Joe Kennaway
Joe Kennaway played in two hundred and sixty-three league games for Celtic over eight season from 1931 until the the outbreak of the Second World War and just once for Scotland in 1933 in the drawn fixture against Austria at Hampden. It was the game when for Austria Matthias Sindelar played at false-number-nine, the team was coached by Jimmy Hogan and the Austrian team played with a style that reminded the watching SFA directors of Scotland before the Great War. And they were right. That was the style Hogan had learned at the boots of
R.C. Hamilton during a season of epiphany in 1906-7 at Fulham and would over the next thirty years embed in Central Europe, not just in Vienna, Bern and Lausanne but most importantly in Budapest and from there in World football.
So why had Kennaway come to Scotland? In one sense the reason was simple. Although his father, Charles, and his mother would both die in Montreal he and she, nee Grant, had been born elsewhere. The place was Dundee. So Joe, actual name James Turnbull Kennaway, was by blood Scots and generations so. He could be seen as simply a Diasporan coming home or at least being brought, invited home, albeit in circumstances that were more
convoluted, more complicated and considerably more sad than most.
In the summer of 1931 Joe Kennaway was playing not in Canada but the USA but in goal, for he was a goalkeeper, for
Fall River in Massachusetts. He was in that club's team put up against a touring Celtic side and had clearly impressed, not least
Willie Maley. Joe had kept a clean sheet. Fall River had won 1-0. However, that might have been the end of it but for a terrible turn of events. Just weeks later on 5th September Celtic was facing Rangers at Ibrox. Early in the second half John Thomson, the Celtic goalkeeper, went for a ball with Rangers' Sam English. His head collided with English's knee. Thomson's skull was fractured but there was worse. The artery in his right temple was ruptured. His head filled with blood and although he was operated on in hospital the rupture proved fatal. At 9.25 that evening Thomson was pronounced dead.
Celtic in the game following Thomson's death turned to its recently-signed but experienced reserve 'keeper, John Falconer, but on 10th October after just seven appearances he suffered a
recurrence of a knee-injury that would not be healed in the short-term. The club had a problem that it tried to fill locally by signing twenty-year old Joe Coen from Clydebank but not satisfactorily, at which point in mid-October Kennaway was remembered, very quickly contacted, sent for and boarded the boat for Glasgow. He arrived on 30th October, was officially signed that very day and, replacing Coen after just three appearances, was between the uprights the next, a 2:2 draw at Motherwell. And there he stayed, fully justifying Maley's faith for a career that spanned practically the whole decade. He showed himself even in the always rough and tumble, sometime brutality of Scottish First Division to be was a solid and dependable keeper with excellent handling skills and ample courage, one synonymous with the 1930's. He may not have been as agile or as graceful as the small Thomson; few, if any, ever were; however, his reflexes were lightening quick though and, being physically bigger, he seemed to revel in the physical battles endured with the robust forwards of the day. And he also grew to a be a noted expert in the art of stopping penalty kicks, something that always comes in handy. Indeed, Celtic with him as the custodian would win the league in 1935-6 and 1937-8, the Scottish Cup in 1933 and 1937, the latter in front of a record crowd of over 146,000, and in April 1938 it also took the, for Kennaway at least, aptly-named Empire Cup. Four teams from England played four from Scotland, and, although the great English team of the mid-1930s, Arsenal, did not take part, it was won by Celtic after extra-time defeating Everton, 1-0, the same Everton which would go on to be the English league winners in 1938-39 with, in what was regarded as the unofficial championship of Britain, as if to show just what Scotland had been deprived of, Kennaway conceding just a single goal in four games.
Joe Kennaway would cease to play top-flight football at the comparatively young age. But for the war he might well have gone on longer but he was in 1939 only in his early thirties.. And would return to America, where from 1946 until 1959 he was coach of the Browns University team in Providence, Rhode Island, just a few miles across the state border from Fall River. In fact before Fall River and Scotland he had spent a season with Providence F.C. and two more as it had become the Providence Gold Bugs, his wife was from North Providence and, having become a naturalised American in 1948, he would die there too in 1969 and is buried in Johnston, a town just to the east of the Rhode Island capital.
But Joe Kennaway had been been born neither American, as his naturalisation demonstrates, nor Scots. And therein lies the tale of his one cap. In fact he had been born where his parents had died, a Canadian in Montreal, either in 1905 or 1907. He was clearly a man of, shall we say, fluid nationality but then many emigrants are, no matter what their origins. They had, indeed have, little or no choice. However, it made for complications. Under the 1887 IFAB ruling a player born in the Empire could make the choice of playing either for the country, in which he was born or for the Home Nation, from where his father had come. Note father, not mother. And no grandparents. Joe Kennaway's father was a Dundonian so Joe could and had seemingly chosen Scotland. However, there were two complications. The first was the status of Canada itself. It had achieved Dominion status from the United Kingdom in 1867 but had become a "Commonwealth realm" in 1931, two years before Kennaway would be selected for the country of his parents and his new employer. The question is, at that point was Canada Empire or independent or something else, something in between and therefore whether the IFAB ruling applied or not? The answer is probably that no-one knows. It had an international status unheard of in 1887 and therefore not covered. And the second complication was a match some seven years earlier and, just to add another twist twist, before Canada's then latest constitutional adjustment.
In 1925 Canada had played two matches against the United States. The first had been in Montreal, a win for Canada, the second in the USA, in New York, a win for the home team. Kennaway was not involved in either. In 1926 a third friendly was arranged to be played in New York once more. This time Kennaway was called up. He was there, between the posts behind, it must be said, an on-field rag-bag in what turned out to be a 6-2 drubbing and ninety minutes that cost him his Scotland career. They became an issue. The other Home Nations, for which can normally be read England, objected. A Canadian should play for only for Canada, it was said and furthermore, although in 1926 a Canadian could, given certain circumstances, have played for either Canada or Home Nation Kennaway had made his choice. And it had not been Scotland. There was no argument just as two years earlier in similar circumstances there had not been for Barney Battles, in fact Scots-born and the son of a former Scottish international, who also had been selected and after a single game set aside because in one of those 1925 games against Canada he had played, again once, for the USA. There was consistency, if a degree of flexibility, indeed, of reasonableness was sorely lacking to the detriment of three parties, the two individuals concerned but also Scotland itself.