The Greenock Connection: How a Scottish industrialist founded the forerunner of West Ham United

The Bicentenary: Honouring Donald Currie

For we long-suffering Scots Hammers – and especially those of us who are Greenock-born devotees of West Ham United – the 17th of September is a day of quiet reverence, almost sacred in its significance. For on this date this year, we marked the bicentenary of the birth of Donald Currie in Greenock. Currie was an industrialist of formidable energy, a shipowner whose vessels stitched together the trade routes of the empire, a parliamentarian, and later a generous philanthropist. But for us, who trace our loyalties not through stock markets or shipping ledgers but through claret and blue veins, his most luminous legacy lies elsewhere: as the first chairman, founder and financier of Old Castle Swifts FC.

From Swifts to Hammers: The Scottish Catalyst

The Swifts were a works team, forged in 1892 from the sweat and sinew of Scottish shipyard workers toiling in West Ham, east London. When the club dissolved in 1895, its embers did not die. Instead, they were carried across the docks and found new life in the new-born Thames Ironworks FC who, a few short years later, would be reborn as the beloved West Ham United. Indeed, a significant number of former Swifts players (Scots among them) became Ironworks players. And so, the first true spark of our club was struck with Donald Currie’s birth two centuries ago: a spark that ignited a roaring furnace of Greenock engineers, shipwrights and footballers, who poured like molten metal down to London’s East End, bringing with them their labour, their accents, and their dreams. Leafing through the old rosters of the Swifts is like reading a roll-call from the Clyde: Lyndsey, Murray, McFarlane, Leith, Baird, Mitchell, Fraser, Taylor. Among them, fellow Greenock engineers Robert Taylor and David Murray – brothers in craft and in spirit to Currie himself.

The Trade Winds: Sugar and Shipbuilding

Currie’s path had first taken him through Cunard in Liverpool before he struck out alone, founding Donald Currie & Co in 1862, which blossomed into the famed Union-Castle Line. In his youth he had laboured in his uncle’s sugar-refining business back home in Greenock, and so the old trade winds of sugar, no less than shipbuilding, braided Greenock to London. Consider Abram Lyle, another Greenock son and sugar magnate. In 1865 he acquired a refinery in Greenock, and later others in Plaistow and Silvertown. Distrusting strangers, he brought his entire workforce from Greenock by train in 1882 – from foremen to labourers – just as the German sugar bakers before him had imported their own countrymen to staff their refineries both on the Clyde and in east London. My own forebears from Bremen were among those 19th-century sugar men. ‘White gold,’ like shipbuilding, flows through the strata of our family history. So too did Currie expand, acquiring land at Canning Town near the mouth of the River Lea, where his Scottish-recruited workforce tended his ship-repair yards. And it was here, in 1891, that he resolved to establish the Old Castle Swifts – a team financed by his company, a spark struck on the anvil of Union-Castle steel.

A Family Tradition: From Clyde to Upton Park

In time, the Swifts passed into history, yet their spirit endured with a new East End works team being formed in direct response to the Swifts demise. The Thames Ironworks FC men picked up their hammer, carrying the Scottish tradition forward until they became West Ham United in 1900. Even then, Scots still laced up their boots for the Irons. Decades later, in 1965, my own father Ronnie Ahlfeld – a lad of seventeen – followed the same compass southward, signing schoolboy terms as a youth player for West Ham, even making a few appearances for the reserves in the Metropolitan League against St Neot’s and Dartford Town. Fate was cruel: injury curtailed his rise, sending him home to become youth team manager at Greenock Morton FC, just as my grandfather Robey Ahlfeld had once guarded the goalmouth for old Greenock Morton Juniors before the war. My young cousin Brinley also had trials at the Hammers and was on the books for a brief period too. Yet my father returned from London with something indelible – a love for the East End and its warm-hearted people, for a club that had shown him such kindness during his brief, blighted playing days. That love passed to my brother Robert and me. Season after season, we made pilgrimages with Dad to Upton Park, cheering the Hammers through the glory years of Frank McAvennie and Tony Cottee in ’86, and later marvelling when Neil Orr – a fellow Gourock lad from Morton – donned the claret and blue. We even crossed paths with Ray Stewart and the great manager John Lyall, himself an East Ender of Scottish stock. We kept the faith even through the wilderness years in the old Second Division, when the defence was more sieve than steel. Those trips were brightened by visits to my aunts Senga and Ellen and our London cousins, weaving family into the fabric of football.

The Forge Is Not Yet Cold

And so, who can say what the future holds for our oft-troubled club, with its uneasy owners and financial storms? Yet even now, the embers of West Ham still glow; the forge is not yet cold, the anvil not yet silent. So, raise a glass to Sir Donald, born two hundred years ago in Greenock, who unknowingly set in motion the great, clanging poetry of the Hammers.