Interview: Jessie and Margaret Stein, sisters of Celtic’s greatest manager.
(Scotland on Sunday)
Link:http://sport.scotsman.com/viewarticle.aspx?sectionid=6980&articleid=6606328
Published Date: 31 October 2010
One spring morning in 2010, almost 25 years after his death, two elderly ladies in Burnbank, Jessie McNeill and Margaret McDaid – Jock Stein’s two surviving sisters – put on a pot of tea and made themselves comfortable in the front room.And then they spoke publicly about their extraordinary brother for the first time.
Jessie: There were five of us – four girls and John – plus our dad, George, and mother, Jane, all growing up together in a wee house in the miners’ rows at Burnbank. Two of our sisters died young which left John as the oldest, me and then Margaret.
Margaret: The block where we live now is not far from our original house and is on the site of the old railway track that used to take the coal back down from Earnock Colliery where our dad and also John – or Jock, as folk kept calling him – worked. He only got called Jock when he started playing football. We never called him that.
Jessie: Being the only boy John was doted on by our mum. She loved us all but especially John. He was her boy.
Margaret: Dad enjoyed having a son to share his interest in football. Jessie: Dad was a big Rangers man and supported them all his life. Even when John played for and managed Celtic our dad’s team was still Rangers. Of course he wanted John’s team to do well but he was Rangers daft and John was brought up in a Rangers-supporting house.
Margaret: When John played for Celtic my dad still went to see Rangers on a Saturday. John sometimes had to make sure there was a place on the local Rangers supporters’ bus to Ibrox for Dad before he got his things together and headed to Parkhead to play for Celtic.
Jessie: And my dad, who would have his Rangers scarf on on a Saturday, used to wish him luck. But always used to say “I hope you just draw”. That made John laugh every time. Dad would never change his team but we all knew he was also incredibly proud of his boy. When my dad had his stroke John was playing regularly for Celtic at centre-half. Whenever John used to go to see him either in hospital or back at the house he used to ask him who was the best centre-half in Scottish football. He used to always say George Young of Rangers! Never, ever John. My dad died aged 72 a few years before John’s team won the European Cup in 1967. That was a tragedy. He was a proud, proud man and would have been made even prouder by what John had achieved. He may have been a Rangers supporter but he would have been the proudest man in Scotland to see his son with the European Cup.
Margaret: As a brother there was never any nonsense with John. He was straightforward.
He never smoked or drank and could work out if someone was good or bad pretty quickly. He was a very kindly man. Maybe too kind, because when he became successful he had a lot of hangers-on. He was wise to those folk.
Jessie: John never needed alcohol or cigarettes to have fun. In fact when he lived in Queen’s Park he never even brought drink into the house. He always kept it in the garage. There was so much that one freezing winter night all the bottles of wine and whisky burst and they made a huge puddle on his garage floor. It stank for weeks. He hated smoking and said if you were meant to smoke you would have a chimney coming out the top of your head.
Margaret: His first love was his family and then football. I never bothered with the game, even when John was involved. I didn’t watch any matches at Parkhead. One of the few I did watch was the European Cup final in 1967 but that was on the television. It never crossed my mind to go.
Jessie: We went to the celebrations when Celtic arrived back in Glasgow. That was brilliant. Even after that win John never changed. He used to still come up to see us and our mother after our dad died. He never got too big for his boots. A lot of folk think he should have got a knighthood after Celtic won the European Cup and I agree. He should have got one but I don’t think he would have liked one.
Margaret: Aye, you’re right. Oor John wouldn’t have liked all that fuss. In saying that when you see some of the folk that get knighted nowadays, it’s ridiculous. They must be scraping the bottom of the barrel. John would have been much more deserving, although not getting knighted would have been no big deal for him.
Jessie: He did get the CBE, which he picked up at Buckingham Palace. My mother asked him what Buckingham Palace was like and John said that her house in Burnbank was a bigger palace. He said the Queen’s house wasn’t any better than my mother’s and the carpets were worn. John also got an invite to the Queen’s Garden Party at Holyrood. My mother said that was nice, but he wasn’t going.
Margaret: He had us all laughing when he said he had been at her hoose and she hadn’t been to his so he couldn’t go into her garden until she visited him.
Jessie: “I cannae go to sit in her garden on her chairs and eat her food until she’s come to visit me first,” John used to say. He had no airs or graces. One day when he was up at my mother’s two wee boys came up and knocked on the door and asked for his autograph. John signed and said to them both “So what team do you pair support?” One said Celtic the other said Rangers. And John said to them, and I’ll always remember it: “You pair stick together and love one another, whatever happens.” He had no time for all that religious nonsense. He loved football. He couldn’t understand all the rubbish about Catholics and Protestants supporting different teams.
Margaret: The night he died in Wales was terrible.
He had slight heart problems long before that and once I remember he had to stop his car and stand against the school wall on his way to Parkhead. When he got there the club doctor asked him to go to hospital. He did go but he was murder in there. I remember visiting him on a Saturday and he was in bed and there was a television in another room and he was in and out the bed getting the football results. He was not very good at resting. He never wasted a minute of his life. He was not really well the day he went away to Wales for the World Cup qualifying match in 1985. His wife Jean said that he had not been well. He had been at Celtic Park, because someone had been injured, then he had to go with Scotland to play Wales. Jessie, me and our husbands were in my house the night of the Wales game. We were delighted Scotland had won (sic] and saw John coming out of the dugout at the end and when he went down we thought someone had kicked his ankle as he always had a bad ankle. We turned the television off at the final whistle to have a cup of tea and a chat. When we put the television back on John’s picture was upon the screen saying he was dead.
Jessie: We could not believe it. We were out that door straight away and Margaret’s daughter, Janice, ran us down to John’s house. His wife was there, Ernie Walker’s wife, other folk from the SFA, Jean’s brother and John’s daughter, Rae, was in a terrible state. She loved her dad so much.
Margaret: John’s funeral was a fitting tribute to him. There were thousands of people out on the street on the way to the crematorium. There was a man at the top of a hill near the crematorium with a Rangers scarf on as the hearse went in. We were in one of the cars and called him the Lone Ranger. John would have loved that. The fact that man and lots of other Rangers fans lined his funeral route was great. He would have been really touched.
Jessie: John always kept his private and public life separate. So much so that when Bob Crampsey brought out a book two years after he died he wrote that he only had one sister left alive. Margaret and I went up to see him and asked which one of us was deid!
Margaret: He gave us a free book!
Jessie: We weren’t at the unveiling of his bust at Parkhead. The first time we ever saw it was when we went to Parkhead for my 70th birthday and paid for a stadium tour. It was Margaret’s son-in-law who booked the table in the name of Simpson so they had no idea who we were, and we didn’t tell them.
Margaret: We didn’t want to make a fuss. John never traded on his name when he was famous. He was a humble man who treated everybody the same.
Jessie: We still miss him to this day. He was a great brother.