‘I JUST love the freedom of the mountains,” says Elsie Cook, Scottish football’s answer to women’s rights activist Emmeline Pankhurst.
At the age of 79 the suffragette from Stewarton has now bagged 141 Monros, her passion for climbing ignited by the breakdown of a relationship in 1991.
The 96 miles of the West Highland Way offered a form of therapy. A freedom the men who passed through her life had spent decades trying to take away.
“That’s exactly it,” she tells Herald Sport. “As I walked that route from Milngavie to Fort William I started to feel as happy as could be. I realised that I loved the great outdoors, I loved walking in the woods, I loved fresh air, I loved the beauty of my surroundings. More than anything I loved the freedom.
“The freedom to play football, the freedom from problems, the freedom to do what I want to do. We only get one life and no man should ever tell you what to do.”
The pursuit of freedom would generate a call from Jock Stein and a kiss from Pele. It cost her a marriage, secured a degree from the Glasgow School of Art at the age of 60, inspired a new book on her life and secured admission to the Scottish Football Hall of Fame. More than anything it secured the right for women and girls to play football whenever and wherever they like.
She winds the clock back to a meeting at 6 Park Gardens in 1972 when Willie Allan, the old-school, dapper secretary of the SFA listened to what she had to say before informing her that ‘football is not a game to be played by women.’
“God love Willie,’ she says with a shake of the head. “I actually felt a bit sorry for him that day because he looked to me like a nice wee honest man.
“But I couldn’t understand why he was going on like that. Lassies have feet, we have heads, we can chest the ball and kick it and that was my argument.
But his whole body language and everything he said screamed, ‘no’.”
In May 1961 a 14-year-old Elsie had lined up alongside her formidable mother Betty and two aunts and a prolific striker by the name of Susan Ferries in a team which would form the basis of a club called Stewarton Thistle.
Within 11 years she was the first honorary secretary of the new Scottish Women’s Football Association and, in the autumn of 1972, a letter arrived from English counterpart Pat Gregory proposing the first international challenge match between the nations.
Read more:
-
Forrest on fire as Scot shoots course record to seize lead at the Nexo Championship
-
Penge keeps the head and recovers from an opening eight with fine repair job
Privately owned – and outside SFA control – Ravenscraig Stadium in Greenock would be the venue. Scotland’s strips were funded by a Provident cheque, while Cook paid a visit to the All Sport Shop in Kilmarnock to purchase badges and numbers from her own pocket, her mother coaxing colleagues in the stitching department of Robert Mackie & Sons to sew them on.
Sixteen players gathered at the old Anderston Bus Station in Glasgow’s Argyle Street to make their way to Inverclyde to familiarise themselves with the pitch where they would face the auld enemy. When the transport for the game failed to turn up Cook was forced to move quicker than she ever did in her days as a Stewarton Thistle trailblazer.
“This big van came through the Hielan’ Man’s umbrella at Central Station and I sprinted down the road stopped the van chapped on the guy’s window.
“He asked, ‘what can I do for you hen?
“I said, ‘this is the Scotland lassies’ team and you can get us to Greenock?”
A payment of £30 secured a passage to Inverclyde in the back of a van carting frayed sofas and lamps with tassles on the shades to a new home.
The first women’s international match saw Scotland lose 3-2 to England on a frozen pitch on November 28. In 2019 – 47 years after the event – the Scottish FA invited the team to Hampden and presented them with the delayed international caps Willie Allan and his obdurate wingman Ernie Walker considered an affront to professional football.
They were never alone in that. In the industrial macho Scotland of 1972 women and football were viewed as oil and water. In some quarters they still are.
“Even my man was embarrassed by me playing the game…” recalls Elsie.
“Matt was a lovely guy, he still is. But he would go into his work in the morning factory and they’d be winding him up with, ‘aye your wife was brilliant at the weekend…
“I think he took it seriously a lot of the time and he gave me an ultimatum. It was fitba or him.”
In 1974 Elsie took a train to Edinburgh, daughters in tow, with the intention of submitting her resignation as secretary of the SWFA.
“I was at the front of the hall and they presented me with a memento of my time as secretary and expressed regret that I was chucking it.
“But the next issue on the agenda was the appointment of a new Scotland women’s manager.
Read more:
-
Russell Martin in Rangers transfers hint and what he will prioritise
-
Brendan Rodgers bristles at Shin Yamada question as he explains Celtic selections
“One of the lassies up the back of the hall shouted, ‘we want Elsie.’
“I’d gone to resign as secretary and came back as the team manager. I’d to go back down the road on the train and tell Matt the news.”
By now football was an all-consuming obsession. In her new book, ‘A Kiss Fae Pele’ – written in her Stewarton dialect with author Tom Brown – she expresses a “wee hint o’shame that ah wisnae a better wummin, a better mammy an’ a better wife.”
To illustrate the point she tells the tale of the day she took daughter Linda for a walk with the family dog Blackie, passing a men’s game where one of the teams were a player short. Invited to make up the numbers she returned home, soaked to the skin. When her husband opened the door there was no daughter and no dog. She’d left them behind.
“I wasn’t a good mammy,’ she maintains. “And I wasn’t a good wife because in my head it was always about the fitba.”
While Matt Cook sought comfort on the golf course, his wife leaned into the football and they drifted apart. In 1980 they went their separate ways.
“You have to be true to yourself don’t you? The good thing is that Matt has a smashing wee wife these days. Marion is brilliant, so I like to think I did him a good turn.”
By August 1974 the barriers to women playing football had come down faster than the Berlin Wall. The SFA’s decision to relent prompted a call to the Stewarton home of Elsie’s mother. Jock Stein wanted a word.
“Oh my god, I thought my mammy was havering,’ she laughs now.
“I loved Jock to bits. He asked us to play a Scotland select in front of the Celtic fans before a European Cup against Olympiacos. What a man.
“He was the number one for me….apart from Pele.”
Ah, yes, Pele. The first love of the young Elsie Cook’s life was Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Brazil’s talismanic genius. A player she first clapped eyes on at the age of 11 when he secured global acclaim in the 1958 World Cup Finals.
Working for a firm of bunnet manufacturers in Stewarton, a 19-year-old Elsie concocted a plan to present the world’s best loved national team with tartan tammies during a pre-World Cup training camp at the Marine Hotel in Troon before the 1966 finals in England.
One by one the Brazilian players emerged from lunch. First came Tostao, then Garrincha, the little bird. After that came Gerson, defender Djalma Santos, goalkeeper Gilmar, captain Bellini, winger Jairzinho, midfielder Alcindo and – finally – the great man himself.
“Ah just burst into tears and Pele came over and cuddled me and asked me why I was crying.”
The tears worked a treat. A pair of tickets were handed over for the friendly game with Scotland and Elsie and her friend Pat – ‘she hated football’ – were transported to Hampden for a 1-1 draw on a bus reserved for Brazilian FA officials and directors.
“After the game Pele knocked out the window to me and shouted to us to come to Liverpool for the World Cup. As luck would have it I got home and my granny and grandpa were up visiting from Liverpool.
“I told them Brazil were playing there and my granny – who hated football – handed me my keys for the house.”
By Brazilian standards the tournament was shambolic. Eliminated from the group stages after losing to a brutal Portuguese side Elsie persuaded a crocked Pele to autograph a picture of the two taken in Troon. A gust of wind blew the image from her hand and it was lost until Shoot magazine printed an article on ‘Fan’s lost Pele photograph’ and back it came in the post.
The reunion was brief. Rose Reilly, Cook’s fellow Hall of Fame member and childhood friend, owned up to transporting the picture to Italy years later and failed to give it back. That incident is one of the reasons the two are no longer close.
When Cook took early retirement from her post as a community education officer and enrolled in Glasgow School of Art at the age of 57 she earned high praise and encouragement from a lecturer for her dissertation on the history and growth of women’s football.
“Unfortunately Rose Reilly took that and never gave me it back,’ she claims now. “She said later she didn’t have it.
“We were best pals for all those years from the age of nine. But the relationship isn’t what it was.”
Her new book endeavours to burst “a few urban myths aboot (Reilly’s) career achievements.”
The usual narrative has it that Reilly won the women’s World Cup with Italy in 1984. As Cook points out she actually played in the Mundialito, a precursor to the Women’s World Cup created in 1991.
“Rose never won a World Cup. And she never played in a World Cup either…”
Hurtling towards her 80th birthday she forgets her words from time to time.
Yet, when it comes to football her memory is as sharp as the pictures highlighting her remarkable life in the Hall of Fame.
“Seeing my face on what wa’ over there could start me greeting,” she says pausing to gather herself. “It’s the first time I’ve seen it and it’s a very emotional thing.
“I look around these walls and see my Kilmarnock heroes like wee Tommy McLean and Frank Beattie up there and it just makes me think what an amazing gift football gave me.”
