Bill Struth and the Rangers rituals that prove he was ahead of his time

Many of those heroes of yesteryear came from the era when Bill Struth ruled the roost at Ibrox and Rangers did the same in Scottish football. Willie Waddell, Willie Thornton, Willie Woodburn, Tiger Shaw, Bobby Brown Jimmy Smith and Bob McPhail were just some of those heroes who regaled me with their memories of playing for Struth’s Rangers.

Those recollections stretched from the manager’s early days in charge, during the Roaring Twenties, a century ago, through the 1930s and 40s and on into those final seasons of the Iron Curtain team at the start of the 1950s. This was folklore on an epic scale. And what a joy it was for this then still young sportswriter to listen to their stories provide a window onto a bygone era and smuggled the allure of Bill Struth across the years.

Much of what they told me became part of the inspiration for the first book to be written about the grand old man, my defining biography of him, ‘Struth: The Story of an Ibrox Legend’. What was obvious to me as I listened to these great stars from yesteryear tell their tales was just how much Rangers in the 1980s owed to the foundations, first laid by the club’s original manager, William Wilton, and then built on by Struth, who appropriately enough, was a stonemason to trade.

Now, what is even more amazing and yet just as obvious here in the third decade of the 21st century and 65 years after his death, is the fact Struth’s building blocks still stand firm against the march of time. Rangers class, something first highlighted by Bill Struth, remains the touchstone for what it means to be part of Rangers, both on and off the park.

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Take the example of Jimmy Smith, whose association as a player and then trainer lasted more than 30 years. Smith, a giant of a man, a rumbustious centre forward in the days when football was a much more physical game, was known to the Ibrox legions as the biggest centre forward in the world. He arrived at a time when Rangers had just won another league title and added the Scottish Cup to their roll of honours, smashing a 25-year-old Hampden hoodoo.

Recalling that time Smith said: “Struth had been the manager for eight years and already he showed what a wily bird he was. He knew the best way for a younger player to start getting on with the established stars was for the team to live together for a while. Remember, this was many years before it became fashionable for teams to go to pre-season training camps.

“Struth was ahead of his time in this respect and what he did was arrange one summer for a tour of America and in those days that meant crossing the Atlantic in a liner.

“Another thing about him was that he was a great motivator. Before we went down the tunnel on a Saturday afternoon he had us all believing we were the best players in the world. I always believed I was the best centre forward in the world. Not because Bill Struth told me but because of the way he treated me, which made me believe I was special.

“There were all sorts of wee things he did which made you feel special. For instance, when we went in at halftime there were people waiting there to scrape the mud off your boots and clean your knees and there was a fresh strip waiting for you to change into.”

Think of the modern game with the biggest clubs in England and abroad employing highly paid sports psychologists and compare that to the clever little mind game tricks Struth played to get into the heads of his players and to unnerve opponents, and you soon discover why Jimmy Smith and so many of those old-timers all insisted Bill Struth was ahead of his time.

Take one of the greatest players ever to don the Rangers colours, Bob McPhail who was the oldest living Ranger at the time I interviewed him and whose book, Legend, written with veteran journalist Allan Herron, is required reading for fans. His take on the way Struth earned respect is slightly at odds with the myth of him being a martinet.

McPhail said: “He gained the reputation of ruling with a rod of iron, but that was from people who only thought they knew him. He was never ‘boss’ or ‘gaffer’ to us, but always Mr Struth. He said his job was making you fit and motivated and to make to you realise the importance of playing for Rangers.

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“We were told to always dress well in a dark suit with a white shirt and sober tie and to wear a bowler hat on match days, while Celtic players wore a gallus working man’s bunnet. When we won the Scottish Cup in 1928 my bonus was £20, which was an enormous sum back then.”

Another example of Struth being ahead of his time was in employing a sprint coach. Nowadays all the big clubs have one. But it was Struth who started the trend. And, as McPhail explained, the Struth ethos of nothing but the best for Rangers was underlined by the man he chose.

McPhail said: “Eric Liddell had won an Olympic gold medal at the Olympic Games in Paris in 1924 and when the manager wanted to speed us up it was Liddell he asked to come and coach us.”

Liddell was of course immortalized in the multi-Oscar-winning movie ‘Chariots of Fire’. This was surely another of Struth’s ways of making his players, or his boys as he often referred to them, feel special. In that field he was an Oscar winner himself.

George Young, who succeeded Jock Tiger Shaw as captain and who stood as a colossus in the Iron Curtain, summed up Struth neatly when he said: “He was a master of psychology and he could read and understand people like no other. That meant that when he came into the dressing room he knew just what to say, even if it meant standing logic on its head He said things with such confidence that we believed him.”

In many ways what so many players from Struth’s era said about him was echoed last year by the more recent past stars, recalling after his tragic death, how Walter Smith dealt with them. Just as Smith could join his players to let off steam in the back room of a citycentre bar as the team went for nine-in-a-row in the 1990s, so Struth had his big names round to his Copland Road flat on a Sunday evening for refreshments as they gathered around his piano for a sing-song sixty years earlier.

One man who provided a direct link from Struth to the very brink of this more modern area was Willie Waddell, a star outside right, a master manager and general manager before becoming managing director and the brains behind the new Ibrox, with three stands built between 1978 and 1981.

In some ways those stands are as much a monument to Bill Struth as they are to Willie Waddell, for it was Struth’s vision which built the magnificent redbrick main stand, now named for him. There are many iconic images of Ibrox Stadium but none so powerful, none which makes the hairs on the back of a Rangers supporter stand on end and none as regal than the view of that main stand.

And no wonder.

For Struth insisted that only the best went into its building. In those days the finest shipbuilding craftsmen in the word plied their trades on the River Clyde and Struth ensured the main hall and the marble staircase were as elegant and opulent as the ballrooms and fixtures and fittings on any of Cunard’s ocean-going luxury liners.

The influence Struth had on Waddell, and which Waddell in turn had on Rangers in the latter part of the 20th century, was apparent when he said: ”During all my time as a Rangers player, Rangers were my whole life. And to me, Mr Struth was Rangers, for Rangers were his whole life.”

“That was obvious as he grew older in the late 1940s and into the 50s when he took great delight in reminiscing and telling tales of the escapades some of his great players had got up to in the past. He loved talking about Sandy Archibald, Billy McCandless, Tully Craig and Archie ‘Al Capone’ McAuley.

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“Most of all, though, he loved talking about Torry Gillick, who I had played alongside and who was a great character. The old man would throw back his head and laugh and laugh as he remembered Gillick’s antics.”

Tales about Struth were also told when Waddell, his great attacking teammate, Willie Thornton and Bob McPhail, all of whom were still involved with Rangers, would meet up during the late 1980s to watch Rangers reserves. The Struth ethos was their bond.

Something which is often overlooked about Bill Struth is that he was born in 1875, a year after Winston Churchill, when Queen Victoria reigned over a quarter of the world’s land mass and the Rangers of the Gallant Pioneers were only three years old. Yet today, in this third decade of already turbulent 21st century, and in the year of their 150th anniversary, the Rangers Bill Struth-built stand supreme as the world’s most successful football club.

The predictions of sportswriters are like the best laid schemes of mice and men. However, this old sportswriter confidently forecasts that when Rangers celebrate 200 years, Bill Struth’s name will still echo triumphantly, extolling his and Rangers virtues through the ages.

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