Paddy Crerand: Never Turn the Other Cheek

The British had no right to be imperialistic in Ireland, although the British media usually see it differently. They claim now, for instance, that everybody in Iraq who fights against the invading British or American forces is a terrorist. But what right do the British and Americans have to be in Iraq? If you invade someone else’s country then you are wrong. I cringe at phrases like ‘the sun never set in the British Empire’. That meant nothing to the ordinary man in the street who was used as cannon fodder so that the rich could get richer. The British conquered and exploited countries all over the world for centuries. Catholics had a very difficult existence under British rule, but it was seldom easier for the working-class Protestants either. They just weren’t aware that the British were dividing and ruling. My family were deeply resentful of the British in Ireland.

My older brother John was born in Plumbridge, but the shop was not a success so he and my parents moved to Glasgow, with dad finding work digging the tunnels that were to form the Glasgow underground system. He always saw it as a temporary job and hoped to scrape enough money together to open another shop. It never happened.

I came along on 19 February 1939, my first breath taken in the family home at 260 Crown Street, in the heart of the tough Gorbals district just south of the city centre on the other side of the Clyde. I don’t remember my father, but I was curious to find out about him as I grew older. I learned that he came from a staunchly republican family who had fought in the uprisings of 1916 and 1922. Most of his friends finished up in jail for being involved in the republican movement, and when he died mum received several letters of condolence from the jail in Belfast.

After his death, my granny Anabella in Newtonstewart who had been so disapproving of the marriage asked my mum and the kids to come and live with her. She had forgiven my mother for the crime of falling in love with her son, but mum decided to stay in Glasgow. Granny in Newtonstewart then disowned her, a strange situation as she deprived herself of seeing her only grandchildren.

Back in the Gorbals, neighbours and friends held a collection to raise money for my mother as there was no social welfare. Mum went back to work as a waitress in a city centre hotel in an attempt to scrape enough together to feed and clothe the four of us. She couldn’t do it alone and my aunt Mary, who had moved to Glasgow, was a great help looking after us when mum worked. Our grandmother in Gweedore sent food parcels too. Mum’s sisters would frequently come over from Donegal to help us out. We needed the support and the lack of money was always evident. Mum regularly used to dispatch me to the front door when the rent man came and I would tell him that my mum wasn’t in so we didn’t have to pay. Someone in London owned our property so I wasn’t bothered about not paying them. It wasn’t the fault of the rent man – he was just doing his job – but he was working for an absentee landlord who made fortunes out of the poor in Glasgow. Like many in the Gorbals, we felt that there was something inherently wrong with that. We’d delay paying the rent for as long as possible, our own little protest in the hope that we would make life awkward for the landlord.

Mum rented a room for us in the house on Crown Street, where five of us slept, ate and washed, sharing a communal toilet. Mum was used to hardship but she considered the conditions intolerable and we moved to a tenement building nearby at 129 Thistle Street. That had the luxury of a kitchen, which my mother slept in on a pull-out bed, leaving the four kids in the other room. With hindsight I realize that we lived in abject poverty, but at the time we didn’t know any different and I never felt hard done by. We used to get our clothes from the church and even though we were desperately poor, we always tried to show otherwise. The church used to give us boots, big clumpy ones that would have lasted for a hundred years, but we tried not to wear them. We were never hungry and I was happy playing football all the time. Mum told me that from the age of three or four I would head a ball against the wall. Well, it was better than staring at it because there was nothing else to do.

Boredom was everybody’s enemy. We had few toys and there was no such thing as a television, so the only thing to do was play football. You weren’t allowed to play in the street, but we still did … and ran every time a policeman appeared. The police got sick of us smashing the low windows of the tenement blocks and would stop us playing. They once chased me down a back alleyway. I thought I could get out at the other end but I couldn’t and they caught me. ‘You’ll get a real kick if we catch you again’, said one of them. I was petrified. I was only five.

My first school was St Luke’s primary. I was in the school football team by the age of seven, alongside players three years older than me. I played against Frank McLintock as he was at a nearby primary school, St Bonaventures. Years later, in 1963, we would be on opposite sides in an FA Cup final.

School was just an extension of football as far as I was concerned. We played every day after school, in the light summer evenings, and Saturday mornings and Sunday too. I used to wake up at seven o’clock every morning, although school didn’t begin until nine. My pals all did the same and we had a full-scale match in the playground before going into class. The playground was the only place we could have a game without breaking the law. It’s a cliché that people of my generation started playing football with tennis balls or bundles of rags; we did see the occasional full-size football. The problem was that the lads who owned them were invariably useless and always last to be picked. So they would take their balls home. At lunch I would go home for food: soup and potatoes, or mince and potatoes. I never really saw fruit, unless I got an apple or an orange as a Christmas present. I’d eat as quickly as I could and then rush back to school to play football.

I played centre-forward for my primary school team, not because I was quick, but because I was strong and could kick the ball with both feet. I scored loads and loads of goals and played there until I was ten. Then they put me back in the middle of the park, again because I was so strong.

Football was our lives although we did occasionally play rounders or cricket, with the stumps marked in chalk against a wall in the street. The tenement building would stretch for 150 yards and there would be five or six football matches going on in front of it at a time. Nobody owned a car in the Gorbals and we only saw cars on the main roads, so they weren’t a distraction.

We used lampposts as goalposts, only stopping when the man came to light them. Nobody wanted to play in goal – that’s probably why Scotland is not renowned for its goalkeepers. If you went in net you were allowed to come out after letting two goals in, so that’s why there were high scoring games. Because we were playing ten-a-side in a very enclosed area, players became very skilful.

If we weren’t playing sports, we’d have a look around the middens – the place where the rubbish was kept. Rats were plentiful there. We’d search through the rubbish for ‘lucks’ – something which someone had thrown out that might be worth something.

A big day in my life came when I had my first holy communion aged seven. I was nervous and excited. People made a sandwich and wrapped it in paper. They would also slip some money between the paper and the sandwich which was a local tradition. I was given three or four pence and thought I was rolling in it.

It was at primary school that I learned the facts of Gorbals life, namely that there were two kinds of people in the world – Catholics and Protestants. You were either one or the other. There was no such thing as a neutral. That’s what we were taught, but it wasn’t totally true. The Gorbals had a significant Jewish population and I used to go to the houses of some Jewish families on a Saturday and offer to light their fires for a few coins, because they were forbidden from doing so. The Jews were kind to me and I liked them.

I am a Catholic, of course, one of many children from Irish families who settled in the Gorbals, partly because it was the cheapest place in Glasgow to rent a room and partly because they were likely to know people who had already moved there.

Poverty and other social problems like alcohol meant the Catholics fought a lot among each other. There were public houses on every corner and when men came out of these at night they stood around, argued and they fought. Not that they needed an excuse. They probably reckoned any kind of exercise was better than going back to houses that were darker and more overcrowded than the pubs they had left. They fought with fists, or bottles, hatchets, or knives. And this wasn’t just in the evenings. I can vividly remember watching a hatchet fight at three o’clock on a midweek afternoon.

Since the adults spent so much time fighting it was only natural that the kids followed their example. We used to have mass battles twice a week with the boys at Adelphi Street, a Protestant primary school, over the road. It was harmless stuff – nobody really got hurt – but it seemed the proper thing to do. Benny Lynch, later a world champion boxer, was a Catholic who lived on Adelphi Street.

On the street, the rules were simple. If someone didn’t like you then he hit you. And you hit him back whether he was bigger than you or not, because if you didn’t hit back then the word went round that you were a sissy … and then everyone in the neighbourhood had a belt at you. As you grew up you learned more about fighting – and I can assure you that nobody ever mentioned the Marquis of Queensberry. Punching, kicking, and spitting were all in the game and you had to give as much you got.

There were many wonderful people in the Gorbals, people who would give you their last penny and do anything for anyone in trouble, but there were some bad characters. The adults used to say that if someone asked you for a match in the street when it was dark, you didn’t stop – you ran. Because that was a common trick of stopping people to slash them, and there were probably another couple of toughs hiding nearby in case you resisted.

There was an old Polish cobbler who had a shop in our street. We always played football near his shop because he didn’t chase us away and we liked him. There was a spell when we didn’t see him for weeks. I never forget how I felt when I saw him again. He had a scar which ran from his right ear to the side of his mouth and another from his mouth to his other ear. Someone had stopped him at night and taken the few shillings he had with him, and he needed eighty-five stitches.

The dark streets and even darker closes and stairways were made for crime. My mum was strict and wouldn’t allow us out at night, but I still got into lots of fights as a kid. A lad called John Ferguson battered lumps out of me and bullied me a little bit. I knew that I had to have a go at him again and I did. I beat him; I knocked the daylights out of him in fact, but he became my pal then. There was another lad that I beat up who kept turning up at my door every five minutes to ask for another fight. I could have beaten him, but he would have kept coming back for more. I gave up in the end and said, ‘You’re too good for me.’ He accepted that, because he had shown his courage. I was ten.

It didn’t matter how big the fella was who hit you, you had to hit him back. If you didn’t then your life was a misery. You got little fellas who would fight people ten times bigger than them just to show that they were not cowards.

It wasn’t long before I discovered the library. It was an escape, a world away from the fighting and football, the only place I went to which was quiet. I had been a good reader at school and I would read through the newspapers a few times a week. I developed a love for books and although I was never really a fan of fiction, I loved Treasure Island. I would read about Ché Guevara in later years and be fascinated to learn that he had family connections with the west of Ireland. His real name was Ernesto Guevara Lynch De La Serna.

The Catholic Church kept a lot of people out of trouble. They paid for a Boys’ Guild which had a gym where you could play crab football – where you sit on the floor and kick out with your legs – or snooker. They organized a football team and I used to play for them on Saturday, as well as my school team. Two games on a Saturday were normal for me and on Sunday I went to church partly through fear; it was a mortal sin if you didn’t attend.

There were loads of lads who were better footballers than me in the Gorbals but they were distracted by drink and drugs in later years. They are the sort that sit at the bar telling everyone how good they could have been. My mother kept me away from all that. I’d get a belt from her across the back of my hand if I misbehaved.

Being Catholics, we always had fish on a Friday. A man used to come round with a barrow laden with every type you could imagine. You would pay a fortune for it today, but it couldn’t be anything but cheap in the Gorbals because nobody had any money. For Christmas I’d get a bag of sweets, which was a big thing for me. They were wrapped in curly paper which made them more important.

It’s funny how your memory works. I can’t remember what I did yesterday and yet I have vivid recollections from childhood, like watching the communist marches each May Day. They were led by a fella called Andy Smith who lived on Thistle Street. He was a mad Celtic supporter who had a big poster of Stalin in his flat. Stalin was still alive and I was led to believe that he was a good person by Smith, who believed that we should all look after one another. Most people in the Gorbals agreed with the philosophy, even if they didn’t see themselves as communists. People helped their neighbours out and always supported them. Maybe they could only offer milk and sugar, but they supported each other emotionally too.

For as long as I can remember, I have supported Celtic. If you were a Catholic and Irish then you supported Celtic. I can’t even begin to explain why my brother John supported Rangers. Maybe it’s because they were a better team or maybe it was because he wanted to be different and, if so, he certainly achieved that. I can remember him getting his Rangers scarf and going off to Ibrox by himself, which was a very brave thing to do if you lived in the Gorbals. I admired him for that.

Mum was a real Celtic nut. She went to lots of matches and her support of the team never wavered. She was lucky enough to attend three European Cup Finals in four years, the first in 1967 when Celtic triumphed in Lisbon, the second a year later between Manchester United and Benfica and the third in 1970 when Celtic lost in Milan.

Celtic’s ground, Parkhead, was a twenty-minute walk away and I would go with my mates for matches and wait by the turnstiles until someone lifted us over. I never went to games with my mum, that wasn’t the done thing. The ritual of being lifted over the turnstiles was one that every Glaswegian kid went through. It was accepted that if a man arrived at a turnstile with his boy he was allowed to lift him over and they both got into the match for the price of one. The turnstile attendant could hardly ask the man to prove that the boy was his son. Most supporters, therefore, were willing to lift a boy over if he asked them. So before any game you would see dozens of boys running alongside the grown-ups as they approached the turnstiles, shouting the immortal phrase: ‘Gonny gie’s a lift o’er, mister?’

Until I was too old, or too heavy, I had many a lift, and one of my earliest football memories is of getting into Hampden Park at the age of ten and seeing a fabulous Great Britain team with a forward line of Stanley Matthews, Wilf Mannion, Tommy Lawton, and Billy Liddell beat the Rest of Europe 6–1. I can also remember seeing Tom Finney play for the first time in 1952 when England beat Scotland 2–1. Even though he was wearing the white of England, I knew I’d seen a great winger. The Scots didn’t know what to do with him because, being so two-footed, he could beat them any way he wanted. Later I saw Finney play in quite a few internationals. I saw Stanley Matthews, too, but Finney was clearly the better of the two. The one thing I liked about Finney is that he bowed out at the top. Most good footballers refuse to admit when their best playing days are over, and they go on and play for as long as they can for the sake a few more pounds when they have already made a lot of money in their career. I think this spoils them in the eyes of the public because they are remembered as failures with an expanding waistline instead of the brilliant performers they were before. It says much that Finney was prepared to step out of the limelight when he had the slim build and was still in his prime.

I went to Parkhead for most of the home games. It was so huge that despite the big crowds it was rarely full to its 80,000 capacity. I don’t think I ever had a penny in my pocket but I always got into the ground and stood on one of the vast sweeping terraces that made up three-quarters of the stadium.

Charlie Tully was a Celtic player who became my childhood hero after the war. He was signed from Belfast Celtic in 1948 in the hope that he would stop a decline at the club. He never trained well but he had so much ability. I loved him and he was a big star, just like George Best was to become. He once scored direct from a corner kick against Falkirk. The referee blew his whistle and made him take the corner kick again. Nobody could believe it when he re-took the kick and scored for a second time.

Playing for Ireland at Windsor Park in 1952, he scored from a corner again, this time in a 2–2 draw with England. However, he’s more remembered for his pre-match chat with his marker Alf Ramsey that day.

‘What’s it like to be an automatic selection for your country, Mr Ramsey?’ he asked him.

‘It’s an absolute privilege, Mr Tully,’ Ramsey replied.

‘Good, because you won’t be one after today.’

Charlie, nicknamed ‘The Clown Prince’ because he used to torture opposition right-backs and make clowns out of them, was a cult hero in Glasgow. There was even a green flavoured ice cream called ‘Tully’.

Celtic didn’t win the league between 1938 and 1954 – Rangers were a much stronger team in those days – but they did win the 1951 Scottish Cup at Hampden against Motherwell 1–0 thanks to a John McPhail goal. I went to that game along with 131,392 others.

My memories are not just confined to football in Scotland. I remember listening to the 1948 FA Cup Final on the wireless. A family who lived near us had a radio and I was amazed at how it worked and how words could come out of it direct from Wembley Stadium in London. I listened to the game and I wanted Manchester United to win for two reasons. The first was because they were losing 2–1 at half-time and I liked the idea of a team coming from behind, no matter who they were. The second was because United had Jimmy Delaney, an old Celtic player, in the team. Yet if Blackpool had been losing 2–1, I’d have wanted them to win.

In later years, Duncan Edwards, the Manchester United great who died in the Munich air disaster, was a hero of mine. I liked half-backs. He scored the winning goal for England against Scotland at Wembley in 1957. I took an interest in Manchester United because they were such a young team. The Busby Babes they called them. Most teams seemed to have an average age of twenty-eight – but the Busby Babes’ was about twenty-two.

During the school holidays – Easter, summer and Christmas – we’d head back to Ireland to visit my grandmother in Gweedore. We’d get the Anchor Lines boat to Derry from the Broomielaw in Glasgow and I’d spend all my free time in Donegal. It always felt like home and I would cry my eyes out when it was time to leave. I’ve now lived in Glasgow for over twenty years and Manchester for over forty, but I consider Donegal home, even though I wasn’t born there or have never lived there for more than four months. When I met someone in Glasgow, they would ask when I was going home for a holiday.

I was so excited when we travelled to Donegal. We’d get the boat at 5.30 pm and would arrive in Derry at 9 o’clock in the morning. The journey would be horrendous as the boat chugged along and we travelled third class. I can remember sitting there alongside cows, which travelled in the same compartment. There was a bar on the boat though. The owners knew what they were doing, keeping the masses half pissed that they wouldn’t care about being treated like cattle.

The boat arrived in Derry and we had to cross the border between the six counties and the rest of Ireland, where the controls were very strict. We would try to bring chickens and eggs back from Ireland because they were scarce in the Gorbals. The B-Specials, who were a branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), would come onto the bus and treat us very badly because we were Catholics. They would get us off the bus and search it. When we re-boarded everything would be gone. If you said anything to them they would hit you with a rifle.

The situation made me very angry and I started to become more politically minded when I was a teenager. I read a lot about Irish history and formed the opinion that the British policy in the north of Ireland amounted to dividing and conquering. My father’s side of the family had been hard-line republican. When revolutionary leader Michael Collins wanted to come to an agreement with the British for an Irish Free State in 1921, with the six counties in the north being worked out later, my family were against it and accused Collins of selling out. They wanted all of Ireland or nothing. They didn’t want a Northern Ireland and didn’t recognize the new border. The British, in their wisdom, knew that partition would split the republican movement and civil war ensued. Collins should be remembered as one of the greatest ever Irishmen, but I wouldn’t have voted for him because he compromised and split the country. He did this because he believed he could make further progress with the British in the future. But he was killed in an ambush in August 1922.

Gweedore is officially the largest Irish-speaking parish in Ireland – Gerry Adams learned his Irish there – and, despite only having a population of 5,000, has some notable former residents. Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll was born there and was related to my family. He left Gweedore at an early age and became an enforcer for the mafia in early twentieth-century New York City. He grew up on the streets of the Bronx, where he joined a street gang and befriended the gangster Dutch Schultz. As Schultz’s criminal empire grew in power, he employed Coll as an assassin. During the 1920s, Coll developed a risky but lucrative scam whereby he would kidnap powerful gangsters at gunpoint and extort a ransom from his captive’s associates before releasing them. He knew that the victims would not report it to the police, especially because, being criminals, they would have a hard time explaining to the authorities how they happened to have such huge supplies of cash in order to pay for their release. Coll is one of the villains depicted in the film The Untouchables.

Coll is distantly related to former Northern Ireland MP Brid Rodgers, who is also from Gweedore. She became the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and was involved in the Irish Civil Rights Movement from 1965.

Another son of Gweedore is James Duffy, an Irish recipient of the Victoria Cross. He was 28 years old, and a private in the 6th Battalion of the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers during the First World War, when he was awarded the VC for gallantry in Palestine.

The musical heritage of Gweedore is very rich. Clannad and Enya are from there. A lot of my friends from Glasgow moved back to Donegal and still live there. If I go to Glasgow these days I have to get a hotel room and that seems strange.