The official opening of the redevelopment of the Club’s facilities marks an important milestone in the Club’s history. It was both an opportunity and an incentive to complete a story, albeit an abbreviated and, in some respects, an unsatisfactory one.

The Club’s archival material is extensive. It reveals many issues which a proper history would wish to pursue. Time has not been available to do that, so this history is brief.

I hope that I will find the time - and the will! - to be more rigorous, hopefully in time for the 2006 centenary of the introduction of rugby to ‘the Cartha Club’ as it has been known over the years.

If I don’t achieve that, then I can be content that someone following in my footsteps will have something on which to build. It would have made my own task substantially easier and, almost certainly, more complete if the history compiled in 1952 had been available. Who knows, perhaps one day a copy will turn up at a jumble sale, as one of the 1905 publications did a few years ago.

Although this history is produced on behalf of Cartha Queen’s Park rugby club, it is certainly not a history of that club. It is the story of Cartha Athletic Club, of which rugby was a section for some seventy years.

Indeed, the minutes record that the question was raised many years ago of whether the rugby club should be allowed to refer to itself as Cartha Rugby Club; the Scottish Rugby Union confirmed that it was officially known as Cartha Football Club.

As CQP is now a rugby club, some purists may find the greater picture less than satisfactory, but limiting the narrative to the rugby story would have been less than fruitful – as a careful reading of what follows will reveal.

I had hoped to include as an appendix a list of those members of Cartha Athletic Club who achieved international honours in all sports while with the Club – there were many of them. I believe this would have given a useful taste of the level of activity of Cartha in its heyday, which extended over several decades. However, without substantial further work this has not been possible.

Finally, I have acknowledged the source of information in the few instances where it has been provided from outwith the Club’s minutes.

I wish to add a general acknowledgement of the enthusiastic assistance of Fiona White of the SRU library and museum at Murrayfield, as well as John Davidson, the SRU’s honorary historian.

Alan R Irons
19 September 2001