|
|
|
In
The Beginning 
On the 6th of November 1887 a group of prominent Catholics
met to announce the formation of a team to be called the Celtic Football
and Athletic Club. This announcement was met by an immediate and willing
response, of voluntary labour that went into the building of the club's
first ground, and of donations which by January 1888 had come in from
various sections of the Catholic community, led by the Archbishop of
Glasgow and various other Church dignitaries and men of affairs.
In local politics, small business and now in the country's leading leisure
pursuit, these Catholics were issuing a challenge to a Protestant establishment
that saw 'Irish' Catholics as inferior in race, subversive in politics
and enslaved to a foreign and idolatrous religion.
With such origins the Celtic F.C. was bound to have a stormy career,
and so it was to prove. Ostensibly founded to feed the poor of Glasgow's
essentially Catholic East End, it was also intended
to keep them free from apostasy in their leisure time. Very soon the
club emerged as a leader of the Catholic community, scoring victories
against the Protestants where it hurt most. The Protestants were to
get their revenge in the form of Glasgow Rangers, and thereafter both
clubs benefited from that unholy partnership of business and bigotry
that became known as The Old Firm, a story
that has been told elsewhere.
In those early days there was no disguising the sympathies of the club.
Its players and directors were happy to lend their names to demonstrations
in favour of Irish Home Rule politics; the team
played in the colours of the Emerald Isle and flew that country's flag
at the ground; and was supported by every priest, not just in Scotland,
but in the United Kingdom, while it had the sympathies of
the dispersed sons of Erin wherever they were to be found. Today the
club still flies the Irish flag and the team plays in Irish colours,
but it has divorced itself from the Irish politics with which it was
once so closely tied, although sympathy for the IRA can still be found
today in the chants, slogans and banners of its hardcore support. That
support is still mainly, but far from exclusively, Catholic, and until
David Smith in the early 1990's all its Directors were Catholics, but
apart from that the club is open to anyone, as players in the team,
employees in the office or at the ground, or as members of any branch
of the club's supporters' organisations.
In short, the club has mirrored the growth of Catholic community in
Scottish society as well as playing a vital role in it, a role which
has diminished as that community won its place in the mainstream of
Scottish society and not just as an enclave (even ghetto) within it.
A visit to the Maley family that was such a vital episode in the founding
of the club: the trip out to Cathcart by Brother Walfrid, the priest
whose idea the club was, and the indefatigable
John Glass whose energies assured its success. The purpose of the trip
was to sign on Tom Maley, a player of no mean reputation, but it was
to be the signing of Tom's brother, Willie, that was the real catch,
as he was to join the club as a player, then quickly become its secretary
and manager, a post he held until he was sacked in 1940.
The Maley family themselves, were a minor metaphor of the Irish tragedy,
for the third man who led the expedition that night was Pat Welsh, then
a successful master tailor but who would have been swinging from a rope
in 1867 if it had not been for Sergeant Maley of the North British Fusiliers
allowing his Irish patriotism to overcome his military duty when he
released the young Fenian and let him escape to Scotland, from where
he kept in touch. Sergeant Maley, in retirement in Scotland when this
visit took place in December 1887, had four sons, each born in a different
country.
Three of them were to make careers in football, 'the fourth became a
priest.
Email Daithi
McGonigal regarding any additions or comments.
|
