Charles Bannerman

Given that the term "Thistle" appears to be reserved exclusively for a less successful club from Maryhill, they do seem to have narrowed their options on that one.

I'm really glad I'm not doing a broadcast report on this one! Look at the Dundee 16, 22 or even 26! Having these three guys on the team sheet is in no way compensated for by a very straightforward "Nick Ros"s. And to think I used to worry that the boy Bolochowecki might come off the bench when he was at County. Commentators' nightmares all of them! (Not Nick!)

I know! You could write a book about all this.

Well Inverness Union, along with Crown, is where the Jags originated from! But it could have been worse. Yes Highland could have had their HQ in something like Union Street.... hang on a minute....

I still think ICT has it by a short head if you go on syllables. ICT - 10. LTHV - 9.

When I saw that photo I thought "Bloody hell! IBM is going to LOVE this!!"

Was there not another barber's in Grieg St, nearer the river? Might that have been Scotty's??

Interesting article but I would dispute the suggestion that Inverness was spared bombing during WW2 because it was "so far North". Inverness would have been reachable from German bases in Norway but the Luftwaffe didn't visit simply because it didn't house anything of sufficient industrial or strategic significance. Further North than Inverness, Invergordon was attacked because it was a naval base. They tried to get the naval fuel tanks beside where Invergordon Academy now is and hit one... number 13! Scapa Flow in Orkney was an even more important naval base and it was attacked quite often, although never very successfully by air. Fighter cover for Scapa was based at Wick aerodrome so Wick was also attacked. They had difficulty finding the aerodrome but on a couple of occasions in 1940 the town itself was bombed and there were several fatal casualties, including children.

They would have needed subtitles every time Diggar opened his mouth! And that was frequently!! But yes indeed... pure entertainment - theatre even.

It may indeed have been started in the 70s and it has grown in scale ever since.

Well not quite. Caley had 5 goals chalked off, including the one he illegally scored, for The Legend not being a registered player in the final derby at Telford Street, so that makes it 4-3 Jags across the four games.

Pardon me if I nitpick benevolently and only slightly about this and Kingsmills' post which has just gone up. The original name was indeed Caledonian Thistle, first publicly mooted in December 1993 and agreed soon after as the only politically acceptable solution to one of several problems which threatened to sink the m****r deal, and with it SFL football for Inverness. The "Inverness" was added in the summer of 1996, not as a quid pro quo for the £900,000 Common Good Fund grant but for the earlier Highland Regional Council agreement of 1994 to grant a 99 year lease of the current stadium site. That agreement had included a "best endeavours" clause about the name - in effect once any addition at all became politically possible, which happened to be in 1996. The £900,000 CGF grant wasn't actually given by the District Council but by the new Highland Council as one of its earlier acts after it was formed in 1996. There had been a very belated IDC agreement late in 1995 to award that money from their own funds, but opponents within the council fought a temporarily successful wrecking campaign on this, based on QC's opinion of what the word "payable" meant in an IDC motion to pay the money put down by David Stewart. This delayed payment past IDC going defunct on the formation of HC which, in the face of earlier threats of possible legal action, very quickly - and indeed willingly - agreed to pay this from the CGF, control over which also transferred to them in April 1996. As for what this money was for, let's start with HRC's planning committee's requirement that the club also paid for an access road for the stadium. This resulted in a severe curtailment of the stadium itself and road + stadium being classified as a single entity - the "stadium project", with a budget of £5.4M, and defined as such by then Chairman Dougie McGilvray. Hence, when the £900,000 application came along it was in practice for the global project, but was presented as being specifically for the road to make the request politically more acceptable. But one way or another the road from roundabout to stadium, which was put there at ICT's expense to allow access to the stadium and which was then "adopted" by the Council, has indeed been of massive economic benefit to the area by way of it being linked by an extension to the Harbour which opened up the entire seafront. Councillor Clive Goodman was, I think as Chairman of the Harbour Trust, the first publicly to moot this extension and illustrate its potential benefits, and that was certainly one "Eureka moment" during what was a very tortured process.

Memories!!!! And a classic shot too with a man in the chair and Diggar nowhere to be seen! He would either be in the back shop or sorting someone's coupon or out on the street shouting amiable abuse at someone - often not of either of his own two "blue" persuasion. The "D and D" is, I think, Diggar and Dennis, after Diggar took "young" Dennis into the business, maybe mid-late 60s. However Dennis didn't fancy it and I think went and drove buses instead before returning. Note the advert for the next Caley game in the window.

That'll be the "new" Fire Station, but how soon after it moved from Castle Wynd to Harbour Road would need someone better than I am with cars.

It was opened as such before becoming the Empire Theatre and the "pictures" went to the Playhouse and the La Scala.

You are dead right! Apologies....31 years on my memory fails me since it was indeed the other way round. It was Jags who took the early lead and a Caley wag - hence obviously not Dave Williamson! - who came away with the one liner in question. However I think my memory is intact enough to be able to help you in your request for a Caley victory in that era. I think it was April 1986 in a midweek game at Telford Street and it was Caley 7 Jags 0. I had the misfortune of having to interview Jock McDonald about Jock having been shafted by Wallace Mercer in an attempt to get into the Scottish League... just AFTER that game On the other hand, two and a half years later at the same venue it was Caley 0 Jags 3 in a qualifying cup final replay.

"The Mast" at the top of Craig Dunain. I believe the first parts of it went into place in the early 80s. The car looks perhaps 50s-ish (IBM?) so when thew photo was taken, Willie Logan's plane possibly hadn't by then crashed into the Craig. On the other hand IHE may mean spires on the Cathedral which I believe were left off for cost reasons. Note the air raid siren on the left hand tower. I rthink these were left in place post-war in case there was a danger of us getting nuked.

David Balfe managed OK in 1996. Many didn't like it but I thought it was OK. Regarding the name, on one side the forum is getting requests not to mention the m-word. Then on the other there are questions like this which, although understandable, do require the wheel to be reinvented and the m-word to be revisited in order to answer them.

I'm sure you would, but you can always hope that your reading age may, one day, progress to higher things.

I was at that game come to think of it! I think Caley must have got an early opener since I remember one waggish Jaggie (it might have been Dave Williamson) cracking up the whole stand with a shout of "Come on Jags - Caley are playing for time!" One observation I'd have to make is that for an Inverness Derby cup final at an Inverness venue over 30 years ago between two teams both in quite successful periods of their history, the crowd does look a bit sparse. That's an observation which might challenge claims about crowd size in "the old days" although I do appreciate that far more attended for instance in the immediate post-war years. Also, if that's all the joint crowd that could be assembled even for a big occasion as described..... then where did all these post-1994 "refuseniks" we keep getting told about actually come from?

Bang on Fraz! But what the original poster needs to remember is that Caley Thistle is the latest stage in the evolution of organised football in Inverness which goes right back to the 1880s and possibly before. The OP was as yet unborn even when Thistle and Caley played out their latter games in the 1990s but he has to appreciate that for over a century these clubs were at the centre of the continuous thread which very many people still regard as highly important although there will be some who are not of an age to be able to do so. Thistle and Caley winning the Qualifying Cup or beating Kilmarnock or Clyde in the Scottish Cup is part of exactly the same historical thread as Caley Thistle winning the Scottish Cup. This awareness of Thistle and Caley will not survive forever and in perhaps 60 years there will be no one left who still remembers them. Active memory of them will by then have literally died out, just as there is no one left now who remembers Crown and Union which were partners in the process which formed Thistle in the 19th century. In the early 20th century it would have been just as valid for their former fans to have marked their past as that is for Thistle's and Caley's now. OCG is bang on the money with what she says too, while Sneckboy makes a fundamental point which begs the question of Deano - in the event of the formation of a Highland United would you want to ignore the act that ICT and its already proud history ever existed?

That would appear to be a bit on the sensible, fan friendly side for the SFA but you never know. And I wonder how favourable the Police would be to such a harmless arrangement for the fans of two non OF clubs? Or will the claimed existence of organised hooligan elements within 35 of the 42 SPFL supports emerge as an excuse?

You mean all these people on the High Street at election time with the "black hangman's noose on a yellow background" badges? Come to think of it, that's going to be fun when campaigning gets started for May. Bring on the Natbaiting season!

I think people are indeed waking up to the reality that the slashing of Council services is happening because the SNP will neither give Councils enough money to pay for decent ones, nor allow them to raise enough for themselves. In the first instance they would prefer to put the cash elsewhere such as crowd pleasing free prescriptions and free passage over an ever more decrepit Forth Bridge. In the second instance we have a Council Tax freeze where they are relying on enough people not to twig the cause and effect link between SNP policy and the state of their services.These are therefore SNP-imposed service cuts which the SNP have cynically engineered in an attempt to create yet more grievance. As for the Breferendum, I once again curled my toes right through my socks at the Leader of the 53.5 in the Commons today. Here was our National Parliament debating an issue which could have implications for the UK and for an entire continent and here's Angus Robertson still not even sure where the kailyard fence is and banging on about Scotland. Give any of these SNP people a full tractor and trailer, with an order for a London address and they would roll up Oxford Street and ask the first person they saw "Where do you want your tatties then?" They really are such an embarrassment that they make you ashamed to be Scottish. Indeed I just wonder how many of these 53.5 muppets actually know where Europe is? The threat of a second Scottish referendum is an interesting one and I wonder what the SNP really think. I'm sure the likes of the Gelluns wing of the party and "Branch 1314 Willie Bell Memorial" are just desperate for one. On the other hand there will be others who will positively be bricking their tartan knickers at the thought of this in the continuing absence of overwhelmingly positive polling, since if they lose again they are dead in the water for the foreseeable future. But, come any second referendum, there would have been not one but TWO of their so-called "fundamental changes" namely 1 - the oil panacea which they've been banging on about since the mid 70s is now worth damn all, is fast running out and is in some respects a liability. and 2 - they would now be asking for a Yes vote in order to create this wee half-arsed EU exclave welded on to a substantial non-EU state with 11 times the population, a massively larger GDP, a different currency, passport controls, no obligation to pay benefits or provide health services to Scottish foreigners and a Darienesque competitive spirit in the face of an economic basket case of a neighbour whose ruling party has been the source of decades of hostility and Anglophobia.