Parkhead and the East End, Glasgow

The East End: Glasgow's Irish Heartland

Glasgow's East End — the sprawling working-class territory east of the city centre, stretching along the Gallowgate and London Road toward Parkhead Cross and beyond — was, from the mid-nineteenth century, the heartland of the Irish Catholic diaspora in Scotland. The communities of Bridgeton, Calton, Camlachie, and Parkhead received wave after wave of Irish immigration from the 1840s onward, and the density of Irish settlement in these districts made them, in social and cultural terms, as Irish as they were Scottish. Streets that appear on maps as Glasgow streets were, in practice, Irish streets — their character shaped by the Catholic parishes, the Irish-language societies, the Hibernian mutual aid organisations, and the communal institutions that the Irish diaspora built wherever it settled in sufficient numbers.

The East End's Irish character was inseparable from its industrial character. Parkhead Forge — the great steelworks of William Beardmore & Company, established in its Parkhead form in the 1860s and eventually one of the largest integrated steelworks in the world — was the economic anchor of the East End from the Victorian era to its decline in the twentieth century. The Forge produced everything from armour plate for warships to railway track to the guns of the First World War, and it employed thousands of workers in the surrounding streets. Irish workers, concentrated in the East End's tenements, were a significant part of the Forge's workforce — alongside Scots, English, and, in the skilled trades, workers from other industrial centres.

The institutional Catholic infrastructure built by the East End's Irish community was extraordinary in its density. Catholic primary schools, secondary schools, churches, fraternities, and confraternities knitted the community together in a network of mutual obligation and shared identity that was simultaneously Irish and Glaswegian — an identity that was neither one nor the other but something new, forged from both. The generations born in Glasgow to Irish parents developed a dual consciousness — strongly Catholic, strongly Irish in heritage and solidarity, but also unmistakably Glaswegian in accent, humour, and urban orientation — that characterises the West of Scotland Irish Catholic community to this day.

Brother Walfrid and the Foundation of Celtic FC

Celtic Football Club was founded on 6 November 1887 at a meeting in St Mary's Parish Hall in the East End of Glasgow. Its founder was a Marist Brother named Andrew Kerins — known in religion as Brother Walfrid — who had been born in Ballymote, County Sligo, Ireland, in 1840, and who had come to Glasgow as part of the Catholic teaching order that was building schools for the Irish immigrant community. The immediate purpose of the new football club was charitable: to raise money for the Poor Children's Dinner Table, a soup kitchen established by the East End parishes to feed the destitute children of the Irish Catholic community who were going without food in the industrial slump of the 1880s.

The choice of football as the vehicle for this charitable purpose was not accidental. Football had become the dominant sport of working-class Scotland by the 1880s, and it offered a mass spectator appeal that could generate significant revenue from gate receipts. The model of using football for charitable purposes was already established — the Edinburgh club Hibernian, founded twelve years earlier by the Irish community there, had shown that an explicitly Irish Catholic football club could attract large crowds and create a powerful community identity. Brother Walfrid was influenced by the Hibernian example and explicitly sought to replicate it in Glasgow's more populated and more Irish East End.

Celtic's founding was an act of diaspora institution-building of the first order. The club was named for the Celtic people — encompassing Irish and Scottish Gaelic heritage together — and its founding committee included prominent Irish Catholics from across the East End parishes. Within its first years it had become not merely a football club but the primary social institution of Glasgow's Irish Catholic community: the place where the community's identity was performed, defended, and celebrated, and where the rivalries and solidarity of the Irish diaspora found their most vivid public expression. That function — as community institution as much as sporting club — has never entirely been relinquished.

The Old Firm and Scotland's Sectarian Football

The rivalry between Celtic and Rangers — the "Old Firm" — is the most religiously and ethnically charged football rivalry in Britain and one of the most intense in the world. Celtic, founded by and for the Irish Catholic community, adopted green and white as their colours and an Irish four-leaf shamrock as their symbol. Rangers, established earlier (1872) as a broadly Protestant club, developed in the late nineteenth century as the sporting institution of Protestant and unionist Glasgow — a counterpart to Celtic's Catholic and Irish identity. The two clubs became locked in a rivalry that expressed, on the football pitch, the sectarian division that Irish immigration had introduced into Glasgow's social life.

The geography of the Old Firm rivalry was mapped onto Glasgow's urban space. Celtic's ground at Celtic Park in Parkhead was in the Irish Catholic East End; Rangers' home at Ibrox was in the Protestant southwest. The march of an Old Firm match day through the city — the green-and-white to the east, the blue-and-red to the west — reproduced the sectarian geography of the streets in amplified and ritualised form. The violence that sometimes accompanied these encounters in the earlier decades of the twentieth century was a sporting expression of the gang warfare and communal hostility that also manifested in the Gorbals streets and Bridgeton closes.

Rangers' long-standing practice of not signing Catholic players — maintained formally until 1989, when Maurice Johnston became the first Catholic to play for Rangers in the modern era — was the most explicit institutional expression of this sectarian geography. For the Irish Catholic community of the East End, Celtic was not merely a football club but a statement of existence: proof that the community was present, powerful, and not to be ignored. The intensity of Celtic support in the East End parishes, the culture of Celtic memorabilia in Irish Catholic homes, the way in which the club's fortunes were experienced as the community's own fortunes — all of this reflects the club's founding purpose and the community from which it grew.

The Barras and the East End's Commercial Life

The Barras — Glasgow's famous covered and open-air market, established by Maggie McIver in the 1920s near the Gallowgate — is one of the great institutions of the East End's working-class commercial life and a social institution as much as a trading venue. McIver's genius was to organise the informal street trading that had always clustered around the East End into a permanent, covered market with managed stalls and regular trading days. The Barras became famous across Scotland for the extraordinary range of goods available — new and second-hand, legal and otherwise — and for the character of the traders and customers who made it the liveliest market in the west of Scotland.

The Barras reflected the East End's cosmopolitan working-class character. Irish traders and customers were a significant presence from the beginning — the market's catchment area overlapped almost exactly with the Irish Catholic settlement zones of the East End — and the mixture of cultures, accents, and goods gave it the quality of a borderland where different communities interacted in the relatively neutral space of commerce. The Barras also developed a musical dimension: the area around the market became one of Glasgow's primary music-hall and popular entertainment zones, and from the 1950s onwards it attracted second-hand record dealers and music sellers who made it a destination for Glasgow's developing youth culture.