There is a collection of around 5,000 items held in safe keeping at Murrayfield which chart the last 100 years of Scottish rugby history.
The heritage lead, Laura Tinch, says this is a national treasure hiding in plain sight. She invites everyone to become involved in the Murrayfield Memories campaign by submitting some of their own.
This is a nationwide campaign launched by Scottish Rugby as the national stadium celebrates its centenary this year. It is aimed at collecting and celebrating personal stories
The project will highlight Murrayfield’s heritage through the memories of fans, shining a light on the social history of the game through the stories spanning 100 years.
Under the stands there are match balls, photographs, hand-stitched caps and all sorts of paraphernalia. Ms Tinch has spent the last four years cataloguing the “finds”. She would now like to digitise the entire collection so that it can be viewed from anywhere in the world for all rugby fans to see.
Archive
Laura said: “The collection is a national treasure hiding in plain sight. When I first opened the vault – well room to be more accurate – it was overwhelming, priceless artefacts piled high, barely labelleds.
“There was a marble hippo from Zimbabwe sitting next to an eagle from the USA, both brought home from Rugby World Cups. Of course, there are the trophies, the jerseys, the balls, and the medals, but I knew this is about far more than just rugby, it’s about people, about Scotland.
“There are of course famous sporting moments that are synonymous with Murrayfield – the Grand Slams, the Calcutta Cups, magical rugby moments, but the archive is far bigger than that.
“It’s about the local clubs, the volunteers who marked the pitches, the families, who travelled every weekend. These stories are the soul of Scottish rugby – they deserve to be remembered. It takes incredible dedication and an enormous amount of time. You could have a team of 20 trying to look after this collection and it’d still take forever to catalogue it. But that’s a huge part of the charm and challenge – there’s so much history in every piece.”
Jewels in the collection
One of Laura’s favourite discoveries is a near-pristine dark blue silk flag from South Africa, dated 1932. “It’s almost 100 years old and still gleams,” she said. “Unfolding it for the first time gave me goosebumps.”
A set of ornate international caps, each one hand-stitched, dating back to 1871 is also a highlight. “They’re like tiny pieces of art – silver-threaded, velvet, beautiful. You can see history changing through them, from the craftsmanship of the early game to the more practical caps after the Second World War, and the arrival of women’s caps in the modern era. Each tells a social story as much as a sporting one.”
Human connections
But it’s the human connections that move her most. During Scottish Rugby’s 150th anniversary celebrations, Tinch – helped by Murrayfield tour guide David Jordan and his wife Fay – tracked down the descendants of James Michael Blair, a soldier who died in the D-Day landings who represented Scotland during the Second World War years, but was never officially capped. “We found his relatives in Inverness and sent them his cap,” she recalls. “It was incredibly emotional. These are moments when sport becomes family history.”
Folklore
Her work has also uncovered the quirks that make rugby folklore unique – like the tale of fans spiking cockerels with rum-soaked raisins to sneak them into Murrayfield in the 1980s. It’s a moment immortalised in the Scottish rugby museum in a famous photograph of legendary Scotland captain, Finlay Calder bearing down on one of the birds on the pitch.
Laura said: “Everybody’s seen that image, but few know the mad story behind it. It’s those eccentric, very Scottish touches that make the archive so alive.”
Other artefacts include a pair of black boots from 1971 – once work by the late great Scotland captain PC Brown – with branding blacked out in marker pen to prevent the giant forward falling foul of sponsorship rules in the sport’s strictly amateur era.
Bill McLaren
The archive also includes handwritten notes from Bill McLaren, the legendary commentator whose voice became the sound of rugby for generations. “Bill’s story transcends the pitch,” Tinch says. “He was a teacher, a soldier, a pioneer of sports broadcasting – and he connected Scotland to the world. Holding his notes in your hands, written on old school jotters, is spine-tingling.”
An addition to the Bill McLaren story was donated to the museum earlier in the year when the late George Massie’s collection of Bill McLaren ties and score cards were presented to Laura’s safekeeping.
To contribute your story to the Murrayfield Memories archive click here: scottishrugby.org/murrayfieldmemories
