DUBLINTIMEMACHINE: On this day in 1887, Celtic football and athletic club was formerly constituted by Sligo native Brother Walfrid during a meeting in St. Mary’s Church Hall in Calton, Glasgow. Although the year 1888, featured on the crest, is more associated with the club founding the true seed was planted that November night in 1887. 

It wasn’t just the sporting needs of the community that motivated Walfrid. Born in 1840, he`d emigrated to work on the railways in Scotland as a teenager before taking holy orders to serve within the city of Glasgow. He always dreamed of catering to the large and highly impoverished Irish emigrant community there. 

Poverty, hunger, and unemployment plagued all the immigrant Irish of Glasgow. It was the shocking infant mortality rates in particular that drove Brother Walfrid to find some means of fundraising to alleviate the suffering of children, as well as lift the spirits of the downtrodden neighnbourhoods. He took inspiration from the sporting success of Canon Edward Joseph Hannan, who founded Edinburgh Hibernian in 1875. 

After Walfrid was reassigned by the Vatican to the East End of London in 1893, he continued to champion the lives of the poor via the medium of football. He established a charity called The Poor Children's Dinner Table.  He passed away aged 74. As well as a large statue in Celtic Park, Brother Walfrid is also commemorated by a monument in his hometown of Ballymote

Celtic and Brother Walfrid