Your Memories: 'Hearts were Scotland's top team in those days'

Published on Saturday 14 February 2009 10:19

JOHN FERGUSON, 91, has been a proud Jambo for 85 years. A Heart of Midlothian fan from the age of six, he has followed his team through thick and thin, and was a season ticket holder at Tynecastle until he was 80.

"I have gone to hundreds of Hearts games," he says.

"I was lucky because we lived at Morrison Street at Haymarket for a time, so I used to walk to Tynecastle.

"I started going to Tynecastle at six years old. In those days it was packed, with 40,000 people. It was better than Celtic or Rangers are now. In fact, in those days, Celtic and Rangers were way below Hearts – Hearts were the top team in Scotland.

"I remember the days of Willie Bauld, Tommy Walker and John Cummings. They are the ones I can remember most vividly.

"Willie Bauld, Alfie Conn and Jimmy Wardhaugh were the Terrible Trio in Tynecastle and they were terrific. In my memory, they were the greatest. There have been none as good as them, apart from John Robertson. They just played football as it should be played.

"My brother used to take me. He was six years older and very good, he used to look after me."

The son of a miner, Mr Ferguson was born in West Lothian and moved to Edinburgh at the age of eight. He now lives in Rosewell, Midlothian.

"I was born in Broxburn. My dad was a miner, like most people in those days.

"We moved to Edinburgh in 1929 when my dad got a gardening job in a large house in Church Hill. My mother did the cooking for the lady there.

"I went to Bruntsfield School until I passed my 11 plus, then I went to Bellevue School.

"I played centre half for the school team at Bellevue. I wasn't bad, but I wasn't anything like a professional."

Mr Ferguson got his first job at the age of 11, but says he still had to rely on his parents for money to buy his ticket at Tynecastle each week.

"I did a message boy job from the age of 11 until I was 14. I took messages to people on a bicycle with a basket on the front. I delivered fruit and vegetables for Greig's on Haymarket Terrace. I got two shillings a week and gave a shilling to my mum and kept one for me, but I still had to cadge off my mother and father to go to the football."