KTF Reviews

KEEP THE FAITH'S REVIEW – CELTIC BOOKS FOR THE CELTIC-MINDED CHRISTMAS

David Potter reviews yet another Celtic book as Timdom prepares for Christmas shopping for that special present for that special someone. Needless to say, David concentrates on the Celtic-minded market, so don't expect his appraisal of Rankin or Rowling.

David writes:

HEROES ARE FOREVER

The Life and Times of Celtic Legend Jimmy McGrory

By John Cairney

Mainstream £15.99

“They gave us James McGrory and Paul McStay…” is the beginning of a song now popular with the Celtic fans, and it is perhaps indicative of how great a figure Jimmy McGrory was that he is still sung about, now 70 years after his apogee. Scandalously underused by Scotland (only 7 full “caps”), McGrory scored 550 goals in 15 years for Celtic, and was loved by a whole generation of Celtic fans.

It is not easy to do justice to such a legend, but John Cairney has a jolly good try. Cairney, now resident in New Zealand, is of course well known for his series “This Man Craig” in the 1960s on BBC and for his virtuoso performances on Robbie Burns, to whom he was fortunate enough to bear a certain resemblance.

McGrory is, like Burns, a Scottish legend.

Cairney has delved into McGrory's family history, stressing the Irish ancestry and the shocking poverty of the Garngad in Glasgow when Jimmy was born on April 26 th 1904, some 10 days after Celtic's first goalscoring hero, Jimmy Quinn, scored his famous hat-trick against Rangers in the Scottish Cup Final.

McGrory's mother died young, worn out by poverty and childbearing, and his father met his death in a bizarre accident when he was accidentally hit by a stone while sitting on a park bench! The funeral was on a Saturday morning, and Celtic's manager Maley insisted on Jimmy playing in the afternoon. By the end of that season Jimmy had repaid Maley by scoring the winning goal in the 1925 Scottish Cup Final!

Jimmy was married twice, his first wife being Nona Green of the Green's Playhouse family. This was a happy marriage, although the boy from the Garngad suddenly found himself rich enough to own a car, much to the disapproval of the Manager and Directors of Celtic who considered them too dangerous. Nona died tragically in 1944, then Jimmy married Barbara who outlived him.

McGrory was a man devoid of scandal, and there is a dearth of juicy gossip, although Cairney (and McGrory's family) are at a loss to explain why Jimmy “loaned” Celtic £800 in 1933! In addition, his first marriage is arranged in strange circumstances after Celtic come back from their triumphant 1931 tour of North America. But no real scandal ever attached itself to the gentlemanly Jimmy McGrory.

Cairney makes up for the lack of salaciousness by telling of McGrory's part in the history of Celtic, including the time that Maley despicably tried to con the Celtic daft youngster into going to Arsenal! Characters like Patsy Gallacher, Tommy McInally and the tragic John Thomson live large in this book, and Cairney gives us a good account of how McGrory and Bob McPhail of Rangers created the Hampden Roar with a brilliant goal in 1933.

The end of the Second World War saw Jimmy at Parkhead as Manager, where frankly for 20 years he was a misfit, simply doing what the autocratic Bob Kelly told him to do. But as Cairney says, McGrory signed most of the Lisbon Lions (not Willie Wallace) and remained loved by the Celtic fans until his death in 1982. He had been suffering from dementia caused by too much heading of the heavy ball.

The book's pictures are good, although there are a few mistakes in the captions. The 1937 Celtic team for example contains men called Kennary, Bucham, Craw and McMenenny, who are better known to Celtic historians as Kennaway, Buchan, Crum and McMenemy.

The picture of Jimmy receiving a car is not at Celtic Park – it is surely Rugby Park, Kilmarnock. Ramsay MacDonald met the Scottish team in 1931 (while still Labour Prime Minister and before he disgraced himself by going National), and I suspect that the man at the back of the “factory storeman” picture in Ayrshire during World War 2 is too tall and thin faced to be Jimmy.

But this book is well worth a read, if you like your football heroes. It is a meaty subject, for records and McGrory go hand in hand. In this case there is an admirable and accurate Statistics section compiled by Pat Woods. But there is more to the McGrory legend than that, and Cairney has here done an admirable job.

I grew up loving Jimmy McGrory, for he was my daddy's favourite. Come to think of it, he was everybody's daddy's favourite, was he not?

David Potter