Supporting Hibernian regularly takes a certain level of commitment, the highs and lows of following the club through thick and thin can sometimes make attending games every week feel like a labour of love.
When every match is an away game that commitment is even greater. North East Scotland Hibs organise regular buses to matches at Easter Road and away from home – we caught up with the group’s chairman Douglas Reid to get to know them a little bit better.
How & when did NESH start? Who were the key figures in creating the supporters’ club?
There’s quite a few Hibbies in the North East of Scotland. Many people have moved here from Edinburgh over the years for work but many of our members are from the North East, didn’t want to support Aberdeen or either of the Old Firm and chose Hibs as their team.
People have been travelling independently for years by car, bus and train and – many years ago – there was an Aberdeen Hibs branch who ran a regular bus to games however that branch fell away for various reasons.
It was in late 2017 that Frazer Henderson – a Hibbie from Edinburgh who lived at the time in Aberdeen – proposed getting a branch off the ground again and we held our first meeting to get the club going. We chose the name NESH (North East Scotland Hibs) to reflect the fact that our membership comes from right across the North East and not just from Aberdeen.
We formed a committee and we were off and running. Frazer became our Chairman and I was appointed as the Treasurer. We had great support from some other key members – too many to mention here – who filled the other committee roles. I remember when I presented our first budget to the committee I made the assumption that we would recruit 35 members. There were a few intakes of breath and some responses of “really?” at the proposed number of members but I’ve always been confident that we could get a good number of Hibs fans interested in joining the club.
How many members does NESH currently have?
As of today we have 97 members. What is interesting is where they all come from: as you would expect we have lots of members who live in Aberdeen (or the immediate area) but we also have members in Montrose, Elgin, Nairn, Arbroath, Banff, Laurencekirk, Dundee, Orkney and some folk who have moved back to Edinburgh – including Frazer (who is now our Honorary President) – have remained in membership.
We even have a member who is originally from Peterhead but who now lives in the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean and also a member who now lives in Wales. I also think it’s great that the captain of the Aberdeen Women’s football team – who is a dyed in the wool Hibbie – is a NESH member.
How enjoyable is it to have a group of like-minded Hibs fans in the north east of Scotland to socialise & travel with?
Living in the North East we are surrounded by fans of clubs like Aberdeen, the Dundee teams and, unfortunately the Gruesome Twosome and it can be hard at times to fight the Hibbie corner (verbally not literally), so it’s great to feel part of a group of Hibbies up here. Nothing beats meeting up on a Saturday morning to get the bus down to the game and we get some strange looks from folk when we gather on Union Street in our colours to head down to the game.
It’s also great to be able to meet up with other Hibbies if we can’t make a game. We often meet in our ‘spiritual home’ – The Butchers Arms in Aberdeen – to watch games together.
In recent seasons the Butcher’s Arms has been a welcoming place for travelling Hibs fans ahead of matches at Pittodrie – how did this become your designated meeting place in Aberdeen?
Yes, The Butchers could be called our ‘spiritual home’. We used to meet in another pub in the town centre which was owned at the time by a couple of Hibbies but when they moved on we didn’t feel as welcome. Graeme who owns The Butchers is a mate of one of our members and is a former foot soldier with The Tartan Army. He made it clear that he would welcome us and he hasn’t let us down.
We often watch games in The Butchers and had more than 45 of us there to watch the cup final last season. We hold our Committee Meetings and our Annual General Meeting in the pub and Graeme and his staff look after us well (usually with a complimentary buffet).
Whenever Hibs play Aberdeen at Pittodrie we try to make as many Hibs fans as possible welcome in the pub and we have had literally hundreds of people at times before games. Graeme and his guys pull out all the stops out for these occasions and make sure that they have as a many staff working as needed to ensure everybody gets served as quickly as possible.
The NESH logo and flag has become quite recognisable, when did this come about and what is the reaction like to the flag when it’s displayed at matches?
The flag is a legacy back to the days of the Aberdeen branch. Anyone who has seen it can’t fail to notice the two sheep on the flag which seems fairly appropriate given our connection with Aberdeen and we know it winds up a few locals which makes it even better.
It’s a bit of a monster flag (we often wonder if whoever ordered it got centimetres and inches muddled up) so we are a bit selective about which games we take it to these days. When we get back into Europe it will need its own seat on the plane! We are thinking of getting a slightly smaller, more portable one which we can take to every game.
NESH have been supportive with Hibernian Supporters Ltd in recent years, are there any other fundraising/charity initiatives which the branch support aside from following the club home & away?
Membership of NESH is very reasonable: a £10 joining fee (for which you get a free NESH scarf) and £2 per month after that. We don’t aim to make a lot of money and once we have paid for the bus to games (which we subsidise as we only charge £10-15 return for members to travel to games) there isn’t a lot of money left over.
What money we do have we try to re-invest in Hibs. We have sponsored a player for the past few seasons (currently we sponsor Kevin Nisbet’s away jersey) and have made donations to the Since 1875 guys – when they existed – for displays and to Hibs Women.
The branch was recently invited to meet majority shareholder Ron Gordon before a match at Easter Road – how good was it to be recognised for your efforts as a group and meet the chairman?
We know that there are many Hibbies who travel from all over the UK to support the team so we don’t think there’s anything particularly special about NESH, however we think we are probably the furthest travelling organised (i.e. run a regular bus) branch in the Hibs support.
Shortly after Ron bought Hibs we wrote to him to let him know about our branch and I think he was quite impressed by the commitment of our members to get to games. I think anyone who has met Ron will agree that he is a real ‘people’ person and he said he was keen to get the chance to meet us so we arranged to meet just before the St Johnstone game at Easter Road earlier this season.
As the club Chairman I’m sure he has a lot to do before a game but we were really impressed with the time he took to talk to us and the frankness he spoke with. We were so impressed that we made Ron an honorary NESH member and he is now a proud owner of one of our scarves.
With almost all matches being ‘away from home’ for the branch – how do you keep interest levels and morale high with the ups and downs of supporting Hibs?
You are right about every game being an away day for NESH members (in fact we have NESH mugs which bear that legend). For a 3pm kick-off our bus leaves from Aberdeen around 8:30 in the morning and usually picks up folk along the way in Laurencekirk, Montrose, Arbroath and Dundee. We will also usually stop at Kinross on the way down for a Greggs (or something healthier). As a result, it usually takes around four hours to get to Easter Road and the same to get back home. That’s a big time commitment for our members.
It will come as no surprise that the biggest motivator for people is a successful team. When the team is going well or it’s a big game then it’s a lot easier to fill the bus than for a Wednesday night game against Ross County at Easter Road when we are not playing well.
For example, we filled a 57-seater for the League Cup final against Celtic before Christmas. As well as making sure we keep the bus as cheap as possible to travel on, the main way we try to encourage folk to travel is to make the bus trip a really good day out.
We have a good laugh on the bus, take our tunes very seriously (John is our resident DJ) and generally try to turn the bus into a bit of a party whether we win or lose. Gavin – our Membership Secretary – is legendary for his quizzes. It’s a long way back up the road for us to have silence after a defeat so we try to make sure that we lift everyone and have a good time on the way home.
You can stay up to date with North-East Scotland Hibs by following their social media channels:
The East Stand 