Bob Crumley Player Profile

Biography

Robert ‘Bob’ Crumley was the Dark Blues’ goalkeeper when Dundee FC won the Scottish Cup in 1910 for the first and to date only time. Between the wars the cup winning side were often referred to as “Crumley’s Boys” in the city when people talked about the Scottish Cup winning side and local hero Bob became the longest surviving member of that famous side.

Bob Crumley played for Dundee for five seasons and kept fifty-nine clean sheets in 152 appearances, making him sixth on Dundee’s all-time clean sheet record table. .

Crumley was the grandfather of local author and The Courier columnist Jim Crumley who wrote a novel based on Bob’s life in 2004 in which he paints a compassionate, thoughtful and often funny portrait of his grandfather.

Here Jim Crumley, a native of Dundee and lifelong supporter of his grandfather’s club, shares his recollections of his grandfather and the story of Dundee’s only Scottish Cup winning keeper:


In its day, which was a handful of years culminating in the spring of 1910, the line-up of Dundee’s only Scottish Cup-winning side was as famous as the Liney-Hamilton-Cox side of the early 1960s. It read: Crumley, Neal, MacEwan; Lee, Dainty, Comrie; Bellamy, Langlands, Hunter, MacFarlane, Fraser.

The goalkeeper, Bob Crumley, was my grandfather. I never knew him. I was an oblivious one-year-old when he died in January, 1949. So the only image I carry of him in my head is the black-and-white cigarette card I have. A friend of my mother’s came across it in a sale in Aberdeen and asked if she would like it. She said yes, and gave it to me. This was late in her life and long after my father had died.

So the grandfather I carry around in my head is a head-and-shoulder pose, arms folded, impeccably groomed hair, and a robust and familiar-looking chin (familiar from my father, his brother, his uncle, and every time I look in the bathroom mirror).
He is looking slightly to his right rather than straight at the camera, which suggests it was taken from a team photograph. It measures two-and-a-half by one-and-a-quarter inches and on the back there is this:

Smith’s CUP TIE cigarettes
No 85
R. Crumley Dundee
A very safe goalkeeper who came from Newcastle United to his present club.
In packets of 10.

That’s it. It’s not much to go on, and it is the only clear picture I know of. The rest are team pictures, some of them hand-tinted, and he crops up in some of those hand-drawn illustrations that newspapers used to carry alongside match reports before they got the hang of action photography. As for family photographs, there are none at all.

Thanks to some hushed-up rift in the family after his wife died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 (and he arrived home from the war too late to bury her), his six children were brought up by a maiden aunt, his wife’s sister. So his face is completely absent from our family albums.

He was born and bred in Lochee, and lived much of his adult life in Lochee High Street. His football career began in the very early years of Lochee United, who were formed in 1892 when he was 15. As far as I know his first professional side was Newcastle United, and he spent at least some of his time there as a full back. But by the time Dundee signed him – for £50! - in the summer of 1907 his reputation as a goalkeeper was well established.

Dundee were a force to be reckoned with in the first decade of the 20th century, runners-up in the Scottish League First Division three times, and in the 1908/09 season they lost out to Celtic by only one point. It was a question of time before they broke through to become a trophy-winning side. League form in the 1909/10 season had not lived up to expectations but they were judged a serious prospect for the Scottish Cup. It proved to be something of a marathon, the tone of which was set in two breathless first round ties against Ayrshire amateurs Beith; Dundee won the second 1-0 after a 1-1 draw. There were more convincing performances first against Falkirk (3-0) and then Motherwell (3-1).

There was no extra-time in cup-ties and the idea of penalty shoot-outs was footballing science-fiction. Every drawn game was replayed. So it took three games to get past Edinburgh Hibernian, and it was the third game before the first and the only goal was scored. The final was against Clyde who had already beaten both Rangers and Celtic. The first game was a 2-2 draw, the second was 0-0 draw.

Dundee went behind to Clyde three minutes into the third game, but thanks to goals by Bellamy and Hunter they were 2-1 up midway through the second half. One report noted: “Desperately, Clyde laid siege to the Dundee goal. But with Crumley and Dainty outstanding in defence, there was no further scoring…”

So April 20th 1910 became a famous day in the history of the Club. So famous in fact, that 50 years after the event I would be asked about my grandfather from time to time by Dundee fans at school and not a few teachers.

The fact that it was after 11 o’clock on a Wednesday night when the cup-winning team arrived back in Dundee with the cup did not dampen the celebrations. A horse-drawn parade from the West Station to Dens Park and – much later – to the Royal British Hotel for a team meal, was mobbed by a crowd of 20,000. In the heightened atmosphere of the occasion a few urban myths were born, one of which suggested that the horses were unyoked and the fans took over to provide the horse-power. More believable is that men were passing bottles of whisky around in the street and the city was unsteady on its feet for the rest of the week. A public subscription elevated the players’ cup-winning bonus to somewhere around £40-a-man.

Bob Crumley enjoyed one more season at Dens, but Dundee only finished sixth and were knocked out of the Scottish Cup by Hamilton Accies at the semi-final stage. The 1910/11 season was also notable for the end of a 39-games unbeaten run at Dens Park. It would prove to be the end of an era too, and as with all great sides, it was slowly broken up. Bob Crumley was 39 by then and called it a day.

His younger brother, yet another Jim Crumley (there has been one in every generation of the family back to the middle of the 19th century), played in goal for Dundee Hibs for a few years before transferring to Swansea. In later life he became a fish-and-chip-shop owner in London. I knew him well, and he was very close to my father (also Jim), but although we talked football many times, my famous grandfather was never mentioned.

When Bob Crumley’s career ended he became a corporation messenger, which, coupled with his famous past, may have had something to do with the fact that his funeral was attended by four Lord Provosts of the city, and a crowd of about 400 people, including the Dundee team of the day and their manager George Anderson.

The same year, Anderson signed a 17-year-old goalkeeper called Bill Brown from Carnoustie Panmure. When I was taken by a neighbour to my first game at Dens in 1955 he was pointed out to me as the team ran out, with the words: “There you are, Dundee’s best goalkeeper since your grandfather.”

I was to have two more glimpses of Bob Crumley from people who knew him when they were children and he was an old man and completely blind. In the throes of writing a book about my home town called The Road and the Miles I discovered that my family’s account of his life was very different from the facts. By this time my parents’ generation were all dead and for the first time I looked beyond the family for my information.

The first of the two glimpses came from a near neighbour when he lived in his last years in Benvie Road. The neighbour remembered playing football in the street as a child and Bob Crumley would come out into the street, sit on a low ground-floor windowsill, and “he could follow the game with his ears, turning his head to follow the ball – and the noise”.

The second glimpse was a rather more useful variation of that theme, for he would go to Dens and a group of blind men would gather round him, and he would commentate for them on the match, because he could read it with his ears and from the sound of the game he could visualise the whole thing, from the inside.

I wrote his story down in a short novel called The Goalie. It sold a few hundred copies and vanished without trace, but in the process of writing it I got closer to my own sense of Bob Crumley than I could ever have achieved in any other way. And it’s not everyone who has a cigarette card of his grandfather.