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.
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 were carried
across the docks and found new life in the new-born Thames Ironworks F.C. —
who, a few short years later, would be reborn as the beloved West Ham United. Indeed, a significant number former Swifts players (Scots among them) became Ironworks players.
And so, the first true spark of our club was struck with
Donald Currie’s birth two centuries ago: a spark that ignited a roaring furnace
of Greenock engineers, shipwrights and — in time — footballers, who poured like
molten metal down to London’s East End, bringing with them their labour, their
accents, and their dreams.
Leafing through the old rosters of the Swifts is like
reading a roll-call from the Clyde: Lyndsey, Murray, McFarlane, Leith, Baird,
Mitchell, Fraser, Taylor. Among them, fellow Greenock engineers Robert Taylor
and David Murray — brothers in craft and in spirit to Currie himself.
Currie’s path had first taken him through Cunard in
Liverpool before he struck out alone, founding Donald Currie & Co. in 1862,
which blossomed into the famed Union-Castle Line. In his youth he had laboured
in his uncle’s sugar-refining business back home in Greenock, and so the old
trade winds of sugar, no less than shipbuilding, braided Greenock to London.
Consider Abram Lyle, another Greenock son and sugar magnate.
In 1865 he acquired a refinery in Greenock, and later others in Plaistow and
Silvertown. Distrusting strangers, he brought his entire workforce from
Greenock by train in 1882 — from foremen to labourers — just as the German
sugar bakers before him had imported their own countrymen to staff their
refineries both on the Clyde and in East London. My own forebears from Bremen
were among those 19th-century sugar men. ‘White gold,’ like shipbuilding, flows
through the strata of our family history.
So too did Currie expand, acquiring land at Canning Town
near the mouth of the River Lea, where his Scottish-recruited workforce tended
his ship-repair yards. And it was here, in 1891, that he resolved to establish
the Old Castle Swifts — a team financed by his company, a spark struck on the
anvil of Union-Castle steel.
In time, the Swifts passed into history, yet their spirit
endured with a new East End works team being formed in direct response to the Swifts demise. The Thames Ironworks FC men picked up their hammer, carrying the Scottish
tradition forward until they became West Ham United in 1900. Even then, Scots
still laced up their boots for the Irons.
Decades later, in 1965, my own father Ronnie Ahlfeld — a lad
of seventeen — followed the same compass southward, signing schoolboy terms as
a youth player for West Ham, even making a few appearances for the reserves in
the Metropolitan League against St Neot’s and Dartford Town. Fate was cruel:
injury curtailed his rise, sending him home to become youth team manager at
Greenock Morton F.C., just as my grandfather Robey Ahlfeld had once guarded the
goalmouth for old Greenock Morton Juniors before the war. My young cousin Brinley
also had trials at the Hammers and was on the books for a brief period too.
We kept the faith even through the wilderness years in the old Second Division, when the defence was more sieve than steel. Those trips were brightened by visits to my aunts Senga and Ellen and our London cousins, weaving family into the fabric of football.
And so, who can say what the future holds for our oft-troubled club, with its uneasy owners and financial storms? Yet even now, the embers of West Ham still glow; the forge is not yet cold, the anvil not yet silent.
So, raise a glass — to Sir Donald, born two hundred years ago in Greenock, who unknowingly set in motion the great, clanging poetry of the Hammers.
Up the Irons. And happy birthday, Sir Donald.