That a major figure in the foundation of what we now know as Arsenal is David Danskin there is no doubt. It would be good if some sources of his biographical details, open ones included and not least the Arsenal club's own, did not conflagrate him and his cousin of the same name. But there are accounts that have it reet-like, not least my own that can be found by clicking here on David Danskin. Danskin was a Scot, again not in question, but not from Kirkcaldy. However, he was still a Fifer, in fact born in Burntisland, who spent a short period of his childhood in the town that is today the home of Raith Rovers and the hometown of Val McDermid and Gordon Brown amongst others, went back there as a teenage, apprentice engine fitter and reportedly as player for the now defunct Kirkcaldy Wanderers. But he spent most of his childhood in a cottage beside the Holl reservoir, where his father had become the "Waterman", and which lies deep in the countryside north of Leslie, now part of modern Glenrothes, Leslie being where his same father had been born.

And it is not so much Kirkcaldy but Fife that is to an extent the key to the unlocking of this story. When Danskin in 1885 and aged twenty-two moved south to work at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, then in Kent, now London he arrived with a football-bug that he found he would share with several fellow workers, amongst them Durham-born and therefore English Jack Humble and former Nottingham Forest players, Fred Beardsley and Morris Bates; Humble and Bates much the same age as Danskin and Beardsley at thirty something of an elder statesman. So it was that in December 1886 that the works' team that emerged, initially called Dial Square, the name of the works itself, played its first game with Danskin as captain and Beardsley as goalkeeper and vice-captain, Humble not featuring until the following season.

A month after formation Dial Square was renamed Royal Arsenal. David Danskin continued to play for two seasons until injury cut his appearances to a minimum. Humble played until the following season 1888-89, Bates, now captain, until the season after that and Beardsley, by then in his mid-thirties, until 1891. But in the meantime the club had been transformed both on and off the field. With regard to the latter Jack Humble would become one of the main movers of the club turning professional. It did so in 1891 eventually prompting Danskin to be involved, as Arsenal became a company, in the formation in 1893 of Royal Ordnance, a still amateur alternative that proved short-lived, but the period between formation and professionalisation, indeed the road to the success that led to professionalisation, had seen on the field a change in club direction that seemed on the face of it remarkable but could be said to be simply an expansion of an ethos that was already there and had started with Danskin himself. It became Scots.   

That first 1886 Dial Square team in fact included not just one Scot, Danskin, but a second, Edinburgh-born Duncan Porteus, who was also a committee member. And it is clear that for the Royal Arsenal squad for the complete 1886-7 season Scots connections and therefore football enthusiasm were further drawn upon. Of the nineteen players three more, so with Danskin and Porteus a quarter to half, and namely, the Crichton, n.b. Creighton or Crighton brothers, Robert and James, with Robert possibly actually born north of the border, and John Gellatly, were Diaporans, the sons of migrated Scots parents. And the following season the ratio remained the same, albeit with changes, Porteus becoming one of the joint-secretaries but a new Scottish playing-arrival with a twist, 19 year-old Peter Connolly. It may have been pure chance but Connolly, actually the son of Irish immigrants, was born not just a Fifer but also in Kirkcaldy. And he would die there too at just twenty-seven of the Scottish, working-class curse, tuberculosis, but not before appearing for his adopted, English team one hundred and twenty nine times over six seasons.

Moreover the flow would continue in 1888-9 at what might increasingly be described not yet as London's but Kent's Scottish club, with Millwall having the  comparative claim for the capital city. David Danskin would still play fourteen times. Connolly twenty. Both Crichtons were also still there were again new arrivals. A new name, twenty-four year-old William Scott, would feature twenty times also. He had been born just across the Tay in Angus, perhaps in Kirriemuir,  maybe Forfar, where he is said to have played for the home-town club, founded just three years earlier. Moreover there were four more newbies, this time from source. Straight into the team stepped twenty year old, J.M Charteris and twenty-one year old John McBean or McBain, both once more said to have been born in Kirkcaldy. In the case of McBean he was actually born just up the coast in Leven but brought up in Kirkcaldy, at the opposite end of the High Street to Connolly, the Stark's Park end, although his home-town team is said, like Danskin's, to have also been Kirkcaldy Wanderers. As for Charteris, confirmation of his origins has proved more difficult but in the end not impossible. That James Charteris was born in Scotland seemed certain and in about 1868. In 1891 he recorded in Plumstead as a tailor at the Royal Ordnance and there are other indicators that might be him but none even in wider Fife. In fact in 1886 he is said to have been turning out for The Well, which suggests Lanarkshire origins but the truth is he was born James Miller Charters in Lanark in 1867 to a father from Kirkcudbright, possibly explaining the Kirkcaldy confusion, moved to Motherwell aged about five, rearranging is surname slightly in the process of growing up there and returning again after football to die in the town in 1895 at the age of just twenty-eight, which once more suggests the dreaded consumption. 

However, it now meant that five  of the English Arsenal's not just squad but first team, so almost half, were now Scots-born, whilst on the periphery at least for the moment were in addition Hugh Barbour and David Howat. Barbour had been born in Glasgow and previously played for 3rd Lanark before wandering south and, although Howat had been born in Preston and had been on the fringes of the North End team, his parents again were both from the Auld Country, indeed from Ayrshire. And by the following season, 1889-90, both were to be fully in first-team reckoning, Hope Robertson recruited from Partick Thistle would join them and there would be yet two more names  knocking on the door, briefly Inverness's Willie Campbell with fourteen goals in just nine appearances and Willie Stewart. Indeed, whilst Campbell would the following year, the first openly professional season, take the field for the club fourteen times before moving to Preston to try his luck there, Aberdeen-born but Plumstead-raised Stewart would in fact play twenty-nine times. And he would be joined in the first eleven by David Gloak, who would stay two years becoming joining Millwall Rovers, later Millwall, and a player, McHardy, who again is something of a mystery as yet unsolved but possibly George McHardy from Dundee. And with their inclusion the number of Scots in that same first eleven had progressed to at least six, possibly seven so two thirds.  Indeed, it might have even have been more. On 19th September 1891 in one of the first games of Arsenal where it players were openly paid to play the team was Bee in goal, full-backs, Rankin and McBean, Andrew Rankin having arrived from Glasgow Northern, half-backs, seemingly in a 2-3-5, Howat, centre-half McHardy and Stewart and the forwards Galston's Gavin Crawford, David probably Danny McLaren from Lochee, James Paton, Andrew Pearson and Tommy Graham, who had the previous season been in the losing Vale of Leven side to Queen's Park in the Scottish Cup Final. It meant that at least seven of the team that day were certainly Scots and perhaps as may as ten, the odd-one-out being Edmund Bee, the 'keeper.

Moreover there would be a final newcomer on the periphery, not Willie but another Campbell, simply called signified by J., who would take to the field a not inconsiderable eight times seemingly without official recognition but with a suggestion. Perhaps he was John Campbell on a brief meander that would take him from the mighty Renton and an unofficial and amateur cap against Canada as his only representative honour to officially professional Sunderland and Newcastle via then still The Manor Ground, Plumstead. The Gunners' move to north-east London would not take place for another two decades, albeit with future Scots contribution that not necessarily always in numbers but certainly in influence would become, if anything, greater still.  But then that is proto-history for the moment too far.