Ibrox stadium guru, Burns' wife and opera star join list of great Scots in biography book

Published on Wednesday 7 October 2009 22:00

A FOOTBALL stadium architect, who watched in anguish as 26 people died in the stands he had designed at Ibrox Park, yesterday won recognition for his later achievements that improved safety for fans.

In 1902, Archibald Leitch was among the spectators who ran to help the victims after wooden terraces collapsed at the new Ibrox stadium.

"I need hardly say," he wrote later, "what unutterable anguish the accident caused me, surely the most unhappy eyewitness of all."

Yet his reputation rebounded so well that his firm went on to work for 30 British and Irish football clubs. And yesterday his name was added to the roll of prominent Scots in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), as the world's first specialist designer of football grounds.

Forty Scottish names were entered in the ODNB's latest online update yesterday, picked to mark the Year of Homecoming.

They ran from Leitch to the Ayrshire-born Jean Armour – the wife of Robert Burns, whose 250th anniversary is celebrated this year – to the opera singer Mary Garden, who retired to her Aberdeen home after a global stage and screen career.

At the time of its completion in 1900, Ibrox Park was the world's largest purpose-built football ground, with a capacity of nearly 80,000. After the disaster at the 1902 Scotland-England match, Leitch had his competence questioned, but a timber merchant was prosecuted.

The stands and terraces he designed in the years that followed, with tubular steel crush barriers, became industry standard. Most were demolished following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in favour of all-seater stadiums.

"Why we liked him, why he qualified, is because his architectural contribution was considerable," said Dr Philip Carter, publications editor of the ODNB. "He did as much as anyone to shape the way people enjoyed the modern game of football. His contribution to national history is considerable, and he is one of those people who has a worldwide reach."

The list of 40 Scots – out of 96 additions in this latest update – began with Jean Armour. From there, biographers moved to Scots who became influential figures overseas amid the expansion of the British Empire.

They include Robert Dollar, a shipowner and philanthropist. After moving to Canada as a boy, he followed his father into the timber trade. Building a multimillion-dollar fortune, he returned to Scotland to visit his mother's grave in Falkirk in 1884, and later donated both library funds and a public park, named Dollar Park, to the city.

Other entries include William Hastie, who first went to Russia as a workman for Catherine the Great's Scottish architect Charles Cameron. He went on to become a bridge designer in St Petersburg and, eventually, the Russian Empire's chief town planner, producing standardised urban designs, used from the Baltic to Siberia.

Other Scots range from Christian Fletcher, who smuggled the crowd, sceptre and sword of state of Scotland away from Oliver Cromwell's advancing troops, to the Victorian golf club maker Hugh Philip, called the "Stradivarius of golf club makers".

James Blyth, who died in 1906, is recognised as the first person to generate electricity from a windmill, built at his holiday home in Montrose.

Archibald Leitch (1865-1939)

Glasgow-born Leitch was Britain's most prolific and innovative architect of football stadiums in the first great age of the game. His career nearly ended following the collapse of a stand at Ibrox Park stadium in 1902, two years after he designed it. Cleared of responsibility, he went on to create grounds for Rangers, Arsenal, Manchester United, Everton, Sunderland and Aston Villa. His designs can still be seen at Ibrox, Hearts' Tynecastle Stadium and Craven Cottage, home to Fulham. In total he

Mary Garden (1874-1967)

Soprano Mary Garden , the daughter of an Aberdeen ironworks cashier, sang for Claude Debussy in Paris – he created the role of Mlisande for her – and Oscar Hammerstein in New York. After a roving life that included volunteering as a nurse in the First World War, she returned to Aberdeen.

Jean Armour (1765-1834)

Armour is said to have met Robert Burns when his dog ran over her washing. She stood by the poet despite his notorious philandering, even raising his child by another woman. Burns celebrated his wife – "the lassie I lo'e the best" – in 12 of his songs. After his death, she was celebrated as a living link to the writer.