Happy birthday to the Celtic View, fathered by Jack McGinn and born on 11th August 1965, 48 years young today.
The View began life as a four page broadsheet. On the front page of its first issue the editor described one of its aims as, “… We shall provide information and talking points that the national press cannot give because of the much greater demands on their space.” The big talking point of the first issue was the appointment of Jock Stein to take charge of the Scotland national team for the World Cup qualifying campaign. Jock had been in charge of the squad for two ties the previous May, against Poland (a 1:1 draw in Chorzow) and Finland (a 2:1 victory in Helsinki. Initially this was to be the extent of Jock’s involvement, but the SFA asked for his term as manager to be extended as long as Scotland still had a chance of qualifying for the finals in England and the club agreed.
Chairman Bob Kelly took the opportunity through the pages of the View to let the fans know that, “The most important aspect of our new agreement is that the SFA were willing to meet all our conditions if they could get their man. We feel we have reached an ideal compromise… if there is any conflict between the club’s fixtures and those of the association Mr. Stein will remain with his club.” Jock Stein is quoted by ‘Kerrydale’ as saying: “Naturally I am pleased with the honour but I want all Celtic fans to know that my interest will always be first and foremost Celtic’s interests. It was my football ambition to return to Celtic. Everyone can rest assured that I wouldn’t do anything likely to harm Celtic.”
The pictures on the front page were of the Scottish Cup winning team of 1965 and new signing Joe McBride who expressed his delight at joining the club from Motherwell.
Another new player had a small feature on page 2. “The youngest player on the staff is sixteen year-old George Connelly who joined us from Tulliallan and hails from Dunfermline.” Compare the modern day hype of any player with the litotes of, “For a very tall lad he is a skilful manipulator of the ball.”
The rest of the page was given over to a report on the very first Scottish Football Writers’ Player of the Year ceremony, an award won by Billy McNeill, a ‘Where Are They Now?’ column focusing on ex-Celt John McAlindon, at that time working on the groundstaff at Celtic Park, a puff for the Celtic Supporters Association and a quiz for younger readers. The accompanying text to the questions and the instructions for entering reads like a Higher Mathematics exam paper. “In order that you younger readers will show carefulness as well as knowledge of your subject we shall look for correct spelling in all of your answers… You must write your answers in the order corresponding to the questions (1, 2, 3, 4). Then give your full name, date of birth, school and class number and home address…” The six prize winners (strictly confined to those under the age of 15) would receive a guinea. The board were obviously not going to part with them without a fight.
The View’s page 3 stunner was a large picture of “some of the trophies which adorn the sideboard in the boardroom,” and fans were informed that Stevie Chalmers shot a 77 at Milltown Golf Club in Ireland while over in Ireland for the Shamrock Rovers game, “very creditable as Steve had never seen the course before.”
The very first letters to the View appeared on page 3 as well. One was signed “Hopeful” of Glasgow who was allowed to air a grievance; he wanted some of the Pools money to be used to create a tarmac road on the approach to the turnstiles, fed up as he was of having to “wade through a sea of mud” to get to them. “And if this isn’t asking too much dare I suggest some improvement to the primitive toilet facilities.” By the time “Hopeful” got his wished for pissoir he had probably changed his name to “Despairing”, like the rest of us. The other letter was congratulating the Celtic View on starting up, the first of many congratulatory messages received on behalf of either the board or the View over the years. Yes folks, the seeds of Pravda had already been well and truly sown.
The back page message from Jock Stein looks forward optimistically to the start of the new season and there endeth the text, because the rest of the page is mostly given over to the August Celtic Pools winners and how much dosh they got. Very dull, unless you want to scan through it to see which of your neighbours you could tap money from that week.
Advertisements included one from Roberts Stores in Trongate offering a junior football pack of jersey, shorts and socks for 22/6- (That’s one pound and twenty five pence for post-decimal babies) and car dealer W.F. Kivlichan was offering a year-old Mini (one careful owner) for £410 (cost you £14,000 today… Not for the same Mini obviously, for the equivalent).
On the occasion of the View’s 40th, the club published a celebratory book. Manfred Lurker reviewed it for the fanzine.
The Best of the Celtic View: the 100 covers that made you laugh, cry and cheer; by Paul Cuddihy and Joe Sullivan; Headline Publishing; 222 pages illustrated throughout; £19.99 hardback
How could we resist a title like this? The dear old Celtic View, brainchild and celebrated organ of the legend that was Jack McGinn, 40 years old and the raison d’être of the blatt you are holding in your hand right now.
What we have here is a mainly visual chronicle of how the View has chosen to reflect the major events in the history of the club during its existence. The editors have selected significant View covers and accompanied them with some text to put them in context.
These, the cover of the book gushes, are the 100 covers of Pravda that made us “laugh, cry and cheer”.
This book charts the story of the View chronologically, starting from the 60s when Jack’s organ sprang up for the first time. In the first few years of its inception the club’s in-house newspaper, which appeared every Wednesday, was a paragon of sobriety and understatement, unrecognisable concepts to a medium almost completely sold-out to tabloid values. League title wins in the mid to late 60s were celebrated with the journalistic equivalent of a Stanley Matthews-style manly handshake and headlines like “congratulations” or “the cup final”.
The Lisbon souvenir issue is positively over the top. It even has a couple of pictures and a splash of green on the front cover.
Our other European Cup final is represented by a View cover from the day of the final, May 7th 1970, complete with distinctly upbeat messages from Bob Kelly, Jock Stein and Billy McNeill. This is one of the issues I remembered from my boyhood days. On one of the other pages the View had printed a map of where the victory procession would take place. Talk about confident of victory.
The issues from the 70s reflect a mixture of highs and lows, the most infuriating cover being one from 1971. No fewer than 100,000 people had paid to see the first team and the reserves in the space of a week. The club chose to brag about it; the fans must have been wondering where all the money was going.
During the 80s the newspaper format stayed the same, but you can tell that the Pravda style that became so infamous is beginning to seep its way into the articles. Jack McGinn is quoted in a feature on the renovation of the South Stand in the summer of ‘87. “Last year saw the transformation of the Celtic End – this year it’s the stand.” This was the kind of rhetoric that was starting to wind people up, especially fans who were standing in the ‘transformed’ Celtic End wondering what kind of parallel universe Jack and his cronies on the board were inhabiting.
The 90s was the View’s nadir. It hit the buffers on March 2nd 1994 with a front page lead about ‘Cambuslang – the dream comes true’. As Kevin Kelly stood in the middle of a toxic swamp with his arms outstretched like a manic scarecrow, even the View staff must have realised that nobody with half a brain was believing this stuff any more. Yet, even in this book there are no covers featuring the likes of Terry Cassidy, Patrick Nally, Gefinor, Stadivarious or the assorted futuristic ‘artist’s impressions’ of what Celtic Park was going to look like if we all kept faith with the Kelly and the cronies.
Jock Brown practically took over the View at one point, sniping back at his one-time mates in the media, but he doesn’t rate a mention either.
There’s definitely an air of truth and reconciliation about the club these days, so it would have been a laugh to be reminded of some of these pantomime villains that blighted us for years.
Overall, I enjoyed this book, even though I don’t remember cheering at too many of the covers (anybody who cheers when they see a Celtic View cover needs help). I did laugh in a GIRUY way at some of the 90s covers, and I may even have shed an inner silent tear when I turned a page and saw a picture of Martin Hayes grinning back at me holding aloft the Celtic scarf for his signing on photo shoot.
The early issues were more interesting than practically anything that was in the last 50 pages – lots of Henrik hagiography – and there were reminders of old View features that were a bit of a fix for a nostalgia junky like me. Who can forget the Celtic Boy feature, the terrible cartoon that used to take up about half of the front page or the Spotlight on a Fan feature? Bob McDonald’s European football round-up I can genuinely claim to have given me a lifelong interest in the game beyond these shores. Thanks Bob.
But what happened to ‘Pick A Team’ or, my own personal favourite, the £10 Star Letter, most of which started with, “Hats off to Jack McGinn and the Celtic board for…”
Nicely presented, loads of evocative pictures and even some undemanding text. Ideal for Uncle Tim’s Christmas.
MANFRED LURKER
BTW, the official birthday of NTV is 29th August 1987. If you want to read our very first issue the follow the link. Makes for an interesting contrast with the View. Wonder if “Hopeful” of Glasgow ever ended up writing letters to us.
http://www.ntvcelticfanzine.com/about%20ntv/about%20ntv%20contents.htm
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