New Kilbowie Park 1939-1996

A Brief History

Before the new there has to be an old, but the old has to have been new. Kilbowie Park was new in 1899, when the new Junior football team, Duntocher, rented a field behind Kilbowie Gardens, from Mr. Riddell, a farmer, for £14 per annum. Kilbowie Park, a modest ground, was nearly forty years old when it hosted its last game on Friday, June 2nd, 1939 when Clydebank Juniors were beaten by Renfrew in the semi-final of the Elder Cottage Hospital Cup. Duntocher had opened their ground on October 21st, 1899, against Kirkintilloch Rob Roy in the Dumbartonshire Junior Cup. In front of 200 spectators, Clydebank won 2-1, with goals from Dougie Cameron and Bricky Watson. At season’s end Duntocher changed their name to Clydebank Juniors.

Against the background of improving industrial fortunes after the depression of the early 1930’s, the heavy machine tool manufacturers, Messrs. D. & J. Tullis, needed room to expand their Kilbowie Engineering Works and so the Juniors had to end their tenure at Kilbowie Park. This came to the attention of the public in October 1937 when it was announced that the Ways and Means Committee of the football club were negotiating for a new ground, and having completed the legal details, the plan was to be submitted to the membership for approval.
The initial letter had come from the owners of the ground in June 1937, and at a meeting of the members of the football club it was decided to appoint a “Ways and Means Committee” to work through the needs of the club. The initial idea was to slide the ground further eastwards, and to have the ground completed during the close season. Ways and Means found that this solution would cost around £1,000. At the same time they investigated the prospects for an entirely new ground, to be bought outright. After some searching the Ways and Means recommended the purchase of 5.43 acres of allotments in Montrose Street at a cost of £900, which satisfied the club membership and followers as it would still be in the Kilbowie district and Kilbowie and the Juniors were “synonymous terms”.
The Ways and Means Committee had their powers extended to enable them to raise the necessary finance and to borrow £500 from the Clydebank Co-operative Society, Ltd, to complete the purchase of the ground.
If buying the ground was the easy bit, building a football ground was harder.
The playing surface was to be laid by Messrs. J. & R. Stutt of Paisley, the contract was for £1,000. Generously, Clydebank Town Council donated the turf, from a site adjoining the new ground, and it was found to be ideal.
Below the turf were several hundred tons of clinker and one third of a mile of tiled drains. The area of turf laid out was 144 yards by 66 yards.
The Committee had considered, after visiting other new grounds, that the priority was a first class playing pitch, and then to build the embankments for spectators.
The main embankment was started in April 1938 by Messrs. John Brown & Co, who started tipping 30,000 tons of the material needed, but they didn’t actually produce enough waste, and so the tipping would take years. Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons came to the rescue and in only four months they provided over 28,000 tons of suitable material.
Securing the new ground involved tendering for a fence of best corrugated sheeting, nine feet in height, with all steel supports. With all the important pieces intact, Mrs. Peter Robertson, wife of a well-wisher and patron of the club, laid the last piece of turf on 28th August 1938.
All this work had involved the Juniors in quite an amount of expenditure and Councillor Francis, in charge of Ways and Means, estimated the total would eventually be £3,000.
The fundraising started in earnest in January 1938 when the club’s 200 members agreed to a levy of sixpence each per week for the 52 weeks of 1938. This would raise £260.
At the New Year game with Duntocher Hibs, there were big queues for the sale of OXO, all profits going to the building fund, a practice which the club planned to continue.
In June 1938 a jumble sale was held at Kilbowie Park to raise funds for the new ground.
August 1938 saw Clydebank’s newest cinema, La Scala, hold a Sunday evening show for the fund. La Scala also held a special show on Saturday October 1st, hosted by David Kirkwood MP, with the Clydebank Male Voice Choir present at the showing of the Busby Berkeley musical “Hollywood Hotel”.
Although much of the work was completed by the time the last sod was laid, the Juniors hoped to stay at “old” Kilbowie up until the end of 1938 in order to let everything settle, but in October of that year, Tullis agreed that they could stay until June 1939. This was a greatly appreciated gesture especially as Tullis did need to extend their operations.
Two years had elapsed since their first notice to quit and the ground was more or less finished. Since the outset there had been plans for McAlpines to build a grandstand and pavilion costing £2,500, but due to various matters out with the control of the firm, they could not complete the building before the opening of the ground. They then generously agreed to build a temporary pavilion until time permitted them to proceed with the original plan.
A final touch had been making a track around the playing pitch with ash supplied by Singer Manufacturing Company Limited.

July 29th, 1939, was a red letter day in the history of Clydebank Juniors as that was the day that they opened their new ground, New Kilbowie Park. Their opponents were old, and local, rivals Yoker Athletic and over 9,000 turned up to see the ceremony.
Just after three o’clock, Mr. Trevor Roberts, the Juniors’ President, various members of the Ways and Means Committee, Provost Low and assorted councillors walked to the centre of the field to carry out the official ceremony. The honour of opening the new park was that of Councillor Francis, who cut the blue ribbon that stretched across the halfway line, and formally declared New Kilbowie Park opened.
The crowd around the blue and white railings witnessed a fine game which the Juniors won 4-1; Strong was the hero with three goals, Russell the other. English got the consolation for the Whe Ho.
Afterwards the club president hosted a tea in the New Windsor Rooms for the various dignitaries and friends involved in the procurement of the new park.
Clydebank Juniors had only played a handful of games when War was declared with Germany and along with Clydebank, Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh and Dunfermline were declared banned areas, resulting in the cessation of football. The phoney nature of the start of the war resulted in these areas having football re-instated shortly after.

At the end of 1939-1940 Duntocher Hibs suspended operations for the duration of the War, but Clydebank and Yoker Athletic decided to continue on.

Season 1940-1941 was one of the better ones in the club’s history as they won the Central League and the Dumbartonshire Junior Cup, but on field activities were clouded by activities in the sky above.
Between March 13-15 German aeroplanes blitzed the Clydeside conurbation and Clydebank was devastated. New Kilbowie Park took a battering as the incendiary bombs and parachute landmines intended for Browns, Singers and the the other heavy industries dropped on the football field. Only five weeks later the Juniors were back in business, but it was to be over two years before New Kilbowie was playable again. In the interim Clydebank played home matches at Millburn Park, Alexandria and Holm Park, Yoker.
1941-1942 saw Clydebank win the Central League as well as the Scottish Junior Cup without playing at home (New Kilbowie) as they played all their home games that season at Holm Park, Yoker.
Football returned to New Kilbowie on July 31st, 1943 when Yoker Athletic reopened it in a Central League fixture. The Juniors won 8-3. Rice (4), McVean (2), Galletley and Ferguson did the damage.
The pockmarked playing surface had been repaired by debris and rubble from the surrounding areas including in the south-west corner the wreckage of a tram.
The rest of Wartime was seen through at Kilbowie and gradually life started to readjust.

In November 1947 a new loudspeaker and broadcasting system was installed. A few weeks later the club was reportedly excited about how well the music broadcasts were going down.
Old friends of the club, Duntocher Hibs, were gearing up to restart in time for season 1948-1949 and were fighting to get the bombed Glenhead Park restored. They did manage, although the first few games took place at New Kilbowie. But it seemed that just as one ground reopened another was about to close. The ground was New Kilbowie Park.
The Blitz had left only seven out of 12,000 houses in the Burgh undamaged. 5,000 of the houses in the town were destroyed or demolished and after the war the Burgh suffered a chronic housing shortage. In November 1948, in the quest for a solution to the housing problem, Clydebank Town Council’s Housing Committee turned its attention to New Kilbowie Park for land to build on. At the same time, Whitecrook, Drumry, Radnor Park and the Faifley were being developed.
The intent was that New Kilbowie Park would be compulsory purchased to make way for new housing but the Juniors were going to make a fight of it. But the bureaucracy was slow, and by October 1949, the club was putting out petition sheets against the Council’s proposed acquisition of “part” of New Kilbowie.
At a ceremony in December 1949 to mark the club’s Jubilee, news came from Baillie Wood that the Town Council had set aside land at Williamson Street for the building of a new park for the Juniors when they had to vacate New Kilbowie Park.
Happily for the club nothing ever came out of the proposals to either demolish New Kilbowie or to relocate further up the hill.

By September 1952, concrete was being laid on the large New Kilbowie embankment to create terracing on one side, the other three at a cost of £700 were completed in the 1954 close season.
In November 1953 the big crowds were beginning to dwindle as the Press reported only 2,800 attended the home derby with the Whe Ho, but then again in February the Bankies took around 7,000 people to the Junior Cup 4th Round tie with Carnoustie Panmure. The Sixth Round saw 23,496 at Ashfield to see the Juniors beaten. Three trains and thirty buses went that day.
The big crowds always came out for the big games and in 1954-1955 the Third Round of the Junior Cup saw 35,000 attend the three games it took to beat the Vale of Leven. A record 10,500 attended the game at New Kilbowie.
Only a few weeks later another new record of 11,000 turned out for the Cup visit of Tranent.

When McAlpines had built the temporary pavilion in 1939, no one would have thought temporary meant nearly seventeen years. The work started early in 1957, and the Pavilion was ready for the start of 1957-1958, at a cost of around £900. This was to a scale of one third of the size that was originally planned for before the War. The Pavilion had enough seating for club officials, changing rooms and upstairs was the stadium announcers perch and a small bar area. There was also a boardroom for conducting official business. At the front of the Pavilion were the dugouts. Clydebank usually had the eastern side as the home team.
All the expenditure to improve the quality of New Kilbowie Park did not meet with a regularly successful football team. Like many other teams the Juniors saw a dramatic collapse in their support.

“Juniors Football Club is broke”, ran the headlines in November 1960 and the Clydebank Press started an appeal for funds. The money started to come in dribs and drabs and the problem was resolved in the short term, but it was in the long term future that the path was not so clear. In the previous decade nearly 60 Junior clubs had folded – a trend that would continue for years.
The Kirkintilloch Herald reported in March 1964, on the sad state of affairs at New Kilbowie when it declared that Rob Roy supporters, by nine to one, outnumbered the home locals. Less than a month later a shock hit Scottish football in the form of the amalgamation between East Stirling and Clydebank Juniors. The last time Clydebank Juniors played at their beloved New Kilbowie was on May 17th, 1964, when they beat Duntocher Hibs 5-3 in the first leg of the Dumbartonshire Junior Cup Final.

The Steedmans arrived at New Kilbowie in the form of E.S. Clydebank bringing with them the Firs Park enclosure, floodlights and goalposts. Although E.S.C. were short lived it did bring back to the ‘risingest burgh’ an active interest in Senior football. When E.S. went back to Falkirk, Clydebank paid them £6,000 for their enclosure. That solitary season of 1964-1965 saw New Kilbowie Park’s record attendance of 14,900 established against Hibs in the Scottish Cup.

The Steedmans, alert to the need for alternative revenue streams, even after the Bankies joined the Scottish League in the summer of 1966, developed The Bankies Social Club, overlooking the pitch, which was opened in December 1966. The Bankies club had a bar on the ground level, as well as some administrative offices. On the upper floor was a function suite.
News in the Glasgow Herald on Christmas Day 1969 was that at Dumbarton Sheriff Court Clydebank were granted a six week extension for the liquor license. The need arose because they had forgotten to renew.
In 1976 it was reported that JBE paid for Bankies Club memberships for 1000 employees.
The playing surface perimeter railing was replaced by a barrier in 1968-1969 to prevent encroachment on the playing surface. This had the effect of restricting the playing surface to quite a narrow 68 yards.

At the end of 1976-1977 facing promotion to the Premier League it was reported that New Kilbowie required around £50,000 of renovations to be able to comply with safety regulations and bring the ground up to standard.
A new set of six floodlight pylons were installed at a cost of around £20000 in 1977. The lights which had served for a decade had banks of bulbs in four rows of four. The new ones were used for the first time in October 1977 in the League Cup Third Round Second Leg against Dunfermline Athletic. The game ended 2-2 and Bankies went out 2-4 on aggregate. A crowd of 3000 saw the lights inaugurated. The light bulbs formed a large “A”. In an eventful game the referee ended pulled a muscle and swapped out with a linesman. A Labrador held up the game for a spell by attacking the ball.
The same season Clydebank developed the plan to convert the terracing to bench seating. Work started on installing the seating on October 10th, 1977, with a project to add 600 seats which would bring the overall seating capacity of the ground up to 1,000.
At the same time a fence for segregation was put in along the half way line. This was a result of legislation but in the main due to the events of Christmas Day, 1976.
The other seating was contained in two sections. Next to the Bankies Club was a small covered enclosure which was, in effect, a beer garden with some tables and chairs. When the drinking at football regulations came in the stand was filled in with bright yellow bucket seats along concrete beams.
Next to that on the Pavilion side was a small stand that came to be known as the Davie Cooper Stand. This was completed and opened at the start of the 1977-1978 season. It had red and yellow seats. Underneath the stand was a pie stall and in addition to toilets there was storage space for the use of the grounds staff.
The aim of making the stadium all seated, with a capacity of 9950 was to comply with football ground safety legislation. This was followed by Aberdeen’s Pittodrie and Coventry’s Highfield Road.
By the end of the 1978-1979, with the completion of the new Argyll Road, that end of the ground had had the embankment raised around 30 feet, upwards and backwards. A new retaining wall was built and the sections that were not benched were concreted or covered in red gravel.
Overall the expenditure was presumed to be in the region of £500000 between 1976 and 1980.
On the covered (Montrose Street) side of the ground there were sets of pie stalls and toilets at each end.
There were three sets of turnstiles, a set at the home (west) end, a set at the away (east) end and another to get into the two small stands. The last of these entrances was also used to access the main pavilion.
The final piece of the jigsaw that was New Kilbowie Park was the training area in the gap between the main Pavilion, the railway line and Argyll Road. A basic triangle of land was covered in red blaes. The steep embankment was also used for training purposes.
Apart from minor tweaking, that was the way it remained until the day it was bulldozed after the last game on 10th May, 1996.

Fifty seven years of football at New Kilbowie Park had come to an end and the land was sold off for a commercial property.

Sources: Clydebank Press, Glasgow Herald, Clydebank Juniors’ handbook, original research and other contemporaneous accounts.