motive, it was later discovered, was to relocate Clyde Bank to Dublin. The move sparked protests and was ultimately overruled by FIFA.
By 2002, the club was in administration, and it was purchased by Jim Ballantyne with an offer that was accepted over the club supporters' trust. and he moved it to Airdrie, renaming it Airdrie United as a replacement for Airdrionians, who had been liquidated earlier the same year. This was a piece of football franchising every bit as appalling as the transplanting of Wimbledon to Milton Keynes in England. Ballantyne went on to serve as President of the Scottish Football League and also sat on the board of the Scottish Football Association.
Clydebank, meanwhile, were reformed again after the disappearance of the old club. The new club plays at Holm Park in the town, sharing it with local club Yoker Athletic. Holm Park has been significantly redeveloped, including a 4G synthetic surface and new floodlights. They continue to play in the West of Scotland League.
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There is a curious paradox at the heart of the dynamic of football clubs, which always seems likely to attract a certain type of undesirable to the game. In terms of their financial positions, most clubs live a hand-to-mouth existence, but many sit on one asset which has considerable value, their home ground. Because football in Britain developed in tandem with the Industrial Revolution, most football grounds used to be well positioned. In an age before the widespread ownership of cars, they were often situated near to the town centre, or in particular, railway stations.
This means that as real estate prices have increased over the years, clubs that were fortunate—or some might posit, unfortunate—enough to have their name on the deeds to their properties, have frequently found themselves becoming an object of desire for people that might have an interest in buying the clubs on the cheap, running them into the ground, to the point of bankruptcy, and then selling the ground, or perhaps more relevantly, the land upon which it sits, all of which makes a tidy profit.
There have been numerous high-profile examples of this in recent years, but a little further back in the history books lays the story of an institution of Scottish football, one of the founder members of the Scottish Football League, which was brought to its knees and eventually killed off, allegedly by an owner who never lived to see his plans come to fruition.
Third Lanark Athletic Club was formed in 1872, the year of formation of another Scottish giant, Rangers, and 16 years prior to the formation of Celtic. The football team of the Third Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers. A part of the Volunteer Force, they competed in the first ever Scottish Cup two years later and were one of the eleven founder members of the Scottish Football League in 1890 alongside Celtic, Rangers and Heart of Midlothian.
They earned the distinctive nickname of the Hi-Hi’s as, according to legend, a result of a defender at the club clearing the ball so high from their ground that the cry of “high, high, high” became one of encouragement for the team. They won the Scottish Cup in 1889 and 1905.
The club was based in South Glasgow. Queen's Park, arguably the founding fathers of Scottish football, had owned a ground called Hampden Park since their formation, but in 1904 they wanted to move to a new site a short distance away, and gave that site the same name. Third Lanark bought their old site from them and, since they already played at a ground with the same name themselves, renamed it New Cathkin Park.
This bowl-shaped stadium held 50,000 people and alongside Celtic Park, Hamden Park and Ibrox, gave Glasgow four of the biggest sports grounds in the world. The club won silverware in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and they won the Scottish League Second Division Championship in 1931 and 1935, whilst they also finished as runners-up in 1928.
The club continued to play in the Scottish Football League and had further success, losing to Hearts in the 1960 Scottish League Cup final and in the same season finishing in third place in the Scottish League, scoring over 100 goals in the process.
One of their finest seasons is now commonly ascribed to the involvement in the club of one man, Bill Hiddleston. Hiddleston first briefly arrived on the board of directors at Cathkin Park in December of 1954. He returned to the club in 1962, however, and his return was enough to inspire the near-immediate resignation of manager George Young and all of his backroom staff. At the time of his arrival, outgoing director Robert Martin said, “God help them and God save them”.
This was quickly followed by the hasty sale of Dave Hilley, Alex Harley and Matt Gray for a combined fee of £78,000 to Newcastle United and Manchester City respectively. This became the norm for the Hi-Hi's from now on. Having finished third from bottom in the First Division in 1964, the club were relegated the following season with just seven points from 34 matches, and whilst they would perform reasonably well in the second division of the league, off the field problems would mount to such an extent that the club would eventually buckle and collapse under the weight.
Away from the pitch, chaos reigned. Frequent boardroom rows led, more often than not, to acquiescence to Hiddleston's will. While players had serious difficulty receiving their wages, training was limited because of a lack of hot water, and it was even reported that the club had such difficulty paying its bills that they had difficulty getting the floodlights lit for evening matches.
The spring of 1967 was otherwise a glorious time for Scottish football. The national team beat England 3-2 at Wembley, becoming the self-proclaimed champions of the world, whilst Celtic became the first British club to win the European Cup when they beat Internazionale 2-1 in Lisbon, Rangers also competed in the final of the European Cup Winners' Cup, and Kilmarnock reached the semi-finals of the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup.
Back in Glasgow, however, things were going very badly for Third Lanark. The stories of cost-cutting in the club's final years were extraordinary. Match balls were ordered to be whitewashed to give the impression that they were new. Away teams arrived at Cathkin Park with their own lightbulbs and soap to replace the missing ones from their changing rooms.
One player, John Kinnaird, suffered a compound fracture in his arm, and while waiting for an ambulance, Hilston told him to make sure the doctor didn't cut the shirt off him at the hospital, as they didn't have any more. Club suits were billed to players, while supporters bought tickets for raffles for prizes that they would never receive.
Having been alerted by concerned supporters, the Board of Trade were also now taking an interest in the club's affairs. They carried out an investigation into goings-on at the club, and the result of their report was damning. It seemed clear that Mr Hiddleston, for whatever reason, had made his mind up to secure control of the company and in this he eventually succeeded.
The general picture to emerge, then, is that the club came to be run by him—with tragic acquiescence of other directors—as an inefficient and unscrupulous one-man business, with no regard for the provision of the Companies Act, the Articles of Association of the Company, or in the interests of its shareholders, who were clearly excluded from this involvement were all persons who had ceased to hold office on or before the 20th May 1965.
The Board of Trade found that players were paid late and often in coins rather than notes, that they had to make their own way to away matches, hot water was not available after matches, and each managerial appointment was made personally by Hiddleston alone. It was suggested that Hiddleston wanted to run the club into the ground on purpose, so that he could sell the land upon which Cathkin Park stood for housing. or that he wished to relocate the club to one of the new towns that now sat on the periphery of Glasgow, such as Cumbernauld or East Kilbride.
This, however, has never been definitively proved, and Glasgow City Council would later reject an application to put houses on the land. But if the Board of Trade's report did have one significant effect, it was to knock the final nails into the coffin of Third Lanark AC. The club played its final league match on the 28th April 1967, losing 5-1 at Boghead Park against Dumbarton. The Royal Bank of Scotland, who held a charge over Cathkin Park, forced a sale of the ground to pay off a £10,000 overdraft.
Just over a year later in July 1968, four former directors of Third Lanark were found guilty of contravening the Companies Act 1948 and fined £100 each. The investigation by the Board of Trade had accused Hiddleston of blatant corruption and that the circumstances merited a police inquiry, but Hiddleston died suddenly from a heart attack in a Blackpool hotel room that November.
The Board of Trade Inquiry laid the blame for the demise of Third Lanark firmly at his door. The thing is, fans were so furious with him at the time, they even refused to believe he was dead. They felt cheated that they had never got their day in court with him in a dock.
There is, however, an alternate theory that has been put forward regarding the death of Third Lanark, which paints the chairman in a somewhat less harsh light. It has been suggested that the decline of the Glasgow Cup, a tournament which all but guaranteed a lucrative match against Celtic or Rangers but fell into disrepair after the introduction of European football in the mid-1950s, accelerated the club's financial deterioration.
It also seems reasonable to ask why, if Hiddleston was only interested in running the club out of business and selling Cathkin Park, he oversaw building a new stand there in 1963, the construction of which would become yet another burden on the already stretched finances of the club. Hiddleston was an SFA councillor for a considerable amount of time and had been involved with Third Lanark before in the 1950s, so it could be argued he didn't exactly fit the bill of the asset-stripping property developer that we have since come to know and despise.
What is inarguable, however, is that the club was disastrously run throughout its final years, and there were clearly serious irregularities in the accounts in the run-up to its closure. There remains, however, a faint possibility that Hiddleston wasn't quite as guilty as some of the history books would have painted him.
As is customary with so many of these stories, however, Third Lanark didn't quite die in July 1967. With planning permission for housing having been refused, the site of Cathkin Park sat derelict until 1977 when Glasgow City Parks Department paid £350,000 to convert it into an open access park. The Third Lanark name, meanwhile, almost revived in 1974, when the Edinburgh-based works side Ferranti Thistle's application to join the Scottish Football League, was accepted on condition that the club changed their name. But that club eventually decided to call itself Meadowbank Thistle instead. They’re now known as Livingston and play in Cumbernauld.
It is, however, Cathkin Park itself that is perhaps the best-known piece of the club's legacy. The park was redeveloped with sections of the terracing, complete with crash barriers, still in place, and it makes for one of the most haunting day trips that any football supporter can make. And the spirit of Third Lanark lives on in more than just this. The club has existed in several forms over the intervening decades.
Are there any lessons that we can take from the stories of these three clubs a little more than 50 years ago? Perhaps there is just one takeaway that stands out from this story. Bill Hiddleston, who steered Third Lanark towards the Rocks, was an SFA councillor, while Jim Ballantyne sat with both the SFA and the Scottish Football League.
The profile of the rogue football club owner is the sharp-suited, sweet-talking, used-car salesman, but even those with a professed love for the game can make bad decisions or act in ill-faith. At least the Stevens later reflected upon the moral aspect of what they did. Bill Hiddleston may well have paid for the stress of it all with his life. But sometimes there doesn't have to be a theme. Sometimes they're just linear sequences of events at two different football clubs.
The 1960s were not great for the national team in Scotland, and a downturn in interest was always likely to negatively impact upon clubs who were always living precariously, as East Stirlingshire were, or badly, as Third Lanark were. East Stirlingshire's decision to turn full-time once in the top flight had lasting ramifications, the most pressing of which was that it set a minimum requirement for attendances that the club was never likely to achieve at Firs Park.
Third Lanark just seemed to have been exceptionally badly run at best, and Hiddleston's death just over a year after the club's complete collapse almost robbed the story of its full stop. He has subsequently been declared the person to blame, and this is the most accurate overall summation of events.
And while Clydebank and East Stirlingshire would go on to lose their places in the Scottish Football League, they do both survive. Third Lanark are now a ghost club. The only traces of their existence, a bunch of ever-dwindling memories, faded yellow match reports, some grainy black and white photos, and the ghostly Cathkin Park itself.