THE ORIGINAL BHOY

Celtic are one of Britain’s biggest football clubs but, as Mark Hornsey reveals, they were founded by a humble religious brother as part of his efforts to raise money to help the poor and disadvantaged of Glasgow’s East End

- Mark Hornsey

Brother Walfrid, who goes down in history as the founder of Celtic Football Club, came from very humble origins. He was born Andrew Kerins, in County Sligo, in 1840, the son of a peasant farmer.

His childhood coincided with the Great Famine of 1845 onwards, and although he only had one other sibling, life was hard for the family. At the age of just 15, to escape poverty, Walfrid made the brave decision to leave home and travel to Glasgow (on board a coal boat) to look for work. He was one of an estimated 100,000 people who crossed the Irish Sea between 1845 and 1860 in search of a better life in Scotland. Many of them, Walfrid included, ended up in the East End of Glasgow.

Little is known about Walfrid’s early years in Glasgow, although by 1864 he had decided his vocation in life was to join the Marist Brothers, a teaching order. That is when he was given the name Brother Walfrid. In 1868, when Walfrid had completed his training, he returned to the East End, where he became a teacher. By all accounts he was a tireless campaigner for the poor and disadvantaged. It was doing this work that gave him the idea of using football matches as a means of raising money for those who most needed it.

There were two matches in particular that grabbed his attention, both of which took place in Glasgow in 1887. The first was Hibernian FC winning the Scottish Cup, the most prestigious trophy in Scotland, by beating Dunbarton in the final at Hampden. This caused great jubilation among Irish Catholics, and Walfrid saw at first-hand how football could lift the spirits of those he served.