The Scots Football Historians' Group
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.
This site is dedicated to the exploration of Scottish football, that is the modern game largely created here, and Scots football, taken to the World in passion, minds and feet by our forebears, largely amateur in the true sense, who in so doing created the beautiful, global game. Our aim is to un-cover and relate the real stories of and backgrounds to this passion for the World game and preserve the legacies no matter what and where globally. We research, spotlight, advocate, mark, preserve and restore, all voluntarily. Now we even comment, so before scrolling on to enjoy or use our content first consider a donation.
Comment
World- or just Heritage?
The adjacent logo is that of UNESCO World Heritage. And currently there seem to be two places vying for it for football, both in Britain and each in some ways laudable. The first, Glasgow, has been on the go for a few years but seems just now to rest in part on spurious facts and, again partially, on incompleteness. The second, newer one is Sheffield. It is better factually but with one major, major flaw. Sheffield Rules football was not our Association game and thus even with good research might just as well be the Swedish variant, Aztec or Chinese.
But that is not to say that the principal of application presumably on Criteria (i), (iii) and (vi) (Click here to view them) is not a good one. Indeed Scotland currently has one in the creation, Scotland's Trail, so there is national governmental will for this sort of project, which should not be ignored and might be harnessed on the basis that not over-covetous South Glasgow but our nation more widely is actually and provably the source globally of much of the "The Beautiful Game".
So on that basis we suggest a new application, Scottish Government-backed, and four marker locations. The first is the Queen's Park open-space because it was where a group of men from the North, Moray and Aberdeen, joined together with men from the South, Glaswegians, to play not just an ad-hoc game but one from which the profoundly influential Queen's Park club, our doyen still, was founded. And the other three needs must be in the Vale of Leven. At Park Neuk in Alexandria, where football as a working-class game began. At Tontine Park in Renton, where modern football with not just attack, defence but now a mid-field, was formulated. And in Dumbarton perhaps aptly right in front of the Citizens' Advice Office that now stands on the site of the tenement where John William "Jake" Madden was born and from where he would play for the town team, Celtic and Scotland before taking himself to Prague, never to return, but do so as the first player turned coach and as such be the pioneer-carrier of the top-flight Scottish game beyond our shores. Indeed so successful was he that his picture adorns the reception of the Slavia Prague stadium, a stand is named for him and there is still an annual pilgrimage to his grave. Those Czechs know how to honour.
And we ask too that all the above might be done with a little humility - Scotland, on-field, is not the footballing force it was for so long - and with taste. Indeed there we have an example. The good folk of Busby have erected in their midst a bust of Tommy Donohoe, one of their own and also of the three takers of football to Brazil, all Scots, by birth or Diaspora. It stands on plinth, subtle in its remembrance and recognition, a model perhaps for similar Unesco-sanctioned memorials; a plinth, a plaque of explanation, a football as a globe and a thistle (See above). And if Unesco show themselves not to be interested then perhaps we can out of simple, national pride do it anyway and before Down South's at very best marginal claim goes further?
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A Caring, Perhaps Saving Critique?
We at SFHG like a trail. Just scroll down and you will find twenty-eight to be explored virtually or physically as you wish, albeit the reach is so extensive that one is in Ireland, two in Continental Europe and two require crossing the Atlantic.
But there is one closer to home, in Glasgow, created not by us and which, we suggest, requires a little, threefold attention. It is “Football’s Square Mile”.
The first point of contention is after the welcome its invitation to “explore the origins of passing-game”. There is little evidence that either it or even passing itself was first employed there. The latter is recorded first in Sheffield and then from Chatham before the Association game fully arrived in Scotland in 1871. And the former did not really emerge until the early 1880s and then with as much likelihood that its very much still-Scottish source was on the banks of the Dunbartonshire Leven as those of the Clyde.
The second point is a little pedantic. Football comes in many forms and they had as many origins. What we are talking about is the Association game aka Soccer and a little precision might ensure that amongst others Irish Gaels, Americans, Canadians and some Australians will not be rubbed up the wrong way.
And the third is that more than one of the sites spotlighted might simply be wrong in content or location, including where a plaque has been placed. And don’t just accept our pointing towards potential inaccuracy. It’s borrowed. The concerns comes from an impeccable source. It suggests that at a minimum in Site 1 the wrong birth-date of Alex Watson Hutton has been posted, to which might be added that of the almost thirty years AWH spent in Scotland twenty-seven, including his learning of the game and the meeting of both future his wives, were in Edinburgh. A better object of Glaswegian adoration might be John Harley, creator of the Uruguayan style of play, who was born five hundred yards from Cathcart Cemetery and brought up within a mile of it. Moreover, in Site 2 the wrong building is claimed to be the birthplace of the Scottish Football Association. Indeed a plaque is said to have been placed (on a lamp-post?) when it should be on the other side of the road. And the source says there is more. We await developments with interest.
So with all this in mind there can be two responses from the Square Mile, batter on regardless or accept scrutiny, cooperate, correct and even add. Generally there were many more contributing clubs than just Queen's Park and Third Lanark. Specifically, Site 5, the Glasgow Necropolis, is the also the final resting place of James Richmond and Don Siillars, both Queen's Park and Scotland players in the early days of the game. Are they not also worth a mention? Similarly Site 8, the Southern Necropolis, contains the grave of David Wotherspoon, one of Scotland's very first eleven and which, as we have reported (Scroll down and see below), is unmarked. Perhaps some money might be found from the SFA or elsewhere and used to change that for perpetuity. And Site 21, Cathcart Cemetery, contains not just seven graves of import but is the burial-place of ten more former internationalists with neighbouring Linn Park having seen the cremation of a further nine. All equally deserve honouring. Our man, Martin Donnelly, can help in every case. Consult him and not only will the history then be both right and augmented, as it would be by the addition of our Southside and Southern Suburbs Trails, but, with Glasgow’s football looking to be gain UNESCO World Heritage status, embarrassment by omission, even international mockery through error might be avoided by the city, its authorities, the SFA and also not re-percuss on non-Glaswegian, football-following Scots more widely. Think on.
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Sheffield in the Birth of Football
There is in Sheffield some interesting work being done on the origins of football. It, that is the game there, began in 1857 with Sheffield F.C., a team, which in a remarkable parallel with Glasgow's Queen's Park precisely ten years later, was until 1860 a team with no "mates" or as we would say, "nae pals".
The work involves delving into the local Press of the time to both seek and find references to combination, positioning and even passing. And they were half a decade before Scotland and two or three years even prior to London and the Royal Engineers.
But there is a problem, albeit for them not us. Sheffield, club and city, played to it own rules. It was not Association football. The Sheffield Football Association did not merge into the London equivalent until 1877, admittedly with rules added from the former that were so superior that they persist to this day. But it was done from a position of weakness. For all the start it had had in development, when the two codes first crossed in 1873-4 in the FA Cup Sheffield F.C. did not get beyond the Third Round, effectively the Quarter Finals, was walked-over in the First Round the following season and was defeated in the next, 1875-6, again in Round Three, but this time after two walk-overs in its favour. And this was whilst, when their vanquishers and eventual Cup-winners, The Wanderers, later faced, in the November of the year, their Scottish equivalent, Queen's Park, the result was for the English team a 0-6 defeat at home. Nor was it a lone example of increasing Scots Association superiority not just over English teams but Sheffield ones specifically. A month earlier again Queen's Park had defeated Notts County and in December would do the same to Cambridge University, with the previous April Clydesdale having already rolled over Sheffield Wednesday and Alexandra Athletic Sheffield Albion and both Scottish teams being well down the then Caledonian pecking-order. The latter had been knocked out of the season's Scottish Cup in the First Round, the former in the Third, both by the Hampden club. Thus it is clear the potential was for Sheffield, with its twenty years in the game, to learn from Scotland with five and not the contrary. The questions are, on both sides, why.
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A Hampdener Rebuttal
Hyperbole can certainly be fun. It can also be good but inaccuracy can be the former but not the latter. And so it is with our national game.
On the front page of the web-site of The Hampden Collection, one which otherwise serves an extremely valuable function in spotlighting the contribution Glasgow, central and south, made to early Scottish football, (also click on the map to view) the following claims are made:
“this (The First Hampden Park) is where the ‘Scotch Professors’ developed the modern passing, running and combination game, and exported it to the world.”
Not one of them is true, so let’s examine why and in something of reverse order.
That Scots took essentially today's football to much of the World, indeed starting with England, is correct. It is documented, see for example:
But they were not Professors of any kind with one notable, future exception, Alexander Meiklejohn of Pawtucket, USA who in fact was born in Lancashire but only because his family briefly passed through on the way from Neilston to Rhode Island. In fact in the beginning to England the carriers were largely miners, factory-workers or labourers barely out of their teens, for whom what football they had learned in perhaps two or three seasons at home might offer a slightly better-paying alternative in the short-term and at best perhaps a pub to run in probably a Lancashire mill-town in the long. Nor did they come through Hampden. Of the seventeen Down South in 1880 not one had played for Queen’s Park. Of the 20 in 1882 it was twenty and again none again and in 1884 it was seventy-four and, you guessed it, none again. And even of those going in the same period further afield, either temporarily or for good, there were only two, one to China and the other to Chicago. In fact, whilst football was first played by our countrymen in initially Australia, then Canada, the USA, Uruguay and Argentina and beyond it was by enthusiasts from home and even Diasporans bitten by the same bug, who probably knew of the Queen’s Park club, called their own teams after it but had never seen Hampden in their lives.
Then there is the twofold problems of this game developed in Glasgow’s expanding Southern Suburbs being, first, “passing, running and combination” (PRC) and, second, “modern”.
Modern football, I would contend requires not just PRC but tactics i.e. deliberate organisation and three effective on-field elements to match; attack, defence and mid-field. Attack was always there. The ethos of the clubs that in 1863 formed the Football Association was it all-out. Organised defence came in Association football in 1872 in the first international and through Robert Gardner. A mid-field of sorts appeared in 1878 in Wales at club level and at international level in 1882 and 1883 with 2:3:5, the only problem being that in spite of it both Wales and England kept being beaten by Scotland and its traditional system. Only in 1888 did that change as Scotland adopted the domestically-sourced Renton model, got thoroughly gubbed but persisted and was able after a few seasons and other impediments to work it out even as its export had already begun, and this time through players with the maturity actually to know what they were doing. In 1887 81 Scots were playing south of the border. In 1898 it was 270.
And so finally we turn to PRC itself. No kinds of football have been sports that did not involve running. The assertion that it came from Hampden, Scotland or anywhere else is simply foolish. As to passing and combination there is evidence from elsewhere, namely in Sheffield-rules football, that they were in some way employed perhaps six and certainly two years before even the formation of Queen’s Park, never mind the acquisition of the First Hampden, the only counter to which is that it wasn’t the Association game. But even then there are still problems. Combination is documented as being used even in Association football by the Royal Engineers as early as 1869 and passing by 1870. Scottish football essentially started in 1872.
And there is more. Whatever was played in Yorkshire or Chatham might have involved passing but was still not the “passing…. game” and here there is for the Hampdeners a proper problem. There is no real evidence that such a thing was employed by Queen’s Park in the first half of the 1870s - "passing" itself is mentioned only in the report of the 1874 international and then with "close-dribbling" - but every evidence that it was a decade later. So what happened in between? Whatever it was it probably had little to with The Spiders and therefore their ground or grounds. The team went into significant decline from 1876, knocked out of the country’s major competition, the Scottish Cup, in the quarter-finals in 1876-7, in the third round in 1877-8 and the quarter-finals again in 1878-9, before starting a major recruitment drive that seems to have involved “tapping up” players from other clubs. There are several examples, not least Andrew Watson. And meantime as emphasis on passing seems to have grown another club ruled the roost and needs must therefore be considered the most obvious source of the trend, its players even recorded not just as employing but scoring from it in the 1877 game against England. That team was Vale of Leven from Dunbartonshire’s Alexandria so nowhere near Hampden, not even from elsewhere in Glasgow but way outwith the city altogether.
Folk
As the "Lawman" is laid to rest,
Roddy Forsyth's Tribute to him
A young man sits at his desk in the offices of Aberdeen County Council, meticulously drawing a plan for a bin shed which is to be constructed behind a housing project. It is 1958, the young man is 18 and he is living the dream – of being an architect. His name is Denis Law and he knows he is lucky to have his job, because he suffers from strabismus, a condition in which one’s eyes face in different directions, and his employers were dubious about his suitability until they asked him to attempt a test drawing which he accomplished in tidy fashion.
Had this scenario really taken place, our record of Law would be confined to dusty files in a municipal archive. “I used to draw street plans in my school jotters,” he told me over a beer in Rapallo when we were covering Scotland’s participation in Italia 90. “It was a real thing for me. I loved playing football but it didn’t seem like something I could do for a living.”
However, the trajectory of a lifetime can be diverted by seemingly innocuous circumstance. In Law’s case, it was the fact that Archie Beattie, brother of Andy, the manager of Huddersfield Town, happened to be in Aberdeen to visit a relative and he chose to take in a youth game while in town. Although he thought that Law was an unlikely looking prospect, Archie was struck by his skill on the ball and recommended him to Andy, who was sufficiently impressed to offer the 15-year-old a contract and pay for an operation to correct Law’s vision.
The rest is legend.
Law had now embarked on the construction of a unique career and the lines and angles which he would master existed, not on graph paper, but in the unfolding drama of football contests, where he would establish himself as the greatest player Scotland has produced. That must inevitably be a partly subjective judgement but it assumes significant weight when it comes from the most successful manager in British football history.
"He was the best Scottish player of all time,” said Sir Alex Ferguson, on hearing of Law’s death at the age of 84, last week. It is January 2025. “He was a fantastic player. He epitomises Scotland, fighting away, having a fight in an empty house. He was an incredible human being."
The statistics of Law’s career reinforce Ferguson’s call. Law made his debut for Huddersfield at the age of 16 and at 18 he won the first of 55 Scotland caps (at a time when far fewer international matches were scheduled than nowadays), in a British Home Championship victory over Wales at Ninian Park, where he scored in a 3-0 win.
His tally of 30 goals in 55 Scotland appearances remains a national record, equalled only by Kenny Dalglish over almost twice as many games – 102 in total. Dalglish, the only other player to vie with Law as best Scottish footballer, said upon hearing of Denis’s passing: “Others can have their opinions but, for me, he was the hero.”
Law also racked up a portfolio of club records by scoring 18 hat tricks for Manchester United – in the modern era Wayne Rooney is tops with 8 - and he netted 46 goals in 1963-64, a tally which remains unsurpassed at Old Trafford. That season he was named European Footballer of the Year and he is still the only Scot to have won the Ballon D’Or. The iconic image of his scoring feats was of Law’s ability to appear stationary in flight when heading the ball and punching the air with his jersey cuff gripped inside his fist whenever he found the mark.
That said, Law was possessor of one distinction which rankled with him for the rest of his life. He played in the Scotland side battered 9-3 by England in the Home Championship encounter at Wembley in 1961. As a Scot, living and working south of the border during England’s triumphant World Cup campaign five years later, he was the butt of many taunts and famously – or notoriously, depending on your allegiance – played a round of golf on an otherwise deserted course while Alf Ramsey’s players secured the trophy against West Germany.
His painful recollection of the 1961 fiasco was only partly exorcised by Scotland’s 3-2 victory at Wembley in 1967, England’s first reverse as world champions. Law wanted badly to inflict a much heavier defeat but could not dissuade the equally strong-willed Jim Baxter from cavorting around the pitch, socks rolled down to his ankles, playing keepie-uppie rather than inflicting humiliation by helping rack up an emphatic score.
A factor not usually mentioned in Scottish accounts of the event was that – in those days before substitutes – England played with only eight effective players because of injuries sustained during the match by Jack Charlton, Ray Wilson and Jimmy Greaves. At half time the Scots led 1-0 from a Law strike and in the dressing room he beseeched Baxter to devote his energies to the infliction of tangible damage by way of goals.
“Jim wasn’t bothered,” Law recollected 30 years later. “He was just saying, ‘Aye, aye, right. We’re taking the piss out of them.’ We could have scored at least five that day.”
The following year, the immortal triumvirate of Law, Bobby Charlton and George Best propelled Manchester United towards a European Cup triumph. Law, though, had to sit out the victory over Benfica at Wembley because of injury. Meanwhile, Scotland’s failure to reach the finals of either the FIFA World Cup or Uefa European Championship for 16 years after 1958 kept him off the stage of the major international tournaments.
He did make a single appearance at the 1974 World Cup finals against Yugoslavia, in the 2-0 victory over Zaire, but he was clearly past his peak and the game marked the last outing of Law’s international career, prior to his retirement from football the following season.
His strongly developed individualism had been in evidence when he chose to play, at either end of his career, for Manchester City, having been idolised between times by the Manchester United faithful as ‘King of the Stretford End’. It had also motivated him to sign for Torino in 1961 when wages in Italy far exceeded the pay scale of English clubs, but the ingrained defensive negativity of the Italian game frustrated Law to the point where he walked out on the club and returned to Scotland until Matt Busby paid £115,000 (a record fee at the time) to bring him to Old Trafford.
When his playing career came to an end, there was speculation that Law would go into management, but the suggestion was never entertained by those who knew him well. When the eminent Aberdonian journalist, Jack Webster, suggested to the Aberdeen vice-chairman, Chris Anderson, that the club should bring their native son to Pittodrie as manager, Anderson replied that Denis could not organise a tea party, far less a football club.
Instead, Law became a football pundit, principally for the BBC, and I had the immensely enjoyable good fortune to work with him at three World Cup finals and many domestic and European games involving Scottish clubs. We could not walk a street at a Scotland game abroad without him being beseeched by the Tartan Army for autographs and pictures and he invariably complied with good humour, although I once saw the combative side of his nature surface when a supporter tried to take a photo of him in a hotel urinal.
The intrusive fan was left in utterly no doubt what would happen to his camera if he took the snap – and retreated prudently in hangdog fashion.
The most poignant feature of Denis’s later years was the affliction of dementia, that curse of far too many players who thrilled us with their ability to head a football.
But on the positive side of the balance sheet of achievement, Scottish dialect has given us the perfect description of Denis Law, as he was perceived during his predatory peak as the country’s highest scoring striker. He was gallus.
The definition of gallus is a perfect ABC of his character and talent - adventurous, bold and cheeky. Denis Law was a gallus law unto himself.
RIP the Lawman, architect of football fantasy.
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The Brazilian Scot(t)s
The smiling face to the left (or above, if you are on a 'phone) is that of Archie Scott. He is a Brazilian, who lives there in a suburb of Sao Paulo. But he is also a great-grandson of Tom Scott, one of three men to have taken football at the same time to South America's largest nation, in his case to Campinas and Jundiai in Sao Paulo state. Nor is it coincidence that all three were Scots, Archie's forebear born in Glasgow but buried in said Jundiai. His grandfather and great uncles pioneers of football in Sao Paulo itself. For more detail click here with more to come.
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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.
And read Roddy's piece on"Lady Florence Dixie, women's football pioneer"
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plus:
John Harley
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:
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Place
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.
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?
Aguilas and El Rubial
There is one football place in Spain that is forever Scotland. It is the beautiful El Rubial, all blue and white for a reason, the oldest football ground on the Iberian Peninsula still in use and the Mercian home currently of Aguilas F.C..
And the reason for the connection is John (Juan) Gray, born Kelso, raised in Edinburgh but for thirty years a resident of the Spanish town, as well as founder, funder and trainer of its first two, undefeated teams.
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Projects
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".
More Notable Research and Restoration So Far by Others with SFHG Input
Where others 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.
and here is.....
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:
The Grave Situation
David Wotherspoon, Southern Necropolis, Glasgow, and Billy Mackinnon, Westburn, Cambuslang
- both graves unmarked
- West Kilbride, Ayrshire, condition of grave declared to be dangerous.
- Methilmill, Fife, gravestone unstable
- 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.
Thinking and Thinking-On
again 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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History
First there is, to used in conjunction with others, our and see our new and developing,
Supplementary Football/Scottish Football Timeline
and then, on 30th November 2022 the Scots Football Historians' Group became "live" and work 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.
But, of course, The Spiders, its players and Hampden were not alone. There were and have been many other players, officials and administrators, locations and events, individually and which we have linked.
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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History Trails
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 Coalfield, 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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SFHG Aims
- - 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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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/
and the esteemed historian of football in Sheffield, Steve Wood, has, amongst his wide range of excellent research, books etc., posted this self-explanatory video, How Scotland United the Rules of Football. Click on to view. ______________________________________________
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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