And when you are done looking at this site for the Scots input on football world-wide, here are two more.
For those who literally want to trace on the ground the local development of Scots and Scottish football in our own and other countries there is the newly available and ever-expanding site of:
The Scots Football Historians' Group
And on Scottish sports history in general but inevitably including fitba', see Andy Mitchell's inestimable:
Quite why it happened will never be fully known. We can speculate. We can guess but the reason for these two towns, really no more than two villages, one large and one a little smaller, being the source of it not just in Scotland, but in Britain and therefore the World, will be forever something of a mystery. We know the how. We know the when. We even have a good idea of what eventually became the what. But only the long-dead could have known that why.
So what is this "it"? It is not football per se. That had in a form we today would recognise already existed for the best part of a decade. However, that form was a football of a type that today is rarely if ever seen. It stylistically has long been replaced, in fact overwhelmed, by another, the source of which can be traced directly back to these two Scots villages. Moreover even its ethos has been displaced by one that has evolved as a direct result of what also began in those two same villages.
The two villages are Alexandria, now the larger one, and on the other side of the river, Bonhill. The river is the Leven. It meanders through the eponymous Leven Vale, from Loch Lomond to Dumbarton and in the first half of the 19th Century it was the source of power and more for an increasing number of works, textile-dyeing and others, that grew up along its banks. It was those mills that slowly turned a rural valley into an industrial powerhouse. And it was that powerhouse that drew in not just workers but working people, an active, energetic and thinking, urban working class.
In 1780 what has become Alexandria had a population of virtually zero. It was a junction with an oak tree, a grocer's shop and a house. From it the road ran south to Dumbarton and east to the ford to Bonhill, a ford that became a ferry and by 1836 was a bridge. In fact Alexandria only came into existence as more houses were added and as the resulting clachan was named after Alexander Smollett, briefly the local MP, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the army who was killed in battle in Holland in 1799. Its naming was an exercise in natural remembrance. The land on which the hamlet stood was owned by the Smolletts, Alex Smollett's father had been the cousin of Tobias Smollett, writer and poet, and until about 1770 Bonhill had been the family seat.
By the early 1800s perhaps 1,000 people had made Alexandria their home. Bonhill parish including it had 3,400. By 1841 the Alexandrian population had tripled. In 1855 Bonhill parish had 7,600, from when over the next half century it doubled again. In 1885 there were 12,500, in 1911 almost 16,000. But the year that is of most interest to us is 1872, the month, December. It was when football arrived and the two villages were home to about 9,000. They were a mixture of locals and fairly locals, Lowlanders, also by then a significant number of near-Highlanders, from Argyll and the Isles to the west and the Perthshire hills to the north-west and what might be described as a small number of others.
Now football came with the missionary zeal and in the feet of members of the Queen's Park club from the southern suburbs of Glasgow. Of that there is no doubt. A year earlier Queen's Park had entered the English FA Cup, the first English FA Cup. They had been invited to do so because they had agreed to accept the FA's rules of a game they had practised north of the border for four years and with virtually no opposition. Few other clubs were interested. Frankly football in Scotland was not proving a success, at least not so far. Yet, the first FA Cup changed all that. Queen's Park had only been prevented from taking it by an inability to afford the train fares to London for a replay of a semi-final. However, they had already done the journey once and, having achieved an away-draw against the eventual winners, The Wanderers, interest had been aroused. It was interest that was further built on when still in 1872 on 30th November a game had been arranged in Glasgow between a team representing England and one Scotland, essentially the Queen's Park team, at which, although Queen's Park aka Scotland had been expected to lose, in front of a crowd of perhaps 4,000 a creditable draw was achieved. Not only that but, although scoreless, the clash seems to have achieved something more tangible than arousing simple nationalism. Interest had been been given a second and vigorous stir, showing itself when not long before Christmas, days after the England game, Queen's Park came to Leven Vale to show the locals what this "Association Fitba" thing was all about.
A demonstration match took place on the local shinty field. Queen's Park presumably lined up as they had in the international, 2.2.6. The locals also lined as they knew; like a shinty team, probably 2.2.3.3 and the game began, it is said, with frequent interruptions to explain rules more fully and quite possibly to exchange players. The outcome was enthusiasm. Within weeks in early 1873 three new clubs had been formed locally. One was in Dumbarton itself. The other was in and named after the village down the glen, Renton, and the third, Vale of Leven, was in Alexandria.
Queen's Park had and would take part in a number of similar, missionary games in and around Glasgow and the footballing word would spread. The Scottish Football Association was formed in the Spring of 1873, on 13th March. It consisted of eight founder members. Vale of Leven was one of them. Renton and Dumbarton would soon follow. By the Autumn sixteen clubs would take part in the initial playing of the Scottish Cup. Queen's Park was there of course, a team of Highlanders and drapers, middle-class, lower middle-class perhaps, but middle-class nevertheless to a man. And twelve more of the clubs were also made up of members drawn from the same social stratum. However, at least two of the three from the Vale of Leven were by definition fundamentally distinct. In Renton, Alexandria and Bonhill members of the middle-classes were few and far between. They might have owned and even overseen the factories but did not man the pits and presses, which were the preserve of another type of Scot with, of necessity, a quite different approach to life and therefore to sport.
And the difference raised its head within weeks. The first round of the first Scottish Cup were played in October 1873. Renton took on and beat Kilmarnock at home, whilst Dumbarton was drawn against Vale of Leven but in a game that would not place. In the Vale side was John Ferguson, shinty-player and runner, a sprinter. And that was a problem, at least it was made into a problem by Dumbarton, perhaps then a slightly middle-class Dumbarton. They objected to Ferguson on the grounds that in a sport that was avowedly amateur he was a professional. And that he was, as a runner. Whilst he had played shinty for the love of it, he was after all of part-Highland origin, he had won prizes, perhaps even cash, in the working-class tradition of professional athletics. Some might have said so what. Dumbarton, for whatever reason, did not.
It was a problem that was to take two years to overcome, Clydesdale having recycled the objection the following year. The solution was the election as second President of the Scottish Football Association of A.S. McBride, Vale of Leven President. He replaced Archibald Campbell, of Clydesdale, who meantime had found no objection to Ferguson having played for Scotland under his watch. Jake Ferguson had in 1874 been on the right-wing in his country's third game and pointedly its first ever win, one of six caps the print worker later publican, would gain.
In a sense John Ferguson epitomises as places both Alexandria and Bonhill, where he was born, and Vale of Leven as a football club. The team that reached and won the 1877 Scottish Cup Final included him and Andy McIntyre, Sandy McLintock, John Baird, John McGregor, Willy Jamieson, Robert Lindsay, John McDougall, Archie Michie, Bob Paton and Willie Wood. He had also been there in 1875, alongside Wood, Jamieson, Andy and James McIntyre, McLintock, Paton, McGregor, John and James Baird and McDougall when defeated in the semi-final of the same competition by Renton but interestingly not in the first team The Vale put out, drawn in quite probably from shinty, later. It had included Bob Parlane in goal, Michie, Bob Jardine, Matthew Nicholson, John M Campbell, Lindsay, Charles Glen, John and George McGregor, Duncan Cameron and William Kinloch.
They were a score of players in all. One, Willie Wood, was a print-work manager. Another, John Campbell, produced aerated water. The rest were print-workers, dyers, engineers and smiths, clerks and carriers, hard-grafting proletarians. That is bar one more and he was perhaps key, at least at the very beginning. In the first team ever Matthew Nicholson was a defender. His father was a print-worker from Inverness-shire but Matthew by 1881 had progressed from teenage warehouseman and aged just twenty-nine would have a shop in Bank St., Alexandria. It was a draper's shop. And those same players were also mostly locally-born, nine in Bonhill, seven in Alexandria and just five outwith the Vale, however, their origins were individually different. Like Nicolson their parents had been drawn from all parts of the country and with them came sporting traditions. From Perthshire it was the Ba'game, from the Highlands and Islands it was shinty, a sport, at which Leven Vale was perhaps the best below the Highland Line and one which Vale of Leven, in essence a Highland club, continued very successfully to play in parallel with football for a decade more. In 1880, knocked out early from the Scottish Cup, it turned its attention to the local shinty equivalent, the Glasgow Celtic Society Cup and took it in football shorts and boots beating kilted and bare-foot Glencoe in the final.
The shinty win was without doubt a remarkable display of sporting versatility. It was also a two-fold statement, if unrecognised at the time. Shinty was the game of the Highland land-worker, of the Highland, rural working class. By continuing to play it the Vale of Leven club and Renton too, which reached the next two Celtic Society Cup finals, re-emphasised firstly their working-class credentials and memory. But they also demonstrated the continuity of their working-class origins and standards, standards which had also been there as they had initially grown into football and then as football had grown and would continue to grow around them. The Leven Vale clubs, of which Vale of Leven was initially the most successful, played a different game. They played what they knew. They played with a working-class attitude. It was perhaps not as "nice" as what had come before it but it was more effective. The results showed it and, moreover, it soon became the accepted norm initially in the West of Scotland but, as it began its spread south in the early 1880s, not least in Northern Lancashire as the game notably gripped the equally working-class English mill towns. Nothing could be more indicative of this norm than the number of Scots players tempted south over the next half a decade by the next and initially English stage in the progress of the working-class game, professionalism. However, the drift south was not of players alone. Certainly they went because of skilled feet but with something else as well, something that could be passed on. Organisation was a part of it but there was also style, philosophy for the more pretentious. It is not chance that these Scots players were also known as "Scottish Professors".
Much had been written about this style, this philosophy, summed up as "the Scottish passing game". That it existed is undoubted. That it existed fully-formed in 1880 is not. It too was in Scotland at that time a work-in-progress, which has two implications. The first is that it had a way to go to fruition. There the year 1888 is crucial. The second is that it had come so far from somewhere. The problem is that the where is contentious. Conventional footballing history says Queen's Park, yet for the last three years of the 1870s that club had been but a floundering shadow of its former self and certainly not at the forefront tactically. The "Scottish Professors" came from elsewhere. Admittedly it pulled itself together at the beginning of the 1880s, taking the passing game as was onwards and upwards but it did so by inheriting, more accurately copying the essentials from elsewhere and replicating them, not least through recruited talent. The talent came from other Glasgow clubs. The elsewhere was the Vale of Leven.
Vale of Leven, Alexandria and Bonhill's club, had from its first stirrings approached the game of football differently. Contemporary reports have Leven Vale players, players who would form Vale of Leven and Renton, taking the field as if they were playing shinty. It is not unreasonable to assume they also adopted the tactics they knew, shinty tactics, and again that they over time learned to adapt them to the new sport and, as a corollary, the new sport around them. Noticeably they applied the notion of pairings. We know that because newspaper reports of the period of games say so. From an an hoc forward-line of six literally in print, reflecting what was seen on the pitch, three such pairings emerge, one on the right, one on the left and one in the centre. And these, as in shinty, move from being formally side-by-side to one-in-front-of-the-other but with the knowledge that in play there could and would ne both and all variations in-between according to circumstances. Reports too point to Vale of Leven as an if not the origin but in reality it matters not. What does is that the Vale of Leven club demonstrably did it best, their trophy cabinet did not lie, and, moreover, that others saw it, understood, if not whence it came but where it might take them, imitated, played on and in time eventually by.
The Vale of Leven club never really came to terms with professional football. With Renton just down the road and Dumbarton only a wee bit further still perhaps its never had the catchment area to produce the required revenue. In 1891 as league football started in Scotland it was there. The following year it finished in last place and was not re-elected. In 1893 it was not part of the first professional league. It only joined the Second Division in 1905. In 1924 it dropped to the Third Division, was dissolved in 1929, reemerged in 1939 and continues to this day in the Scottish Junior Football Association Western League Division Two. Just now it is a long way from being football pioneers and the best in the World but at least Alexandria and Bonhill still have their team, in a way that Renton does not, and, of course, a record that will always be. All that is missing is the physical acknowledgement - a placard, saying simply and uncontroversially "Working-Class Football was born here!" perhaps?