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Now in his sixties, DAVID LEGGAT has retired from a career in newspapers that began when he joined the Glasgow Evening Times in March 1966. Among the papers he has worked for on both sides of the border are the Birmingham Evening Mail; the Daily Express; the Sunday People, covering the West Midlands; the Sunday People, Scottish edition (twice); the Sunday Mail, Scotland on Sunday; the Scottish Daily Express; and finally as a freelance with the Scottish Sunday Express.

As well as having a passion for football in general and Rangers in particular, David loves the music of the Great American Songbook, Porter, the Gershwins, Rogers and Hart, Johnny Mercer, etc, particularly when performed by Sinatra, Lady Day, Ella and Tony Bennett, but has a soft spot for many of the more modern interpretations, particularly those by the Canadian singer-pianist, Diana Krall.

He says he would love to have been Frank Sinatra, Jim Baxter or Winston Churchill. Or better still, have had a voice like Francis Albert’s, a left foot like Slim Jim’s and a vocabulary to match Churchill’s.

STRUTHBill Struth was one of the most successful, outstanding and charismatic managers in football history. He won an astonishing eighteen league championships, ten Scottish Cups and two League Cups with Rangers, as well as being the visionary behind the building of the magnificent Main Stand at Ibrox, which now bears his name. His career with Rangers spanned an incredible forty-two years, beginning as Rangers trainer in 1914 and only ending when he died in 1956.

Now, in Struth, the full story of his remarkable life is revealed for the first time, from his beginnings as a champion runner, to his first days at Rangers and his incredible time as manager from 1920 to 1954. Included too are interviews with some of the legendary stars who he managed, such as Bob McPhail, Tiger Shaw, Willie Waddell and Willie Thornton. And there are fascinating insights into his private life, his wife’s tragic suicide and the personal battles he fought later on.

Struth: The Story of an Ibrox Legend is a compelling account of a unique man who kept his private life strictly off limits while living in the full glare of the public eye as one of football’s most successful and revered figures.

B+W trimmed size 226 x 155mm HB

struth

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Also by David Leggat

GREAT SCOT

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struthTHE STORY OF AN IBROX LEGEND

david leggat

BLACK & WHITE PUBLISHING

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First published 2013by Black & White Publishing Ltd

29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 13 14 15 16

ISBN: 978 1 84502 703 2

Copyright © David Leggat 2013

The right of David Leggat to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The publisher has made every reasonable effort to contact copyright holders of images in the picture section. Any errors are inadvertent and anyone who for any reason has not been contacted is invited to write to the publisher so that a full acknowledgment can be made in subsequent

editions of this work.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Refi neCatch Ltd, Bungay, SuffolkPrinted and bound by ScandBook AB, Sweden

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For my old Scots Presbyterian Granny,Jane ‘Jean’ Buchanan (nee Marshall),

1896–1976.A true Christian lady.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IX

PREFACE XII

1 THE TRIPLE CROWN 1

2 BEGINNINGS AND TRAGEDIES 9

3 BECOMING A RANGER 16

4 THE WEE BLUE DEVIL 23

5 THE ROARING TWENTIES 31

6 THE BIGGEST CENTRE-FORWARD IN

THE WORLD 42

7 GREETIN’ BOAB 49

8 END OF THE HOODOO 56

9 STRUTH’S GRAND DREAM 64

10 HUNGER FOR SUCCESS 73

11 STRUTH’S SECRETS 81

12 THE NEW LOOK 88

13 SAM ENGLISH 95

14 CHANGING FACES 105

15 DAWSON, GRAY AND SHAW 112

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STRUTH

16 THE DOUBLE AGAIN 119

17 AS OTHERS SAW HIM 126

18 THE SCOTTISH CUP AGAIN 131

19 ON TOUR 139

20 CHAMPIONS AGAIN 147

21 THE WILLIES 153

22 THE WAR YEARS 161

23 MOSCOW DYNAMO 168

24 THE IRON CURTAIN 176

25 THE ENEMY WITHIN 184

26 THE TRIPLE CROWN AGAIN 193

27 DOCTOR ADAM LITTLE 201

28 THE DOUBLE AND MORE 208

29 NEW NAMES 218

30 THE DOUBLE YET AGAIN 223

31 THE FINAL DAYS 233

MANAGERIAL RECORD 239

BIBLIOGRAPHY 240

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ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NO BOOK is ever written in splendid isolation. And I required much help, encouragement and advice to research and write the story of Bill Struth. There are many whose help should be acknowledged. If there are faults in this book, they are my faults.

At the head of the queue to be thanked is my old sports editor from the Sunday Mail, in the days when that paper sold nearly a million, Alex Gordon. Big Alex edited the manuscript long before a publisher saw it and his keen eye, acute sense of style and vast experience saved me from myself more than once. He also kept a close eye on my arithmetic when it came to goalscorers and results tallying. Thanks are also due to his wife, Gerda, an IT whizz-kid who kept the two old fogies right when it came to saving the work and ensuring it did not fl y off in the direction of the Mars Mercury. My gratitude is sincere and eternal.

At this point I should like to pause and take a moment to remember those who had spoken to me about their time spent playing for Bill Struth and who are no longer with us. Names such as Bob McPhail, Jimmy Smith, Willie Thornton, Willie Waddell and many others will leap from the pages which follow, and their tales about Struth’s sides tell the Great Man’s story with insight and intelligence.

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Neil Stobbie, a Rangers man with a keen interest in the club’s traditions and its early managers, deserves a special mention for his work on my behalf in pinning down Bill Struth’s exact date of birth and other aspects of the private man and his family. It was Neil’s efforts which allow us a glimpse at the tragedy which blighted Bill Struth’s private life.

Robert McEllroy, the publisher of the magazine The Rangers Historian and a man who has written countless excellent books about Rangers, was another who helped steer me in the right direction and who gave up his time selfl essly – as he had when I wrote the Scot Symon biography – to help me.

One former colleague who was also of tremendous help was Allan Herron, the former chief sports writer at the Sunday Mail and Sunday People, whose footsteps I followed at both newspapers. Not only did Allan provide me with one or two excellent insights into the relationship which existed between Bill Struth and the media, but he also gave me permission to use extracts from the book he co-wrote with Bob McPhail, Legend: Sixty Years at Ibrox. Those extracts, together with the stories McPhail told me when I interviewed him, were extremely important to the Struth story. As was the friendship I developed in the late 1960s with another great Ranger, Jimmy Smith, who I interviewed twenty years later.

Mark Dingwall, of the Rangers Supporters Trust, dug deep into his fi les to provide me with what many of the greats who played for Struth said when the Grand Old Man of Ibrox died in 1956. He also opened his fi les to me to reveal long-forgotten Struth anecdotes about his days as a professional runner.

And I cannot pass without a very special and personal thank you to the memory of my dad, Andrew Leggat and grandad, David Buchanan, two great Rangers men. It was the way I heard them speak about Bill Struth when I was growing up which later became my inspiration to write this book.

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xi

But, most of all, my sincere thanks must go to the man himself. To Bill Struth, for having lived and loved Rangers.

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xii

PREFACE

WHEN BILL STRUTH was born in 1875 the British Empire was at its peak and Queen Victoria reigned over a quarter of the world’s land mass. And the Rangers of the Gallant Pioneers were a mere three years old. By the time Struth died in 1956, that Empire had fought and won two World Wars to save civilisation and was beginning to disintegrate. Rangers had gone from strength to strength to outgrow even the wildest of dreams those Gallant Pioneers had harboured. Rangers had become the most successful football club in the world, which is what Rangers remain today, more than half a century after Struth’s death. In fact, there is a sound argument for claiming that much of what Rangers have achieved in the years since Struth died has still, to a degree, been the responsibility of the man whose name remains as synonymous with the club now as it was during his forty-two-year association with Rangers, thirty-four of those years as manager.

Though, as we shall learn, Bill Struth was able to build and mould Rangers even further in the direction he wanted the club to take, by building on the already solid foundations laid by the man he took over from, William Wilton. Wilton had been involved with Rangers since the very early days of those Gallant Pioneers and his dedicated work behind the scenes meant he was the natural choice to be appointed the club’s fi rst manager in 1899.

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PREFACE

xiii

William Wilton, as Bill Struth proved to be, was also a man of vision and he began preparing for the future, for the succession, by naming Struth, who had been with Clyde, as his new trainer in 1914. Though that succession took place much quicker than anyone had anticipated. It occurred in tragic circumstances when Wilton was drowned in a boating accident on the Clyde in 1920.

William Wilton’s death at the age of only fi fty-fi ve was the beginning of the Bill Struth legend as the forty-fi ve-year-old trainer stepped into the manager’s job and ensured that for the following thirty-four years he ruled Rangers with a rod of iron, while Rangers, in turn, ruled Scottish football. The amazing total of honours Struth’s reign harvested for Rangers, mind-boggling as it most surely is, does not even tell the full story of what he could have achieved had league football not been reorganised on a regional basis during the Second World War. That, along with the fact there was no Scottish Cup competition, meant a total of twelve more possible trophies were removed from Struth’s grasp. For who is to say Rangers would not have won them all during a period when they were just as dominant as they has been in the 1930s?

Rangers’ wartime record testifi es to their dominance and adds to the belief that men such as Jerry Dawson, Jock Shaw, Willie Woodburn and Willie Waddell would have added the majority of those dozen pieces of silverware to the Ibrox Trophy Room, itself a Bill Struth creation. However, Struth’s offi cial haul of eighteen League titles, ten Scottish Cups and two League Cups is impressive enough, particularly remembering that the League Cup did not come into being until season 1946–47.

But as a manager Bill Struth was more than a collector of silverware. He was more than a builder of teams of strength, resilience, pace and fl air, plus goals galore. He was more than a mere manager of a football club. Bill Struth was the man who

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fi nely honed the standards originally put in place by William Wilton and embedded them into the very fabric of Rangers. Everything about a Rangers player had to the very best. From the way he played, through the way he dressed on and off the park and right up to which seats he was seen in at the cinema. As far as the players Bill Struth chose, from his fi rst signing, The Wee Blue Devil himself, Alan Morton, through iconic captains such as Davie Meiklejohn, Jock Shaw and George Young and including such stars as Bob McPhail, Willie Waddell and Willie Thornton, right up until his very last signing, Ralph Brand, Struth always got the very best for Rangers. To have the words after your name ‘of Rangers and Scotland’ became bywords for outstanding achievement. It meant the player had lived up to the standards Bill Struth set.

During the late 1980s I was fortunate to conduct a series of interviews with many of the stars who helped write the Rangers and Struth story of glory. This litany of legends included Waddell and Thornton, Tiger Shaw and also Bob McPhail, who was there in the early years of Struth’s reign in the 1920s. They provided a window into another world, a world which is even more distant now but which this story of Bill Struth will bring alive again with all its heroic vibrancy and great deeds. Their memories and the recall of other great Rangers names from the past who spoke to me – including Eric Caldow, Billy Simpson, Johnny Hubbard, Davie Kinnear, Bobby Brown, Jimmy Smith, Willie Woodburn, Jimmy Duncanson, Johnny Little, George Niven and Ralph Brand – help to bring the Struth era back to life with all the colour and drama which makes it unique.

Bill Struth had many contradictions. He was a martinet. But he could laugh at himself. He was a strict disciplinarian. But he took an almost fatherly pride and interest in his players, calling them ‘his boys’. He was a dandy, too, keeping a wardrobe inside Ibrox

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PREFACE

xv

and changing his suit at least once a day. But most of all, Bill Struth was a man who lived and breathed Rangers every minute of his life and whose home was only a couple of hundred yards away from Ibrox Stadium. A man and a manager who dominated Scottish football as no other had or has to this very day. And a force for good, too.

Struth, as we will also learn, was a man ahead of his time with regard to the fi tness and training of his players. That was something he carried into management from his time as a trainer with Rangers and before that at Clyde, where he fi lled a similar role, and even before that, as a professional runner. For the fact is that Bill Struth was never a professional footballer, yet he knew a player when he saw one. But even more important, he knew a Rangers player when he saw one. Someone who could conform to Struth’s demands on and off the fi eld.

He is often dismissed as a man of his time and it is to Scottish football’s Hall of Fame’s shame that he had to wait to be inducted into it for fi ve years after the gates to it were opened for the fi rst time in the twenty-fi rst century to allow many lesser talents admission. Yet Bill Struth’s time at Ibrox stretched from the start of the Great War through the 1930s, through the Second World War and into the 1950s. He was born when Queen Victoria was on the throne and was still manager of Rangers when the second Elizabethan Age dawned. Therefore, to dismiss him as merely a man of his time is arrant nonsense. For Bill Struth’s time was a very long time indeed. He was not stuck in any small timeframe. Not confi ned to any blink-of-an-eye passing moment. And such is his everlasting impact on Scottish football that the fi nest main stand in Scotland to this very day, built at his insistence and opened in 1929, remains as imposing as ever and has been renamed the Bill Struth Main Stand as a monument to a great man’s vision.

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xvi

Bill Struth was more than a manager whose footballing achievements continue to outstrip all others more than half a century after his death. He was more than a man who set certain codes by which he demanded everyone associated with Rangers should live by as footballers and as men. Bill Struth was a towering fi gure in an age of giants. And the fact that his name when invoked in this the second decade of the twenty-fi rst century still provokes the same sort of awe among Rangers supporters, as though he was some sort of mythical Godlike fi gure, speaks volumes for his lasting impact.

This, then, is the tale of a man who shaped a Scottish institution at a time when Scottish institutions were good, honourable and noble things. It is the story of Bill Struth. It is also, of course, the story of Rangers. For the names Bill Struth and Rangers will remain linked for as long as there is history.

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1

1

THE TRIPLE CROWN

It had only been possible to win what we now call the Treble but what was then known as the Triple Crown from season 1946–47, which was the fi rst campaign in which the then new Scottish League Cup was in competition. Rangers under Bill Struth achieved this remarkable feat in 1949, at only the third time of asking. But, amazingly to modern minds, it was only when the Scottish Championship had already been secured to take its place inside the Ibrox Trophy Room alongside the League Cup and when Rangers had reached the Scottish Cup Final that the realisation of what the Ibrox club stood on the brink of achieving dawned on those inside the dressing room.

One man who remembered it all with crystal clear recall when I spoke to him forty years after the event was the man who became the fi rst captain to hoist all three trophies aloft in the one campaign, Jock ‘Tiger’ Shaw. Shaw was the embodiment of the Bill Struth mantra. He was tough and looked tough. In fact, Tiger Shaw appeared as though he had been hewn from the very coalface which he worked on as a miner when, as a young and up-and-coming left-back, he played for Airdrie. Eleven years before Shaw reached the pinnacle of his career, when Rangers beat Clyde in the 1949 Scottish Cup Final to clinch the Triple

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STRUTH

2

Crown, the defender had arrived at Ibrox, the subject of a typical Struth swoop.

Shaw said, ‘I had been with Airdrie as a regular fi rst-team player for fi ve years. It was part-time football and I worked down the pits in Lanarkshire. But when I was told that Rangers wanted to sign me, it meant an escape from the pits so I didn’t take much convincing that it was going to be the right move for me. But if I had needed anything to convince me it came when I arrived at Ibrox and went to be introduced to Mr Struth in his offi ce at the top of the Marble Stairs. I had played at Ibrox for Airdrie a few times, but this was the fi rst time I had ever climbed those stairs and looked around to see how grand everything was, especially compared to Broomfi eld.

‘However, when I met the manager, what he told me made a big impression on me and made me feel a very special person. He told me he was going to sign me, not only to be his left-back, but also to be the new captain of Rangers. He told me that such a position was a great honour and that he had every faith in me conducting myself in the right manner off the fi eld and also of being the leader on the park.

‘I remember he made it clear to me what would be expected in terms of me setting an example, and he also said that he had been looking for a new captain to replace Davie Meiklejohn, who had retired a few years earlier. The very fact of being mentioned in the same breath as Meek made me grow a few inches. He had been the giant of Scottish football when I was growing up in the 1920s and when I started playing in the early ’30s. The very notion of me, a laddie from Lanarkshire, being chosen by Bill Struth to replace Davie Meiklejohn was quite something for me to think about.’

It is a story which perfectly illustrates the way Bill Struth worked and the way his managerial mind thought. Today the

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THE TRIPLE CROWN

3

sports psychologists would no doubt talk about mind games and trying to gain an extra edge. Struth, despite those who claim he was a man of his time, displayed traits and insights which actually placed him ahead of his time. His introduction to Ibrox of Tiger Shaw was just one such trait and Struth’s reading of the measure of the man’s character he was signing and handing the captaincy to was such that he knew, far from inhibiting Shaw being told he was being signed to replace such a legend as Meiklejohn, would only serve to make the new skipper all the more confi dent in his ability to succeed. As the man himself told me forty years on from his fi rst day as a Ranger, ‘If Bill Struth said it was so then that is exactly what it was going to be.’ Another example of how astute Struth was is that although Shaw was then a mature player of twenty-fi ve he had spent the previous three seasons with Airdrie in the old Second Division.

But one of the Ibrox greats of the era, Bob McPhail, who had also started his career with Airdrie and who was then coming to the end of his playing days, still had plenty of friends at Broomfi eld and they spoke highly of the left-back. McPhail mentioned this to the Rangers manager and Struth, as well as having the player watched, made his customary enquiries as to what sort of man he was. Was he the sort Bill Struth wanted as a Ranger? In the case of Shaw, it was soon apparent that he fulfi lled every one of Struth’s demanding criteria. Of course, at that time the new left-back and just installed captain of Rangers was simply Jock Shaw, which is all he had ever been known as during his fi ve impressive years with Airdrie.

He said, ‘It was a strange thing, but nobody called me anything other than Jock. I was christened John, but in Lanarkshire in those days, John soon becomes Jock, but that just as soon changed to Tiger when that is what the Rangers supporters started calling me during my debut. After I signed for Rangers I hardly had time

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4

to think about anything because Rangers were due to take part in the big glamour clash of the time, the annual match against the best team in England, which was Arsenal. These games were billed as the Championship of Britain and got big crowds.

‘I was up against Arsenal’s new right-winger that night, a Welsh international called Bryn Jones. The Gunners had paid £14,000 for him and that was a very big fee in 1938. I think Rangers paid £2,000 for me.’

Regardless of the disparity in transfer fees, there was only one winner in the head-to-head contest. Shaw tamed Jones. An eighteen-year-old who was to become one of the greatest Rangers of all time, Willie Waddell, also making his Rangers debut, scored the only goal of the game but it was the new captain who created the biggest buzz. Shaw, more than one spectator remarked, not only mastered Bryn Jones but he did so by tackling like a tiger. The game had only just moved into the second half when the crowd could be heard urging Tiger to tackle Jones. From that day on John Shaw, who became Jock Shaw, was Tiger Shaw for the rest of his career and beyond.

And what a career Shaw had, as Bill Struth’s shrewdness was once again underlined. Tiger Shaw played 238 times for Rangers, plus 289 wartime appearances, winning four titles, three Scottish Cups, two League Cups, plus six wartime Southern League titles, one wartime Regional League, the Scottish Emergency War Cup, Four Southern League Cups, the Summer Cup, the Victory Cup and four Scotland caps. He was also a mainstay in the Iron Curtain team of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the last truly great side of the many built by Struth. It was a team which was stout and resolute in defence and which could swing into attack with pace, breaking on the wings, particularly Waddell on the right, feeding on long diagonal passes to create the chances for bustling centre-forward Willie Thornton. And it relied on

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THE TRIPLE CROWN

5

defenders defending. There was no scope for full-backs to go rampaging forward in the modern way. While today a full-back is often chosen for his attacking skills, while defensive defi ciencies are overlooked, when Tiger Shaw played a full-back’s only job was to put the opposing winger in his back pocket. Which is why, despite his long career as a Rangers player, he scored a mere three goals.

It was towards the end of that long career when he was, in fact, thirty-six years old that Tiger Shaw enjoyed his supreme skipper’s moment at the end of the Scottish Cup Final win. Rangers went into the Scottish Cup Final against Clyde at Hampden on 23 April 1949, with the Scottish League Cup already won and the Championship all but actually clinched. An inevitable win over already-relegated Albion Rovers the following week would mean Rangers could not be caught by Dundee. Rangers did get that win, beating Albion Rovers 4–1, which meant that, technically, the Triple Crown could not be won by Rangers by beating Clyde in the Scottish Cup Final. But Bill Struth knew the signifi cance of the occasion, something Shaw made clear.

He said, ‘During that spell we had been dominating and we had so many really great players in the team that it was natural for us to think that we could win everything going. But it was only in the week before the Scottish Cup Final that we realised we could now do something which had never been done before. Struth made that clear to us a few days before the game at Hampden when he spoke about the opportunity we had to make history and we had all seen stuff in the newspapers going on about the Triple Crown.’

The reference to what later became known as The Treble was clearly a straight lift from Rugby Union and the old Five Nations Championship, which included the four Home Nations, plus France. Any of the Home Nations which could overcome the

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6

other three in any one season was said to have won The Triple Crown.

Rangers began their defence of the Scottish Cup, which had been won when they beat Morton 1–0 in the previous season’s fi nal, by seeing off Elgin City 6–1 at Ibrox in January. They followed that by going to Motherwell and winning 3–0 and were then drawn at home to Partick Thistle, who were seen off 4–0, before a semi-fi nal against East Fife.

Shaw said, ‘There was a special feel to that match, for East Fife were managed by Scot Symon and he and old Struth had been close when Scot played at Ibrox, or at least as close as any player ever got to the old man. But we were good that day and Willie Thornton got a hat-trick and we won 3–0.’

Bill Struth must have known the signifi cance of his name being the fi rst into the record books of managers who had won the new clean sweep of Scottish football’s Honours Three. Four times before in his career as Rangers manager, Bill Struth had steered the club to the Scottish League Championship and Scottish Cup Double, then considered to be a phenomenal feat. However, two years earlier, a 2–0 replay defeat to Hibernian at Easter Road in the second round of the Scottish Cup had put paid to any hopes he had of winning the fi rst- ever Triple Crown which was up for grabs. That was a real disappointment to Struth, as the League Cup had been captured and the title was later clinched.

By the time Rangers went into the 1949 Scottish Cup Final with the League Cup won and the title virtually assured, the old man, as his players referred to him behind his back, was in his seventy-fi fth year. In recent times fans have become used to seeing managers in their seventies, such as Sir Bobby Robson and Sir Alex Ferguson, but more than half a century ago life expectancy was not as high as it is in the second decade of the twenty-fi rst century and Struth was viewed by many as not merely the old

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THE TRIPLE CROWN

7

man, but as a very old man, indeed. It was also around this time that his health was starting to fail.

But as was the way of Scottish men of Struth’s generation, he kept his thoughts to himself and we do not have any record of how he viewed himself, or of how many other opportunities he may have thought would come along for him to make history of being the fi rst manager ever to win the clean sweep of all three trophies. Certainly he gave no hint to even his closest confi dant within the dressing room, his skipper, Tiger Shaw, for Shaw said, ‘To us, the old man was indestructible and would go on forever.’ What we do know though is that three years earlier Bill Struth had been offered the chance by chairman Jimmy Bowie to step down, name his successor and become a director. Struth resisted with such a passion that eventually it was Bowie who was unseated from the chairmanship. But whether or not that made Bill Struth aware of his managerial mortality, we do not know, but as far as Tiger Shaw – by then a gnarled thirty-six-year-old veteran – was concerned, inside the Ibrox dressing room there was no real thought of the old man stepping down.

Shaw said, ‘The Final was against a Clyde side which had struggled near the bottom of the table and which just managed to avoid relegation, but they raised their game against us and we had one of those days when everything we did was just a wee bit off.’

The thing was that even when things were ‘a wee bit off,’ as Shaw said, for the Rangers of Bill Struth there was always still enough in the team’s reserve of spirit to prevail, and so it proved with two George Young penalties and goals from Eddie Rutherford and Billy Williamson, giving Rangers a 4–1 triumph. Of course, there was no cavorting with his players on the pitch by Bill Struth to celebrate, as is the modern manager’s way, but the quiet pride the manager must have taken in his team’s

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8

achievement would have been considerable. Scottish football was changing and with the arrival of a third tournament, the Scottish League Cup, the demands on Rangers to continue to dominate were considerably increased.

However, Bill Struth, a man in his mid-seventies and starting to suffer the fi rst signs of ill health brought on by advancing years, had struck another historic blow on behalf of his beloved Rangers. And the man he had plucked from Second Division Airdrie for just £2,000 eleven years before and picked to be the captain to succeed the seemingly irreplaceable Davie Meiklejohn, Tiger Shaw, had shown by his durability just what great foresight and knowledge of men Struth possessed.

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9

2

BEGINNINGS AND TRAGEDIES

THE VERY fi rst thing there is to learn about the life and times of Bill Struth is that he did not take his fi rst breath as a newborn baby in the same year in which most folk believe he was born. In fact, the year of his birth on the tombstone in Glasgow’s Craigton Cemetery which stands sentinel over the grave he shares with his wife Catherine is wrong. It gives the year of Bill Struth’s birth as being 1875. The fact is I have seen a copy of his birth certifi cate and it registers the birth of William Struth as having taken place on 16 June 1876 at 10.30pm at 20, Balfour Street, Leith. The proud parents were William Struth, described as a journeyman mason, and Isabella Struth, née Cunnigham. The birth was registered at South Leith on 27 June 1876. Two myths are thus put to bed by this information, the fi rst being that Bill Struth was born in 1875, when his birthday was 16 June 1876. The second is that the boy who grew up to be Bill Struth, manager of Rangers, was a Fifer. This is due to the fact that the family moved to Milnathort, which is actually in Kinross-shire, when he was still a toddler and it was there he spent his early schoolboy years before his father’s search for work took the family back to Edinburgh.

It was after the move back to Edinburgh, where his parents had their roots, that Bill Struth followed in his father’s footsteps by serving his apprenticeship as a stonemason. But his passion was

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for running. Bill Struth soon discovered that he was fast and had vast reserves of physical endurance. In that respect, he was much similar in character to the greatest runner of the early part of the twentieth century, Olympic gold medal winner Eric Liddell, a man with whom Struth became friends in the 1920s and ’30s when the Scottish missionary became a frequent visitor to Ibrox.

However, where Bill Struth differed from Eric Liddell was in his approach to running. The young Bill Struth believed that as he clearly had a talent, it was a talent for which he should be paid. Not for him the Corinthian ideal of doing it just for the glory. Struth became a professional runner. It was a mantra by which he lived his life and the belief that sporting excellence should bring with it fi nancial rewards led him to ensuring that those who played for him, the players who made Struth’s Rangers the best in Britain, were also the best-paid footballers in Britain.

In the Victorian era, it was normal for men and women to marry much younger than they do now. The daughter of one of his father’s workmates, Catherine, had caught his eye. She was the same age as him and was pretty and vivacious and both families came from similar backgrounds. Therefore, when his apprenticeship was completed and he qualifi ed for a full journeyman’s wage, Bill Struth and Catherine were married in Edinburgh in 1898. It had been Bill Struth’s fervent wish that the couple would have children, and given his aptitude for sport, it seems likely Struth’s hopes were for a boy so that he could pass on his passion and coach a son in running. Alas, it was not to be. They soon discovered they could not have children. This was the fi rst real tragedy to strike Bill Struth. But he was a working-class Scottish Presbyterian and his values and bearing were those of the epoch of the British Empire in the Victorian era. He kept his painful thoughts to himself.

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As the years went by, though, Bill and Catherine still yearned for a family and the records show that after they moved to Glasgow they fostered a baby boy and christened him William J. Struth. Bill and Catherine lavished their love on the baby, who grew up and married, and it is what happened later which led to a second tragedy, one which was to lead to a fateful consequence. When Bill Junior married, there was much anticipation inside Bill and Catherine’s home at 193 Copland Road, just a goal-kick from Ibrox Stadium, that their foster son would provide them with a grandchild. Those hopes were dashed when the couple’s fi rstborn, Wilma, born on 12 November 1938, died within an hour of her birth. It says a great deal of the sort of stoicism which was part of Bill Struth’s character that this did not outwardly affect the way he went about managing Rangers. But how it affected Catherine is another matter. She had not borne the news that she could not give Struth a child well, and although she was a doting mother to the couple’s foster son, she retreated into herself, despite Bill Struth’s efforts to lift her spirits.

One of Struth’s great loves as a pastime was singing. He loved a sing-song and this was a time before televisions, when every house had a piano and there was always someone who could play it. Struth took great delight in inviting his trainer, Arthur Dixon, and his captain, Davie Meiklejohn, and other close confi dants to his home every Sunday night and they gathered around the piano for a sing-song. After a win by Rangers on the Saturday – which happened most weeks – the singing was loud and lusty, with the supporters’ favourite of the era, the old Scots ballad, ‘The Bonny Wells O’ Wearie’, a particular favourite of Struth.

However, the fact is Catherine was suffering from what nowadays would be recognised as depression and treated with medication and counselling. The 1930s were less enlightened

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times and when they morphed into the 1940s, with Britain standing alone in the way of Nazi Germany’s bid for world domination, Catherine must have felt even more alone and afraid. Perhaps Bill Struth thought that all would be well when a granddaughter, Ann Elizabeth Struth, was born as a healthy baby on 15 August 1940. But Catherine continued to retreat into herself and there is no telling what fears and worries tormented her mind as, in 1941, the Nazi bombs obliterated Clydebank, on the bank of the River Clyde across from the Struth home. And with Christmas 1941 approaching, dark clouds settled over Bill Struth’s wife and she took her own life. Struth must have been utterly devastated by the loss of his life’s companion, someone he had known for almost fi fty years, since they were both starry-eyed teenagers, walking side by side, but never hand in hand and under the watchful eye of a chaperone.

Struth, of course, hid his emotions well and threw himself even more into the day-to-day running of Rangers, but according to the man who knew him the best, someone who had played for him and then become his trusted right-hand man as Rangers’ trainer, Arthur Dixon, something, some spark, went out of Bill Struth and never returned.

Dixon said, ‘We both arrived at Ibrox in 1914 and he was my trainer when I signed for Rangers from Oldham. He was strict, but he was a man of great humanity and every Sunday, before his wife died, we would gather at his home in Copland Road and group round the piano for a sing-song. He fancied himself as a bit of a singer and he had a decent baritone voice. That stopped when Catherine died and he was never quite the same man.’

But what about the man Bill Struth was when he courted Catherine? What sort of young man was this hard-working stonemason who spent every weekend travelling the length and breadth of Britain in search of not just glory, but prize money on

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the professional running circuit in order that he could build a comfortable home for his bride-to-be? Well, if the stories Struth later regaled Arthur Dixon with are any guide, then the young Struth was something of a rapscallion. Not quite a rascal, but certainly a young man who got up to the same sort of things many young men get up to before settling down.

One Struth story was of the time he went to run in Wales at a sports meeting. Struth was a middle-distance runner and this was what provided cover for him to pull off a money-making trick. What happened, in Struth’s own words, was, ‘I often chuckle when I look back and remember one adventure I had when I went to run at a meeting in Porthcawl in Wales. When I got there it was still early morning and was still pitch dark. I was due to run in a race later that day and because I had hardly any money I didn’t look for any lodgings. My plan was to win the prize money and use some of it for my train fare home, for without the prize money I could not afford the train ticket.

‘So, I found where the park was and found the competitors’ tent, which was already pitched, and as I was tired I lay down for a sleep. When I awoke it had rained and I was drenched, but I was fi t and that meant nothing to me. But when it came to the race, the mark they gave me, where I was to start from, made winning an impossible task for me. Those were tough days and professional racing was not for a weakling. I knew I could not win off the mark, but I knew I had to do it somehow, so, as we lined up, I slipped my number from back to my front and eased my way along an avenue of spectators as though I was chatting, pretending I was not a competitor. By doing that I gained a vital twenty yards and when the starting pistol barked I tore away.

‘The fi nishing post was out of sight of the starter, so when I breasted the tape and was handed a voucher which I was told I could cash at the local bank, I dashed back to the tent, gathered

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up my clothes and, still in my running gear, made for the bank at top speed. I knew there was a protest raging behind me and that I had to get out of Porthcawl fast. But I was in luck, for even though the bank clerk looked astonished at the sight of me in my running clothes, he didn’t waste any time in cashing the voucher.

‘Then I had another race on my hands, as I had to beat the clock and get to the station and get a train. When I got there the train had just started to steam out, but I managed to jump on it. Mind you, I had no idea of where it was going. We did get up to all sorts in professional racing in those days.’

But Struth also recalled, ‘Years afterwards, I sent the same sports meeting a donation of ten times the fi ver I had won that day.

‘There was also a meeting in the north of England where I did not win anything and again had no money for the train. So every time the ticket collector came around, I opened the train door, closed it behind me, ducked down below the window and hung on, crouching on the running board of the carriage.’

Those two tales demolish the idea that Bill Struth was some sort of po-faced tyrant. In fact, some of his more outlandish exploits on the professional running circuit made him more than prepared to see behind any scams any of his players tried to pull on him, and it is entirely reasonable to assume that the rapscallion which remained part of Bill Struth’s make-up helped him to understand that great rapscallion who he signed for Rangers twice, Torry Gillick. Maybe Bill Struth saw something of his young self in Gillick and indulged him because of that.

During his time on the tracks of Britain, Bill Struth took an interest in his own body and watched for signs of any weakness in opponents. He became a self-taught student, and although he had no formal physiotherapy training or qualifi cations, he had a sharp eye and a keen brain. As well as professional running, Bill

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Struth started to take an interest in professional football, which was establishing itself as the spectator sport for the masses in those early years of the twentieth century.

He took a liking to Heart of Midlothian, attracted by their romantic Scottish name and the fact that some of his friends supported Hearts. Bill Struth, though, being Bill Struth, wanted to be more than a mere spectator. He wanted to put what he had learned about sporting injuries and their treatment to good use and also to learn more. So, he was soon helping to train Hearts. Now in his thirties, Struth knew his running days were behind him. He could no longer add to his income as a stonemason with prize money from the track, so when the opportunity to move to Glasgow and become the trainer of Clyde presented itself in 1908, he took it. Bill Struth had taken his fi rst major step in becoming the most famous Ranger ever.

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3

BECOMING A RANGER

BILL STRUTH turned down the fi rst offer made by manager William Wilton for him to quit Clyde and become Rangers trainer. However, far from being upset and treating Struth’s refusal to accept the job offer from Rangers, which was clearly a career advancement for Struth, as a snub, Wilton was even more favourably disposed towards Bill Struth. For when Wilton made the initial approach to Struth a couple of years before the Clyde trainer fi nally did leave Shawfi eld for Ibrox, Rangers already had a trainer, the long-serving Jimmy Wilson. And when Wilton asked Struth if he would be interested in moving to Rangers, it was his reasons for turning down the offer which made Wilton even more determined to get him and even more convinced that Bill Struth, though still with Clyde, had shown all of the characteristics the fi rst Rangers manager looked for in a Ranger.

Struth told Wilton that much as he would love to become Rangers trainer, the club already had somebody in that position and that he could not entertain becoming involved in going behind Jimmy Wilson’s back and taking his job away from him. In sticking to such a point of principle, Bill Struth showed that he was a man of honour, a man of considerable depth and substance. In short, the sort of man he would later spend the best part of his

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life recruiting to make Rangers the most successful football club in the world, a status they retain to this day.

One of the things which had attracted Wilton to Struth was that his background in athletics, as a runner and as someone who had also studied the rudiments of physiotherapy, meant he was a similar character to the current trainer, Jimmy Wilson, whose methods had always ensured that Rangers were the fi ttest and best-prepared team in the land. But Wilton, with his links stretching back to the days of the Gallant Pioneers, had a lust for progress and his observations told him that Wilson’s methods, like the man, were growing old.

Across the city, with one foot in Glasgow and another in the Royal Burgh of Rutherglen, was the Shawfi eld home of Clyde, and despite modest means and players, the team was doing well. In season 1911–12, Clyde fi nished third top of the old First Division, a mere three points – in the days of two points for a win – behind runners-up Celtic, with William Wilton’s champions, six clear of their Old Firm rivals. That was when Wilton fi rst made his move for Struth and it was that summer when Struth showed his mettle as a man by refusing the opportunity to take Jimmy Wilson’s job away from him.

What happened, however, tells us more about the way Rangers were run at the time, even before Struth’s stern infl uence was brought to bear on the Ibrox club. And it gives lie to the belief which had been fostered that Wilton was some sort of benign, even avuncular, presence. He was very far from that, as the ten titles and four Scottish Cup triumphs during his twenty-one years in charge testify. For to understand the Rangers which Bill Struth fi nally moved to just days before the guns of August rumbled to signal the start of the Great War and to gain a complete comprehension of the way Struth worked, fi rst as a trainer and then manager, it is vitally important to know what kind of man

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William Wilton was. What Struth, in fact, did when he took over from Wilton, was to hone the style set by the club’s fi rst ever manager. And that style, even when Struth was still at Clyde, was that Rangers players should always look the part. That they should always have a certain dash about them. Even off the fi eld.

In the excellent Growing With Glory, written by the late Ian Pebbles and published to coincide with the Rangers Centenary, a fan, Alex Irvine, who had been a boy during the years before the Great War, recalled being outside Ibrox just before an Old Firm game and seeing some Celtic players, including the top star of the team, Jimmy Quinn, arriving wearing the badge of the Glasgow working man, a cloth bunnet, while smoking clay pipes. However, when the Rangers players arrived, led by Jimmy Bowie, who would later become Rangers chairman, they were wearing bowler hats or soft hats and they all carried furled umbrellas. It is a small point, but what it does is illustrate that the dress code of Rangers players on and off the fi eld, long believed to have been instigated by Bill Struth, was actually fi rst put in place by William Wilton before Struth arrived at Ibrox.

Wilton’s perception in 1912 that Rangers were no longer the fi ttest and fastest team in Scotland, showed his insight. Jimmy Wilson’s health was starting to fail and, although Rangers won the championship again in 1912–13, they faltered the following year, fi nishing second. By which time the trainer, Jimmy Wilson, succumbed to illness and passed away.

This time, with a clear vacancy available, Bill Struth needed no further urging, no time to think things over, and when William Wilton went back to Clyde and offered their trainer the chance to join him at Ibrox, Struth readily accepted.

Unlike in the Second World War, during which the whole population was effectively mobilised in the fi ght against Hitler, with football regionalised, the Great War and the struggle against

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the Kaiser, was almost exclusively confi ned to the battlefi elds and football continued. Struth, though, did his bit when a hospital for wounded soldiers was set up in nearby Bellahouston Park, and the new Rangers physio divided his time between his job training Rangers players and attending to their injuries and his voluntary war work, helping with soldiers who had suffered such devastating wounds on the Western Front.

It must have been a proud day for him and for William Wilton, who had also put in some gruelling shifts helping the war wounded, when Ibrox was chosen as the venue for King George V to visit and invest many of Britain’s war heroes with their richly deserved decorations, their medals for bravery. What Struth saw of the wreckages of human beings who returned from the horrors of the Western Front and who Struth did his best to make whole again must have had a long-lasting effect on him, and it is reasonable to assume this is what made Bill Struth believe injured footballers could, as they would today, crash through the pain barrier.

Back at Ibrox during those six seasons when Struth was the trainer, the balance of power swung away from Rangers to Parkhead, with a transition taking place in the Rangers dressing room. New faces started to arrive and fi nd their feet. Men whose names would ring down the years such as Tommy Cairns, Andy Cunningham, Sandy Archibald, Tommy Muirhead and fi nally, the man many who saw him believe was Rangers’ greatest ever player and captain, Davie Meiklejohn.

Celtic had won the Scottish title for the fi rst three years of the First World War, but gradually the new arrivals at Ibrox gelled and the Championship was regained in 1917–18, before Celtic took the championship again the following campaign, only for Rangers to regain their crown again in season 1919–20. It is obvious during that period that William Wilton, the manager,

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born in 1865 and the older man by a decade and Bill Struth, the trainer, made a good team. They worked well together and it is clear from the way Tommy Muirhead arrived at Ibrox that Struth, though subordinate to Wilton, was already exercising his skill in spotting a player and recruiting him for Rangers. This was illustrated again in the Centenary book Growing With Glory, when Muirhead was interviewed and described the day he became a Ranger.

Muirhead said, ‘During season 1916–17 I was in the Army and on amateur forms with Hibernian and, as I was stationed in Dunfermline at the time, I was able to play regularly for Hibs. Towards the end of that season I was chosen to play for the Army in a representative game and the Rangers player, Scott Duncan, was also picked to play for the Army.

‘At the time I was just a teenager and got a bit of a shock when, after the game, Scott left quickly and then came back into the dressing room with a distinguished-looking older man and introduced him as Mr Struth, the Rangers trainer. We talked for a few minutes or so and I thought no more about it. A couple of weeks later another man visited me at the Army camp in Dunfermline. It was the Rangers manager, William Wilton, and he asked me to sign for Rangers. As an amateur I was free to do so and didn’t need much persuading.’

The way Muirhead was recruited gives us the earliest insight into the way Bill Struth went about his business of ensuring the very best talent in Scotland found its way to Ibrox. Scott Duncan, a long-serving Ranger from the early years of the twentieth century, weighed up the young Muirhead as a player and told Bill Struth about him. Struth then watched the youngster play, looking not so much at his technical skills as the way he conducted himself. Struth then made himself known to the teenager, again weighing his character up, before making other enquiries about

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Front cover pictures © EMPICS / PA ImagesAuthor photograph © Willie Vass Designed by stuartpolsondesign.com

Now in his sixties, DAVID LEGGAT has retired from a career in newspapers that began when he joined the Glasgow Evening Times in March 1966. Among the papers he has worked for on both sides of the border are the Birmingham Evening Mail; the Daily Express; the Sunday People, covering the West Midlands; the Sunday People, Scottish edition (twice); the Sunday Mail, Scotland on Sunday; the Scottish Daily Express; and finally as a freelance with the Scottish Sunday Express.

As well as having a passion for football in general and Rangers in particular, David loves the music of the Great American Songbook, Porter, the Gershwins, Rogers and Hart, Johnny Mercer, etc, particularly when performed by Sinatra, Lady Day, Ella and Tony Bennett, but has a soft spot for many of the more modern interpretations, particularly those by the Canadian singer-pianist, Diana Krall.

He says he would love to have been Frank Sinatra, Jim Baxter or Winston Churchill. Or better still, have had a voice like Francis Albert’s, a left foot like Slim Jim’s and a vocabulary to match Churchill’s.

STRUTHBill Struth was one of the most successful, outstanding and charismatic managers in football history. He won an astonishing eighteen league championships, ten Scottish Cups and two League Cups with Rangers, as well as being the visionary behind the building of the magnificent Main Stand at Ibrox, which now bears his name. His career with Rangers spanned an incredible forty-two years, beginning as Rangers trainer in 1914 and only ending when he died in 1956.

Now, in Struth, the full story of his remarkable life is revealed for the first time, from his beginnings as a champion runner, to his first days at Rangers and his incredible time as manager from 1920 to 1954. Included too are interviews with some of the legendary stars who he managed, such as Bob McPhail, Tiger Shaw, Willie Waddell and Willie Thornton. And there are fascinating insights into his private life, his wife’s tragic suicide and the personal battles he fought later on.

Struth: The Story of an Ibrox Legend is a compelling account of a unique man who kept his private life strictly off limits while living in the full glare of the public eye as one of football’s most successful and revered figures.

B+W trimmed size 226 x 155mm HB