Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang Read online

  I was born in Rottenrow, Glasgow’s famous maternity hospital, in 1972. It was a good year to make my entrance. Just three months earlier, Rangers won the European Cup Winners Cup by beating Moscow Dynamo 3–2 in Barcelona’s Nou Camp stadium. For good measure the Rangers fans also gave the Spanish police a fucking good hiding at the end of the game, of which more later.

  We weren’t the typical nuclear family and that’s putting it mildly. As well as Christopher I have a sister, Carolyn, who is twelve years older than me. The three of us have different fathers and although my father’s name is William McDonald I was given the surname of my sister’s dad, Chugg, a moniker that has caused me a little local difficulty over the years.

  My family are all Protestants, but not churchgoing, and, like most people in the Gallowgate, we loved going along to watch the Orange parades that are such a feature of Glasgow life in the summer months, the traditional marching season. Despite the fact that many of our Roman Catholic, Celtic-supporting neighbours enjoyed the colourful spectacle and the music there was nearly always trouble. However, my abiding memory of the parades is seeing people pissed out of their minds at seven o’clock in the morning.

  I use the word ‘family’ advisedly. The truth is that my father left the family home when I was five and after that I never saw him. He was already married with children when he met Mum and eventually he got an ultimatum from her and my sister along the lines of ‘come home now or it’s all over’. Clearly, the pull of his other family was too strong. I only have a couple of vague memories of him: once when he picked me up from nursery school; the other when he gave me a Tonka truck for Christmas.

  It is only in the last few years that I have realised just how traumatic that breakdown was for me. I was always a quiet child, especially in comparison to Christopher, who was very outgoing, but my parents splitting up pushed me further into my shell. I found the only way to compensate for the lack of a secure family life was to become part of a group. Having pals I could rely on became incredibly important; it gave me a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose. Having read a number of books by people involved in football violence it is clear that many of them also came from broken homes of one kind or another. They, like me, were seeking some kind of consolation for whatever had happened to them at home. That will sound like psychobabble to many people; I don’t think it is.

  Everyone knows about Glasgow’s gang culture from books like No Mean City2. Although it came out more than seventy years ago there are probably as many gangs in the city today as there were then. The place is full of them despite the best efforts of the authorities to break them up. Hardly a week goes by without Glasgow being named in this crime survey and that as the murder capital of Britain or the place in which young men are most likely to carry a blade. Like it or not gang members are prepared to fight, and often to die, to protect their little patch. Given my family background, my personality and where I lived it was inevitable that I would join a gang and when I was seven I became a member of the Young Gallowgate Mad Squad. It was far from kid’s stuff: if you got caught by a rival mob you ended up with a sore face or worse. Sometimes the pain was self-inflicted: I remember chasing a rival gang with a bottle in my hand and tripping over on the pavement; my hand was cut by the broken glass but instead of telling Mum I applied a bandage and tried to keep out of her way for a few days.

  We weren’t short of rivals. The east end is awash with gangs, including legendary outfits like the Bridgeton Derry and the Calton Tongs, both of which we had run-ins with. But our closest and most bitter rivals were the Spur and the Torch, whose members hailed from Barrowfield. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Glasgow’s geography, Barrowfield is within spitting distance of Celtic Park and has a reputation for being the toughest scheme in a city full of tough schemes. Strangers who ventured there would, if they were lucky, get a kicking; if they were unlucky they would not only get a kicking but would also be robbed of their money, their clothes and their shoes. As well as fighting outsiders the Spur and the Torch would fight each other. The dividing line between the two gangs was Stamford Street, nicknamed Nightmare Alley. Such was Nightmare Alley’s reputation that it featured in a 1970s documentary on urban deprivation aired on the BBC.

  The YGMS was outnumbered by both Barrowfield gangs and they would often give us a chasing. The turning point came this day – I was around ten years old – when the Torch turned up in Slatefield Street in the middle of our estate. They knocked fuck out of a Gallowgate boy who was on his own at the time, which enraged the whole scheme. Within minutes the YGMS mobilised, helped by a number of grown men and a well-known boxing family from the area. There were twenty of us against thirty Torch but helped by a fearsome array of weapons, including baseball bats, we chased the cunts down Slatefield Street and right out of the Gallowgate.

  That little incident gave the YGMS no end of confidence and from that day on we took them on as equals, even when the Torch and Spur merged into one big gang. Parkhead Forge – once home to one of the biggest steelmakers in the world but by then a vacant industrial site – was our battleground. We came at each other armed to the teeth; it wasn’t just fists and feet but also machetes, coshes, knives and bats. There would be a fight almost every day and the rate of attrition was frightening, with boys regularly getting carted off to hospital suffering from stab wounds and head injuries.

  The respectable middle classes often wonder why guys like us are so drawn to gang culture and thousands of bearded academic types have researched and probed and analysed the ‘problem’ until they are blue in the face. I could have saved the taxpayer a fortune. Young men are naturally territorial and when you add in the boredom that comes with living an urban desert with fuck-all in the way of facilities it’s easy to work out why it kicks off. Of course cheap drink, like cider and super lager, plays a part, as does glue, the drug of choice for skint inner-city youth. But they are symptoms, not the cause. We had one red-ash football pitch in the Gallowgate, not exactly ideal when you live ten floors up in a multi-storey block and never get to see a lawn. I guess that around half the boys in our area were in gangs and you couldn’t blame us.

  My mother did her best to keep me on the straight and narrow. From the balcony in our multi-storey flat in Whitevale Street she would often see me having a square go and give me a telling off. I could not have wished for a better mother or a more loving upbringing. The problem was she had to put in long hours in her job as a barmaid at the Drum in Shettleston Road and so for long periods I was left to my own devices. I was the typical latchkey kid, hanging about the house on my own for hours, jealous of my pals who were at home with their mums and dads. In his formative years Christopher had the benefit of being under the watchful eye of Carolyn. She really kept him in line and my abiding memory is of her chasing him round the house after he had pulled yet another stroke. By the time I was at the age when I needed a firm hand she had upped sticks and emigrated to Canada, where she is now happily married to a business executive. Had she stayed I am sure I would have turned out to be a different person.

  I was also getting the piss taken out of me because of my surname. ‘Chugg’ is a slang word in Scotland for masturbation and older boys would never let me forget it. I well remember my tormentor-in-chief, who was about four years older than me and lived in the same high rise. That boy teased me mercilessly about my name, often throwing in a hiding for good measure. He died at the age of eighteen, in the early Eighties, which was very good news for me because I might well have murdered the cunt.

  School could have been my passport out of the east end but not when it was run by Glasgow Corporation. My first alma mater was Thomson Street primary school, a dilapidated, red-sandstone heap and, I believe, the oldest school in the city. Despite its many deficiencies I was delighted to be there not just for the company of the other kids but also because I was a pretty able student and was regularly in the top three in the class. I was particularly good at English and I recall that an early ambition
was to become a football reporter, to which end I would compose little stories about my exploits on the pitch.

  The main problem at Thomson Street wasn’t the age of the school or my fellow pupils. It was our teachers. There might have been one or two good ones but to me most of them didn’t give a fuck. It was a chore for them even to turn up and an even bigger chore for them to teach us. They were going through the motions. I had my own, very personal problems to contend with. When I was in primary six, Mum met the love of her life, Tom, and although I now consider him to be my father I resented him at the time. As a result my behaviour at school became disruptive; I got lippy with the teachers, threw my schoolbooks around the class and played truant on a regular basis. The inevitable suspensions followed.

  Worse was to follow. One day in class I was swinging a desk on my feet when the teacher slammed her hands down on the lid. My feet were squashed but instead of saying ‘That’s no’ fair miss,’ as most of my classmates would have done, I picked the desk up and threw it at her. I missed by inches but it was enough for me to receive the ultimate punishment: expulsion. In my six weeks away from school I was referred to a child psychologist, which seemed to calm me down and after that my classroom behaviour improved.

  The same couldn’t be said for my life outside of school. By the time I arrived in primary seven I was already a prolific shoplifter. One of my favourite haunts was the toy department of Fraser’s store in Buchanan Street, from which I stole huge numbers of those little Corgi cars. I was bound to get caught and sure enough on an expedition to What Every Woman Wants I was picked up by store detectives and handed over to the police. I was referred to the children’s panel and placed on a supervision order. Mum was worried sick but she knew it was a phase I was going through, a youthful rebellion against the arrival of Tom. As I said we are like father and son now but it took me years to accept him.

  Fights were a daily occurrence at Thomson Street, as they were on the streets of the east end, and it was at this time that my readiness to take on all-comers became evident. I am not the biggest but that was never a disadvantage. In fact I think my lack of stature was an advantage by forcing me to stand up for myself. My personality also helped. I try never to back down, no matter who I am up against. I also discovered that verbal aggression from someone my size has a huge impact on potential opponents because they just don’t expect it from someone who is smaller than they are. I must have been in a scrap every other day, mainly with guys my own age. I would say I won about half of them, which is a decent batting average considering my size. I didn’t care about the punishments until one day in a final attempt to stop me fighting the teachers pulled the Thomson Street team out of an inter-schools tournament. The decision punished everyone and it was designed to bring home to me that I was letting my teammates down as well as myself. As a member of the team, and a football fanatic, it hurt.

  It certainly helped me when I made the step up to Whitehill secondary school in 1984.3 I was looking forward to going there, not least because on a tour of the school while I was still in primary I noticed two lovely-looking girls. ‘That will do me,’ I thought. The reality of life at Whitehill however was very different.

  The first problem was my blazer or should I say my sister’s cast-off blazer, which I inherited. I didn’t want to wear the fucking thing but Mum insisted. It was twelve years old and really looked its age. I knew the minute I walked through the school gates for the first time that I would get the pish ripped out of me. And so it proved. On my first day I ended up battering a loudmouth who wouldn’t stop going on about it. After that I hid the blazer in bushes on my way to school and picked it up again when I was walking home.

  The second thing I had to deal with was the extreme levels of violence, which came from both inside and outside the school. The boys in second year saw the new intake as easy meat and picked on us from day one. You had to stick up for yourself or your life would become unbearable, although sometimes the odds were just too great no matter how brave you were. I vividly remember being chased for two miles round the Powery area of the east end by a mob of second years wielding coshes and wooden hammers. Luckily for me I gave them the slip and by the time school came around again they had moved on to another target.

  Whitehill only really came together when we were faced with a threat from outsiders. In our case it came from the pupils at St Mungo’s, a Roman Catholic school that was also in the Dennistoun area of Glasgow and less than a mile from Whitehill. That is the Catholic Church for you, creating divisions wherever it can, separating children from the same estate, the same street, the same block. It started at the age of five and I will always remember my Catholic pals from Gallowgate trooping off to St Ann’s while I went off in the other direction to Thomson Street. There is no need for it; quite simply it is a form of apartheid. On their way to and from school the St Mungo boys would shout ‘dirty, smelly, Orange bastards’ at us while we would reply with ‘dirty Fenian bastards’. Fights were an everyday occurrence, made more vicious by sectarian hatred.

  That was life in an east-end school. And just like at primary school most of the teachers, it seemed to me, couldn’t have cared less about helping us to fulfil our potential. The gym teacher did his best to keep me and my pals in line and gave us what Sir Alex Ferguson later made famous as the ‘hair-dryer’ treatment. My geography teacher realised that I had ability and encouraged me but the rest in my opinion were a waste of space. It was more about childminding than education. Given proper encouragement I could have passed a lot more exams than I did but it wasn’t to be.

  THE SOCCER BABE

  I was inspired by my brother’s stories about the violence he was experiencing as a Rangers fan. Christopher had attended the infamous Scottish Cup final of 1980 when both sets of Old Firm fans invaded the Hampden pitch at the end of the game and engaged in running battles. At the age of eight I watched the television pictures of the fights and felt contrasting emotions; worried for my brother but exhilarated by the violence. He followed Rangers all over Scotland and would come back with tales of how the light-blue legions would dominate the towns and cities they visited, rubbing the locals’ noses in it in the process.4

  But that was old-fashioned stuff: scarfers getting pissed up and running amok; there was no planning, no organisation. There was a new phenomenon in the world of football hooliganism: the casual. The word ‘casual’ was now becoming well known to the media and football fans in Scotland, thanks to the mass outbreak of trouble at a Motherwell–Aberdeen game in the early Eighties, when scores of smartly dressed young hooligans fought each other on the Fir Park terracing.

  By this time my Celtic-supporting days had been over for a couple of years and I was now a regular at Ibrox. It was 1983 and although in those pre-Souness days Rangers were rubbish on the pitch I found the terracing fashions inspirational. More than anything else it was shame that made me a football hooligan. When I was growing up, families like ours were given clothing grants and when Mum got ours she would buy me Y cardigans, polyester shirts and waffle trousers. The naffest clothes known to man. It didn’t matter that every other working-class Glaswegian was wearing them; they still made me self-conscious, as they did all self-respecting twelve-year-olds.

  What a contrast with the fashions sported at Ibrox. Boys just a little older than me had wedge haircuts, and wore Adidas Trim Trab trainers, Lois jeans and Lyle and Scott shirts. Some guys, those with a few quid to spend, had Ellesse tracksuits as well as the latest gear by Segio Tacchini and Fila. Others adopted fashions from American sports, with Rangers fans wearing the blue colours favoured by the New York Rangers or New York Jets, providing a clear contrast to Celtic fans with their green Miami Dolphins outfits.

  The Rangers casuals, the Inter City Firm, led by guys like Barry Johnstone5, had come into existence by 1984. I was desperate to join but the problem was my age. The older boys didn’t want a thirteen-year-old hanging around cramping their style and they told me in no uncertain terms where to
go. Desperate to get a foothold in the new, exciting world of football violence some of my like-minded pals and I set up the Rangers Soccer Babes. It wasn’t long before we were called into action.

  Hearts were our first opponents. One Saturday in 1985 their main mob, the Capital Service Firm, was in Glasgow city centre, on their way to Central station to catch a train to Paisley. Never ones to let a promising shoplifting opportunity pass them by Hearts cruised down Buchanan Street looking for opportunities to plunder the fashionable shops that line both sides of Glasgow’s most exclusive shopping destination. About twenty Rangers Soccer Babes, including me, were outside Fraser’s department store when we heard the unmistakeable hiss of ‘CSF, CSF’. No hesitation, we steamed in. As bottles flew in both directions the two mobs came together, scattering terrified Saturday-afternoon shoppers all over the place. The CSF initially got the better of it and pushed us back but we quickly regrouped and chased them down Buchanan Street and under the Hielanman’s Umbrella in nearby Argyle Street.

  I was exhilarated. It was my first experience of FV and the adrenalin rush was incredible. I had never experienced anything like it and I am sure everyone who has ever been involved in the scene will back me up. Drugs, sex, alcohol; nothing comes close. I prayed that my next fix would not be long in coming.

  Our main opponents were the Celtic Soccer Babes, no surprise there. Although I only ever rated the main Celtic mob, the Celtic Soccer Casuals, for a season or two their baby offshoot was a different kettle of fish. For a start it was bigger than our baby crew, and vicious with it. I discovered just how vicious before an Old Firm game at Celtic Park in 1985. Seven of us were standing outside Greaves sports shop in Gordon Street, talking to two boys who had come up from Leeds to savour the Old Firm experience. We spotted two Celtic Soccer Babes and verbals were exchanged. I thought to myself, ‘These cunts can’t be out on their own,’ and no sooner had the thought gone through my mind than forty of them came charging round the corner. We scattered; we had no chance. Forty against seven doesn’t compute, which just goes to show that we all have to run some time despite what some so-called hooligans claim in their books.