Review: Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c. 1872-1932, by William Kenefick.

Kevingrove Review 2 (2008)

This is an open-access text, and can be accessed here.

A Cultural History of Association Football in Scotland, 1865-1902

MATTHEW L. McDOWELL

Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2013 (purchase here)

Rangers and Celtic Football Clubs, together known as the ‘Old Firm’, have received the lion’s share of attention given to Scottish association football in both scholarly and popular literature.  During Scottish football’s formative years, however, the ascendancy of the Old Firm was far from set in stone.  The exhaustive study of these two extraordinary organisations, therefore, greatly distorts our understanding of Scottish football’s Victorian origins.  Both clubs were part of a far greater scene which included not only fellow ‘senior’, well-established clubs, but also any number of ‘junior’, ‘juvenile’ and non-classified football clubs, as well as fledgling associations which oversaw the regulation of the young game.  This study will examine the birth and growth of football in the west of Scotland, during a period stretching from the mid-1860s to the Ibrox disaster of April 1902.

“Social physical exercise?” Football, industrial paternalism, and professionalism in west Dunbartonshire, Scotland, c. 1870-1900

MATTHEW L. McDOWELL

Abstract

This article examines the interrelationship of sport, community, and industry in west Dunbartonshire during the period 1870-1900. During the early years of the Scottish Football Association (SFA) – the 1870s and 1880s – the county’s main football clubs were amongst the SFA’s most dominant, regularly challenging Glasgow’s major clubs for supremacy in the Scottish Cup. These clubs were part of an industrial landscape, based as they were in shipbuilding and textile communities significantly comprised of Irish and Highland Scottish migrant populations. Local industrialists acted as patrons out of a paternalistic desire to mould the message of football. Their attempts were nevertheless undermined by the existence of professionalism in the game, which in turn encouraged an alternative method of social mobility.