The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872 Read Online Free PDF

club came in 1873, a year still celebrated on the intricate mosaics on either side of the Ibrox Main Stand (opened in 1929) and a date which the club has been happy to accept since the publication of Allan’s The Story of the Rangers in 1923, the first great book on the club’s history. It was published to celebrate its jubilee and opened with: ‘In the summer evenings of 1873 a number of lusty, laughing lads, mere boys some of them, flushed and happy from the exhilaration of a finishing dash with the oars, could be seen hauling their craft ashore on the upper reaches of the River Clyde at Glasgow Green.’ Further evidence for the 1873 inception was provided by Moses McNeil himself, in the only ever newspaper interview with the co-founder which research has uncovered. Significantly, however, his first-person piece was printed in Allan’s own Daily Record in April 1935, 48 hours after Rangers had won the Scottish Cup against Hamilton Accies. The influence of Allan loomed large over the copy, which appeared under McNeil’s byline and a headline stating: ‘When Rangers First Reached the Final.’ McNeil, reminiscing on his career three years before his death at the age of 82, wrote: ‘In the summer of 1873 my brothers Peter and Willie and myself, along with some Gareloch lads, banded together on Glasgow Green with the object of forming a football club.’5
  Allan went further and categorically stated in The Story of the Rangers that the club was born from a match played at Flesher’s Haugh on 15 July 1873 between two teams, Argyle and Clyde. He added: ‘These names did not represent organised clubs. The two sides were selected for the purpose of providing a game and names were chosen to give the event some individuality.’ He then goes on to list the names of the players from the two competing teams including, for Argyle, Moses and Peter McNeil, William McBeath, Tom Vallance and Peter Campbell. He continued: ‘It is recorded in a news print of the period that the game was very exciting and ended in a draw.’ Despite extensive research enquiries, the news print of the period has never been unearthed.
  However, that is not to say the match did not take place. If it was played, it was likely the game between Argyle and Clyde featured players all attached to Rangers and who were split on geography based on upbringing to give a practice match a sharper edge. Games were not always easy to arrange in the early 1870s and there was fluidity around player movement that seems quaint in comparison to the watertight contracts of the modern era. Moses McNeil, for example, took a spell away from Rangers for four months between October 1875 and February 1876 to represent brother Harry’s Queen’s Park in games against London cracks the Wanderers, while Tom Vallance returned to his home village for the festive holidays and turned out for Garelochhead on 3 January 1882 when a touring Queen’s Park select won 2–0.6 Queen’s Park players regularly played against each other using the flimsiest of defining factors to differentiate between sides (smokers against non-smokers, for example, lightweights against heavyweights and even north against south of Eglinton Toll). Certainly, at least two names in the Clyde line up mentioned by Allan, Rankine and Hill, were associated with Rangers as players. Remember too, Allan also had access to a primary source of information in McNeil himself who, by the early 1920s, stood with Tom Vallance as the only survivor from the club’s formative years. If history is written by winners then McNeil was best placed to occupy the podium from which he could oversee a selective narrative, even if it was arguably as flawed as the memory trying to recollect events from 50 years in the past.
  Further evidence which suggests Allan’s ability to recall incidents with historical accuracy was not to be trusted came in ‘Brigadier’s’ obituary of Vallance, which appeared in the Daily Record on 18