Such is the stuff of football legend. The year was 1910 and it may have been that Pattullo had arrived in Catalonia from Newcastle. Certainly he was back there in 1914, joining the Tyneside Scottish Brigade for the Great War, being awarded the Military Cross and also being badly gassed. And he still there for much of the next decade and a half, on the face of it curiously from 1918 to 1920 living with a Georgina Pattullo, then alone for a year and for six more years until 1927 with an Agnes Pattullo. But he had been born in November 1888 in Glasgow right in Crosshill, the son of a prosperous Oil Merchant, who had died eight months earlier in April. And grew up there almost within sight of Queen's Park and Hampden at a time when the Scottish game was at its second peak. In 1891 and 1901 he and his elder sister, Jean, the Newcastle Georgina, who married there in 1920, were staying either side of Maxwell Park with their maternal grandmother, Agnes, living on private means with their mother, again Agnes; which also suggests she might have been the one to have been with him again in Newcastle two decades later.

Thus it was that under Gamper's initial wing the man described as the club's "most important and influential Brit of all time" and therefore ranking him above Gary Lineker, Steve Archibald and Mark Hughes made his first appearance for Barcelona in September of the year of his arrival. He would play twenty-four matches for the club, twenty-three that season, and score forty-three times, forty-one in those twenty-three, and by the time the business that had brought from Britain meant he had to return there again it would win the 1910-11 Catalonian Championship. 

And that would have seemed to be it. But he did return for one last game and flourish and two final shows. Firstly, Barcelona had reached the semi-final of the 1912, cross-border Pyrenean Cup. The game was against city rivals, Espanyol, and not only was he just able to make it but to score twice more in a 3-2 victory. It prompted the losing club to make Pattullo an offer to turn professional but he not only declined, ever the amateur, but also seemed to have left playing football almost entirely behind. Secondly, in 1928 he returned to the Catalan capital and the then stadium, Camp de les Corts, taking the honorary kick-off of a Spanish Championship game between Barca and Oviedo, this in the year before the foundation of La Liga. The date was the 15th April, Barcelona would win 7-3, Samitier, Pattullo-like, scoring five and it was probably no more than pleasant break for the Scot en-route to Majorca. The gassing of two decades earlier had taken a toll on his health and the warmth and dry the Balearics was thought might be helpful. It probably was at least initially allowing him to dip a toe once more in the game. The move to the island allowed him in 1930 to manage, albeit briefly, Palma's Club Baleares.   

It was also on Majorca that Pattullo is said to have married, although the marriage does not seem to have lasted. He was soon to have returned to the the UK, perhaps hastened by the outbreak in 1936 of the Spanish Civil War but it was neither to Scotland or even Newcastle but to London. In the meantime both his sister and his mother seemed to have moved south and he seems to have followed.