Exclusive:Inside the infamous Hibs meeting where Hearts owner Wallace Mercer launched takeover - and sparked revolution
‘I asked what the new team would be called the next season ... and they said Heart of Midlothian’ - Duff credits Hands Off Hibs for killing one-sided ‘merger’
It was the meeting that sparked a revolution, giving birth to a fan movement responsible for saving Hibs from a fate worse than extinction. And it included an Agatha Christie-style reveal so shocking that, even 35 years on, one of those present still sounds struck by utter disbelief in retelling the tale.
Former Hibs chairman David Duff is, of course, only offering up his side of a story that contains as many heroes as villains. He’ll know better than to expect a permanent switch, in the eyes of supporters, from one side of that divide to the other. His later conviction for mortgage fraud, meanwhile, obviously undermines his credibility as a witness.
Hands Off Hibs campaigners were real heroes
During a lengthy conversation to promote his new book, Sunset on Hibs, The Plot to Destroy Hibernian, Duff also makes it clear that he considers the fans who fought so hard for their club – and especially Hands Off Hibs guiding light Kenny McLean – as those deserving of most credit. There is no attempt to duck his own part in leaving Hibs vulnerable to the most hostile of takeovers.
Yet, in a book that seems to involve a fair bit of score settling, with its claims about Sir Tom Farmer probably explaining why publication was delayed until after the former club owner’s passing, Duff does reveal some of the details behind David Rowland – a controversial figure in finance and politics to this day - springing Wallace Mercer on him at a London meeting that would change everything. Invited south to meet a purported ‘saviour’ who would help Hibs quash the threat of insolvency, Duff felt he’d been set up and ambushed by Rowland.
“Make no mistake that the drama was created by Rowland,” he said, adding: “When I went up there into his office, Wallace wasn't there. He could have been sitting there. There was to be a grand entrance and this was Rowland's way.
“We all have periods in our life where our eyes look out and see things, but we don't really believe what we see because it doesn't compute or make sense. And it was one of those moments where I'm waiting to see, who am I going to see?
Could it be Robert Maxwell or David Murray riding to rescue?
“Am I going to see Robert Maxwell? Am I going to see, you know … they tell me it's somebody I'm not going to like.
“There weren’t many people in football I didn't like, you know, so who? Is it going to be David Murray or something? Not that I didn't like him, but, you know, was it going to be the Rangers chairman?
“But if I put 100 names down, Wallace's name would not have appeared on that page. If I put 500 names down, it just wouldn't - because that was so far out there. So there was that moment of, this doesn't actually compute.
“They're telling me that we're selling Hibs to someone and the Hearts chairman walks into the room. What on earth is that about?
“So you go into a sort of shock. You go: ‘I don't believe it; I can't believe it.’
“Then you want someone to explain why. So I'm, you know, I'm turning to them and saying: ‘What's going on? I don't understand this. Can you explain it to me?’ And then they did.”
Retelling the story decades on, Duff credits himself with an instinctive desire to get the hell out of Dodge and start the fightback. After what can only have been an incredibly awkward dinner with the men trying to sell this ‘merger’ as the answer to everyone’s prayers.
He said: “I needed to get out of this room quick, back to my people. So yeah, I was saying this sounds very interesting, Edinburgh United, that’s a fabulous idea …
“And then get across the road and say to my people: ‘We need to get home as quickly as possible. This is war.’
The name of new ‘united’ Edinburgh club? Heart of Midlothian ...
“But then we had to go through the awful time of sitting with them and having something to eat when all I wanted to do was get up to Edinburgh and get, you know, and get in the trenches. It was a long time ago, but we were all round a round table.
“I wasn't next to Wallace. And do you know what? I think, I don't think Wallace stayed for the whole meal. It's a long, long time ago, but basically they were explaining what a great idea it was.
“If I would meet them in the morning, come along to this press conference and do it as a united front. I asked my questions and it was very, very clear.
“One of the questions I asked at that dinner, which is in the book, is, you know, what will be the name of the team next season? And it wasn't Edinburgh. It was Heart of Midlothian.”
Duff didn’t show at the press conference the following morning. He didn’t sell his stake. And the fans did the rest, putting enormous pressure on the Bank of Scotland not to shift on their insistence that Mercer needed 75 per cent of the plc shares to make the takeover happen.
“There was never a moment even then when we weren't at war, although I did sort of kid on that we'd be there in the morning,” said Duff. “Because I wanted Wallace to walk into that room the next morning thinking I'd be there and finding I wasn't there. That's how I wanted to introduce the idea that this wasn’t happening. Ever.
“They were presenting this as a fait accompli, as an agreed deal, and I wasn't going to be there. That was a statement.
“There was an intention to have one Edinburgh team. I think there was to be a Heart of Midlothian, maybe you'd put an incorporation of Edinburgh, but I don't know. That wasn't my dream anyway.
“Whether you called it Edinburgh United or not, I know that there was never an intention to have equality between two Edinburgh sides coming together. There was never that intention.”
Stock Exchange flotation left Hibs vulnerable to takeover
The whole story leading up to Mercer’s bid is littered with unlikely alliances and ludicrous financial arrangements involving strings of pubs down south in an era when money men were encouraged to gamble with everyone else’s cash. Hibs being floated on the Stock Exchange was just one particularly unfortunate decision.
“I’ve got to own the mistakes, of course I do, and I do own the mistakes,” said Duff of the move to make Hibs shares available to anyone and everyone. “And this was all pretty new territory, there'd only been one public football club gone public, and that was Tottenham Hotspur, far bigger, and maybe more of the shape of something that could happen.
“When you become a public company, you are subject to potential takeover. But you don't expect that to be, in football, your rival club. And I think the problem was that the institutional shareholders were backing Rowland, and they would go with Rowland. So that made them very powerful.
“So when he decided to take this in a direction that I wouldn't have done, then we were susceptible to it. But any public company is susceptible to a bid. My mistake was choosing the wrong partner, and I genuinely hold my hands up to that.
“I mean, he was a disaster. I mean, he wasn't at the beginning, but we had a lot of bad luck with Black Friday and not getting the thing into position to float it when the economy was strong. And I think I probably agree now that public companies are not necessarily the ways of a football club.
“At the moment we have an outside investor who has an interest in another football club, and that's OK, that's fine, because we have to get our investment where we did. So, you know, it was very early days. But if the question is: ‘Did I put Hibs in a position where they could have been taken over?’ The answer is yes, I definitely did.
“And I made some terrible mistakes. No doubt about that.”
Duff has only been back to Easter Road twice – on both occasions for funerals – since retreating from a fight that ended with a victory belonging to others, most significantly the fans themselves. Even if his refusal to sell did, in the end, prove decisive.
“There's something about being part of the tribe, that even if you're extradited out of the mainstream of the tribe, it's still your tribe,” he said, explaining his abiding affection for the club before adding: “There's never been a moment when I regret not selling my shares. Not a microsecond in time.
“Although my life would have been much, much better if I had done that. There's nothing in me that looks back and says: ‘I wish I should have done that or I wish I'd done that.’
“The pain and the consequences of what I and others went through is partly my fault and partly circumstances. But whatever it is, it's something I would do again tomorrow.”
Sunset on Hibs, The Plot to Destroy Hibernian, is published by Birlinn tomorrow.