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Celtic Boys Club players with coach Jim Torbett, circa 1968. Photograph: Mike Gibbons/Spindrift

'I have been quiet for 50 years': standing up against sexual abuse at Celtic Boys Club

This article is more than 3 years old
Celtic Boys Club players with coach Jim Torbett, circa 1968. Photograph: Mike Gibbons/Spindrift

Many of the perpetrators have been jailed for their crimes. Now a number of survivors and their families claim that officials at Celtic knew about the sexual abuse and did nothing

Gordon Woods was an unlikely candidate to play for Celtic football club, since he came from the other side of Glasgow’s sectarian soccer divide. Born into a Protestant family, he, like his father before him, grew up supporting Rangers. But when he was 12, and had the opportunity to play for his home club’s historic rivals, Celtic – originally founded by a Catholic priest – Woods didn’t hesitate. Celtic Boys Club had such a stellar reputation in Scottish junior football that even his Rangers-mad father thought it was “perfectly fine” for his son to sign for the other side.

It was 1967, and Woods was joining the club just after it became the first British side to win the European Cup. But it was here that he encountered the man who would cast a dark shadow over the rest of his life.

“The trial was at Barrowfield, the training ground of the big club itself, Celtic FC,” Woods told me. “On the day, I was told by one of the coaches that I was not going to be selected, but then a man who I later found out to be Jim Torbett suddenly intervened.” Torbett went to find the young player in the changing rooms and told him: “Ignore that, come back for more training next week.”

Torbett founded the Celtic Boys Club in 1966, and when Woods joined, he was the manager. After practice, he would take the boys to an Italian restaurant in the centre of Glasgow. At the time, Torbett was starting out in the football memorabilia business, making and selling trophies, medals and other trinkets, and he got the Boys Club players to help out.

Jim Torbett in 1998. Photograph: Spindrift

“We started going to Torbett’s flat, which was then a high rise on Pinkston Drive in Glasgow,” Woods recalled. “One night after training, two of us were helping out, encasing football medals in small plastic covers.

“He had asked us to put on our football shorts while we worked, and then invited us to lie down for a rest in his bed. I was 13 at the time. I remember lying in the middle of the bed and then Torbett getting into bed with us. He suddenly put his left hand down my shorts. I recall that I was terrified, but for some reason I could not get away. I was frozen there at that spot. There was a sick feeling in my stomach over what had just happened.”

Woods says Torbett exercised tremendous power over the boys. He could decide their future as players or rejects – a position he cynically exploited. “I was frightened to say anything to Torbett because the dream of playing for Celtic was still there, even though here I was all of a sudden in this nightmare. He could put the fear of God into you. I went home that evening and never said a word to anyone about it. When I went along to the next training session, Torbett acted as if nothing had happened at all.”

Celtic Boys Club was at the time regarded as the elite youth football side in Scotland, and a potential entry into life as a full-time professional for thousands of young players. But for more than two decades it was also a magnet for paedophiles. At least six men connected with the Celtic Boys Club have come under investigation for sexually assaulting boys between the late 1960s and the early 90s. Three of them have been convicted and have served prison sentences.

Now 21 of survivors are bringing a civil case against the club, which will be heard next year. The litigants include at least one prominent ex-Celtic player, and former professional players for other Scottish Premiership sides and Scotland’s national team. They are seeking damages from the parent club, which they claim had “corporate responsibility” for child grooming, assaults and rape by men with longstanding connections to Celtic Park. The survivors and their families believe the leadership of the club knew about the abuse and did nothing about it. They also allege that Torbett was dismissed from the Boys Club in 1974 following accusations of abuse, but was allowed back into the club after four years, where he continued to work with young boys.

Celtic’s official response is that none of this abuse was linked in any way with the parent club, and that the Boys Club was a separate legal entity. Survivors say this denial has added to their trauma and claim this is typical of the club’s attitude: had the parent club listened to the voices of survivors from early on, the abusers’ reign would not have lasted so long.


As a teenager, Gordon Woods ran away from home and spent decades living and working as far from Scotland as he could. He never spoke of the abuse he suffered. Now 65, he has built a life for himself in a small village in rural Aberdeenshire. Recently he found out that, after a particularly bad incident, his parents had become concerned and tried to raise the alarm about Torbett’s behaviour.

The incident took place one evening in 1968, when, Woods claims, Torbett took a group of boys to a toyshop on Maryhill Road in the West End of Glasgow. “It was called Joe’s Toy Shop, and we were taken there on the pretext of labelling mini plastic versions of the European Cup, which celebrated Celtic being the first British winner of that tournament. It was our task to put the words on tiny paper stickers on the cups.

“Torbett asked me to go into the back of the shop and get a box of the mini cups. He followed me into the storeroom. I turned around and saw that he had taken his penis out. He grabbed my neck and tried to forced me to give him oral sex. When I got out of his grasp I left. I remember walking all through the night. It took me hours to get home. I was only 14.”

Following this incident, Woods missed a couple of training sessions. Shortly after that, Torbett’s attitude toward him completely changed. “Torbett took me aside one evening after Thursday training. He said: ‘Our friendship is over’, and informed me I should not come back to the Boys Club.” To the young hopeful, it was devastating news. “It was the end of my dream and I was distraught.”

Years later, he discovered what he understands to be the reason Torbett dismissed him from the club. After the incident in the toyshop, he had written an anguished letter to Torbett, but he didn’t send it. His father found the letter at their home, quizzed his son about what had been going on, and finally decided to inform Jock Stein, the club’s manager, directly about his concerns.

Celtic Park in the East End of Glasgow. Photograph: Jan Kruger/UEFA via Getty

Woods’ mother told him about the letter in November 1998. “About a week before my mother died, I was with her at her home just outside Colchester,” Woods recalled. “Jim Torbett was in the news, because his first trial was being held in Scotland. She told me that back in 1968, Dad had found my letter to Torbett. She recalled that I wrote ‘Stop hurting me!’ Dad told her he put it in an envelope and posted it to Celtic Park, care of Jock Stein.”

Woods now suspects that someone saw the letter and told Torbett. “Torbett wanted me out of the club, without any proper explanation.”

Although the letter has never been recovered, and there is no proof that it reached Stein, Woods wants this episode to form part of his evidence in the civil case. What is clear is that Torbett continued abusing young players after Gordon Woods left the Boys Club.


David Gordon was another unlikely recruit to the Celtic Boys Club. Like Woods, he came from a family of Rangers supporters, and his father even watched home matches from the director’s box at the mainly Protestant club in Ibrox stadium. He joined Celtic Boys in 1972, when he was 12. “We won everything that year, and I was playing as a centre half or No 5. The first season was fantastic and I was very happy,” Gordon recalled.

He remembers training with Celtic’s manager, Jock Stein. “In the 1973-74 season, we played in the first ever European Youth Cup and I spent a lot of time at Parkhead [Celtic’s stadium]. We were also taken down to Largs on the Ayrshire coast for summer training on the beach. We played a tournament down there and I remember Jock Stein coming on to the pitch to join in. He kept bumping into me. Eventually Stein said: ‘You are a big lad, don’t let anyone push you about!’ So then I tackled him and took the ball off him.”

Now 60, Gordon is a Glasgow taxi driver with a reticent manner and a haunted look, who flinches visibly when he remembers Torbett’s abusive behaviour. “After games, Torbett would take us boys off for a spin in his car to restaurants like The Yellow Bird in Buchanan Street and treat us,” he told me. “At first, the only thing he appeared to want in return was for us to buy him sweets. He did spoil us rotten, but when he became full manager [of the Boys Club] in 1967, things started to change,” he said.

Gordon recounts how the dream of playing in the Boys Club turned into a nightmare. “Torbett started inviting boys back to his flat in Pinkston Rise where we would watch TV and play cards. There was a van in the area that sold sweets, and Torbett always sent out two boys to it while one was left alone in the flat with him. He started to ask personal questions like, ‘What is your willy for?’ Or, ‘What is a cock for?’

“One night we were in his flat watching the TV and I was sitting on the couch while the other boys were on the floor. Torbett came over, lay down on the couch and wrapped his legs around me. He grabbed my hand, put it down his trousers and made me wank him. I just froze there and then. I did not know what to do, because at that age I did not know what he was doing. I was just scared. The boys on the floor couldn’t see anything, because the way Torbett wrapped his legs around me he was covering up what he was making me do.”

When he could get away, Gordon ran out of the house and got the bus home. He remembers another youth player, Alan Brazil, left Torbett’s house at the same time. “I remember that neither Alan nor myself spoke a single word to each other on the journey. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I tried to keep out of Torbett’s way. Then I stopped going to games. I was eventually dropped from the team. I had been player of the year but now I was out of the side.”


Torbett’s time at the Boys Club came to a sudden end in 1974. Much later, after he was exposed as a paedophile, there were reports in the Scottish press that Torbett, by then the general manager of the Boys Club, had been sacked by Jock Stein. But at the time there was no mention of any improper behaviour, and no one at Celtic reported the allegations against him to Strathclyde Police. In fact, the November 1974 edition of the club’s official magazine, The Celtic View, crowed that Torbett “bows out after another season of glory”. In the article, Torbett said his football memorabilia business was growing so fast that it was time for him to stand down from managing the youth side.

In 1978, Torbett was allowed to return to the Boys Club, and from then on he was free to abuse a new generation of boys. During his absence from Celtic Park, Torbett had built up his business, The Trophy Centre, which won contracts to sell official Celtic souvenirs and memorabilia. By the mid-80s, he was a millionaire, and had business dealings with several men associated with the club.

There were certainly rumours of child abuse circulating at the Boys Club after his return. In an editorial in Celtic FC’s official publication, The Celtic View, on 10 December 1986, the club raged against those who were saying there was sexual abuse going on within the youth side. The editorial claimed that the club had conducted its own investigation and interviewed those under suspicion, but “could find nothing to substantiate the stories that were being circulated”. It contained a warning to the press: “The boys club leaders who have been placed under a cloud as a result of these rumours” were ready to defend themselves in court, it read, “to make sure these scurrilous stories are buried once and for all”.

Now the survivors and their families are preparing for their day in court, they want to know more about this internal investigation at Celtic Park in 1986. “Our suspicion is that there were no investigations at all, but let’s have the civil action establish if that is the case or not,” the survivors’ lawyer, Patrick McGuire, said.

One of those Torbett targeted after his return to the Boys Club was a boy named Andy Gray. In 1988, Gray was 12 and playing at the club as a striker. “We were very close growing up, and I knew that Andy just lived and breathed being part of Celtic,” his sister Michelle told me when we met in a Glasgow hotel earlier this year. “He played for over three years, but suddenly cut all ties with the club before he turned 16.”

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Gray didn’t speak to anyone about the abuse until he was 40. “When he finally opened up, Andy told us that the abuse had started when he was 12,” said his sister. “He did not go into a great deal of detail, as he was quite reserved, but it appears to have started in Torbett’s car. We lived in the West End of Glasgow, and Torbett had started to offer Gray lifts home from the East End after football training. Torbett invited Gray to his new flat in Kelvindale and also to The Trophy Centre.

“Torbett obviously had a psychological hold over Andy. He had put the fear of God into my brother. We were very close, but he bottled the abuse up,” Michelle recalled, fighting back tears. She said that a combination of fear and shame compelled her brother to keep silent about what had happened to him.

“My dad asked him one time if something was wrong, and he just screamed back that he wanted to be left alone. I found him a few times sobbing his heart out in his room. He kept up a front, he would not talk about it for a few years. Later my father asked Andrew face to face if Torbett had done anything to him, but Andy angrily said no. It got to a stage in our house that you could not mention Celtic or Torbett in front of Andy. It destroyed his life. He never had a proper relationship and he found it difficult to hold down a job.”

The abuse, the cover-up and Torbett’s apparent untouchability led her brother’s mental and physical health to fray. “Andy started smoking cannabis and he also was diagnosed with epilepsy. He rarely left his room and made several suicide attempts. Eventually we got him on his feet and, through a friend, got him interested in moving out of Glasgow and Scotland entirely, to make a new life for himself in Australia.”

Before he left Scotland in 2017, Gray broke down and disclosed to a counsellor at the NSPCC how Torbett had abused him. He was then referred to the police and gave another statement.

Soon after arriving in Australia, Gray had a diving accident at a swimming pool. His sister flew to be at his bedside in a Perth hospital. Before he slipped into unconsciousness and died on 13 October 2017, his sister says, his last words to her were: “Fight for me and the other wee boys.”

Michelle has taken up the fight to get justice for her late brother. She is one of the 21 suing Celtic for damages, and demanding a proper account of how suspected abusers were allowed to continue working with children.


In October 1996, Jim Torbett was arrested after a series of stories in the Daily Record, the Herald and BBC Scotland exposed his history of sexually abusing young players. He was jailed for two years in 1998 for abusing three young players, including Alan Brazil, at the Celtic Boys Club between 1967 and 1974. Following his release, Torbett was still a wealthy man. He moved to California, where a BBC investigations team tracked him down to ask him about other allegations of abuse. Within hours of that programme being broadcast, on 2 May 2017, US homeland security escorted Torbett to LAX airport. He was flown back to the UK and then arrested in Scotland.

Andy Gray’s testimony was among those used to help convict Torbett of a second round of crimes against three boys. Jailing Torbett for six years in November 2018, the trial judge Lo rd Beckett told him: “You used the club as a front for child sexual abuse.”

Michelle Gray believes the parent club at Celtic Park bears responsibility for failing to prevent Torbett’s crimes. “I just want to confront the people who failed my brother. Because if Celtic had kept Torbett away from that club between 1986 to 1994, then Andy’s life and the lives of other boys would not have been ruined,” she said.

It was Kevin Kelly, then a board member of Celtic FC, who brought Torbett back into the club at the end of the 70s. Kelly and the former Celtic View editor Jack McGinn (who became club director in 1986) were longstanding business associates of Torbett.

Andy Gray with his sister Michelle. Photograph: Michelle Gray

Kelly strongly denies that he knew about the allegations against Torbett when he brought him back to the Boys Club in 1978. In fact, he says he was not aware of any allegations against Torbett until the 1998 court case. McGinn, who wrote the 1986 editorial denouncing “scurrilous stories” of abuse, has denied any knowledge of Torbett’s activities before his second stint at the Boys Club from 1978.

Torbett’s 2018 conviction triggered a string of further allegations against senior figures in the Celtic Boys Club. Among other abusers at the Boys Club was teacher Gerald King. In early 2019, King was given a three-year probation order for sexually abusing four boys and a girl at a Scottish school in the 80s. King was convicted of “lewd and libidinous practices”, which included taking a photo of naked boys in the shower, between August 1984 and April 1989.

Last year, Celtic Boys Club’s former kit man, Jim McCafferty, 73, pleaded guilty to 12 charges relating to sexual abuse involving 10 boys between 1972 and 1996. Four of his victims played for the Boys Club, and others played for youth teams he ran in North Lanarkshire. He was sentenced to six years and nine months in prison. At the time of his conviction, McCafferty was already serving a prison sentence for the sexual abuse of a boy in Belfast.

The web of abuse goes further. Police Scotland are now seeking the extradition of another man associated with the Boys Club who is living in east Asia. The football scout Bill Kelly started targeting hopeful young players at clubs across Scotland in the late 60s, and was eventually convicted of abusing 12 young boys in 1987. One of Bill Kelly’s victims, Bill Storrie, was abused while playing for the West Lothian boys club Uphall All Saints in the late 60s. Storrie believes there needs to be an independent inquiry to investigate links between paedophiles working in Scotland during the 60s and 70s, and one of British sport’s most notorious child sexual abusers, the English football coach Barry Bennell.

In February 2018, Bennell, a former coach at Crewe Alexandra, was found guilty of 36 child sexual offences. He was jailed for 31 years for a total of 50 offences against 12 boys, and further convictions have followed, including some just this month, taking the total of known victims to 22. Given that he had worked at four different English clubs – Crewe, Manchester City, Stoke City and Leeds United – as well as having contacts with Scottish teams including Celtic Boys Club, the real number of his victims may still be far higher. Storrie is aware of a claim by one former youth player in Scotland that he was “trafficked” down to Bennell by the Celtic kit man Jim McCafferty.

The Scottish Football Association has promised to publish a report into child sexual and physical abuse in the game, which it commissioned in 2018. Although the SFA has said it will release the report, at the time of writing it has still not been published.


Last year, another man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was convicted of sexual abuse against young players at Celtic Boys Club in the 1980s. Following the conviction, Celtic Football Club released a statement expressing “our deep regret that these incidents took place, as well as our sympathy for the victims who suffered abuse”. However, in its statement the club stressed that “Celtic Football Club is an entirely separate organisation to Celtic Boys Club”.

As a “separate legal entity”, the club accepts no responsibility for the actions of Torbett, McCafferty, King or anyone else. Lawyers pursuing the civil action on behalf of the 21 say they are determined to “knock down the defensive wall” that the parent club have erected in order to protect its reputation.

On the walls of the main meeting room at Thompsons Solicitors in Glasgow’s Bath Street are framed photographs of trade union banners from the glory days of the Scottish labour movement. They are a reminder that much of the law firm’s work concerns industrial injury: they have sought compensation for retired workers from shipyards, docks and building industries whose lives were blighted by asbestosis. In recent years, Thompsons has taken up the fight for the survivors of child sexual abuse.

Patrick McGuire, a veteran of industrial injury cases, is the senior lawyer in the Boys Club case. “When you look in the archives at The Celtic View, you see regular processions of Boys Club players on the field in front of crowds at Celtic Park,” McGuire said. “It is obvious there was no distinction whatsoever. The club’s in-house newspaper talks about the Boys Club being ‘part of the Celtic family’ and one former manager described the youth side as the ‘base of the pyramid’ of the entire club.”

For the survivors and their families, the long fight for justice has been punishing. Michelle Gray and her mother, Helen, say they have been subject to a campaign of intimidation over the last two years for daring to speak out against the club. The threats started when they attended Torbett’s second trial in 2018. “One big man among Torbett’s supporters outside the courtroom even said out loud that my mother and me were ‘dirty lying bastards.’ This was in October 2018,” she recalled. “This was Torbett’s second conviction and there were still people turning up to support him. We were stared at and heard them say that Andy was a ‘dirty lying bastard’ even though my brother was already dead.”

The trolling and social ostracisation of the Gray family has continued. Michelle’s car has been vandalised. “When we went public and said we were joining the civil action against Celtic, I received a death threat on the phone. The level of abuse on social media over the last few months has also been appalling. People have even blanked my mother, who is in her 70s, on the street.”

For Gordon Woods, the toll of this battle for justice has been enormous. “Since this all began in September 2019 with me contacting Thompsons, I have gone from weighing 75 kilos to 55 kilos. I went to the doctors, got all kinds of tests and the results came back, there was nothing physically wrong with me. The GP agreed it could only be one thing – pure stress. But the stresses and pressures are not going to stop me. I have been quiet for 50 years, so I am not going to stop now. I am not going to be silenced by anyone any more.”

The NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331.

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