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Likewise, True Blue claimed the club was named Rangers as rudimentary rhyming slang after the fact so many of its earliest players were strangers to Glasgow.
  Neither tale rings as true as Allan’s account in his book that ‘Moses McNeil proposed that it should be called the Rangers Association Football Club and to the young minds the name had an alluring appeal. It was adopted unanimously. Mr McNeil has related that he had been reading C.W. Alcock’s English Football Annual and had been attracted by the name he had seen belonging to an English rugby club.’12 McNeil’s claims, made through Allan and again in the pages of the Daily Record in 1935, hold water. Alcock’s annuals were elementary guides to the newly formed clubs across Britain and their preference for the various codes of football, including association and rugby. They were first published in 1868 and are so rare that even the British Library does not boast any copies dating from before 1873. The RFU Museum at Twickenham does, however, and their issues make for fascinating reading.
  Before 1870 no rugby team in England featured the Rangers name, although other wonderful handles included the Mohicans, Owls, Pirates and Red Rovers. However, in the 1870 edition of Alcock’s annuals a team called Rangers does appear, based in Swindon, with a kit that included white trousers, white jersey with a blue star on the breast, and a white cap. The Rangers football team that lost the Scottish Cup to Vale of Leven after three games in 1877 were pictured in the photographer’s studio shortly afterwards in a very similar kit, including the blue star on the breast of their shirts, but it can be no more than a coincidence as the blue star arguably owed more to their connection with Clyde Rowing Club, who used it then (and still do now) as their club emblem.
  In Alcock’s 1871 edition Rangers are again mentioned, still at Gorse Hill in Swindon, but with the additional information that they had been formed in 1868 and played a form of rugby known as Marlborough. If it is accepted that Rangers were formed in the spring of 1872, as the weight of evidence suggests, and Moses McNeil named the club immediately, then the Swindon rugby team are the club from whom the Glasgow side took its name. Still, as always, there is scope for debate, because by the publication of the next edition, in the autumn of 1872, the Swindon club had disappeared and another club named Rangers (formed in 1870, but making its first appearance in Alcock’s annual) had taken its place. This second club played rugby union and were based on Clapham Common in London. They were listed next to a club named Old Paulines – from Battersea Park to the south of the Thames, not Walford in the east. Another rugby union rival, from Stamford Hill near Stoke Newington, was named Red, White and Blue. Now, would that not have been a name for Moses to have contemplated?

    The Alcock Annual of 1870: the Rangers name appears for the first time, belonging to a club in Swindon (not specified as a rugby team until the 1871 edition) and with a design of kit similar to the one in which their Glasgow namesakes were pictured in the aftermath of their Scottish Cup Final appearance in 1877.
    The year of formation and the origins of the club name may still inspire debate almost 140 years later, but what cannot be doubted is the royal connection Rangers were able to boast in its very infancy, as a membership card from season 1874–75 announced the patron of the club as the Most Noble, the Marquis of Lorne, who would go on to become the 9th Duke of Argyll. Unfortunately, the reasons behind his formal relationship with Rangers have been lost in the mists of time as the minutes of the club from that era no longer exist, while the archives from the Duke’s ancestral seat at Inverary Castle sadly, for the most part, are closed to the general public and have yet to undergo indexing.
  However, it is clear that the new