Bacup Beginings

It is widely recognised that Bacup Town, formally Irwell Springs, owes it initial existence to two Scots, two brothers, John and Robert Rankine. The year was 1879. It was one of the several teams founded in the explosion of football that had taken place in the previous five years in the north-east Lancashire diamond formed by Bolton to the south, Blackburn to the north, Darwen in the west and Bacup itself. And it is also reported that the siblings had played not just for that year's Scottish Cup winners, Vale of Leven, but the club for which it had been three in a row.


However, there is a problem. No Rankine feature in The Vale teams in any of those years. And it is on the face of it little wonder. The brothers had been born, in 1856 and 1858 respectively, of a cotton-dyer father from Barrhead, the same trade they would also follow eventually in Bacup, and a Glasgow mother but in Rutherglen. They are there in 1871, had been in Glasgow in 1861, would be in Lancashire in 1891 but seemingly no-where in 1881 when aged twenty-five and twenty-three.


However, there are clues perhaps to an explanation. Whilst John Rankine is shown the 1891 census as married, to a Lancashire lass, Jane, childless, working as a Turkey-Red dyer and living at Irwell Springs itself right by the dye-works of that name, his sibling is nearby at Old Clough, a dyer also, married to Annie, Ann Angus, once more from Scotland, indeed from Rutherglen, with their seven children, aged one to twelve, and his father. Moreover, the children were all recorded as Bacup-born meaning the couple were with some certainty already in the town by 1879.


However, tragedy was to strike. In late 1891 Annie Rankine was to die. She was just thirty-three and is buried in Bacup's cemetery. And Robert was quickly to remarry. But he did so not to a local girl but Magdeline Gillespie. And this finally provides a connection with Dunbartonshire.


Magdeline too was twenty-four, had been born in Dumbarton-town, and had grown up with her Irish-born father, a hammer-smith, and her Scottish mother by Renton in Levenbank with its Turkey-Red dye-works. Clearly Robert Rankine and therefore probably also John had connections with, indeed might have briefly worked by, the River Leven and there been exposed to its football. Indeed it also suggests an explanation for the claimed Vale of Leven connection. In Bacup it might have been understood, even suggested, as the club, when in reality it was the valley with its three teams, The Vale itself being the forerunner to be quickly followed even overtaken first by Dumbarton and then Renton.


So what happened to the Rankine brothers. The truth is that we don't know. What is known, however, is that Jane Rankine was still living in Bacup but recorded as a widow, when she in turn died in Blackpool in 1900 and that in 1920 Magdeline Rankine travelled to Canada as widowed also. Seemingly she went to visit at least one one of her children, presumably Robert's children too, who seems to have emigrated. Indeed she herself would die in the Dominion; in Toronto and in 1939.