A HISTORY teacher before becoming an MP, Tam Dalyell is best remembered for initiating school cruises, but he was also an enthusiastic and successful football coach. A new biography, Inside Outside, by Russell Galbraith, recalls that his team at Bo’ness Academy in the late Fifties scored as many as 15 goals in a game and would draw crowds of 1,000 to watch them on a Satuday morning.
To his regret Dalyell has never become a Government minister but he coached his footballers to victory in the Scottish schoolboys’ intermediate shield, beating Glasgow’s Penilee Secondary in the final. Ironically, a local journalist attributes the success of the noted nonconformist and rebel to the fact that he “made the boys think teamwise”.