THIS week sees the centenary of the birth of Jock Stein, one of the greatest football managers in the history of the beautiful game and still the only man to manage a Scottish side to victory in the European Cup.
I will leave it to the pundits and the fans to assess his legacy and decide on exactly his place in football’s pantheon. My task today as a history writer is to give a straightforward factual account of his early life and career in order to put Stein’s greatest achievement into context.
John Stein was born on Thursday, October 5, 1922, in Burnbank, Hamilton, in what is now South Lanarkshire. Burnbank had previously been a mining village before it was absorbed into Hamilton by an Act of Parliament in the 1870s, and it was still dependent on coal mining by the time Stein was born as the son of a miner, George Stein, and his wife Jane McKay Armstrong. He was their only son and Stein had three sisters, one of whom died young.
