‘m proudest moment’ by Denis Frize

Date: 6th February 2026

‘m proudest moment’ by Denis Frize

 

One bitter Saturday winter night in 1848, an elder was coming out of the new St. George’s Tron church in the centre of Glasgow.

 

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a family  – father, mother, daughter and son-  standing shivering on the edge of the square.

 

The Irish had arrived.

 

They were fleeing the famine in Ireland as dreadful as anything we see almost nightly on our television screens. It cost £ 4 to escape to America.

 

It cost less than two shillings to get on the boat at Derry Quay and crowded body-by-body make their way past Paddy’s Milestone, round the horn at Greenock and up the Clyde to the new docks in the centre of the Glasgow.

 

The sight of this family moved the elder to work of Christian relief. By the following Saturday night he had got people to turn out and provide sustenance to the starving.

 

The idea grew and before long they had got the Army to come down from Maryhill Barracks with all their mobile kitchens and also the band. And thus started the first practical do-it-yourself social welfare scheme. The idea that people did not need to starve or go in rags was implanted in people’s minds. And with this idea of basically practical Christianity developed the social welfare that we know today. A decidedly GOOD THING.

 

BUT. This sword had two edges. The Irish formed their own self-help groups through football. The earliest Irish workers  ( e.g. Burke and Hare) dug out the Forth and Clyde Canal. Under pain of mortal sin for missing it, they would attend mass every Sunday morning at St. Patrick’s, still off Royal Mile.

 

Now occurred a great boon for the working class. They did not have to

work Saturday afternoon. So what could the parishioners of St.

Patrick’s do? Edinburgh folk will tell you all Scottish football

started in the Capital. So the Irishmen (  but Catholics only) decided

to join in. So what would a  bunch of Irishmen with aspirations to a

separate country call themselves/? obviously. Hibernian

 

And maddeningly, the Irishmen won the Scotsmen’s trophies off them.  Scottish Cup? No problem. Scottish League? No problem. Make money?

considerable sums

 

So already the Catholics were seeing themselves as a separate enclave in Scotland.

But let’s leave genteel Edinburgh behind. Let’s move to the far more Darwinian atmosphere in which the writer was brought up. Clydeside.

 

One of the highest  concentration of Irish was what had been a royal hunting ground in mediaeval time – Parkhead.

Now it was utterly changed to an iron-producing inferno And yes the

management and foremen were all Protestant Scots but t the unskilled work was done by the Irish. Their pastor was not a priest but an English monk, a Brother Walfrid. And he met the same problems of poverty, malnutrition and unemployment as the elder at the Tron had met.

No social security in those days. and so he and his parishioners in the Easy End of the bigger city did what the Edinburgh Irish had done. They formed a football team They couldn’t call it Hibernian, so they called it Celtic.

And straightaway they found even more success. By 1914 they had won there league championships in a row The religious aspect had faded into the background and  bookies, publicans and  now managed the team. But with several differences big difference from Hibs.

They openly employed Scotland’s first professional player. Doyle from

Preston N.E

 

One Celtic player was asked if he played ‘For faith and fatherland’.

“No,” he replied, ” I play for four quid a week!”

 

They employed Protestant players. The writer  remembers as  aged about seven going into a newspaper shop. I asked to buy a pencil. “What colour would you like, son? ” said the elderly man. ” Green.”

” Oh , aye. Support the team and wear the colours.”

 

Facing me was Johnny Browning, Celtic and Scotland, but not a Catholic.

 

Similar patterns became the norm throughout Scotland. Anywhere there

was a large influx of Irish, there was the Catholic/Protestant split. Dundee was another case in point. Irish men and women could easily pick up unskilled jobs in the jute trade. So they formed Dundee Harp and then changed it to Dundee United. The Protestants supported Dundee. And still do.

But it was industries which required little training that the Irish flourished, in particular Paisley.

You could get an Irishwoman to work for a pound a week in one of the

new cotton-spinning mills

 

But the traditional Scottish trade was by hand work in your own cottage. So suddenly all the Protestant Scots  became unemployed. So they came to hate the Irish., especially when it came to the Mediaeval aspects of their religion.

My own mother, married to a Catholic for both of the rest of their lives, told me that she came under pressure to become a Catholic.

 

> “But,”  she told me,” Ah thought aboot whit ma fether wid say aboot kneelin’ doon tae bits o’ wid”

 

You would have thought the million British dead between1914 and 1918 would have knocked some sense into people’s heads, but almost as soon a battlefield hostilities ceased, the War of Religion started.

 

The Catholics started it off actually before 1914.

 

In 1907 the Catholic Church forbade every Catholic to marry a non -Catholic.

 

I have behind me my father’s missal with the proscription clearly stated. It is unambiguous. But. ‘Love laughs at Locksmiths’.

My father himself, all his marriageable sisters  and I myself got married to Protestants.

One family as an exemplar of what happened throughout  Scotland.

 

Not only does love laugh at locksmiths, but the Law of Scotland does, through Registry Offices.

 

My mother’s sister was born in 1895 and in her memory the green/ blue rivalry only arrived in Glasgow with Harland and Wolff, from Belfast, just in time for the ‘First War’, as all of that generation called it.

 

Certainly, everyone believed that  to be a Catholic or to marry one was an automatic bar to playing for Rangers.

 

To the loss of some illustrious talent. Certainly, according to several autobiographies, Sir Alex Ferguson.

 

But the arrival of Maurice Johnston at Ibrox under Graeme Souness showed that even the strongest walls could crumble.

 

By now we had reached the 1920’s and the  two protagonists brought his Civil war to a climax which still exists in some people’s minds.

 

These two were a Monsignor Kelly in Dumbarton and his counterpart in the genteel purlieus of Dunblane Cathedral.

 

In 1919 the Rev. J. Hutchison Cockburn was appointed Minister . Absolutely a top man in Biblical studies. In the 1950’s he became, along with an American minister, one of the leading lights in promulgating the New English Bible.

 

But he hated Catholics. In the nineteen twenties immigration from Ireland had reached one million. Rev. Cockburn let fly full volley against them All Irish Catholics were  naturally of a criminal disposition. The should all be either jailed or sent back to Ireland immediately.

 

Monsignor Kelly was the other side of the same mirror and as it happens his battleground was the High School I attended, Saint Patrick’s Dumbarton.  Founded in 1858 because the Catholics believed they were not getting a fair deal at Dumbarton Academy, this ramped up to a demand for a complete self-segregation by the Catholics. And Monsignor Kelly’s apogee came with the 1922 Education Act. He fought tooth and nail that Catholics, just as much as any white kids in the Deep South, would not have to mix in any way with the Prods. Separate schools, separate youth clubs, separate swimming lessons.

 

The writer remembers himself and other boys being chidden by a man from the Chapel because we attended record nights in the BB hall. Mind you, the anti-sex league was just as active there also as anything in George Orwell,

 

The writer once got five of the belt for dropping his ruler to look out of the Maths room  window at the girls from Notre Dame. The teacher only stopped at five because he saw the damage five was inflicting.

 

So was there no hope? Well seemingly not. The troubles in Ireland were accompanied in Scotland to the beat of the Lambeg drum and the waving of the tricolour.

 

But in the 1980’s ,as some would write it’,  ‘There was a man came from God whose name was John.’

 

My Protestant mother described Pope John xxiii as ‘The first Pope that was a Christian’. It was like the later collapse of the Berlin Wall, Protestantism was no longer ‘false religion.’ Catholics could attend church of Scotland weddings.

 

The whole atmosphere changed. Now we live in mentally healthier times.

 

And we can now add that the previous Lord Advocate for Scotland, Anne Angelini, a Catholic, will be the Lord High Commissioner to0 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

 

‘All has changed, changed utterly.’ as WB Yeats would say.

 

Denis Frize  17/01/26

 

image Matt Kenyon

---

Posted in: Fan's Blog, Latest News

Tags: fans blogs