Interview: Berwick Rangers legend Eric Tait fears ‘the end for my club’

The man who could reasonably claim to be Mr Berwick Rangers points to an internal window in the lounge of his golf club. “It was like the manager was right though there,” says Eric Tait, “and I thought: ‘Bloody hell, what’s he up to?’” Harry Melrose, boss of the Wee Rangers, was watching the teenaged Tait training in the modest wall-barred surroundings of a school gymnasium and he was about to make the lad’s dreams come true.

Eric Tait, now 67, played and managed Berwick Rangers, who are in danger of losing their Scottish league status. Picture: Craig Connor/NNP

Recalling this, the chance to play for his heroes, Tait’s eyes moisten. Not for the first time today, or the last. Indeed when he next uses the window as a prop it happens again.

Twelve years on from signing for the club, Tait was Shielfield Park’s player-manager. “And my father was the groundsman. There was torrential rain for 24 hours before a game against East Stirling but Dad made sure the pitch was playable. I remember he was worried right up until kick-off about a soggy patch of grass down at the Railway End no bigger than this table which he hadn’t been able to clear – he was such a perfectionist. That day was my mother’s birthday, we were having a party at night. Dad and I were always last out of the ground and the floodlights being turned off was the sign for my wife, just along the street, to put on the kettle. I went looking for him because one of the goal nets had been taken down but the other one was still up. And I peered through to the storeroom and saw his upturned welly boots. He’d collapsed – died of a heart attack.”

Life and death. Good times and bad. Four hundred and thirty-five appearances and 114 goals, making him the top man for both. Laughter and bust-ups. Long awayday bus rides and a visit from George Best. Tait has seen it all at Shielfield and now he fears there might be no more.

Today Berwick teeter on the edge of the trapdoor which could plunge them right out of senior football. The bottomest of the bottom, drunk on defeats, they stumble into the Pyramid Play-off against Highland champs Cove Rangers – frisky, ambitious wannabes from 190 miles up the road who are intent on usurping their nickname and their status.

“We’ve lost seven in a row and haven’t scored a goal – I can’t see how we’re going to get through this,” laments Tait. “I’m sick with worry and can’t sleep. If we go out of the league it will be dreadful for the town and I don’t know if we’ll be able to come back. This could be the end for my club.”

Now, it might seem a bit “North-East Man Lost at Sea” to be preoccupying ourselves with Berwick Rangers in the wake of those incredible Champions League blockbusters, but it’s right that we do. No offence to Cove who must do their job but they’ll be ruining a great story if they win. The story of Berwick is one every schoolboy knows: the club from England who play in Scotland. The club who lend us the air of eccentric, benevolent lairds. “I love that Berwick have played all the time in Scotland and I think it reflects well on Scotland that we have,” adds Tait. “I say that even though in my day the team would go to places like Arbroath and Montrose where they’d shout ‘English bastards’ at us. That was pretty funny because I was the only English bastard in the side!”

The Wee Rangers are the club from the town which, following various border skirmishes, has changed hands 14 times. The club from the town which was once at war with Russia. An oversight by Queen Victoria was behind this wonderful myth: her signature to mark the start of the Crimean War in 1854 listed her full title of monarch of “Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and the British Dominions beyond the sea” but Berwick was missed off the peace treaty. So what of the Rangers of Northumberland dumping the Rangers of Glasgow out of the Scottish Cup in 1967 – if the current team fail does that become mythology, too?

No chance, not with guys like Tait still around. “I was in the Duckett that day, squashed down the front with mates from school,” he says of Shielfield’s shed. “They all wanted a shot of my rattle – black and gold with the names of the players painted by me in tiny writing: Kilgannon, Coutts, Lumsden, Dowds, Wallace, Reid…”

Wallace was Jock Wallace, the manager-keeper, and Reid was Sammy Reid, the goalscorer with Tait fantasising about one day filling his boots, although strictly speaking his first idol was Ken Bowron.

“I was a pupil at Springhill Secondary and Ken was gamesmaster at Tweedmouth Modern and Berwick’s centre-forward.” In 1963-64, Bowron plundered 50 goals including one against Rangers at Hampden in the League Cup semi-finals which is rated by many as the club’s best-ever. Tait springs to his feet to imitate Bowron’s walk, a comical toff’s flounce. “Every lunchtime I used to rush down to the wall dividing our school-fields and watch Ken fire balls at one of his pupils: Brian Boyd, nicknamed Tarzan, who later became the Shielfield barman. On matchdays all the Tweedmouth boys would shout: ‘Come on, Mr Bowron!’”