Please note that this web-site after six months' work concentrated on construction is more or less complete and we are at the checking and editing stage. So for the next wee while as we go through it there will be typos, words missing and bits of unintended gobbledygook so use with the understanding that everything here has been and will be produced voluntarily and in our own, spare time but if you spot something that needs rectifying, let us know. Remember this project is to correct history. We want to hear from youse.
The Scots Football Historians' Group
This site is dedicated to the exploration of Scottish football, that is the modern game largely created within our Scotland, and Scots football, taken to the World in passion, minds and feet by our forebears, fellow countrymen, largely amateurs in the true sense, who in so doing created the beautiful, global game. Our aim is to uncover and relate the real stories of and backgrounds to this passion for the World' game and to preserve the legacies no matter what and where they are globally. We research. We spotlight. We advocate. We mark. We preserve. We restore, all voluntarily, so before scrolling fully down.
Please read the appeals below, one, Joe Taylor, completed and one, John Harley, ongoing, and the commentaries on what has and is being done and still needs to be, to understand what we face and do.
The Joseph Taylor Grave
Restoration work on the grave of Joseph Taylor has been completed. And it and a new, marble plaque were unveiled on 13th April by two of his great-grandsons, Colin and Alex Taylor, in a ceremony at Glasgow's Cathcart Cemetery, also attended by SFHG members. The Daily Record was there too and the following day it published the excellent "Memory of Scottish football legend protected after revamp of historic grave".
Other Notable Research and Restoration So Far by Others with SFHG Input
With more to be done.....
SFHG Project Schedule
The dilapidation of the graves of Scotland's international footballers is an on-going problem. In part it is neglect but mostly simply climate and weathering. The only ones to avoid the effects is the small number that are unmarked and deserve recognition. So the SFHG group, mainly through the unstinting efforts of founder member, Martin Donnelly, having already created the most comprehensive listing of the last resting-places of those who represented us on the football-field from 1872 until the Second World War, a list that will be constantly up-dated until complete, has also turned its attention to the dozen most urgently in need of the same. Each will require up to £5,000 to carry out the necessary works and we invite you to contribute. It can be done through the Honesty Box below. |And the graves are:
David Wotherspoon, Southern Necropolis, Glasgow, and Billy MacKinnon, Westburn, Cambuslang
- both graves unmarked
Robert McCormick
- West Kilbride, Ayrshire, condition of grave declared to be dangerous.
Willie Imrie
- Methilmill, Fife, gravestone unstable
Archie Devine
- Lochgelly, Fife, gravestone crumbling
Andrew Richmond, Craigton, Glasgow and John Gow, Cathcart, Glasgow
- both gravestones facedown and therefore unreadable.
Eddie McBain, Hawkhead, Paisley and John Goudie, Hawkhead, Paisley
- gravestones laid flat since last visit.
Willie Berry, Western Necropolis, Glasgow, Bobby Templeton, Kaimshill, Kilmarnock and Tom Jackson, Eastwood Old, Glasgow
- gravestone/cenotaphs in two pieces.
Then there are the:
The Belfast City Cemetery Tour
Recently, SFHG member Alistair Firth, along with local historian Peter McCabe, conducted the inaugural tour of graves of prominent footballers in Belfast City Cemetery. There are many footballers of importance buried within the huge Victorian cemetery – ranging from Scottish internationals (including Robert Parlane), Scottish-born Irish internationals (including Bob Morrison), Irish internationals (including their first goal scorer and those who played in the first British Championship against Scotland in 1884) and Scottish players who influenced the local game (Marshall McEwan).
A number of people who attended were very knowledgeable about the history of the game and there was a lot of interesting debate during the tour. It is hoped that the feedback will stimulate further interest in future tours and that another one will be written for Dundonald Cemetery later in the year. It is also hoped that we can get interest in the tour as an event for the delegates at FootyCon25 which takes place in June2025 at Windsor Park. Any monies raised will be used to fund future grave restoration and maintenance. For more information contact Ali Firth.
And:
Plus:
1824
And even more recently the inestimable Andy Mitchell, source of the blog, Scottish Sport History and author of perhaps the most valuable of modern Scottish football reference books, "The Men Who Made Scotland", gave a talk at the National Archive. It was a synopsis of his publication "1824", written with John Hutchinson, which traces the origins that year, the life and legacy of The Football Club in Edinburgh, making it the city's, Scotland's and therefore the World's first foot-ball club, and also of its founder, John Hope. It's a fascinating read, available on Amazon and should be a stocking-filler for any thinking football fan anywhere.
John Harley
and
There is a small part of Scotland that is forever Uruguay. It is in Cathcart, a few stones throws from our national football stadium, Hampden Park, and is the birthplace of one of the most important figures in international football. In South America he is known as "El Yoni". Here it was simply John or Johnny Harley. But it was under his influence that his adopted country developed its style of play, one that in the 1920s took it to successive Olympic Gold Medals and in 1930 victory the first World Cup. His contribution to the World game deserves our recognition hence:
Lady Florence Dixie
In 1895, as Lord Kinnaird, President of the FA, and William McGregor, founder of the Football League, Perthshire-men both, controlled English football so Dumfries-shire's Florence Dixie nee Douglas became first President of the again English-based British Ladies FC, the World's first women's football club. As such she added to her already pioneering work as traveller, female war-correspondent and writer the health and well-being of women through sport, see The Ladies' Game and Roddy Forsyth's article, Lady Florence Dixie. At her married home in England she is honoured with a plaque. At her birthplace here in Scotland there is as yet nothing to recognise her and her role in the beautiful game. With your help that can be rectified. See Donations and specify LFD.
The Chilean Founders
Four Scots families took football to Chile, the Scotts, the Gemmills, the Reids and the Ewings to Valparaiso to found the Chilean Football Association in 1895, a second generation of Ewings and the Ramsays a decade later to lay the base for the game in Santiago. Each year the Ramsays' are honoured for what they achieved with pictures of the celebration supplied by Our Man in Chile, Sebastian Nunez Mardones, Yet neither they nor any of their compatriot contemporaries are lauded in their home-land, although their origins are known. Nor are they alone with the question, why not?
with FINALLY, if you find this site interesting and use any of its content, please remember that both research, plaques and particularly preservation and restoration do not come free,. So, if you can make a contribution generally via founder member, Alistair Firth, to SFHG funds rather than a specific appeal, one commensurate with the value you have extracted from our work so far, then do not be shy.
Alistair is pictured above on the left, holding the flag with Joe Taylor's great grandson, Colin Taylor, on the right. Account details are to be found here by clicking on:
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So to the history,
On 30th November 2022 the Scots Football Historians' Group became "live" and development began. The date was deliberately chosen, for two reasons, both symbolic. The first is that it is St. Andrews Day, with Burns Night one of two that are uniquely both Scottish at home and Scots elsewhere. The second is that, as the twenty-second World Cup with its sixty-four international encounters is taking place three and half thousand miles away, precisely one hundred and fifty years ago the first such meeting of footballing nations took place and in Scotland, in Glasgow at the still existing Hamilton Crescent cricket ground. Indeed, although it was a 0-0 draw, the first of many since, it can easily be argued that without that specific game none of what is taking place over a month in the Middle East would be happening at all. Whilst the birthplace of Association Football, forever England, could even then have raised a representative team in a moment, without opposition the game might have withered on a still very slender vine. That it survived is very largely due to a group of eleven young men, amateurs all, a Glasgow-suburbs club team in essence, who were ploughing a very lone furrow North of the Border, which took on the challenge from the South, were expected to be dubbed, with tactical nous acquitted themselves remarkably and instead sparked an explosion in enthusiasm that continues to this day worldwide. Those eleven young men were,
William Ker and Joseph Taylor,
James Thomson and James Smith,
Robert Smith, Robert Leckie, Alex Rhind, Billy Mackinnon, Jerry Weir and David Wotherspoon
and with them the story of the SFHG begins. Over the last few years through the worldwide research of a small number of thorough football historians in Scotland and elsewhere a deeper understanding and therefore an alternative interpretation of the history of the "Beautiful Game", of Soccer has emerged. There is no doubt that Association Football was an English invention, an amalgam of several traditions and codes from various parts of that country. But it was in large measure not the versions, albeit to the same rules, that became firstly that of the working-man and was within two generations taken round much of the World and within little more than a third to the entire globe. That was the then very much pre-eminent "Scottish Game", the seeds of which were actually sown on that day at the very end of November 1872.
We know, through research old and modern, where all of the "Class of 72" were born. They came from a number of corners of our country. We know where all but one of them rest, five in home soil from Cambuslang to Inverness, five like so many of our fellow countrymen in foreign fields, England, the United States, Australia and South Africa. But each one deserves to be properly recognised and physically honoured as a group and individually and that at least in spirit that is what we did last evening. In these modern times where communication is more often than not virtual we all sat down together for the first time and had a dinner to mark the importance of the event of precisely a century and half ago, all those in football that have followed on since and what might be described as our formal foundation. And we did it in the presence of special guests, Colin and Alex Taylor, the great-great grandsons of Joseph Taylor, on the right of the unprecedented full-back pairing in that first Scotland team and later President of the club team that formed it, not the first but arguably the footballing World's most important club team, Queen's Park.
So what now? The object of the SFHG is three-fold:
- - to continue, aid and enlarge the research done by us and serious others on the Scots contribution home and abroad to the World game and post it here on-line, a site which, as our own time allows, we are constantly building.
- - to honour on-line and in the media with biographies and articles by us and significant others and wherever possible physically, at home and abroad with plaques and restorations, those many Scots who have made important contributions at all levels to that same World game.
- - in Scotland itself to encourage the exploration by all those with interest of Scotland's remarkable, indeed pivotal, global contribution to that same World game.
To do this final one we begin with the creation of a series of virtual, footballing trails, The History Trails, and, within some, community Rambles, Strolls and Drive-Throughs, that can be followed on foot or by car just as we have done. See below.
And finally we hope that our work will catch the attention, as it has already again both at home and abroad, of still more descendants of those same contributors, and encourage them to come forward to accept proudly the accolades due to their forebears.
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And from the past to the present and the future:
People
Just under six hundred Scots have until the Second World War, the football history, in which we are most interested, played for the national team. These were days when international games took place annually but in nothing like modern numbers. Today Kenny Dalglish holds the record for appearances with 102,. But then it was Alan Morton with thirty-one and he had an international career that lasted twelve seasons; just one of the stories that we consider still worth telling. For others, click HERE.
Places
It can never be said that Scots football, that is the game in Scotland, the Scottish game, and the sport as carried by Scots round the globe in head and feet, was a slow burner. It exploded both here and there. Within half a decade of 1872 and one club at home teams were numbered in hundreds and within another five years Scotsmen were playing and, importantly, organising football from Wales to Canada in one direction and China in the other. It was a contagion and stories of its spread are HERE.
Matches
The story of Scots and football, indeed of Scots and soccer more generally, is littered with games literally of pivotal consequence. The Glasgow international of 1872 was just the first. But there would be many others, several of those of the first World Cups to 1950 and in between many more, in Britain and Europe but notably also in Africa and the Americas, both South and North. As we and football historians around the World uncover more and more detail accounts are added to and can be found HERE.
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Where they are
From the World's first official football international played in Glasgow in 1872 and the beginning of the Second World War almost six hundred Scots-born players turned out for the national team plus a number who were born elsewhere. Most lived out their lives on and are buried in Scottish soil and one of our aims here at the SGHG has been to trace and track them and their last resting places so that the contributions of as many as possible to our national game can continue to be recognised, honoured, marked, maintained and, perhaps, become places of quiet pilgrimage. To that end we begin with the seven cemeteries/crematoriums, where more are buried or were cremated than any others. They are:
Vale of Leven, Alexandria, Dunbartonshire
Cathcart and Linn, South Glasgow
Craigton Cemetery, Renfrewshire
But, of course, as has been the way of Scots from all walks of life movement abroad has been frequent and in many cases permanent so trace and track is not confined to our immediate frontiers. Indeed, three English locations stand out as the final resting place, the burial or cremation, of a remarkably large number of our own. Those places are:
Liverpool and Greater Merseyside
To see who is to be found where simply click on the individual resting-place and then, for their personal stories, on the names listed.
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History Trails
And across Scotland and, indeed, the World the origins and influences of Scots and their football at home and abroad are to be found everywhere. And sometimes they are in concentrations that can be linked to form a series of trails that will lead you both though histories and places that are unique to our and the World game, to us, ours, you and yours.
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(Kinross & West Fife, The Fife Coalfields, North Fife, The Fife Coast)
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The Gareloch to Cardross Trail
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(From Eaglesham to Hampden,
Kilbarchan via Paisley to the Clyde
and the Glasgow Southern Suburbs in-between)
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The Greenock (& Gourock) Trail
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(Galston, Newmilns and Darvel)
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(Bellshill, Motherwell, Wishaw, Newmains, Cleland, Carfin & Holytown)
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The Diaspora
The Anfield Trail
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Other Recommended Sources
Scottish Sport History
If there is one there is one web-site that has been an inspiration for what the SFHG is trying to provide, comprehensive research into fitba', our football, at home at abroad, it is Andy Mitchell's Scottish Sport History. Since 2012, so for more than a decade, he has produced a veritable stream of impeccably accurate articles and books on many aspects of Scottish sport and Scots in it. It is he, for example, who rediscovered the grave in London's Kew of Andrew Watson. And, although he is not a member of the SFHG, he is seen by us with regard to football as very much a "fellow traveller". So, if you have not done so, please visit his site now by clicking below on:
Andy Mitchell's Scottish Sport History
And we avidly recommend you purchase his definitive Who's Who of all the players, who represented Scotland from the first International game in 1872 to the start of the Second World War. See, buy and read
And there is more.............
For up to two decades a small, dedicated group of enthusiasts has worked away largely without the recognition they deserve compiling data on both Scottish senior and junior football, male and female. They have delved into every aspect of each - clubs, games, players, crowds, trophies - and it is equally available to all for use, support and admiration on:
The Scottish Football Historical Results Archive
plus there is the ever-growing Scotland the Grave, the work of SGHG member Martin Donnelly, with other members Alistair Firth and Mandy Higgins and other chipping in, its records the final resting places of those who have played for the Scotland National Team.
https://www.facebook.com/ScotlandTheGrave/
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Contact
And perhaps you also have more information to add or personal stories to relate. If so, please contact us on:
E-mail: contact@thescotsfootballhistoriansgroup.org
Or outwith Scotland you might like to pass on that information or perhaps put a question to a reputable historian in the country in question. If so, please see our list of Associate Members.
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Short-cut to the The John Harley Appeal
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