Scottish Fitba’s Golden Era

In this guest post, James Stephens transports us back to a time when Scottish football wasn’t all about the Old Firm…

Just imagine a brilliant, competitive football world, where the humble clubs could rise, where the mighty clubs could be toppled, where everyone had a chance. Where the stratifying effects of money were minimised by enormous crowds and a balance of power skewed in favour of clubs rather than players; a true sporting meritocracy. Few would claim such a description for Scottish football, over which the Old Firm (Celtic and Rangers) has stood astride with ruthless dominance for more than a century. And yet, from the resumption of football post-World War II until the mid-1960s, this was Scottish football. 

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

For 19 glorious seasons, Scottish football was that foreign country. A country where clubs could rise and fall, where the trophies were shared around, and where there was not an Old Firm duopoly in sight. Yet like so many of the most beautiful things, it was never meant to last.

While the ‘New Firm’ period of the 1980s if often held up as the smashing of the duopoly, in reality, that period saw only saw four titles elude the Old Firm (three times to Aberdeen, once to Dundee Utd). Not to belittle those achievements, which were extraordinary, but it serves as context. For in the years between 1946 and 1965, an astonishing 12 different clubs won at least one major trophy, with seven winning the league championship flag. 

None of this is to say the Old Firm had disappeared, indeed the post-World War II era was something of a golden one for Rangers, who at that time were Scottish football’s undisputed giants; in those 19 seasons of the post-war era, Rangers won 10 Scottish championships, six League Cups and eight Scottish Cups. Rather than diminish this tale however, the strength of that Rangers side makes the achievements of the other clubs all the more noteworthy as they took them on when they were at their strongest. That Rangers team were known for their defence, which was rather topically nicknamed the Iron Curtain. And while a run of trophies like that would be viewed as domination in most other European countries, it was not so in Scotland. 

The Eastern Challenge to the Old Firm

Since the now-defunct Third Lanark (another Glasgow team) won the title in 1903/04, Celtic and Rangers had shared the championship between them for all but one year until the outbreak of World War II (Motherwell in 1931/32) – 35 seasons and 34 Old Firm title wins. It serves only to make the post-war era all the more unique. 

The first challengers to the might of Rangers would come from the east, with both Hibernian and Aberdeen emerging from wartime football in good shape (the Hibernian team that won the wartime Summer Cup featured none other than the great Matt Busby), and in the first season after the resumption, these three sides would go on to contest the trophies with Rangers winning the title, and Hibernian and Aberdeen finishing second and third respectively.

Aberdeen beat Hibernian in the final of the Scottish Cup played in front of 80,000 at Hampden Park (an astonishing crowd of 95,000 watched the second-round match between Rangers and Hibernian at Ibrox), and Aberdeen also contested the final of the League Cup, losing to Rangers. And while The Dons would remain a force, it was to be the rivalry that emerged between Rangers and Hibernian that would come to define the next five seasons. 

The Hibernian team of the post-war years came to be known as the Famous Five, due to the brilliance of their five-man forward line which was renowned for its innovative attacking play; Gordon Smith, Bobby Johnstone, Lawrie Reilly, Eddie Turnbull and Willie Ormond. They are widely regarded as one of the finest ever to emerge from Scotland (and possibly even the UK) and would win three titles in five years between 1948 and 1952. They were the first non-Old Firm team to win back-to-back championships, and remarkably they came to within 1 point (1950) and goal average (1953) of making it five titles in seven years. The Famous Five also defeated both Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur en route to the final of the UK-wide Coronation Cup in 1953, but surprisingly lost to Celtic in the final. 

The Famous Five’s celebrity led to them being invited to participate in the inaugural European Cup in 1955. In so doing, they became the first team from the UK to play in European competition, reaching the semi-finals (by beating Djurgardens and Rot Weiss Essen), where they lost to Stade Reims, inspired by their own greats Just Fontaine, Raymond Kopa and Michel Hidalgo. The Famous Five were sadly denied their moment in history and a stab at Real Madrid, who would go on to win the first of their five consecutive European Cups. Indeed a 2010 article in The Guardian listed Real Madrid v Hibernian in the 1955 European Cup final as second in a list of the six greatest matches that never happened. 

Despite their brilliance, the Famous Five never managed to win a cup competition, and while Rangers continued to win with regularity, other clubs emerged to grab their moment. East Fife, from the small industrial town of Methil on Scotland’s east coast currently play in the third tier of the Scottish league in front of average crowds of 800. Yet they amazingly won the League Cup three times (1947/48, 1949/50, 1953/54), posted consecutive third-placed finishes in 1952 and 1953, and reached the final of the Scottish Cup (1949/50). 

Motherwell, whose eponymous home town was an industrial hotspot in the west of Scotland claimed both the League Cup (50/51) and the Scottish Cup (1952), and Dundee FC, who were then the dominant of the two Dundee clubs, became the first club to retain the League Cup by winning it in 1951/52 and 1952/53, as well as reaching the Scottish Cup final in 1952. 

It was at this point, as the great Hibernian team began to fall away that Celtic made a brief cameo by clinching the league and Scottish Cup double in 1953/54 (they would also win consecutive League Cups in 1956/57 and 1957/58) before Aberdeen and Rangers shared the titles in 1954/55 and 1955/56 respectively. Another Glasgow side, Clyde FC – who currently play in the third tier, in front of average crowds of 900 – emerged to win the Scottish Cup in 1954/55 and again in 1957/58, and Falkirk would also claim the world’s oldest football trophy by winning the Scottish Cup in 1956/57. 

Hearts of Gold

But it was from Edinburgh that the next sustained challenge would come, as Heart of Midlothian picked-up the mantle from their great rivals Hibernian, initially by winning the League Cup in 1954/55 and then the Scottish Cup in 1955/56, defeating Celtic in front of an astonishing 133,000 fans at Hampden.

The Heart of Midlothian team of that era was one of Scottish football’s greatest ever, and their Terrible Trio front line (Jimmy Wardhaugh, Alfie Conn and the great Willie Bauld) would go on to become legends, setting the foundation for what is arguably the single greatest league season ever produced in Scottish football. In winning the title in 1957/58, Hearts set the record for goals scored (132) and for goal difference (+103); they amassed 62 points from a possible 68 and won the league by a remarkable margin of 13 points. 

That side contained many greats, but none more so than Dave Mackay. Mackay grew up near Hearts’ Tynecastle home and fulfilled his boyhood ambition of playing for ‘the Hearts’. He was a colossus of a player and captained that record-breaking side from his position in the midfield where his ability with the ball was matched by his presence. Mackay would famously go on to become a key member of the double-winning Spurs team in 1961, claim the FA Cup on a further two occasions, and the European Cup-Winner’s Cup in 1962/63. Mackay then went on to succeed Brian Clough as manager of Derby County, leading them to the league title in 1974/75, a remarkable career both on and off the pitch. 

Hearts went on to win a further three League Cups (1958/59, 1959/60, 1962/63) and a further league title (1959/60), completing a remarkable trophy haul that only Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen team of the 1980s would surpass outside the Old Firm. 

It is worth noting that a member of Hearts’ 59/60 league winning side was Gordon Smith, the key member of Hibernian’s Famous Five forward line who had been released after suffering one too many injuries; he clearly was not so old that he couldn’t still contribute, but as we shall see, Hearts made the same misjudgment as Hibernian by also releasing him, and he would go on to sign for Dundee. 

St Mirren, from the town of Paisley just outside Glasgow emerged to claim the Scottish Cup in 1958/59, and in what was to prove a portentous moment, a young manager called Jock Stein led his Dunfermline Athletic side to the Scottish Cup in 1961. Dundee again claimed silverware, this time getting their hands on the Championship in the 1961/62 season, as manager Bob Shankly (brother of Bill), led a team featuring another future Tottenham Hotspur great, Alan Gilzean, and which included Gordon Smith, who was by now 38 years old. 

Smith is perhaps the most iconic player of his time, not only because he was the type of jinking winger so emblematic of football in that era, but because of his achievements across Scottish football, none of which were achieved with the Old Firm; he won five league titles with three separate clubs (Hibernian, Hearts and Dundee) a unique feat that will never be repeated. A truly great player, he remains Scottish football’s all-time highest scoring winger (147 goals in 429 games), was capped by Scotland 19 times and was favourably compared to his two English contemporaries, Stanley Mathews and Tom Finney. 

With both Smith and Gilzean in their forward line, Dundee followed up their league championship win with a glorious campaign in the European Cup, reaching the semi-finals before losing out on aggregate to AC Milan. 

Throughout this period Rangers had remained competitive, and they started the sixties by claiming the cup double in season 1961/62, the league and cup double in 1962/63 and the treble in 1963/64, an ominous sign. But there was to be one last hurrah for the other guys, when Kilmarnock managed to claim the title by triumphing in a winner-takes-all final match against Hearts at Tynecastle – their 0-2 victory in Edinburgh was enough to pip Hearts on goal average. As wonderful as that achievement was for Kilmarnock, the most significant moment for the wider game took place at Hampden Park, where the newly installed manager of Celtic, Jock Stein, led the club to its first trophy in seven years by winning the Scottish Cup. His brilliance, and that of the team he quickly assembled at Celtic Park, killed off the post-war era of competitiveness and pluralism. 

Celtic’s domination of the years to follow is well known, and while other clubs would pop-up to claim a cup trophy every few years, Scottish football returned to its natural state of duopoly. Scottish football’s most romantic years were at an end, the idea of East Fife or Clyde winning trophies, or Dundee narrowly losing to AC Milan in the semi-final of the European Cup are now so anachronistic they may as well be from a foreign country, consigned to the past just as jinky, Brylcreemed wingers and five-man forward lines have been. 

As clubs’ power over players was challenged, money become more and more the dominant factor in determining success. The post-war boom faded as the industries that sustained it slowly died, the record crowds that saw every ground bursting at the seams ebbed away, hastened by the decline of the post-WWII spirit of camaraderie and friendly rivalry, and the rise of football tribalism, drunkenness, and violence in the ’60s and ’70s.

As in the decades before Scottish football’s post-war boom, the Old Firm would again dominate utterly; after Kilmarnock’s dramatic last-gasp triumph in 1965, Celtic and Rangers shared the next 14 titles, and in all of the 55 seasons since, 51 of the titles have gone to the Old Firm, including three sequences of nine consecutive triumphs (twice by Celtic, once by Rangers). Scottish football is enslaved by the Old Firm’s dominance, which is what makes those post-war years so important. So many of Scottish football’s greatest stories are contained within; their fleeting nature serves only to make them all the more poignant.