KTF Reviews

Dan Doyle - The Life and Death Of A Wild Rover

Book Author – Marie Rowan

Published by Black and White Publishing

Price – £7.99

Book Review by David Potter

Quite one of the best reads that I have had in recent times is the new book “Dan Doyle - The Life and Death Of A Wild Rover” written by Marie Rowan and published by Black and White Publishing at the agreeable price of £7.99.

Dan Doyle is of course a legend in the early years of Celtic, and this book is a long overdue biography of him. He is described as a “wild rover” and he was quite clearly a bad boy. The foreword is written by Neil Lennon. Is there some significance in that?

Marie Rowan works at Parkhead. She is a tour guide with a long family tradition of supporting Celtic, and her love for the Club shines through this monumental work. Her research has been painstaking and diligent and she has found out all sorts of things about Dan and the early Celts.

Did you know for example that there was at one point a Celtic Cricket Club with J.H. McLaughlan at the helm, that Dan was one of the founder members of the first Players Union, or that carts pulled by dogs was a favoured method of transport in the mining villages in the 1890s? Celtic's team bus was pulled by a pony and if he slipped in the snow, it was an ominous sign. The book teems with all these interesting and revealing asides.

Dan played quoits in his spare time. He also played bowls for Scotland in a game against England organised by the famous cricketer W.G. Grace, and his main weakness seems not to have been drink, as was commonly supposed, but gambling.

His early years were unfortunate, and his death in 1918 was a tragedy. He had unwittingly caused the death of a man while playing for Grimsby, and was much hated by Everton, a journalist called JJB and a few referees, notably an incompetent guy who refereed a friendly between Celtic and Stoke. Why this was so is brilliantly related by Miss Rowan who thinks that Doyle's most famous AWOL (the one that led directly to the disaster at Arthurlie in 1897) was simply caused by over-confidence and an inability to be bothered rather than an illicit relationship with a woman. When he disappeared from the Scotland squad in Liverpool in 1895, it may have been that he was playing billiards.

The book contains some excellent photographs, including several not previously published. There is one of Cathkin Park in its heyday of 1895, and several of Dan in the green and white vertical strips and the knickerbocker trousers of the 1890s.

Doyle was a handsome and charismatic character, and one can see why he was hero-worshipped by our early fans, including the great-grandfather of Miss Rowan who would have felt that her green and white jester's hat was tame in comparison with 1892. They knew how to celebrate then!

It is an excellent and delightful work, with the author (who has already written several Westerns) clearly winning her spurs as a welcome addition to the many writers of Celtic history. We look forward to many more biographies of old Celts in years to come.

In the meantime £7.99 is a small price to pay for some fascinating reading about a man who played his part in shaping Celtic. It is amazing how much Marie Rowan has crammed into 160 pages.

David Potter