Interview: Donald Findlay QC, Cowdenbeath FC chairman

Published on Saturday 4 September 2010 02:02

Murder is preoccupying Cowdenbeath FC's chairman but, as often happens in a trial, there's an adjournment and I get a text: "Meet me at the Marriott Hotel at 2.30 - D." D is Donald Findlay, Scotland's top QC, as the newspapers he professes not to read call him – the best defence lawyer money can buy.

"My Mondays to Fridays are a complete shambles," he says. "Witnesses will disappear, jurors will fall ill, there'll be a power cut, or it'll be snowing... " The cynic might accuse the flamboyant Findlay of building up his part here, but in Scotland you are innocent until proven guilty. The cynic might also assume one is being invited to express gratitude at being granted some of his valuable and premium-rate time, but this I do happily. Whatever you think of him, the mutton-chopped, fob-watched, pipe-sooking Donald is assuredly one of Scotland's characters, and I've been looking forward to this encounter for a while.

The trial ongoing concerns a murder in Glasgow's Byres Road and the 59-year-old Findlay of course is representing the accused. With as many as 30 cases on the go at any one time you can imagine why you might want the structure and certainty of 3 o'clock every Saturday in your otherwise chaotic, billowing-gown, flapping-files existence.

This explains some of his passion for football but by no means all of it, as we shall discover later. A key question, however, demands an answer right away. Why, given what precipitated his 11-year adjournment from football, can he still be bothered with all the hassle?

In 1999, you'll remember, Findlay was forced to resign as vice-chairman of Rangers after being caught on film at a supporters' club end-of-season party singing The Sash and the one about being up to your knees in fenian blood. Derided and ridiculed, he contemplated suicide. Findlay has always accepted that, whatever his legal achievements in the final reckoning, the incident will have a prominent place, high up his obituaries.

Often, the man in the street will demand a reprise ("Haw Donald, gie's The Sash!"). On the train journey to Glasgow two hacks from another paper, on learning who I was interviewing, chorused: "Say 'Hullo, hullo' to him from us!" So why, in switching from bluenosery to the Blue Brazil, would he want a football profile again?

"Because I was asked," he says. "I've been asked by other clubs – can't tell you which ones – and always turned them down. But Cowdenbeath are my hame toon club. The supporters who came to me were initially after some advice. The club were in danger of going to the wall so I gave it gladly. When they came back and asked me to be chairman I thought: 'Can I give 100 per cent?' There has to be almost an emotional commitment to everything I do, and that was not in doubt here."

So was he worried that he'd be dragging all that unfortunate baggage into Central Park and round the First Division and that this might make his job difficult, if not impossible? He fixes me with a stare. I imagine it's the kind of dead-eyed look he reserves for the witness who changes his evidence, re the crime. And, since I've shifted the chat from Cowdenbeath – the reason he agreed to the interview so as to provide them with some publicity – to Rangers, maybe that's what he thinks I've done. "For goodness sake, that's pathetic," he snorts. "It never crossed my mind. If anybody wants to get all knickered up about what happened at a private function 11 years ago – and really thinks it has any relevance to the present - then frankly I don't think they're worth my f*****g time. If it had bothered the people of Cowdenbeath, they wouldn't have asked me in the first place. I repeat: it was 11 years ago.

"If I'd been sentenced to life in 1999 I would be out by now. For something that mattered."

Save for his explanation of Fife's hierarchical system – "Dunderfermline and Kirkcaldy look down on Cowdenbeath but they're just toffee-nosed b******s" – this will be the only time he swears all afternoon. As I say, I had been looking forward to meeting Findlay. If you're job is asking questions you should enjoy lobbing a few at the grand inquisitor. He may be minus his counsel's horsehair wig, the watch on the chain which belonged to his grandfather, and since we're indoors the pipe, but I've got the whiskers in front of me. It's impossible to say whether he's smiling behind them but a pretty safe bet that he's not.

He's quick to correct. "Not 'one of Scotland's two supremacist teams', Rangers are the supremacists," he says, sounding like a keening minister – not a comparison he'd like because he's an atheist. Famously, he speaks without notes during trials, believing this concentrates jurors' minds and forces him to really listen to witnesses – so I try asking questions off the cuff and, of course, cock up. "With respect, that was five inquiries in one. Do I miss Rangers? Yes, I wish I was still there – I didn't want to leave. Does that mean, because of the Ibrox experience, that Cowdenbeath are a bit of a comedown? No. I'm loving every minute.

"What I can do – and I don't want this to sound patronising – is show them how to run a football club. It may seem straightforward but it's not. At Rangers during the nine-in-a-row years there was an all-for-one, them-and-us mentality where no one was more important than anyone else and it worked. Really, Cowdenbeath's problems are the same as Rangers', the only difference being the scale. So I'm going to try and instill the same philosophy."

His first job was to appoint Jimmy Nicoll as manager; the second was to find a ball. "Honestly, there was a dire lack of them, hardly any kit, too few players and Central Park was wide open – you could have walked in off the street and played a game. So I sorted all of that out.

"The first game I managed to attend was away to Raith Rovers in the Alba Cup. I must admit I'd never heard of the competition but after six minutes I was smiling. That was how long it took for the Raith fans to start up the chant: 'Donald Findlay – you're a w****r!' You see, I don't like being ignored; I'm not a man who takes kindly to that. And of course we won."

Cowdenbeath won again last Saturday, at home to Partick Thistle, when Findlay, who's turned his attention to what happens in the boardroom, reckons the club put on hospitality "every bit as good" as Rangers in his day, even without a club crest on the bubbly. Success this season will be the team staying up; if they get relegated he'll carry the can. Long term, he wants a new stadium and a proper integration of club and community.

He grew up right in the centre of the community, in the High Street abutting the old "jeelie-works". An only child in a tight family unit of mum, dad and gran – "My grandfather, a miner, was killed by pneumoconiocis, others would say he died of it" – he saw his father chase work around the kingdom as pits were threatened with closure. A man "dogged by ill-luck" would later become a church beadle in Dundee, the job coming with a house close to Harris Academy where the young Findlay – a goggle-eyed reader of murder-trial coverage from the age of six – would be schooled.

Findlay speaks warmly of his family and his regret at not being present when they died, sometimes because he was busy pursuing his career. Did he wish that the family had been bigger? "Well, one of the advantages of being an only child is that you're included in grown-up conversations so as a kind of trainee adult I'd get asked whether we should be moving house, which we did often."

Any disadvantages? "I can't share. If you wanted to borrow a book from me I'd lend it to you, but I wouldn't want it back – I'd go out and buy myself another copy." Just then, an image flashes through my mind of Findlay on a J.R. Hartleyesque quest for his favourite lost tomes: Goals, Goals, Goals by George McLean, Simply the Best by Peter van Vossen, My Hundred Best Shots by Ronald de Boer, the latter of course being a book about the languid Dutchman's time in Scotland playing golf.

"Neither a borrower nor lender be – says he who has no business quoting scripture." Findlay has few friends, maybe only four with whom he'd trust with a big secret. Surely that's an average number, I say. "Yes, but beyond that you will have others you call friends and lots of acquaintances. I never kept up with the people I knew at school or university, and this isn't some 'Poor me' cri de coeur, I'm just not very sociable.

"Of course, maybe it's because I'm an only child that I love football. I love being around footballers, the whole thing. Before that match at Stark's Park I asked Jimmy if I could go and see the team and I loved the smell of the changing-room, the clack of the studs on the floor. Football pleases me and excites me."

He loved Champions' League nights at Ibrox but now claims to love "22 guys getting stuck in" at Central Park more. "I saw Rangers a few times last season and my enthusiasm was at a gie low level - they just weren't exciting. But I'm excited watching the Blue Brazil." That is not to denigrate Rangers, something he would never do. He's supported them since he was five, when 47-a-side stramashes at Lumphinnans Primary were always between "Rangers" and "Celtic" and Findlay got lumped in with the latter until his granny ordered him to seek an immediate transfer.

When the sectarian karaoke rumpus broke, Findlay phoned David Murray to resign. "I wasn't sacked." He's stayed friends with the chairman. "We were a good team. David said to me: 'You can be my legs.' We had a sort of agreement that if an idea worked he took the credit, if it didn't I took the blame, and failing that we'd criticise the manager." He says he's never watched footage of the fateful party, or read a Scottish newspaper since. "It would be a good story that I'm still haunted by what happened but I'm not."

The question of what he'd be doing on Saturay afternoons if Cowdenbeath hadn't come calling produces another insight into the strange world of Donald Findlay, QC, who's been married three times, claims with some pride to have no hobbies, spending his life running away from any form of exercise. "Watching rugby league on TV, perhaps. St Helens are my team, even though I've never known where they play." This is his cue for an impression of Eddie Waring, a pretty good one, and when I tell him there's a tribute to the trilby-doffing commentator on telly next week I swear the whiskers part for a smile.

A certain chippiness is admitted, too. "I could never have been a prosecutor because my table-manners aren't good enough for those toffs; I've been known to eat avocado with a soup spoon." But, singing apart, they must have got better because most of his Friday nights are spent on the after-dinner-speaking circuit.

Sometimes he tells tales of murder most horrid; on other occasions the audience just want jokes. Whatever you think of Findlay, he's a fan of the great-but-almost-forgotten Lex McLean. "But Chic was the best." A pause. "Chic Murray, I mean, not Chick Young. And the best gag of all time? Chic, in a cake shop: 'Is that a doughnut or a meringue?' Wifie behind the counter: 'No you're right, it is a doughnut.'"

The unsociable Findlay has flown to Jakarta and back in a day to perpetuate nonsense like this and claims to have had as many bookings from Celtic supporters' clubs after the stooshie as he received before. I always ask if it will be a mixed audience, and by that I obviously don't mean men and women. It's very easy for someone to say they've been offended but by the end of my routine I hope to have offended everyone. Then the question is: 'Have you been entertained?'"

Today I have. I was under the impression time was tight for Findlay but after an hour and a half it's me who says he has to be going. "Yes of course," he says, "back to the office for me, too." Back to a life without a ref's whistle, painted lines and other definites. "Mondays to Fridays, the only things I know will happen are that I'll get up, have a full breakfast, a smoke and fail to complete The Scotsman crossword. I've been trying to finish it for 30 years."

Mr Findlay! Earlier in your evidence you claimed not to read newspapers. I put it to you... (Tragically when I make my dramatic intervention, bound to be greeted with gasps of admiration from the public galleries, I'm already halfway home).