It was a moment of enduring significance, yet it barely created a stir. No British newspaper sent a reporter or photographer to cover the event. The European Cup, they said incredulously, would never last. When Hibernian lined up against Rot-Weiss Essen in the inaugural first round 50 years ago, becoming the first British team to play in the tournament, the encounter was met with indifference.
“Nobody had any idea that it would develop the way it has done,” recalls Lawrie Reilly, a member of the Famous Five forward line, with a soft chuckle. “It was just another game.” On Friday, Hibs will return to Essen to face the German side again, in a friendly to commemorate their momentous meeting. At the Georg Melches Stadium, the present will mingle wistfully with the past.
The European Cup was born in the mind of Gabriel Hanot, the editor of the French sports newspaper L’Equipe, and his perseverance turned it into reality. Uefa had only come into existence 12 months before and their focus was on creating a national team competition, so Hanot and Jacques Ferran, a L’Equipe writer, devised a format for their own tournament, with games to be played on Wednesday evenings under floodlights. At first, the participating teams did not have to be league champions and invites were issued to 18 clubs that were thought to have the broadest appeal across the Continent, while also having stadiums that could host night games. So Hibs, rather than Aberdeen, the title holders, were asked to step into the history books.
“Hibs were the most travelled team in Scotland, maybe even in Britain, because every year from the end of the war we toured abroad,” explains Reilly. “The club must have made a bit of money out of it; I mean they weren’t doing it just for sight-seeing. It cut our close-season down, but it was like a holiday for us as well. And I think it did improve us as players, although you didn’t realise it at the time. We were playing against (tactical) systems that we weren’t used to facing and some of them were quite well advanced, so we benefited from that.”
With the English FA sceptical, Chelsea declined the invite, while Moscow Dynamo felt the Russian winter would be too harsh to allow them to take part. So representatives from 15 teams met in the Ambassador Hotel in Paris on April 2, 1955 and approved the competition’s rules, with Hibs expressing their support by letter. Led by the attacking prowess of the Famous Five — Gordon Smith, Bobby Johnstone, Reilly, Eddie Turnbull and Willie Ormond — the Easter Road side won the league title in 1951 and 1952 and only lost the 1953 championship to Rangers on goal aggregate. By 1955, Johnstone had been sold to Manchester City and the defensive personnel had changed, but they were still a side of distinction.
Hibs were drawn to face Rot-Weiss, the German champions, and they travelled over in September 1955 expecting a stringent challenge. Instead, they found only good fortune. Helmut Rahn was the home team’s undoubted star, having scored the winning goal for West Germany in the final of the 1954 World Cup against Hungary, but injury kept him out of the tie. “We went out there expecting a difficult game, but after 10 or 15 minutes I thought, ‘This is not much of a team’, ” says Reilly. “And we had the biggest support because a lot of British troops were still in Germany. Most of the terracing fans were in uniform, that’s the one thing that still stands out even now, that we got good support from the Tommies. We were told by the manager to lie back and play defensively, so that when we got back to Easter Road we wouldn’t have so much to make up. That was the thought and I suppose that would be the norm now. But once the game started they didn’t impress us at all, so we changed our system, we developed more of an attacking formation. And Eddie (Turnbull), the devil that he is, beat me by a few minutes to be the first Brit to score in Europe. I was the second, but nobody ever worries who was second.”
In front of a crowd of 5,000, Hibs went 2-0 ahead by the break and further goals from Turnbull and Ormond sealed a comfortable win. That the European Cup was not widely viewed as relevant was clear when the second leg was played the following month. Arthur Ellis, an English referee, was selected to officiate and he received a phone call the day before the game asking him to find two linesmen because Uefa had forgotten to appoint any. “Frankly, some of the organisation in the early stages of the European Cup smacked of a chip shop approach,” he later recalled.
Three Hibs players — Tommy Younger, Smith and Reilly — were selected in the Scottish League Select to face Denmark in Copenhagen two days before Rot-Weiss came to Easter Road. Their flight back to Edinburgh, scheduled to return them in time to play, was delayed by fog and they missed the match. “Gordon was so keen to get back that he wanted to rent a plane and charge it to the Hibs,” Reilly adds. “But I said, ‘Gordon, Hibs aren’t going to pay that kind of money’. It didn’t matter because we had a comfortable lead.
“Jock Buchanan was such a late replacement for Smith that he was at his mum’s house eating two helpings of mince and tatties when he was told he was needed at Easter Road. Yet he struck after just five minutes to become the first British player to score a European Cup goal on British soil, although he tired as the game went on due to the heaviness of his unscheduled pre-match meal.
Hibs were drawn against Djurgaarden in the second round, and both legs were played in Scotland due to the severity of the winter in Stockholm. The Swedes opted to play their ‘home’ game at Partick Thistle’s Firhill ground, where they lost 3-1, and Hibs sealed their progress with a 1-0 win at Easter Road. In the semi-final, they came up against Reims, the French side which boasted Raymond Kopa, who went on to star for Real Madrid, and Hibs lost 2-0 at the Parc des Princes and 1-0 at Easter Road. Reims, in turn, loast 4-3 in the final to Real Madrid. The competition was deemed a success — the total gate receipts were £90,000 and Hibs made £25,000 from their participation — and by the following season it grew in popularity and importance. “Other clubs began to realise there was a bit of prestige with getting into Europe,” says Reilly. “I’d have fancied our chances that year, if we’d had the team of five years before. But wee Bobby had moved on and it was a different Hibs from the one that won the league. It will always go down in history, though, that we were the first British team to play in it.”
Rot-Weiss were relegated from the German Second Division last season and the European Cup has undergone its own transformation. But on Friday, when Reilly and some of his former teammates may fly out to join the celebrations in Essen, minds will turn back to a different time. To when Hibs were pioneers in Europe.
