The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872 (16 page)

By the time of the census in 1871 William was 14 and working as an assistant salesman. He lived with his sister Jane, a 21-year-old saleswoman, and mother Jane, 50, who was listed as a housekeeper and head of the family home. Their surname, in what would become a consistent scenario of administrative blunders and careless pen strokes, was listed as McBeth. Crucially, they lived at No.17 Cleveland Street in the Sandyford area of the city – a street that still stands today (although the address no longer exists) running parallel with North Street, a stone’s throw from the Mitchell Library. At the same address – that is, living in the same tenement close – were five members of the McNeil family, including eldest daughter Elizabeth, 30, the housekeeper, eldest son James, 27, a commercial traveller, brothers Henry, 21, a commercial clerk, William, 19, a seedsman, and Peter, 16, a clerk. (Moses was at this time still living at home on the Gareloch.)
  This is the most compelling evidence that links William McBeath of Callander with the McNeils in the early 1870s and the formation of Rangers, although the birth of the club would have represented a period of mixed emotions for a boy who was still two months short of his 16th birthday. At the same time that he and his friends were planning their new adventure in association football, William’s mother died, aged just 53, in March 1872. Her death certificate, signed by her youngest son, again confirmed the family address as No. 17 Cleveland Street and noted her passing was a result of chronic bronchitis, which she had suffered for several months and had, in turn, led to heart disease.
  It was undoubtedly a crushing blow to young William to lose his second parent so early in life and, sadly, death was a spectre that was to shadow his existence throughout the second half of the 19th century. The most distressing tale of all the McBeaths, including even William himself, was the terribly tragic short life of sister Jane, who must have felt she was preparing for decades of happiness when she fell in love with and married shipping clerk Daniel Lang in Glasgow in June 1873. However, by December of that year Daniel, aged just 22, had died from consumption. The effect on his new wife must have been devastating and sadly, in July 1879, when she was only 28 years old, widower Jane also passed away, killed by the scourge of tuberculosis at her home in Kirk Street in the Perthshire cathedral town of Dunblane, a few miles from the original family home in Callander. Once again, it was left to William to sign the death certificate.
  In 1878 William moved across the Clyde to Kelburne Terrace in the Crosshill district of Glasgow, following his marriage to Jeannie Yates (or Yeates) Harris, 21, who had been born in the Govanhill area of the city, the daughter of a hosier, David Harris, and his wife Agnes. At the time of their wedding in Glasgow on 28 March 1878, by United Presbyterian minister Alexander Wallace, William was working as a draper’s traveller and living at No. 41 Elderslie Street, a short free-kick from Cleveland Street. The marriage certificate noted the groom’s full name as William Duncanson MacBeth, which is significant for two reasons. Firstly, as far as can be established, William’s middle name of Duncanson was acknowledged for the first time on official documents and his mother’s maiden name was possibly adopted by a loving son following her death six years earlier. Secondly, a slip of a registrar’s pen consigned the name of McBeath to the annals of history. William would never again be known, in official documents at least, by the name with which he was born.
  Initially, the marriage of William and Jeannie MacBeth seemed to follow a happy and familiar pattern. Two years after their wedding Jeannie gave birth, in April 1880, to a son, also named William Duncanson MacBeth. However, within 12 months the family left Scotland and set up home in Bristol. Almost certainly the demands of William’s job as a commercial traveller took the family south, although the nature of his business and the company for whom he worked are, unfortunately, unknown.
At first the family lived in the St Paul district of the city, at No. 16 Albert Park (the street still exists) and they remained there until at least 1886. The family was expanded still further in 1882 with the birth of a daughter named Agnes Isabella and another son, named Norman Douglas, in 1890. Business must have been going well for William because the family had taken an upwardly mobile step by 1889 when they moved to a more upmarket address, No. 2 Chestnut Villas in the Stapleton area of Bristol.
It is impossible not to read the entry for the MacBeths in the census of 1891 and conclude anything other than that the family, like Man of the Match William against Callander in 1872, were at the top of their game. Their residence at Chestnut Villas was well established and William and Jeannie were affluent enough to employ a domestic servant, 15-year-old Somerset girl Lillie Field.
  However, some time after 1893 (the last known date linking them with their home in Stapleton) the family unit collapsed in such a spectacular style that it would never again be reunited. What devastating episode would eventually force them to send young Norman northwards to live with his grandmother in Glasgow? What caused the breakdown of the relationship between William and Jeannie? Agnes would eventually find refuge working as a nursery governess in Torquay, but what became of her after 1901, when she seemed to fall off the face of the earth? What became of William junior, who has also proved impossible to trace beyond his 10th birthday in the 1891 census?
  It is tempting, knowing the events that were to follow in the spring of 1897, to conclude that whatever employment William enjoyed throughout the 1880s and into the early half of the 1890s was somehow compromised, perhaps by unemployment or some other economic fate. Perhaps the situation was more prosaic – a lack of health or plain bad fortune, or simply a marriage doomed to failure from the start and which no number of children conceived in hope could ever help to heal. Unfortunately, a lack of evidence leaves them as frustrating and unanswered threads that even Rumpelstiltskins himself would struggle to weave into a definitive narrative pattern.
  In the spring of 1897 the headlines in the British press were dominated by world events, including the ongoing funding and engineering crises surrounding the construction of the Panama Canal. German Kaiser Wilhelm II was at loggerheads with his own budget committee in the Reichstag over the country’s naval spending, while famine in India and flooding along the Mississippi in the US had left hundreds of thousands homeless and facing illness and starvation. However, it is unlikely that affairs of state or other political intrigues weighed heavily on the mind of William in March and April of that year as he trudged from one boarding house to another around the favoured holiday resorts that fringe the Severn Estuary, including Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon, Clifton and Portishead. It was not events at the front of newspapers he would have found taxing so much as the pressure of filling the space traditionally given over at the back of the daily publications to classified and display advertisements. As career choices go, it seemed that he had hit rock bottom, accepting in February the kind of employment opportunity that would have made the position of snake oil salesman appear as credible as the post of Prime Minister.
  It was not as if he was selling space on behalf of the standard-bearers of the Fourth Estate – Emmott’s Seaside Advertiser hardly ranked alongside The London Times as society’s great guardian of the truth, as the few copies of the newspaper that did exist were certainly not published by a character with a strong sense of Victorian morality. On the face of it, the position was hardly the most challenging. For 10 shillings a week and a 25 per cent commission it was the duty of William, most often accompanied by his newspaper’s publisher, John Burgoyne Emmott – as it transpired, a conman whose entrepreneurial zeal was clearly in inverse proportion to his sense of ethics – to persuade hoteliers and boarding house owners to advertise in the weekly journal, Emmott’s Seaside Advertiser. The potential advertisers were assured the paper was widely distributed each week to 5,000 households throughout the north of England and the Midlands, from where the bulk of their holidaying guests arrived throughout the year. A standard advertisement usually cost at least five shillings for six months, but on immediate payment of cash it could be secured for half the price. On the face of it, a good deal seemed to have been secured, but nagging doubts soon surfaced among those who had paid up front – and they were confirmed when William and Emmott were arrested in Portishead under suspicion of securing money under false pretences.
  The full story was recounted in May 1897 in the pages of the Bristol Times and Mirror and the Western Daily Press and exposed William as a weak, naïve and impressionable character – sadly pathetic, driven (most probably as a result of recent events in his family life) to accept a job working for a convicted criminal whose ability to sweet-talk over 1,000 gullible souls out of up to £600 in the previous 18 months was as impressive as the depth of his greed and lack of scruples. On Monday 17 May 1897 the story commanded most of page three of the Western Daily Press under the heading ‘Alleged False Pretences in Somerset.’ The story read: ‘A special sitting of the Long Ashton division magistrates was held on Saturday at Flax Bourton for the investigation of charges of obtaining money by false pretences preferred against two respectably dressed men, named John Burgoyne Emmott (45) and William Duncanson MacBeth (40). The proceedings, which were conducted before Sir Edward Fry and Major Thorne, lasted some hours. The original charges against the prisoners were obtaining by false pretences 2s 6d from Joseph John Dobbs at Portishead, on 29 April; 3s from Henry Charles Barrington, at Portishead, on 30 April; and 2s 6d from Albert Thomas Cross, also of Portishead. Mr Dobbs, corn factor, of Beach Road, Portishead, said at the first hearing that on 29 April Emmott came to his house and, representing himself to be the agent for Emmott’s Seaside Advertiser, asked him to advertise his lodgings in that paper. In answer to witness, Emmott said the paper was circulated in the Midlands and had proved such a success in advertising watering places they had decided to take in Portishead and Clevedon. The usual charge, added Emmott, was 5s and upwards per advertisement but as the witness’s house was a small one they would advertise it for 2s 6d. Witness agreed to advertise his lodgings for six months for 2s 6d, the defendant promising to send the paper every week while the advertisement was running. Emmott produced a copy of the paper and witness paid him the 2s 6d.’
  The fraud was repeated with Barrington, who paid three shillings, and also with Mrs Ellen Cross, wife of Albert Thomas, who told how William had first knocked on her door and engaged in conversation on 28 April while Emmott waited at the garden gate. Persistence was clearly a strong characteristic of William’s as he returned twice before finally securing 2s 6d from the Cross family on 30 April. The court then called Arthur Baker, a Birmingham printer, who outlined further details of the fraud. Baker revealed that in 1896 his company printed Emmott’s Seaside Advertiser but that he had never met Emmott before. The work was carried out on a written order received from Emmott in Bournemouth and Baker’s firm, the Aston Steam Printing Works, agreed to publish the paper monthly for a year. However, Baker’s company only printed the paper twice in total and half the initial print run of 1,000 copies was sent to Emmott at a London railway station, with the other 500 retained by the printers awaiting further instructions, which never came. A lengthy correspondence passed between Emmott and his printer throughout 1896 before he finally wrote from Torquay to complain about business being bad and requesting another batch of 500 papers -– his second edition – at a reduced cost of 15 shillings. Surprisingly, the printer agreed and confessed under questioning that, despite extensive experience of publishing in the Midlands, he had never heard of Emmott’s Seaside Advertiser being distributed in Birmingham or its surrounding areas.
  Emmott and William had clearly aroused suspicion in the local community and it came as no surprise when they were arrested by a PC Sharpe in Portishead on 1 May for alleged offences stretching back two months. Details of their arrests were reported in the 17 May edition of the Bristol Times and Mirror as William pleaded, ‘I am only an agent for Mr Emmott, receiving so much per week, and he owes me now over £6 in wages. I did not know [anything] but this paper was printed every week in Birmingham and circulated in Birmingham, Manchester, Derby, Liverpool, Nottingham and several other places. I can’t see how I can be convicted.’ William had been caught with counterfoil receipts in his pockets relating to money received from witnesses in the case. Charitably, Emmott damned William with faint praise, telling police, ‘I wish to say that he is innocent of the charge. He has worked for me faithfully for the last three months, though not successfully. He has handed over all monies, or accounted for them, which he has received.’ Emmott added: ‘I never intended from the first to obtain any money by false pretences.’
  William’s desperation to avoid a longer spell in prison was clear to every reader of the Bristol Times and Mirror as they read over details of his defence. The paper reported he ‘read a long statement, in which he stated that he was engaged in February last at Weston-Super-Mare by Emmott…His salary was 10s a week, all railway expenses paid, and 25 per cent commission on the amount of advertisements, paid weekly. All monies he collected were handed over at the time of receiving them or the same evening. All the working of districts was directed by Emmott and he had no permission to alter the ground without his authority. In canvassing for advertisements he was to make it clear that Emmott’s Seaside Advertiser had a wide circulation in the Midlands as a paper devoted to the advertising of boarding houses, hotels, restaurants etc and that 5,000 copies were distributed weekly in Leeds, Manchester, Derby, Liverpool, Leicester, Northampton, London and several other places and that the advertisements would appear every week for 52 weeks unless ordered for six months only. These things he represented to all he called on and 60 advertisements were taken in Weston-super-Mare alone, some from personal friends, including others for Clevedon, Burnham, Clifton and Portishead…He had been working for Emmott for 10 weeks only and it was utterly impossible for him to know of anything between Emmott and his printer beyond that they were on good terms. The real facts only came to light with the examination of Emmott at the Portishead police station. He declared that he had nothing to do with the paper called Emmott’s Seaside Advertiser further than a paid servant to Emmott as advertising agent. His engagement was to have continued until he had worked Blackpool and district and the Isle of Man.’