Several years ago, while looking for a completely unrelated thing, I found photos of Airdrie’s old Broomfield stadium (they are on pages 26 and 27 of the book) and was reminded of being in the main stand with my father in 1970 or ’71. I didn’t do anything about the photos at the time, but remembered them.
In 2017, frightened for my job as a production editor in the slow decline of newspapers, I went to my bosses at DC Thomson and suggested a department making books out of archive material. The company said: “OK, we’ll give your idea a go” and gave me time, a budget, and all the backing I needed. The first book I did was about household tips from the 1950s! How to get furniture dents out of carpets, how to stop flies entering your house, how to make tea towels last five times as long.
It did very well, your ma would love it! Now I have my own department creating books. The next title was Lifted Over The Turnstiles, which grew from those pix of Broomfield to a 260-page book. The archive I have to work with is incredible. Hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of Scottish sport images from the past 150 years.
Some are photos, most are negatives. Some have a lot of information attached, others have none. Sometimes they are painstakingly catalogued, sometimes you find Cappielow listed under “Gourock & district street scenes 1954-58”. You never know what you’ll find. The cover of Celtic in the Black & White Era is a photo of Hampden In The Sun, that I found in a box that was marked only as “1957-58: B117”. You never know what you’ll find. It’s part of what makes the job so interesting.
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I’ve been a journalist for 41 years, but although fitba daft, I was never a sports journalist. I was on the news desk, chief sub-editor, news editor, production editor. I still write a weekly column for a newspaper on spelling and grammar — mostly complaining about apostrophe usage. Over the years, I made myself an expert on old newspapers, old photos, old match reports. I would go to the file rooms and look at ancient newspapers several times a week, for several decades. It’s a life-long hobby, I am the world’s foremost expert on old Sunday Posts (not that anyone else wants the title!) and it has served me very well now I create books.
I know where to look and (though it is strange to say) how to look. If you want a description of how teams played in the 1920s, read their match reports from every week of the season. Read the feature articles, taking note of who the manager praises and why praise is being given.
You have to think like they were thinking, you have to ask yourself why players are described as “clever” or “off colour”. You have to look closely at the photos and decipher what it is you’re seeing. Look at all parts of the photo, why the crowd is shouting, whether a player in a training photo looks like he is (or isn’t) trying really hard, who is the manager shouting at? All the clues add up.
The archive I work with has quirks. Sometimes you look through the index for a player’s name. Sometimes they will be filed using the name of the game: “East Fife v. Celtic”. Sometimes they are in packets listed only as: “Football actions 1962”. A photo of Celtic Park might be listed under “General scenes, Glasgow (not factories)”.
The people doing the filing might not have cared a thing for football. They were often office girls who wouldn’t know a rugby ball from a football. So sourcing the photos is an arcane process, closer to intuition than science. And often just luck. But that’s what makes the job so interesting. You might find a packet full of school sports days that, somehow, also contains three or four photos of the 1965 Scottish Cup Final.
Some photos you look at and just say “Wow”. Sometimes you find a photo of a laddie doing some welding work and it turns out to be Jimmy Johnstone. I have a dream that one day I will find a packet of photos labelled “general fishing scenes” (or some such) and it will turn out to be Jimmy in his rowing boat. Other times, you know the significance of a game, or a goal, and you just know that someone, somewhere will look at it and say: “I was there, I was in The Jungle. I remember it as if it was yesterday”.
My biggest ambition is for some Celtic supporter to look through the book and come across a photo that makes them think: “I was with my long-gone father/grandfather/uncle. What a day that was. What a game. What times we had.” These books are shamelessly about nostalgia for the games, the places you went to 50 years ago, which leads on to thoughts of who you were with, and whatever happened to them. Football is the background to our lives. The books recapture time.
Finding a never-before-seen photo of a time, or a game, is like having something unlocked in your memory. I am continually told that the books have been bought as gifts for the sort of difficult-to-buy-for bloke who usually gets a new jumper or socks at Christmas — then they spend four hours looking through the book and have to be dragged to the table to eat their turkey and trimmings. I greatly enjoy these stories, I’m one of those old football blokes who would get lost in old photos.
It was an easy choice. There is so much fantastic material, so many great characters to find photos of. But I can explain this best by giving an example. If anyone is thinking of buying this book, go pick it up in a shop and turn to the Hampden In The Sun chapter, pages 40 to 57. Those photos are why this book was published. I’m going to make a huge claim: I’ve spent a lifetime looking at football photos and those are the best I’ve ever seen. Hampden looks incredible. It is like an epic movie set — Ben Hur, or the like.
The low-angle images of Dickie Beattie set against the sun breaking through clouds are incredible. The photographer could have spent weeks trying for a better angle, a better composition of a photo, and not done any better. These photos belong in an exhibition that doesn’t merely deal with football but talks of the evolution of sports photography. I’ve never seen photos that take my breath away quite like them. I intend to contact the club now the book has been published and offer them the high-resolution files in the hope that they might find them useful, or might even find a place for them on a wall somewhere within Celtic Park. I urge you, have a look at these photos. If you’ve seen better, then please let me know.
Putting together a book of great Celtic photos was easy, and yet very difficult. Easy because there are plenty of photos to choose from. The wily Jock Stein realised early in his managerial career that it would benefit his club if he kept a high profile in the media. The great man fed stories to reporters, knowing that they always thirsted after good copy. To compliment these stories Jock allowed, and encouraged, photographers to take photos of his players behind the scenes, at training, even in their own homes. So lots of candid photos are held in the “cave of wonders” that is the DC Thomson archive.
And difficult because Celtic became, as per Jock’s plan, a much-photographed team. This was great for supporters, but not so great for an author trying to find never-before-seen old photos 50 years later.
So it took a lot of work. There were more, indeed many more, photos that could have been used. But they had been seen before — some Celtic images are famous and have been endlessly featured in newspapers, books and on websites. However, the rare gems of never-before-seen photos do exist. And that’s what is in these books. It took a lot of research and a lot of hard work, but for any supporter of Celtic there are images here that won’t have been seen. Jinky at his welding job, Tommy Gemmell out hunting, Gil Heron’s debut for the club, John Thomson at home with his family and fiancée — and photos of great games that have lain hidden.
This is, by any measure, a highly significant addition to the history of the club. You’d have to see to believe the reception the players got after returning from the 1970 Leeds European Cup Semi-Final away leg. You will gaze in wonder at a 15-year-old George Connelly doing keepie-ups. You’ll laugh when you see Jinky’s come-uppance during training at Troon beach.
The biggest jewel, however — an emerald wonder — is the aforementioned collection of photos from the 1957 League Cup Final. They aren’t like other football photos you will have seen before.
There are many good Celtic books. There is an interest and a love of the history and the ethos of the club that runs deep a mong the faithful-through-and-through support. But there has never been a Celtic book like this. There never can be again. This book has material that no other can get close to. It is a unique and fascinating look at a succession of charismatic players — Bertie Peacock, Charlie Tully, Bobby Collins. It is a window on the history of the club that has never been opened before. There are photos here that will fascinate any Celtic supporter, indeed anyone interested in the history of Scottish football.
The foreword is by Marie Clark, daughter of Lisbon Lion John. She talks of her fascination at seeing her father in his youth, in photos that even she has never seen before. She relates how she, and her own daughter, pored over the photos of her mother and father from 1967 and the conversations about her mother’s dislike of hats (yet she is wearing a hat) and the dress she had on in a series of heart-warming shots that show Marie herself as an angelic toddler.
If the book touches the heart of even the players’ families, think what it might do for a supporter who remembers the classic games and players themselves, or who wants to see what it was really like back then
Putting together a book of great Celtic photos was easy, and yet very difficult. Easy because there are plenty of photos to choose from. The wily Jock Stein realised early in his managerial career that it would benefit his club if he kept a high profile in the media. The great man fed stories to reporters, knowing that they always thirsted after good copy. To compliment these stories Jock allowed, and encouraged, photographers to take photos of his players behind the scenes, at training, even in their own homes. So lots of candid photos are held in the “cave of wonders” that is the DC Thomson archive.
And difficult because Celtic became, as per Jock’s plan, a much-photographed team. This was great for supporters, but not so great for an author trying to find never-before-seen old photos 50 years later.
So it took a lot of work. There were more, indeed many more, photos that could have been used. But they had been seen before — some Celtic images are famous and have been endlessly featured in newspapers, books and on websites. However, the rare gems of never-before-seen photos do exist. And that’s what is in these books. It took a lot of research and a lot of hard work, but for any supporter of Celtic there are images here that won’t have been seen. Jinky at his welding job, Tommy Gemmell out hunting, Gil Heron’s debut for the club, John Thomson at home with his family and fiancée — and photos of great games that have lain hidden.
This is, by any measure, a highly significant addition to the history of the club. You’d have to see to believe the reception the players got after returning from the 1970 Leeds European Cup Semi-Final away leg. You will gaze in wonder at a 15-year-old George Connelly doing keepie-ups. You’ll laugh when you see Jinky’s come-uppance during training at Troon beach.
The biggest jewel, however — an emerald wonder — is the aforementioned collection of photos from the 1957 League Cup Final. They aren’t like other football photos you will have seen before.
There are many good Celtic books. There is an interest and a love of the history and the ethos of the club that runs deep a mong the faithful-through-and-through support. But there has never been a Celtic book like this. There never can be again. This book has material that no other can get close to. It is a unique and fascinating look at a succession of charismatic players — Bertie Peacock, Charlie Tully, Bobby Collins. It is a window on the history of the club that has never been opened before. There are photos here that will fascinate any Celtic supporter, indeed anyone interested in the history of Scottish football.
The foreword is by Marie Clark, daughter of Lisbon Lion John. She talks of her fascination at seeing her father in his youth, in photos that even she has never seen before. She relates how she, and her own daughter, pored over the photos of her mother and father from 1967 and the conversations about her mother’s dislike of hats (yet she is wearing a hat) and the dress she had on in a series of heart-warming shots that show Marie herself as an angelic toddler.
If the book touches the heart of even the players’ families, think what it might do for a supporter who remembers the classic games and players themselves, or who wants to see what it was really like back then
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