Hearts On Tour

Hearts OnTour

The 1950ʼs Tours

Throughout the most successful decade in the Club’s history, manager Tommy Walker forged close bonds between his talented players by taking them on six post-season tours to destinations as far apart as the USA, South Africa and Australia. This season, I’m going to take a look at the memorabilia associated with Hearts’ tours of the 1950’s.

Hearts’ record-breaking triumph in the League in 1958 meant that they were in demand as a touring side and in January 1959, the club accepted a prestigious invitation from the Australian Soccer Association to tour Australia in May and June of 1959. Hearts would play fi fteen matches on the gruelling tour including six against sides billed as full Australian international sides. They would score a barrow-load of goals against teams of largely part-time players in representative sides who may never have played against each other before. Indeed, one feature of many of the matches is that Australian sides would hold Hearts to a reasonably respectable scoreline at half time only to see Hearts’ superior fi tness and teamwork enable them to score freely in the second half.

All that was in the future as the Hearts party of 15 players, two directors and Tommy Walker and Johnny Harvey assembled at Tynecastle for the start of a truly epic journey to reach Sydney. These days, you can fl y to Sydney in roughly thirty hours including one or two stops. Back in 1959, it was a different story as the Hearts offi cial itinerary for the tour revealed. The players were to assemble in Gorgie on 1 May 1959 to be bussed through to Prestwick where they would stay overnight to enable them to catch an early fl ight to Amsterdam on 2 May. Following a quick tour of the tulip fi elds, the players buckled themselves in for a fl ight to Rome which stopped in Frankfurt. From Rome, the plane called at Beirut (where the players had their “fi rst real taste of heat” according to Jimmy Wardhaugh in the Evening News), Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok, Manila, Biak in Papua New Guinea and arriving in Sydney at 12.20pm on …. 5 May, some four days after leaving Edinburgh ! The itinerary was similar to the one produced for the 1958 tour to Canada, a small pocket-sized booklet attractively printed with a crest on the front cover. Inside, there was a map to remind everyone where Australia was and a list of hotel room pairings with George Thomson rooming with Alex Young, Willie Bauld with Jimmy Murray and Jimmy Wardhaugh sharing with Ian Crawford. Next, there was a list of fi xtures though many of the fi xtures would change as the tour progressed and a timetable. Like the 1958 itinerary, the “Notes” for players included a passage on the “object” of the tour which I strongly suspect was penned by Tommy Walker. First, he said, the team had a duty to their Australian hosts who, it was hoped, would learn from Hearts’ prowess. Second, “ from experience, it has been found that men, when in close contact with each other for an extended period, may don one of two things; (a) grow more and more irritable with each other and lose all sense of values and duty or (b) grow stronger as the days go by, each day simply acting as a forge the whole into an impregnable force. And so, the latter having been our most pleasant experience of past tours, there can be no doubt in the mind as to the true object of this one – to build ʻesprit de corps’”. You sense Tommy Walker would have been good to have around in lockdown!

Interestingly, the Australian Soccer Association also produced their own itinerary comprising a single sheet of foolscap folded into thirds with an attractive design on the cover. Inside, there’s a wealth of information for the players and offi cials. There is a list of players and offi cials which included an extra director, Mr Ford but didn’t include Jim Fotheringham, acquired just before the tour started from Arsenal and hastily included in the travelling party at the last moment. His name has been written

on the itinerary in the distinctive handwriting of Tommy Walker, the original owner of this copy of the itinerary. The ticks next to players’ names perhaps suggests that this was used to check the players on to fl ights or trains once the tour was under way. Next, there’s a schedule of matches although even that schedule would change once the tour was under way.

Perhaps most interesting, though, are the lists of accommodation and the internal travel itinerary during the tour. The latter shows the party travelling by train twice and coach once as well as taking seven internal fl ights on Trans Australia Airways, a domestic Australian airline. The fl ight from Adelaide to Perth on 11 June would take a little over four hours, the time it now takes to fl y from Edinburgh to Turkey. The team’s hotels are also listed with Hearts spending two spells each in Sydney and Newcastle before moving further afi eld. In Sydney, the tourists were due to stay at the Hotel Manhattan in Potts Point overlooking Elizabeth Bay. Internet searches show that this art deco building is no longer used as a hotel and appears to have been converted into fl ats.

But in his hotel room on the 8th or 9th May 1959, Tommy Walker sat

at his desk and, grabbing a piece of hotel notepaper, selected his team to face Australia in the fi rst test match and the fi rst match of the tour on 9 May 1959. Fellow collector Grant Young is the proud owner of this amazing piece of Hearts memorabilia.

Next time, we’ll look at the programme from that fi rst match in Sydney. Gary Cowen is a member of Hearts heritage group and is currently writing a book about the Hearts post-season tours