This card started us off with the centre of affection, the heart - and there are five hearts on the top of this card.
How we got to associate the heart with love is rather curious, and it all started with plants, the leaves of many of which were similarly shaped - including the sacred lotus. At that time very little was known of the heart, and indeed the Greek "Father of Medicine", Galen, described it as looking like a pine cone, though he also believed it only had three chambers, the fourth was not discovered until Leonardo da Vinci. However there is a possibility that Galen examined a badly diseased and malformed heart. The strange thing is that the first connection in art between a heart and love is in a mid thirteenth century French manuscript, and the heart shown is a pine cone shape. It was also shown the wrong way up, right until the fifteenth century - and this abrupt turn around seems to have come by accident, when the symbol was chosen to denote a suit of playing cards. However this leads us to the strange realisation that they were, and we may be, using our "heart" cards upside down.
Here we have Matt Lynch, who was born in November 1916. That seems as if he must have been ancient when he appeared on this card but he would only have been thirty-two. He has the most excellent biography at Celtic Wiki /ML so I will divert you there.
We had a bit of a quick change round here, and replaced the card originally shown with another set from the same issuer, for when I went to enter this in the index I found we had used the "Popular Footballers" set before.
The home page for all the Kiddy`s Favourites sets can be found with that card, which was our Card of the Day for the 21st of October, 2023 - so here we will only record the details for this set, which appear in our original British Trade Index part II, RB.27, issued in 1969, as :
POPULAR PLAYERS. Sm. Footballers. Nd. ... KHM-7
1. Five red hearts at top of front (75)
2. Three red shamrocks at top of front (52).
Now in our updated British Trade Index there has been a big change, for our set is now described as :
POPULAR FOOTBALLERS. 55 x 32. Five red hearts across top of front. Nd.as "Series of 75", only 52 issued. Nos. omitted 10/11, 13, 19/20, 25/9, 34/8, 44/6, 50/2, 65, 73. Issued in booklets of 10. KID-160
whilst the cards with the shamrocks have been renamed "POPULAR PLAYERS. 1950. Nd. Three red shamrocks at top of front. 66-67 x 41 (52). ... KID-190"
Our man does not seem to appear in the Trading Card Database, but he is card 42 in the shamrock version.
The text on that back is slightly different to our card as well, and it reads "After 12 years at Parkhead Lynch was granted a free transfer at the end of last season but did not take long to get fixed up again. A good type, Lynch has been studying at University and has excellent coaching experience which will go a long way in helping the youngsters." Now our card tells us that he "Has been with Celtic since 1935 and is now doing grand work in coaching the youngsters". This seems to suggest that the shamrock cards came first, because Parkhead is the Celtic Ground, so after he had been there for twelve years it would have been 1947 - and our card, issued in 1948.