The Dumbarton FC website today contained the sad news that Sons’ great striker from the 1970/71 and 1971/72 seasons, and club legend, Kenny Wilson has died.

He scored 67 goals in his short time at the club including 38 in 36 league games in that memorable promotion season of 1971/72 and 4 in the top division the year after before he moved to Carlisle. He and Roy McCormack were the most potent striking partnership I have ever seen. Just sublime.

I noted part of Kenny’s contribution to our promotion in this post. In a later league game against Raith Rovers he scored all 5 in a 5-0 win. One of those he knew little about. He was standing with his back to goal a few yards out and the ball bounced off the back of his foot and over the line. When you’re hot, you’re hot.

My elder brother dubbed him “rubber legs” due to the way he collapsed when tackled illegally. He won more than a few penalties and free-kicks converted by Charlie Gallagher in those two seasons.

In a pre-season friendly against Carlisle United Kenny scored a cracker I always remember as the “£10,000 goal.” Before the game Carlisle were rumoured to be interested in signing him and willing to pay £10,000 as a transfer fee. When Kenny joined them a few months later they paid £20,000.

Sadly his career after he left the Sons was not as successful in terms of goals scored.

He returned to visit Boghead and the Dumbarton Football Stadium (the Rock) often in the years after he retired from football and always had time to spare for the fans.

And so another part of my youth has gone.

Kenneth Malcolm (Kenny) Wilson: 15/9/1946 – 17/01/2025. So it goes.

And now Stan Bowles, the best football player I have seen live,as opposed to on television, has died. He most famously starred for Queen’s Park Rangers, but it was a Carlisle United player that I saw him dominate the midfield in a pre-season friendly against the Sons of the Rock at Boghead in 1972. He just glided over the pitch and past our midfielders as if they weren’t there. It was sublime.

This video kind of speaks for itself in illustrating some of his skills – but it tends to concentrate on him scoring goals. (I note that the person who titled it had a bit of difficulty spelling extraordinaire.)

I see from his biographical information he shared a birthday with me, though he was some years older.

Stanley Bowles: 24/12/1948 – 24/2/2024. So it goes .

The Christmas present of a jigsaw I blogged about here has now been completed. It shows Boghead Park, former home of the mighty Sons of the Rock, Dumbarton FC. Completing it was a fine nostalgia trip for me.

Starting out:-

Pitch just about completed:-

Surprisingly the hardest part to complete was the crowd in the foreground:-

More from Dumbarton FC’s 150th Anniversary Exhibition.

Boghead was home to the Sons for 121 years. As well as featuring Boghead this board mentioned earlier grounds:-

Boghead’s later days and new stadium at The Rock:-

Temas from the 1880s – 1920s:-

1922 Bergen trip team and others from later in the Twentieth Century:-

Dumbarton FC, the Sons of the Rock,  became 150 years old in December 2022. To mark the occasion various events were held over the year and a special set of strips was worn for the season.

There was also an exhibition held in Dumbarton Library featuring items from the club’s history. We visited it in November.

Letter of congratulation to Dumbarton FC from A J Cronin + Division 2 Winners Medal 1971-2:-

Scottish Football League Second Division Championship Flag 1992 plus a winner’s medal for that campaign and ticket for the first game at The Rock in December 2000 :-

Scottish Football League Third Divison Flag Toggle 2009 and season tickets for 1972-3 and 2001-2:-

Football Cards, Medals and Photo of Pavilion at Boghead, Dumbarton’s former ground :-

Postcards of Boghead, football cards and medal:-

Share Certificate, coasters and Civic Reception tickets:-

!884-5 season ticket, ticket for first floodlit game at Boghead and club badges:-

Letter to J F Donovan and more coasters:-

Parts from Boghead turnstile:-

I have just noticed on the club website that Johnny Graham, midfield maestro of that famous Sons promotion team of 1972 has passed away. I can’t convey the sadness I feel at this news.

Johnny’s total of 385 games for Dumbarton FC is the most of anyone who has played for the club, as is his 99 cup ties.

As the club tribute says he scored 29 gaols for the side but assisted countless others. I well remember him scoring a beauty against Falkirk at Boghead in 1970. He got the ball at the edge of their box and flicked it over a defender’s head, whom he ran round to hit the ball on the volley into the net. Sublime.

He also had the unique trick of seeming to let an opposition clearance go over his head in midfield before extending his superb left peg back behind him and without being able to see the ball using the back of that foot propel it forwards again – usually to a team mate. I’ve never seen anyone else do that.

Johnny Graham: 30/12/1947 – 28/06/2022. So it goes.

SPFL Tier 3, Balmoral Stadium, 23/4/22.

This was an odd experience. I’ve been at an away ground before where the home team could win promotion that day (Stark’s Park, when Jimmy Nichol was Raith player-manager) and it was a much more raucous affair.

For a team about to win a championship the home crowd was strangely muted. Maybe it’s an Aberdeen thing. Alex Ferguson said that the most encouragement the Pittodrie faithful gave his team was that, “You could hear them rustling their sweetie papers.”

Whatever the only chanting in the first half came from the small cohort of Dumbarton fans giving it the usual. “We’re only here for the party,” “What a shitey home support,” and “Shall we sing a song for you,” were each given a run-out.

We had the better of the earlier exchanges and their keeper made more saves (two) than ours (one) in the first half. Ross MacLean was worked into a good poaition on the left of the box but his shot was at a perfect height for the keeper to save it. Then Connor Duthie had a shot blocked and Josh Oyinsan shanked the rebound wide. Josh worked another opportunity afew minutes later but his finish was a bit weak and close to the keeper. At the other end Kieran Wright came out to smother a shot in a one-on-one. A pretty nothing first half in truth. The home team were just that though, a team, clearly used to playing with each other. Their passes generally found their target whereas ours could be wayward. However they didn’t look like a side hoping to win their league that day, with not much urgency to their play.

In the second half they did step it up a bit, but only a bit. Patience is a virtue and their one good opportunity was put away, former Son Mitch Megginson unaccountably left free at the edge of our box to rilfe it home. There was really only one winner after that, though we had a flurry towards the end. In retrospect the three changes our manager Stevie Farrell made simultaneously on 66 minutes perhaps made us less potent.

The plastic pitch had done for Eoghan Stokes 14 minutes in. It looked like his studs got too much grip on it and he was forced off.

Balmoral Stadium itself is a kind of soulless place to play football. At the edge of an industrial estate and overlooked by radio and microwave transmitters, it has a tiny stand (a bit like Boghead’s old Postage Stamp) straddling the halfway line with flat surrounds beside it and on the other three sides, though with three shallow stepped enclosures on the side opposite the stand. If there’s one persion standing in front of you you won’t be able to see any of the action. You have to be on the rail. In adddition the goal nets are almost touching the “terracing” barriers behind the goals.

Anyway, congratulatiosn to Cove Rangers on their winning the league.

As for us, a nothing game next Saturday before the nerve shredding play-off. For the second season in a row we’ll come up against Edinburgh City, away on 3^rd or 4^th May, with the home leg on 7^th May. I’m not looking beyond that.

I see from the club’s website that Sons’ centre half from that otherwise immortal team of the 1972 promotion, Jack Bolton, has died.

The line-up for most of that – and the preceding – season is imprinted on my memory as I heard it annnounced so many times over the Boghead tannoy:-

Williams, Jenkins and Muir;
Ferguson, Bolton and Graham;
Coleman, C Gallacher, McCormack, Wilson and B Gallagher.
Substitute, Donnelly.

Jackie, as we fans knew him, played 111 times for the club overall but unlike many of his centre half successors I can’t remember him ever scoring for us. (In those days centre halves moving upfield was still pretty much a novelty.)

As I recall he was about the last piece of the team-builidng jigsaw that manager Jackie Stewart put in place. Certainly without his influence in defence I doubt promotion would have been achieved that season, notwithstanding that side’s formidable attacking prowess.

John McCaig Bolton: 26/10/1941 – 22/2/2021. So it goes.

Scotland’s Football Grounds in the Black and White Era, D C Thomson Media, 2018, 257 p. With a foreword by Chick Young.

Annfield, Bayview, Boghead, Brockville, Broomfield, Cathkin Park, Douglas Park, Firs Park, Love Street, Muirton, New Kilbowie, Shawfield, Telford Street, Kingsmills. Names to conjure with – and all gone to dust (or housing, or supermarkets.)

To Scottish football fans of a certain age (which I am) this book is a magnificent nostalgia fest. It features 41 of the historic grounds of the present day SPFL football clubs, plus two more, Shielfield (at time of publishing Berwick Rangers were still in the SPFL,) and Firs Park. The only ones missing are Peterhead’s former ground at Recreation Park and Annan Athletic’s Galabank. The criterion for inclusion in the book was that a photograph had not been widely published before or else illustrated some quirk of the ground concerned. (I was somewhat disappointed that only one photo of Boghead, former home of the mighty Sons of the Rock, appears; but I have my own memories to savour.) And of course for Inverness Caledonian Thistle you get two former grounds, Telford Street and Kingsmills. In the course of following the Sons I have visited most of the stadia here in their heydays, excepting only those belonging to the ex-Highland League clubs (though I have walked past Telford Street Park several times and even been to Clachnacuddin’s Grant Street Park in Inverness for a game – a pre-season friendly they played against East Fife; in 1976, while I was in the town.) I have frequented many over the years since.

The book is a delightful celebration of the history of the beautiful game in Scotland – and also a memorial to what has been lost. Cathkin apart, all of the grounds on the list above have been replaced by bright(ish) new(ish) stadia but most of those have yet to invoke the glories of these now mouldered (Cathkin again) or vanished (most of the rest) temples to Scotland’s abiding sporting obsession. With only one exception, Hampden, the book tends not to delve as far back as pre-World War 2, hence the absence of even longer gone grounds such as the Gymnasium, home to St Bernard’s FC, of which photographs would in any case be vanishingly scarce.

There is a 1930s, Art Decoish-looking, building in the pictures of Shawfield that I don’t remember from my only visit there and which I assume was demolished years ago. My favourite old ground, Firs Park, is shown in the days before that huge concrete wall was erected at one end to stop the ball going on to the access road to the retail park beside the ground; before, even, the office building that overlooked that end of the park in the 1970s. That other redolent relic, Cliftonhill, is shown lying in a natural bowl perfect for siting a football stadium.

The text is studded with various titbits of arcane information. Glasgow had at one time three of the biggest football grounds in the world in Hampden, Celtic Park and Ibrox. And there were plans to extend Shawfield’s capacity to add to that list of superstadia. The world’s first penalty kick was awarded against Airdrieonians (away at Royal Albert in a charity Cup match) and was scored by a James McLuggage. (Not from a penalty spot, that had yet to be invented; from any point along a line twelve yards from goal.) A WW2 pillbox was constructed at Borough Briggs with slit windows/gun ports all round (those sly Germans could after all have attacked from any direction) and remained in place till Elgin City joined the SFL in 2000. It was Ochilview which hosted the first ever floodlit match in Scotland. Falkirk once held the world record for the highest transfer fee and Brockville was the venue for the first televised floodlit game. Rugby Park used to be ‘mown’ by a resident sheep – three in total over the years. Hampden’s square goal posts now reside in St Etienne’s museum as they were held by that club to be responsible for their defeat at the hands of Bayern Munich in the European Cup Final of 1976 since two of their team’s efforts rebounded out from the goal frame instead of scraping over the line. Les poteaux carres is still used as a phrase for bad luck in the city.

Attending football matches is no longer as economical as it was back in the day. One photo shows a 20p entrance fee at Firhill in 1970. After inflation that 20p would equate to £3 in 2018. Try getting into even a non-league ground for that now! Some things definitely were better in the good old days.

Pedant’s corner:- “the current club were established” (was established,) “the club were on the up” (the club was) sprung (sprang, x2.)

I’ve been aware for a long time that though I have a category for Scottish Football Grounds in which I post pictures of those theatres of disappointment I’ve never actually featured what Sons fans know as The Rock.

Given that this season promises to be one of the most dismal in over twenty years for said fans what better sight to lighten the mood?

The stadium has had several sponsored names over its years since the club moved from the traditional Boghead: Strathclyde Homes Stadium, the Bet Butler Stadium, the Cheaper Insurance Direct Stadium,* the YOUR Radio 103FM Stadium, and now the C&G Systems Stadium reverting to Dumbarton Football Stadium in times between sponsorships.

It really is in a fantastic location.

Dumbarton Rock and Dumbarton Football Stadium from Castle Road:-

From car park and pedestrian access. The turnstiles here are for the home end:-

Stadium, Stand and Dumbarton Rock from main car park:-

Stadium and Dumbarton rock from western part of car park:-

Showing Stand seating:-

Stand from River Leven side:-

Stand from west car park:-

Main Entrance from car park entrance:-

From Home support end of Stand. Kilpatrick Hills (known locally as the Long Crags) in right background:-

Pitch panorama. Dumbarton town in background. The large red brick building, once part of Ballantine’s Distillery, has now been demolished:-

Away end of pitch:-

I caught this disinterested spectator before a game once:-

*When that one was first referred to by a BBC Radio Scotland reporter at a game I remember the programme’s presenter Richard Gordon wailing, “Noooo.” It was bit of a minter.