LITMIR.BIZ

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was the first ever communist.

      I didn’t see Noreen again for three years, then I spotted her at the Ancient Order of Hibernian dance hall on Errol Street in 1959. The boys stood on one side of the hall and the girls on the other. You had to be brave to cross the dance floor and ask a girl to dance. You had to be quick off your mark, too, because the best girls would go quickly.

      Noreen used to say no to a lot of lads and I rescued her from one called Tommy Moy. He was the best looking boy in the Gorbals and Noreen had been on a date with him. I could see that he was pestering her to dance. But I could also see that she wasn’t getting up to dance with him. To refuse to get up and dance with a boy was a big insult. Everyone noticed it because he was the only boy who had gone over to ask someone to dance. I was sitting near the stage and looking at Noreen. If I’d gone over there would have been a fight, so I beckoned Noreen over. She later said that she would have never got up to any lad like that, but she wanted to escape from Tommy. And she’ll be the first to admit that she thought she was god’s gift, because she was the best-looking girl in the Gorbals. She had won beauty prizes.

      Noreen walked over and I started talking to her. Tommy Moy turned round to Noreen and said, ‘Oh, you’re into footballers are you?’ Tommy followed Noreen down the street after the evening had finished and I was walking behind. He was bigger than me and had a very high opinion of himself, which in some ways was justified because every girl in the Gorbals fancied him. I told him where to go and to leave Noreen alone. At first he looked me in the eye and I don’t think he could believe what I was telling him. I looked straight back at him. I was deadly serious and he backed down and walked off.

      We went out a few times and I considered Noreen to be my girlfriend, but I’m not sure that she thought the same about me – as I soon realized. A new dance hall opened in town and Noreen won a competition for being the most beautiful girl in there. She won £50 – a fortune in those days – and her picture was printed in the newspaper the following day. This lad had asked her to dance that night – it turned out to be Bobby Carroll. I saw him in training the next morning and he said, ‘I saw that girl you said you were going out with last night at the new dance hall.’

      Noreen had told me that she was washing her hair and I believed her so I told him he must be mistaken. Then he showed me the Daily Record, which had a picture of Noreen in it. I felt pretty stupid. I was supposed to be going to the cinema with her later that day, so, when we met up, I asked her if she had stayed in and washed her hair the night before. She told me that she had. She must have thought that I was daft.

      We walked towards the cinema, the Coliseum on Ellington Street, and there was a big queue. The lads at the front saw me and ushered me straight in, which was a bit embarrassing because a lot of my friends were there. I asked her again what she had done the night before and she still stuck to her story. I used to give her one shilling to buy some chocolates before we went in, but on this occasion I didn’t. That set her mind wondering. I then bought one cinema ticket. We were on a platform overlooking the queue and people were looking up at us – it wasn’t just that I played for Celtic, but Noreen’s picture had been in the newspaper. I gave her the ticket and announced, ‘I hope you enjoy the film, because I am going.’ She was flustered so I told her that I knew she hadn’t stayed in and washed her hair the night before. She panicked. She was mortified at all her friends seeing her left alone and she said to me, ‘If you buy another ticket I’ll tell you the truth.’ I had her good and proper.

      Noreen told me, ‘I’m not your girlfriend.’ She had been seeing other lads, too, so I gave her an ultimatum, saying, ‘You’re either my girlfriend or you’re not.’ She chose me. She later told me that her brothers had told her never to say no to any boy from the Gorbals.

      When Noreen told her brothers that she was dating me, they said, ‘What does he see in you?’ But she said that they were happy because I was Catholic and especially because I played for Celtic. Not that they were against Protestants and Noreen had been out with them before. Noreen’s mother needed more convincing. She remembered me from when I played for Scotland against Ireland in Dublin in my second international game. It was televised and she had watched it with Noreen’s dad. It was a tough game and I was accused of being dirty. When she found out that Noreen was going out with me, she wasn’t impressed and told her that I was a hooligan.

      I may have been fiery on the football pitch but I was a saint compared to many of the people I’d grown up with. Early in my Celtic career I visited Barlinie jail in Glasgow with Jim Baxter. We were asked to go there by one of the prison officials and we were held up as role models, examples of how you could be a success even if you came from a poor area. I couldn’t believe how many of the people I knew in there. We had a football quiz and as I looked at those who stood up to ask questions and the others sitting around them, I realized that I knew most of them by their first names.

      They had either been at school with me or lived in the streets nearby in the Gorbals. The only difference between them and me, I decided, was that they hadn’t been so lucky to have a mother like mine. I didn’t have a father but my mother was a very strong person. She’d give us a belt if we were naughty and told us to face life’s problems straight on. You had to look after yourself because nobody else would. It made you a strong character, but too many strong characters went the wrong way. Until I was nine years old I was in bed every night at 6.30 pm. And until I was seventeen I was never allowed out after 9.30 pm. This kind of discipline was the only way to keep a boy from getting into the kind of mischief that, for so many, eventually turned to crime.

      Richer people could buy their way out of problems, but poorer people couldn’t. Most of the lads were in Bar-L for robbing. They robbed because they didn’t have anything. During our visit the idea was for the prisoners to ask Jimmy and me questions, which some of them did. But so many of them hid away because they were embarrassed and didn’t want me to see them in there.

      Back on the pitch, the biggest fixtures of the season were of course the Old Firm games. There was segregation at these games long before it became the norm in England. At Celtic Park, the fans approached and left the stadium down different roads to keep them apart. There were always incidents, with people fighting at the ground and all over the city. It wasn’t nice – decent working class people beating each other up. Being a socialist, it always saddened me.

      We were told to play to the whistle before every game and never to get involved in any incident with any other player. This was underlined before Rangers games. I had a great hatred of Rangers as a club – that came with growing up in the Gorbals – but I never agreed with the fighting. Later, I always had the needle with Rangers as a football club because I was never allowed to play for their team. I would never have gone there, but it would have been nice to say no. And yet I got to know a lot of the Rangers players when I played for Scotland and they were smashing lads. Bobby Shearer looked after me and made me feel welcome when I first got in the Scotland team, yet he was the Rangers player that most Celtic fans hated because he used to kick other players. I was a young lad when I first played for Scotland, but Bobby was like a father figure and was someone I could go to if I had a problem. When I was an older player, I treated the younger lads like Bobby had treated me.

      We used to get a bonus of £25 for beating Rangers, almost three times our weekly wage. Invariably, we didn’t beat them because they were a far better side with players like Jimmy Baxter, Jimmy Millar, Ralph Brand, Bobby Shearer, Eric Caldow, Harold Davis, and Alec Scott. The best players in Scotland were not confined to Ibrox though. Pat Quinn of Motherwell was probably the toughest opponent I played against because I couldn’t get near him. He was an inside-forward, a great passer of the ball with the imagination to beat players in different ways. Several English teams were looking at him.

      One of my lowest moments for Celtic was when I missed a penalty in an Old Firm game at Parkhead, which we lost 1–0. Jim Baxter started messing about with the ball on the penalty spot to try and distract me. He succeeded. I had to get back to the Gorbals after the game and it was difficult not to be noticed. I took a tram car and then a bus. I just kept my head down and tried to be inconspicuous, but I was wearing a shirt and tie which made me stand out. I saw my pals on the corner that night and they were not happy. As I approached them, someone shouted: ‘Professional footballer and

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