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The Thistle and the Grail
Within the severe and depressed slums of Drumsagart, rife with unemployment and discontent, the members of Thistle cling to their game as an escape. And when they actually start winning, a momentum grows up in the community around them, as they come to represent ambition and hope. The Holy Grail of football, the Scottish Junior Cup, glitters at the end of a string of matches and suddenly the entire town of Drumsagart is depending on it...
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Robin Jenkins
54 books35 followersAuthor of a number of landmark novels including The Cone Gatherers, The Changeling, Happy for the Child, The Thistle and the Grail and Guests of War, Jenkins is recognised as one of Scotland's greatest writers. The themes of good and evil, of innocence lost, of fraudulence, cruelty and redemption shine through his work. His novels, shot through with ambiguity, are rarely about what they seem. He published his first book, So Gaily Sings the Lark, at the age of thirty-eight, and by the time of his death in 2005, over thirty of his novels were in print.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 8, 2023
This is the third of Jenkins' novels I've read in the past six months, and while all three stories were equally well-written, it's probably the one I enjoyed the most. A fascinating study of football and society in 1950s working-class Scotland, it's chock full of wry observations, rich humour, and memorable characters. It was a wee bit wordy in places, but overall very, very good.
May 16, 2022
The thistle of the title is the local team of the small town of Drumsagart, Drumsagart Thistle Junior Football Club, whose blue shirts have a red thistle crest. The grail is the ultimate quest for a Junior* football team, the Scottish Junior Cup.
Despite the apparent thrust of the title that the novel will be about football, it isn’t really. There may one day be a definitive novel that deals with that perennial Scottish obsession but this isn’t (quite) it. The quote from John Cairney on the cover to the effect that this is “easily the best book written on the relation between football and society in Scotland” may well be true but the novel’s narrative more or less skirts football. Instead, it is more about a small town, the characters who inhabit it, and the distraction from their lives that football represents. Bill Shankly is supposed once to have said, “Football isn’t a matter of life and death; it’s more important than that.” While at times, in the throes of a match, it can perhaps seem that way, it really isn’t. But as a distraction from life’s tribulations it can be a temporary balm - even while adding to them.
At the start of the novel Drumsagart Juniors are hopeless, suffering regular drubbings – usually to nil – every week. This culminates in a mass protest after a 7-0 humiliation at the hands of their fiercest local rivals, Lettrickhill Violet, wherein the committee members are the subject of intemperate threats and club president Andrew Rutherford is in danger of being dismissed. Mysie Dugarry, granddaughter of the club’s most famous player, who had gone on to play for Scotland, suggests they try one Alec Elrigmuir whom she describes as the best centre forward in Scotland. (He plays for a pit team and she is sweet on him.) Under pressure Rutherford agrees. Committee member and local pub owner Sam Malarkin offers to provide a free drink to everyone should the Thistle go on to lift the Cup, safe in the knowledge it won’t happen.
Apart from the possibility of Elrigmuir, a further potential hero arrives when Turk McCabe, a former centre-half, returns to the town from a sojourn in England. Now in his mid-to-late thirties he is an unlikely saviour but has determination and turns out still to have positional sense. And so the journey to the grail begins. There is a brief description of the first-round game at Carrick Celtic but Jenkins’s writerly gifts are not convincing here. (I suspect this may be true of any attempt by any novelist to depict an imaginary football match.)
There is a whole cast of minor characters each of whom is drawn realistically and sympathetically. Sam Malarkin’s interest in Alec Elrigmuir is more than football related as is his sister Margot’s - a source of dismay later on when Mysie gets to hear of it and Elrigmuir threatens not to play as a result of her displeasure. Elrigmuir himself may be a good footballer but off the field he is all but a simpleton.
Despite not being published till 1954 this reads like an interwar, even a 1920s, novel. Harry Reid’s introduction tells us, though, that Jenkins was a reluctant author with many manuscripts kept in his locker.
The attitudes to women of the male characters in the book read as being decidedly off-kilter these days. “The apple had been a gift. Eve’s to Adam had been free too, and it had soured the world,” and, “With women it was, of course, different; their brains were lighter, no-one could expect them to be as serious as men.” At a club committee meeting discussing the team’s problems we have, “‘Have you noticed, gentlemen,’ said Wattie Cleugh, ‘how it’s women causing all the trouble? …. It would seem that what started in Eden’s still going on.’” However, Agnes Elvan’s observation that, “‘There’s not a woman in Scotland doesn’t know the importance of football is exaggerated,” is probably still widely applicable. There is also a wonderful Scotticism when a character describes another as having, “the mind of a five-year old lassie whose backside was underskelped.”
That the times have changed in other ways too is illustrated when a doctor - called in to examine Turk after his put upon mother had poured boiling water over his feet - says of the offer of a cigarette, “‘Do him good.’ The doctor intercepted the packet and took one himself. ‘Do me good.’”
Turk is of course an habitué of the pub. When the local minister, who does not like football - or pubs - came to proselytise, Turk, in his eagerness to berate religion but wanting to show some knowledge, responded with a misquote, saying, “‘I am become a sounding brass or a tingling simple.’ That’s Bible.” A few lines later Jenkins transforms this double Malapropism into an inspired pun. On leaving the pub McCabe castigates those who remain as, “A shower of tingling simples.’”
The novel does not neglect wider issues. There is a small diversion into Politics. Rutherford’s father is a long-time socialist councillor, while Rutherford himself runs on behalf of his brother-in-law a biscuit factory, producing Drumsagart Bannocks in their distinctive blue and red liveried packets. His dismissal of Lizzie Anderson for theft, leaving her and her mother to likely penury excites his father’s ire. That Lizzie has falsely implied Rutherford had got her pregnant does not weigh in the balance for him. In his turn Rutherford interprets his father’s concern for the poor as a desire not to have the latter’s grandson well provided for. Poverty and the misery of unemployment are described but presented as matters of fact. Fecklessness on the part of impecunious men spending money on a triviality like football is implicitly deplored.
Yet it does not escape Scottishness. On a trip to an away game Rutherford reflects, “Scotland was a country where faith lay rotted like neglected roses, and the secret of resurrection was lost. We are a dreich, miserable, back-biting, self-tormenting, haunted, self-pitying crew, he thought. This sunshine is as bright as any on Earth, these moors are splendid: why are not the brightness and splendour in our lives? Seeking them, here we are speeding at fifty miles an hour to see what – a football match, a game invented for exercise and recreation, but now our only substitute for faith and purpose.” But there is still the lingering shadow of Calvinism, “too much pleasure on Earth weakened the promise of heaven and strengthened the threat of hell.”
*This designation does not mean for young players. It was a peculiarity of the Scottish footballing landscape that up until a year or so ago there were two separate non-amateur grades of football in Scotland; the Seniors, all those whose names are familiar from the Saturday football scores plus some in four non-national leagues, and the Juniors, still (semi-)professional but playing in a different set of closely geographically-based leagues – except for the all-encompassing Scotland-wide Junior Cup. The former Junior sides have now all joined the Scottish football pyramid system.
Despite the apparent thrust of the title that the novel will be about football, it isn’t really. There may one day be a definitive novel that deals with that perennial Scottish obsession but this isn’t (quite) it. The quote from John Cairney on the cover to the effect that this is “easily the best book written on the relation between football and society in Scotland” may well be true but the novel’s narrative more or less skirts football. Instead, it is more about a small town, the characters who inhabit it, and the distraction from their lives that football represents. Bill Shankly is supposed once to have said, “Football isn’t a matter of life and death; it’s more important than that.” While at times, in the throes of a match, it can perhaps seem that way, it really isn’t. But as a distraction from life’s tribulations it can be a temporary balm - even while adding to them.
At the start of the novel Drumsagart Juniors are hopeless, suffering regular drubbings – usually to nil – every week. This culminates in a mass protest after a 7-0 humiliation at the hands of their fiercest local rivals, Lettrickhill Violet, wherein the committee members are the subject of intemperate threats and club president Andrew Rutherford is in danger of being dismissed. Mysie Dugarry, granddaughter of the club’s most famous player, who had gone on to play for Scotland, suggests they try one Alec Elrigmuir whom she describes as the best centre forward in Scotland. (He plays for a pit team and she is sweet on him.) Under pressure Rutherford agrees. Committee member and local pub owner Sam Malarkin offers to provide a free drink to everyone should the Thistle go on to lift the Cup, safe in the knowledge it won’t happen.
Apart from the possibility of Elrigmuir, a further potential hero arrives when Turk McCabe, a former centre-half, returns to the town from a sojourn in England. Now in his mid-to-late thirties he is an unlikely saviour but has determination and turns out still to have positional sense. And so the journey to the grail begins. There is a brief description of the first-round game at Carrick Celtic but Jenkins’s writerly gifts are not convincing here. (I suspect this may be true of any attempt by any novelist to depict an imaginary football match.)
There is a whole cast of minor characters each of whom is drawn realistically and sympathetically. Sam Malarkin’s interest in Alec Elrigmuir is more than football related as is his sister Margot’s - a source of dismay later on when Mysie gets to hear of it and Elrigmuir threatens not to play as a result of her displeasure. Elrigmuir himself may be a good footballer but off the field he is all but a simpleton.
Despite not being published till 1954 this reads like an interwar, even a 1920s, novel. Harry Reid’s introduction tells us, though, that Jenkins was a reluctant author with many manuscripts kept in his locker.
The attitudes to women of the male characters in the book read as being decidedly off-kilter these days. “The apple had been a gift. Eve’s to Adam had been free too, and it had soured the world,” and, “With women it was, of course, different; their brains were lighter, no-one could expect them to be as serious as men.” At a club committee meeting discussing the team’s problems we have, “‘Have you noticed, gentlemen,’ said Wattie Cleugh, ‘how it’s women causing all the trouble? …. It would seem that what started in Eden’s still going on.’” However, Agnes Elvan’s observation that, “‘There’s not a woman in Scotland doesn’t know the importance of football is exaggerated,” is probably still widely applicable. There is also a wonderful Scotticism when a character describes another as having, “the mind of a five-year old lassie whose backside was underskelped.”
That the times have changed in other ways too is illustrated when a doctor - called in to examine Turk after his put upon mother had poured boiling water over his feet - says of the offer of a cigarette, “‘Do him good.’ The doctor intercepted the packet and took one himself. ‘Do me good.’”
Turk is of course an habitué of the pub. When the local minister, who does not like football - or pubs - came to proselytise, Turk, in his eagerness to berate religion but wanting to show some knowledge, responded with a misquote, saying, “‘I am become a sounding brass or a tingling simple.’ That’s Bible.” A few lines later Jenkins transforms this double Malapropism into an inspired pun. On leaving the pub McCabe castigates those who remain as, “A shower of tingling simples.’”
The novel does not neglect wider issues. There is a small diversion into Politics. Rutherford’s father is a long-time socialist councillor, while Rutherford himself runs on behalf of his brother-in-law a biscuit factory, producing Drumsagart Bannocks in their distinctive blue and red liveried packets. His dismissal of Lizzie Anderson for theft, leaving her and her mother to likely penury excites his father’s ire. That Lizzie has falsely implied Rutherford had got her pregnant does not weigh in the balance for him. In his turn Rutherford interprets his father’s concern for the poor as a desire not to have the latter’s grandson well provided for. Poverty and the misery of unemployment are described but presented as matters of fact. Fecklessness on the part of impecunious men spending money on a triviality like football is implicitly deplored.
Yet it does not escape Scottishness. On a trip to an away game Rutherford reflects, “Scotland was a country where faith lay rotted like neglected roses, and the secret of resurrection was lost. We are a dreich, miserable, back-biting, self-tormenting, haunted, self-pitying crew, he thought. This sunshine is as bright as any on Earth, these moors are splendid: why are not the brightness and splendour in our lives? Seeking them, here we are speeding at fifty miles an hour to see what – a football match, a game invented for exercise and recreation, but now our only substitute for faith and purpose.” But there is still the lingering shadow of Calvinism, “too much pleasure on Earth weakened the promise of heaven and strengthened the threat of hell.”
*This designation does not mean for young players. It was a peculiarity of the Scottish footballing landscape that up until a year or so ago there were two separate non-amateur grades of football in Scotland; the Seniors, all those whose names are familiar from the Saturday football scores plus some in four non-national leagues, and the Juniors, still (semi-)professional but playing in a different set of closely geographically-based leagues – except for the all-encompassing Scotland-wide Junior Cup. The former Junior sides have now all joined the Scottish football pyramid system.
July 12, 2023
A brilliant novel by an author that I am embarrassed to say I had previously never heard of.
This book creates a vivid picture of a small Scottish town in the 1930s through the vehicle of junior football. It has a host of minor characters to accompany the main ones. Regardless of their role in the story each minor character is fabulously portrayed to increase the depth of understanding and appreciation of Drumsagart.
The main character is Andrew Rutherford. His relationship with his home town is a complicated one. He strives to do his best and be a good man, but is under-appreciated and generally disliked by the townspeople. Any good he tries is continually misconstrued and twisted in negative ways. It is only where he conforms to the way others want him to be, fighting much of his own instinct, that he becomes valued by Drumsagart, yet at the end we see him still alone and melancholy.
This is so much more than a book about fitba, but it demonstrates the all encompassing nature of the sport in the 1920s, elements of which still remain today.
This book creates a vivid picture of a small Scottish town in the 1930s through the vehicle of junior football. It has a host of minor characters to accompany the main ones. Regardless of their role in the story each minor character is fabulously portrayed to increase the depth of understanding and appreciation of Drumsagart.
The main character is Andrew Rutherford. His relationship with his home town is a complicated one. He strives to do his best and be a good man, but is under-appreciated and generally disliked by the townspeople. Any good he tries is continually misconstrued and twisted in negative ways. It is only where he conforms to the way others want him to be, fighting much of his own instinct, that he becomes valued by Drumsagart, yet at the end we see him still alone and melancholy.
This is so much more than a book about fitba, but it demonstrates the all encompassing nature of the sport in the 1920s, elements of which still remain today.
June 28, 2023
Old classic. Shows how life in 1930’s industrial Scotland was. Last read it about 30 years for my English higher.
December 11, 2024
My seventh Jenkins and the least of them , my mind glazes over whenever sport is described, the non soccer bits were enjoyable enough.
February 4, 2016
With this book I feel like I discovered a hidden gem. In an unlikely place, at that, because I am not a huge fan of football and neither of realism/naturalism/modernism, whatever you want to call it. And there were way to many characters in the beginning, it could have been a disaster. But Robin Jenkins somehow managed to balance all of this with human interest, occasionally startlingly beautiful prose and a very subtle humor I appreciate. And I feel like I've learned a lot about what football means to the Scots. Or maybe even people in general.
February 24, 2014
The Thistle is Drumsagart Thistle a struggling Lanarkshire football team, the Grail is the Scottish Junior Cup. Robin Jenkins novel tells of the club's struggle to win the cup against all odds and how in one way or another the whole town is drawn into that struggle.
This book was written in the early 1950's and this shows, however once I settled into it it became both amusing and moving tale.
This book was written in the early 1950's and this shows, however once I settled into it it became both amusing and moving tale.
July 29, 2014
"Jenkins writes about football beautifully. If Peace captures the pace and excitement, Jenkins captures the emotion and beauty of the game." Full review at: http://stevek1889.blogspot.co.uk/2014...
August 3, 2013
Bleak yet readable
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews