As I write this I am aware that the man, whose story I am about to tell or rather retell, John Campbell Orr, spent very much of his childhood in a house perhaps no more than two hundred yards from this desk. Today the ground floor is a Red Cross charity shop. The address is 34, Bonnygate. The town is Cupar in Fife. But it is not where Campbell Orr was born. That was in the Gorbals and in 1850. Nor is where he made his impact on football. That might have been on the international rugby field but the fates conspiring saw that it would be in England, more precisely in Birmingham.   

From the biography published in 2017 by Martin Shirley, John Campbell Orr's great-grandson, from which I from now borrow extensively and which I totally acknowledge, we learn that Campbell Orr, as he was known more simply, was schooled ten miles from Cupar in St. Andrews. And it was in its famous university that at eighteen the young man then enrolled, became a regular member of its rugby team and where in 1870 was captain-elect. However, back in Cupar Campbell Orr's mother died in 1866 and father's business as a printer, not least of the Fife Herald, was failing. By 1869 it was bankrupt and his personal assets used to pay creditors. As a result by early 1870 Campbell Orr had left, probably obliged to leave,  university, St. Andrews itself and even Cupar and was working as a solicitor's clerk in Edinburgh, having moved there with his family.  Moreover, Robert Munro, his replacement as St. Andrew's rugby captain on 27th March 1871, so at much the same time, played alongside Alfred Clunes Ross, another erstwhile university teammate of Campbell Orr, in the World's first rugby international. It took place at Raeburn Place, Edinburgh, where Campbell himself had early played against its Academical incumbents to this day, and was won by Scotland. One wonders first if Campbell Orr that day was watching on and second, whether he himself in better circumstances might also have been in what was that day not a modern Fifteen but a victorious Twenty.   

Campbell Orr remained in Edinburgh for two years. That is before, as his father seems to have moved briefly to Birmingham, taking his family with him, then have returned to Scotland, re-marrying in Edinburgh in 1874 and dying in Glasgow in 1880. Meanwhile, Campbell Orr, having taken himself and his clerking skills south, remained there, where within a year of arrival he was joint-founder of the city's first football club. It was the Birmingham Clerks' Association soon to be known as Calthorpe F.C., named for the county estate in Edgbaston where it had its first ground and just a mile south-west of the city centre that as industrial Birmingham expanded was being swallowed up and developed. And the other joint-founder was another Scot, John Carson, with whom an interesting, indeed, potentially historically remarkable, side-story begins to unfold.

Back in Glasgow Carson, a fellow clerk, had been an early, playing member of Queen's Park. He was a footballer, one of the earliest known north of the border. He is even recorded as on on 23rd June 1870 having scored in a 4-0 win against Airdrie in one of the doyen club's very few external games of the period. But there is more still in the tale. He did so having either having moved to Glasgow within the two previous months or to take part travelling in from his home town of Helensburgh. However, whilst Carson and his parents were staying in Helensburgh, it was not his birthplace. That was just up the coast in none other than Rhu and it was also the birth-village of the Peter and Moses McNeil, brothers who would go on to be founders of Glasgow Rangers, with Moses also a future Scotland international, once more the birth-village of Peter Campbell, the third of the four Rangers' founders and again Scotland player. Moreover it was also the home village of the Vallance brothers, also later of Rangers and, in the case of Tom, of Scotland, and of Henry, the third of the McNeil brothers, who, although born just and along the coast in Shandon, became from 1873 and in Glasgow once more, after a season's dalliance with 3rd Lanark, a stalwart of Queen's Park and by his birth in 1850 was an almost exact contemporary of John Carson. It is inconceivable that, given the size of Rhu, then and now, that they could not have known each other and, indeed, entirely conceivable that Carson might have played a role in Henry joining Queen's Park and his exploits even having been part catalyst in the creation by McNeil's younger, teenage brothers, in order to get a game too, of a new club that has become, well, what it is today.

In Birmingham at Calthorpe, however, Campbell Orr and Carson faced a quandary, what code of football to play? Indeed as late as 1874 games were being played under mixed rules but with Campbell Orr accepting that it was easier for rugby players, not least himself, to adapt to Association rules rather that vice versa the decision was finally made. It, and Carson's obviously still active contacts, led in February 1877 to a game taking place at Calthorpe's second ground on Bristol Road against Queen's Park Strollers, i.e. the Glasgow club's 2nd Eleven travelling south. The Strollers won, presumably Carson playing some part, as he is known to have played in fixtures that season. Campbell Orr certainly did and on the field, scoring one and involved in a second in what was a narrow 3-4 defeat. And on that basis the Scots returned ten months later this time with perhaps a beefed-up team and certainly more success. Calthorpe was again defeated, this time 0-8, but one wonders what kit the teams wore to distinguish them as, at abut that time at John Carson's suggestion, perhaps insistence, Calthorpe is known to be playing in the exact same black and white hoops as his previous affiliation.

Both Campbell Orr and Carson gave up playing in the early 1880s. Indeed Carson by 1883 seems to have abandoned football altogether, although he remained in Birmingham until retirement, a move then to Lyme Regis and his death there in 1931. Calthorpe continued but somewhat hamstrung in a way Aston Villa, to where Perthshire's William MacGregor, once an early fellow Scots Calthorpe member, had transferred his loyalties, avoided very early on with the finding of its Perry Barr ground by the Lindsay brothers of Golspie, Sutherland. There entrance could be charged, whilst across the city the Calthorpe Estate made that impossible, so Calthorpe FC remained amateur as The Villa, the team of north Birmingham, and later Small Heath, now Birmingham City, the team of the city's south-east, did not. It is a fact, a monetary reality, that might even be a better explanation than oft cited simple confusion of Archie Hunter arriving in Birmingham in 1878 with better-known but amateur Calthorpe his stated destination but actually joining shamateur Villa.

Yet after ceasing to play Campbell Orr's role in the game continued undiminished, now off the field. From clerk he had become a football journalist. Meantime he had, whilst still playing,  served as Honorary Secretary of the Birmingham and Counties Football Association from its first iteration in 1873 and formation in 1875. Then he was its Honorary Treasurer and post-playing from 1886 Secretary once again, a position, in which he remained until his death in 1921. By then the Association that had founded by two and started with eleven, had 1,200 affiliated clubs but Calthorpe as a senior club was not one of them.  It seems to have disappeared, disbanded around 1890, fixtures and fittings from its ground sold off in 1891. He was also during that same long tenure the County Representative for Birmingham and to have served for the best part of twenty-five years on the Council of the Football Association. And in all these roles he was integral to the formalisation of football's rules, its literally global Laws, the organisation of England's leagues, its disputes on and off the field and its fixture from local to international level. Indeed, with regard to the latter Junior internationals were a direct result of his efforts.

Campbell Orr was, however, opposed in principle to professionalism but, of course, had to bow to the inevitable. Yet his early opposition might be part of the explanation of why initially so few Scottish, pretend-amateurs and then openly professionals can be seen to be recruited by Midland's teams. Whereas the first arrived in Lancashire in 1880 with the exception from two years earlier still of Hunter, indeed the Hunters at Villa,  it would be from then a full decade before the first took the field for West Bromwich, two years more for the same at Wolves and an additional five at Birmingham. And at Midlands' clubs outwith Birmingham, chronologically Notts County and Stoke, Leicester, Forest and ultimately Coventry, the situation would be much the same. Indeed, until those turning-points beginning in 188-9 and the foundation of the Football League, with at first only Villa included, it is noticeable just how local players were and to a large degree would remain. In fact it could be argued that, with the exception of Villa, in the English Midlands the Scots influence never really penetrated on-field, the Welsh one largely supplanting it.  

However, that is a discussion for another time. As Calthorpe failed or as a middle-class entity decided not to adapt to new footballing realities John Campbell Orr would stay in Birmingham until his death at the age of seventy-one. John Carson would outlive him by ten years. Yet it meant that the Cupar-boy had spent two and a half times as long in the English Midlands as his homeland. He had also married locally to a local girl. However, Scots he would clearly remain. A listing of the seven of his eight children, who survived, says much. They were Kenneth, Andrew, Graeme, Marjorie, Norman, Wihelmina and Gordon.  In addition he served as President of the Midlands Scottish Society, very much a case of physically "Ye' can tak the man oot o' Glasgae" or is it "Fife" but  in so many places elsewhere in the World entirely to the benefit of non-Scots culturally, philosophically and above all organisationally "ye' cannae tak the Glasgae/Fife oot the ma'". Indeed, a couple of newspapers quotations from his great-grandson's biography perhaps best illustrate this with regard firstly to his under-trumpeted importance not just to football in the English Midlands but to the whole English game, past and present, and secondly to him as a man, an immigrant and a Diasporan. Simply,

"Orr is recognised as one of the game's great administrators of the first fifty years"

Whilst from the Birmingham Mail in about 1910 and not without openly judgemental condescension and un-disguised stereo-typing that even today would warrant the author both a "thank-you" and in Scots a "good slapping" he was,

"A quiet, easy-going, unobtrusive, typical Scotsman of the right sort - a cheery, even-tempered, far-seeing sportsman, and a living refutation of the calumny that anyone from "ayant the Tweed" cannot appreciate a joke." 

And to reinforce my point, in the modern context for "Scotsman" simply read West Indian, African even perhaps Syrian or Afghani and for "Tweed", Atlantic, Channel or Tigris and see where it just might take you.