Glenbuck

 

As I was travelling down the M74 this week I took the chance to take a minor diversion and visit the village of Glenbuck - or at least what remains of it. Glenbuck was a small mining community in Ayrshire which had, at it’s peak, around 1,000 people living there. The last deep mine closed in 1931 and the community went in to decline. The bulk of the village was demolished to make way for an opencast site in the 1990s and the village would have been all but forgotten had it not been for the remarkable success of their local football team, the Glenbuck Cherrypickers, who produced at least 38 (and probably more) professional footballers including the legendary Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly.

 The road that led to the centre of the village is now an access point for the opencast site. As it was a Saturday when I visited there didn’t seem to be any activity.

There are some cottages remaining. This cottage appeared to be occupied as there was smoke emerging from the chimney. I didn’t look any further as it was a private road.

When it was announced that the old village was to be demolished a monument was erected by Liverpool fans to acknowledge the village's sporting history and as the birthplace of Bill Shankly.

I’m not sure if the site is regularly visited but there was a Liverpool football shirt left in tribute – it had their shirt sponsors from a couple of years ago so I don’t know if it had been there for a while (I replaced it after I had taken the pictures).

The only other sign of activity I could see was the trout fishing at the loch.

It’s difficult to say why a tiny community like Glenbuck produced so many professional sportsmen but I can think of at least two reasons. Firstly, there really wasn’t that much to do so the endless games of 5-a-side passed the time and gave the men something to look forward to after a hard day’s work. With this concentration of playing the poor players would become competent, the competent ones would become good, and any with a real streak of talent would become exceptional. Secondly, mining is a hard and dangerous life and, in all probability, an early death. In the early part of the 20^th Century professional footballers where not the highly paid superstars they are now but they earned more than miners for essentially doing an activity which they loved in the first place. Any chance to play professionally would be grabbed, gratefully, with both hands.

Aside from Bill Shankly the town produced many players who excelled both in Scottish and English football, including Sandy Tait and Sandy Brown who won the FA Cup with Tottenham, Bob Blythe who managed Portsmouth, the Knox brothers who would play for clubs such as  Sunderland and Everton and also Bob Shankly, Bill’s older brother, who played at Falkirk before coaching at Stenhousemuir and managing at Falkirk, Third Lanark, Dundee, Hibernian and Stirling. His time at Dundee was quite remarkable as he won the League Championship and went on to take them to the semi-final of the European Cup. This must have provided an inspiration to Bill as his Liverpool side won the English Second Division in the same year. I managed to find the following article which has some pictures of the town as was.

Scottish football has been in turmoil recently and it is difficult to remember that, until fairly recently, Scotland was a major exporter of football talent. I’m not sure whether the decline in grass roots football has more to do with the failed Rangers model of buying in players from abroad or that there are now more distractions and life is generally easier than the one the Cherrypickers endured. It’s hard to say but the financial jolt from the Rangers debacle may be inspiration that the game has needed for many years.