A Greenock Spark That Lit the Hammers’ Flame
For we long-suffering Scots Hammers — and especially those of us who are Greenock-born devotees of West Ham United — today is a day of quiet reverence, almost sacred in its significance. For on this date, the 17th of September 2025, we mark the bicentenary of the birth of Donald Currie — Greenock born on the same day in 1825, and departed this life in 1909. Currie was an industrialist of formidable energy, a shipowner whose vessels stitched together the trade routes of empire, a parliamentarian, and later a generous philanthropist. But for us, who trace our loyalties not through stock markets or shipping ledgers but through claret and blue veins, his most luminous legacy lies elsewhere: as the first chairman, founder and financier of Old Castle Swifts F.C. The Swifts were a works team, forged in 1892 from the sweat and sinew of Scottish shipyard workers toiling in West Ham, East London. When the club dissolved in 1895, its embers did not die. Instead, they w...