Obituary: Lawrie Reilly, spearhead of Hibs Famous Five attack

Born: 26 October, 1928, Edinburgh. Died: 22, July 2013, in Edinburgh, aged 84

LAWRIE Reilly was the last survivor of Hibernian’s championship winning sides of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The spearhead of the fantastic Famous Five attack of Smith, Johnstone, Reilly, Turnbull and Ormond, still considered by many to be Scotland’s greatest ever forward line, the tenacious Reilly was the scourge of defences the length and breadth of the country as Hibs burst to the forefront of Scottish football during the immediate postwar years.

Deadly inside the penalty area, he was the archetypal goalscoring predator, his all-action style making him immensely popular with the supporters. Although relatively short in stature, he was not afraid to go in where it hurt, scoring many important goals for both Hibs and Scotland, but modestly he was always content to put his success down to the talents of others.

Although the family home was in the Bryston Road area of Edinburgh, just a few hundred yards from Tynecastle, the home of Hibs’ great rivals Hearts, the young Lawrance was actually born in his grandmother’s house in Raeburn Place on 26 October, 1928. Originally to be named Lawrence spelt in the usual way, an error by the registrar mistakenly recorded the name as Lawrance on the birth certificate, and Lawrance it remained.

The only one of the magical forward line who was a childhood Hibs supporter, by the time he had reached secondary school age he had visited most of the prominent football grounds in Scotland with his dad John, who worked on the railways.

The young Reilly started playing organised football at North Merchiston primary school before moving on to Boroughmuir secondary. Unfortunately for him, at that time Boroughmuir didn’t have a football team, but he soon joined the well-known crack juvenile side Edinburgh Thistle, which was run by Hibs legendary groundsman Harry Reading. During his time with Thistle, the club would embark on a 55 game unbeaten run, culminating in Scottish Cup success, the young Reilly scoring an incredible 106 goals during this period. His goalscoring exploits soon caught the eye and, although offered signing talks with Hearts, there was only ever going to be one destination for the young Reilly. Both he and team-mate Archie Buchanan joined the Easter Road side as amateurs in 1944.

His first appearance in a competitive outing for Hibs was in a reserve fixture against Hamilton Academicals at Douglas Park on 25 August, 1945, but he would not have too long to wait for his first team debut and he lined up at inside right alongside his boyhood hero Gordon Smith in Hibs’ 4-1 defeat of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire on Saturday, 13 October, that same year. Although failing to score that afternoon – Hibs goals were scored by Milne (two) Bogan and Kean – he scored the first of what was to be many goals for the club against Queen of the South at Easter Road on 24 November, his only first team goal in ten starts that first season.

Quickly becoming part of the first team set-up, he was still by no means a regular, and although he was one of the 12 players that made their way from Edinburgh for the 1947 Scottish Cup Final against Aberdeen, he was not selected for the game and watched from the stand as Aberdeen defeated Hibs 2-1 in the first post-war cup final.

The following season Hibs would win their first league title since 1903, but still unable to command a regular start the youngster failed to make enough appearances to qualify for a championship medal, something that irked him until the end of his days.

National Service had been reintroduced in 1949 for young men reaching their 18th birthday unless they were in a reserved occupation, and for a while it seemed as if the young Reilly’s progress at Easter Road would be disrupted. However, he would escape military service by a strange quirk of fate. In that first year, there were far too many potential inductees and the authorities decided to exempt anyone born in the month of October 1928, a decision that would be of immediate benefit not only for Reilly, but also team-mate Archie Buchanan.

Hibs’ humiliating defeat at the hands of Second Division Dunfermline in the semi-final of the League Cup at Tynecastle in 1949 saw the introduction of Bobby Johnstone seven days later in a game against Queen of the South at Easter Road. Although the supporters were not to know it at the time, it was the first competitive outing of a forward line that would soon achieve legendary status – The Famous Five.

With Reilly this time playing a prominent part in the proceedings, Hibs would win consecutive championships in 1950-51 and 1951-52, only missing out on another in 1953 on goal average to Rangers. Ironically, if today’s goal difference had then been in operation instead of goal average, Hibs would have won the championship for a third consecutive season.

By this time, Reilly was a regular for Scotland. Somewhat surprisingly selected at outside left in the Scottish League side to face the League of Ireland at Ibrox at the beginning of the 1948-49 season, scoring twice in a 5-1 victory, less than a month later he made the first of his 38 full appearances, again on the left wing, in Scotland’s 3-1 defeat of Wales.

His first appearance at Wembley came in April 1949 when Scotland faced England in a game that will be forever known as the Jimmy Cowan international. Lawrie scored once in a 3-1 victory that afternoon with a diving header from a Waddell cross, but it was the Morton goalkeeper Cowan who was the man off the match, defying England on numerous occasions.

Reilly’s goal that day was the first of five he would score against the Auld Enemy at Wembley, famously scoring both in the 2-2 draw in 1953, his second in the final seconds earning him the sobriquet “Last Minute Reilly”. In setting up an individual goalscoring record against England that is unlikely to be broken, he also managed to score Scotland’s solitary counter in a 2-1 defeat at Hampden in 1952.

In winning his 12th cap against Belgium in Scotland’s 5-0 victory at the Heysel Stadium in 1951, Reilly became Hibs’ most capped player, overtaking goalkeeper Harry Rennie’s record that had stood for 43 years.

After almost ten years at Easter Road, soon after arriving back from Brazil following Hibs ground-breaking trip to South America in 1953, Reilly shocked the football world by going on strike after being refused a testimonial as had been awarded to team-mate Gordon Smith the previous year. The news that the Scotland centre forward could possibly be up for sale fuelled widespread interest despite the reputed £30,000 price tag, most notably from Stoke, Burnley, and Manchester City, with league champions Arsenal said to be leading the chase. There was even a somewhat bizarre bid of £17,000 from lowly Stirling Albion, but with Reilly’s continued absence also affecting the fortunes of Scotland, who were obviously missing the input of Hibs most capped player, the dispute was eventually settled with the help of Scottish Football Association secretary Sir George Graham, who agreed to arrange a testimonial game against a Scottish representative side sometime in the future.

However, his long-awaited comeback was cut short a few months later when he went down with a bout of pleurisy, then a far more serious illness than today, and he would miss not only the closing months of the season, but also several full internationals, including Scotland’s ill-fated World Cup campaign in Switzerland when they lost 7-0 to Uruguay in 1954.

He had recovered sufficiently to take his place as Hibs became the first British side to participate in the inaugural European Cup campaign in 1955, the centre forward scoring one of the Edinburgh side’s goals in a 4-0 victory over Rot Weiss of Essen in Germany as Hibs progressed all the way to the semi-finals.

In 1958 a knee injury that had required surgery hastened Reilly’s premature retiral from the game aged only 29. Perhaps fittingly, his last game was against Rangers, a side he had faced in numerous titanic battles throughout his career, scoring one of Hibs’ goals in a 3-1 victory at Easter Road only a few days before Hibs met Clyde in that year’s Scottish Cup Final.

The long-awaited testimonial game between a Hibs XI and a Scottish representative side took place at Easter Road later that same year, Reilly somewhat ludicrously prevented from taking part in the game because he was not a registered player.

He retired to take over the running of the Bowlers Rest pub in Leith, a venue that was popular with supporters before games at Easter Road, where he would spend the next 40 or so years before retiring completely to concentrate on his golf.

A member of the Hibernian Former Players Association, and a trustee of the Hibernian Historical Trust, in later years he was the “front” for the Alzheimer’s Football Memories programme at Hampden, and until a few years ago he was a match day host at his beloved Easter Road. Incredibly modest in spite of all he had achieved in the game, Lawrie always had time to spend with the supporters both young and old and remained a popular figure at Easter Road.

As well as his 22 goals in 38 games for the full Scotland side, in a career spanning just under 12 years Lawrie Reilly scored 234 goals in well over 300 games for Hibs, a quite incredible record. He remains to this day Hibs’ top goalscorer in competitive games and one can only wonder just how many he would have scored had his career not been brought to such a sudden end because of injury.

He is survived by his wife Iris, and son Lawrence and family.

Taken from the Scotsman