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:
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Il Davidson Genovese
(This section could not have been written without the much appreciated help of Isabel and Roy Rhode, great-granddaughter and grandson of George Davidson, and Allessandra Pittaluga, nee Ghigliotti)
If Queen's Park, although now playing outside the top flight, is the longest surviving club in Scotland then the equivalent in Italy is Genoa C.F.C. The difference is the Genoa has remained one of the country’s great clubs, presently in mid-table in Italy’s top flight, whilst Queen's Park was in the Scottish League Two, that is the third division and is now in the second. But there is a reason. Both clubs started amateur but Genoa did not remain so long, whereas Queen's Park uniquely had until just two seasons ago.
Genoa's story officially began in 1893, when a group of British businessmen, including the British Consul, met in the then British Consulate in Via Palestro just round the corner from the city's Anglican Church to form the Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club. It was initially a very “Inglese” institution, with a membership of thirty, all British, which was in time added to by others, exclusively non-Italians, particularly Swiss and Germans, all attracted to Genoa by its growing commercial importance following the opening of the Suez Canal twenty-five years earlier. Genoa became one of the great coaling stations on the way to India and was also the main port of departure for Italian emigrants heading for the Americas, North, South and Central.
However, as English as the new club appeared there was an early, distinctively Scottish input, without which it might never been possible. John Wilson, said to have been born in Lanark, and Alexander MacLaren, in Glasgow or Perth, had come to Genoa as young men in the 1850s. There they had built up a business based on ship repairs, engine-making, railway equipment and a foundry and also owned a piece of open, flat land in Campasso, on the then edge of the city, land which they made available to the new club as its first sports field.
Three years later in 1896 a 29-year old London-born doctor by the name of James Richardson Spensley, a man with a huge enthusiasm for football, arrived in Genoa from England. Like
William Mackay
in
Huelva
in Spain he came to treat the increasing number of British sailors passing through the port. Spensley joined the Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club and the following year put forward two proposals, both of which were accepted. The first was that the club be opened to Italians, a maximum of fifty to begin with, and the second was for the introduction to its list of sports of his game, Association football.
It was a sport that was also expanding elsewhere in Italy; Northern Italy to begin with. In Turin Internazionale Football Club, thought to be the first Italian club dedicated solely to the game came into being in 1891. In the same city Juventus followed in 1897. 1899 saw the foundation of AC Milan and between, in 1898, there was the also the formation of the Italian Football Association and the first, four team, Italian Championship with a season normally from January to March, later April.
Genoa's first football team would be a mixed squad of Ghigliotti, De Galleani, Bocciardo and Bertollo, Spensley, in goal, two Swiss brothers, Eduardo and Enrico Pasteur and Dapples, Leaver and Le Pelley and the Scot, William Baird, up front. In the 1898 Italian Championship won by Genoa the team had Baird was now in goal, Spensley at centre-half. It also included six Italians, not least Fausto Ghigliotti, a known all-round sportsman, whose family owned a ship-provisioning company in the port and was the great-grandfather of the above-mentioned Allessandra. The team was, of course, entirely amateur, a private, club team centred around the mixture of British, Italian, Swiss and other nationals that were mainly involved with the port and its merchant, Royal and other naval ships' traffic.
Meanwhile, it is said that Campasso was not big enough to allow the laying out of a football field, which necessitated finding a new ground. Looking at the area, as I have, it appears unlikely. There seems to be plenty of space. Nevertheless in 1897 Genoa Cricket and Athletic did find and move somewhere else, and on the other side of the city at Ponte Carrega. However, there are two stories, one short-term and the other long, associated with the move. The first is that Wilson and McLaren, both in their sixties, had died within months of each other. The land at Campasso may have had to be relinquished as part of their estates not because it was too small. Secondly, Ponte Carrega was a cycle-track, one owned by an important, local sports-club called La Societa Ligure Ginnastica Cristoforo Colombo. It was named after Christopher Columbus because he was not Spanish or even Portuguese, as you might think, but Genoese and a certain George Davidson, also with ship-provisioning interests in the port, was an active member.
1899 saw Genoa once more enter the Italian Championship but with Athletics dropped. It had become the Genoa Cricket and Football Club (GCFC), as it is still known to this day, never having taken an Italian name. The team, now with just two Italians, one still Ghigliotti, again won the title, for the second year beating Internazionale Torino. And the new century was to see a third straight championship win, this time defeating another Turin side, FBC Torinese in the final but on the way overcoming, Sampiersdarense, one half of today’s Sampdoria, the city of Genoa’s other major team. That year five of the Genoa team was Italian, Ghigliotti once more amongst them, but with the Scot Baird gone, replaced by the first local 'keeper, Parodi, and George Fawkus on the left-wing.
In 1901 Genoa changed its strip to the red and blue stripes worn to this day. The club had first played in England colours of white shirts before blue had replaced it. The change to red and blue coincided with the election of another Fawcus, Dan, founding signatory and ex-player, as President. It also for the first time lost the championship that year, finishing runners-up to Milan Cricket and Football Club, today's A.C. Milan, however returned to winning ways in 1902, 1903 and 1904 with teams dominated by Swiss and fewer British, and with a third Turin club, the emerging Juventus, as runners-up in the last two of those seasons.
1904 would also see the presidency of the club passed to ex-player, Eduardo Pasteur. In 1905 championship positions were reversed. Genoa was to be runner-up to Juventus, including in its team half-back Jack Diment, said also to be a Scot or a Geordie but actually Anglo, if only notionally. More research by the legendary Andy Mitchell has shown him to be John Bowman Diment, born in 1885 in Plymouth but only because his father, a Sergeant in the Gordon Highlanders, was posted there for sixth months. After that the family returned North of the Border and he was raised in Durris in Aberdeenshire, before, post-Army, his father took the family to Newcastle, where Jack found work in shipping. He amongst others, another Briton, Squair, a forward, and the Swiss, Hess, had been brought in as amateurs, for which read shamateur, by the also Swiss-born textile entrepreneur, Alfred Dick, who would soon lead a breakaway from Juventus that would see the foundation of Torino, the movement of Diment et al to and the arrival of Vittorio Pozzo, the great Italian manager of the 1930s, back from Zurich and Manchester at the new club. And here the Mitchell research adds more detail. Diment and Squair were both very young, nineteen and twenty, and friends with much in common, the latter also working on Tyneside as a shipbroker's clerk. But to give him his full name, James Macgregor Squair, had been born in Edinburgh in 1884, lost his mother aged three and moved south at the age of eight, only when his father remarried.
In 1906 Genoa was third to Milan and Juventus and then dropped out of the picture, at least as far as the Scudetto was concerned, eclipsed on the field even in its home city by Andrea Doria, the other half of, the Doria in Sampdoria. And there were also other problems off the field. With its British roots Genoa had always naturally had a strong British contingent of players and there was increasing resentment from some clubs of them and foreigners in general playing in Italy, notably from Switzerland, the first country in Continental Europe where the game had taken hold. FC St. Gallen had been founded as a sports but not yet football club in 1879. The Swiss Football Association was formed in 1895 and league football there began in 1897. Open hostility erupted in 1908 when the club, Federal Gymnastics, formally objected to the Italian FA and a bar on such players was introduced. Genoa disagreed, as did Milan, Firenze and Torino, where the team is said to have then included a McQueen, James McQueen, otherwise a somewhat itinerant school-teacher, London-born of a Scottish father, who would on moving on in 1913 captain Marseilles to the 1913 French Championship.
All four clubs, Genoa, Milan, Firenze and Torino, threatened to withdraw from the championship. However, a compromise was found. It was that Italian football would have two competitions, two cups, one, the Federal, the Coppa Spensley, in which foreign players were permitted but in which just two teams competed and the other, the National, the Italian Championship, initially played regionally, in which foreigners could not take part. However, Genoa decided not to play in either.
For a year such player imports remained banned but the ruling was then overturned. The clubs that had withdrawn returned yet the parallel championships continued. Genoa now took part in both competitions. With its Italian team in the Italian Championship it got no further than the qualification round. With its Federal, its Spensley team including foreigners, it reached the semi-finals, losing to all-Italian, Pro Vercelli, the eventual champions.
Meanwhile, in the course of 1909 further important changes had been made to the Italian game. Matches were played before Christmas. The season became not simply 1910 but 1909-10. There would also be one league, not regional leagues and the Federal and Italian competitions were combined. However, two titles would still be awarded, one for the team with the most points and another for the best positioned all-Italian team. Meanwhile Genoa had a new president, Vieri Goetzlof, replacing Eduardo Pasteur. The club would finish fifth, Internazionale taking the overall title with Pro Vercelli the best Italian team. However, Genoa did it seemingly not just with the inclusion of an increasing number of British names, most interesting of all, Fred White.
Back in England there was a Fred White, who had retired from the English game earlier that same year. A defender he had played for nine years from 1900 for his local club, Luton Town, and was just twenty-nine when he had called its a day at least at league level. He ceased playing league football so comparatively young, which suggests injury, but might not have ruled out an extra pay-day at a lower level. It could have been Italy but he would not have played for nothing, he was a professional, and he must have been recruited by someone, who travelled to Britain.
1910-11 proved no more successful for Genoa than the previous year. Pasteur returned as President. The league increased in number and was regional once more. Both titles were taken by Pro Vercelli. Genoa was mid-table fifth, with more losses than wins in spite of more British names, Swift, Murphy, Telleson, Weightman, Coggins and Davis, said to have appeared in the team. Telleson or Thelleson is something of a mystery and may not have been British at all. Murphy is said to have been a right-back, possibly Irish from the name. Weightman may well have been David Weightman, a centre-forward, who made just four appearances for Burnley between 1909 and 1912 and then nothing. He could well have been freelancing elsewhere. Davis could have been the Welshman, Walter Davis. He had served in the army until 1911 and was based in Gibraltar. He then returned to Britain, turned professional in the Southern League with Millwall, aged twenty-three and played as a centre-forward for Wales five time before the Great War. It is not impossible that he passed through Genoa and had a game or two. Coggins was Thomas Coggins, English-born of Irish parents and active at the club, said to have been the junior team trainer, if there was one, presumably also playing in the First team. And finally there was Swift. Possibly he was George Swift, a full-back mainly with Leicester until he retired in 1906, then turned to management, at Chesterfield until 1910 and Southampton once more from April, 1911. He was apparently not working in England in the Italian 1910-11 season, might have stayed a short time at Genoa and then moved on to Torino before returning home. Swift might even have been brought in not so much as a player but as effectively a first “manager”, one that did not work out in the port city. And someone with authority must have made the arrangements.
In 1911 Luigi Aicardi became Genoa President. And it was to all intents on Aicardi's watch that the club's first, official outside trainer was brought in, said to have been working at the time of his appointment in Genoa's port and to have been suggested by Coggins. The trainer was 30 year-old William Garbutt, a right winger who had had a nine year career with Reading, Woolwich Arsenal, Blackburn Rovers and was again said in the 1911-12 season to be on Arsenal's books, although he is not listed and played no games. It was at the end of a season during which Murphy had still been there and a Miller, Dearden, a Marsh and a George A. Smith arrived. He was George Arthur Smith, a player with Ilford, once in the Southern League, recorded at Genoa for the 1912-13 season and then for the next two seasons until organised football was suspended due to the war as player-manager and then manager at Alessandria FbC, fifty miles to the north of Genoa. The other are more obscure but must have been active in competitive football in England at a reasonable level but with careers that had ended not with age or injury but rather stalled. Part of the reason was lack of opportunity. Until 1920 the English Football League consisted of just two divisions of twenty clubs each, forty in total, only six of which were in London and southern England, where the Southern League predominated.
Again the question has to be asked how these British players were recruited to the club. It might have been Coggins but in reality had to be someone both able to cultivate extensive contacts in British football and who had access and say-so at the highest level in Genoa Football Club itself. Such contact and access became still more required with the appointment of Garbutt. He had been a successful and well-respected professional player in England. He, like all the other British players, would have been highly unlikely to have come to Genoa on a whim, not least because he was newly-married and his wife pregnant. Indeed his leaving to coach in Italy was openly reported in the Athletic News on 26th August 1912, a professional Press report about a professional player. The story of him working in the port is also likely to have been a fiction to explain his arrival or even a ruse to pay him for working at the football club indirectly. The club did not pay him. A company in the port or elsewhere in the city did. It was standard practice world-wide, from England in the 1880s, as football passed from amateur to professional via the “shamateur” stage. It was what Dick had done at Juventus and Torino five years earlier. It was what was at precisely the same time being done as football changed from past-time to business in Argentina, Uruguay, the United States and elsewhere.
And someone must also have handled the contractual arrangements not just for Garbutt but the additional British players, who had already passed through and those he brought in for the 1912-13 season, Eastwood, Grant, Walsingham, Mitchell and MacPherson, all said to be amateur and undoubtedly “shamateur”, and all forwards. It says something about what Garbutt had thought of the attacking prowess of the team he found on his arrival in August with then several months to bring in reinforcements from the Old Country before the Italian season kicked-off. As for those new players they came from a number of sources. MacPherson, probably a Scot, had been recruited from Livorno, presumably already shamateur there, and is said to have played the season at Genoa before moving on to La Spezia, one of a number of seemingly itinerant, British players in the Italian game before the First World War. John Grant, a centre-forward, was just 20. Said to have been born in 1891 in London he was Northern Irish in origin. Aged fifteen he was playing for Cliftonville in Belfast. At sixteen he was said to be in Sweden before returning to turn out for Southport and then in 1911 aged twenty, clearly a talent, he joined Woolwich Arsenal, playing four league games in the season. Garbutt, ex-Arsenal himself, recruited him from there, he remained at Genoa until the Spring of 1915 and never seems to have played football again. Perhaps he returned to Britain to enlist as so many did, as Garbutt also did. Interestingly in 1918 the death in combat is recorded of a John Grant of the Royal Irish Rifles. And Davis was back, perhaps just briefly, an Italian interlude from Millwall and interestingly it was in Italy too that he served during the Great War, receiving severe leg injuries, which seem to have forced his retirement from the game in 1919. Additionally there was twenty-four year-old Percy Walsingham. He would remain with Genoa until 1916, spend three seasons with Bologna and then return in 1920 aged thirty-two for a final season with Garbutt, before which had played for Millwall, Clapton Orient and Chelmsford, all once more in the Southern League so at a good level but not in the top, top-flight. Eastwood was Hector Eastwood, a centre-half, born in Edmonton in London in 1887, who had played six games for West Ham in 1908, then also joined nearby Ilford for three seasons, then one at Genoa and the next at Naples. It suggests that Mitchell, probably Alfred Mitchell, might have come from the same level of the English, perhaps British game.
And the person, who seems most likely to have had the necessary expertise to deal with all the British incomers beginning could really have been only one man. He needed to be a good, a hard-nosed businessman, perhaps with interests in the port, from where he could pay Garbutt and perhaps others. He needed to have reason to travel to Britain on a required, even regular basis. He needed to understand the British mentality. And above all he needed to speak English.
In 1913 Luigi Aicardi was replaced as Genoa President, by George Davidson. It was an interesting selection, if in the circumstances, unsurprising. Davidson was sporty but not originally a football man although he had by 1913 already been associated with the club for fifteen years. He had excelled as a cyclist, having in 1886 and aged 21 been Italy's second ever road-racing champion. His penny-farthing is in the Genoa Football Club museum in Genoa's Palazzina San Giobatta. His photograph in the 1890s equivalent of Lycra hangs on the wall. And when his time in football came to an end he returned to cycling, not least in Rapallo. It was he, who as President of the town's cycling club was in 1948 instrumental in the organisation of the first running of the now classic Milan-Rapallo race.
But George "Geo" Davidson was not Italian. He may even have not had an Italian passport at the time. He was a Scot to his roots and by birth, an early Chris Hoy. He came into this World in Letham in Angus in 1865, his father, also George, then a dresser at a local linen factory, and his mother, Isabella Gray, she having grown up in the village. He went to Italy only in 1873 at eight years of age, with his family but was to stay for the remainder of his life. And the reason for him going to Italy was probably also linen. George Davidson Snr had been born in Strathmiglo in Fife in 1842, the son of weavers. A decade later he was still there but a decade later still, in 1861 the picture is unclear. He may have been in Dundee or already have been in France. Certainly he was there a year later and at the age of perhaps barely 20 was marrying in Landerneau in Brittany. That he was marrying a Scots girl in France suggests that several may have been sent there to work. Brittany was a centre for linen manufacture in that country, not least for ships' sails. That she was five years older than he is also curious.
In 1871 George Snr. and Isabella were back and living in Angus. He is recorded as a Linen Factory Manager, although not necessarily in Scotland, and the family was at 72, Keptie St in Arbroath. They had three children. George, aged 8 and two sisters, Helen, three years older, born in France, and Catherine, two years younger and also born across the Channel. It suggests the Davidson family had been in France until perhaps 1865 and that Isabella at least had come back to Scotland that year. They or she then returned to France almost immediately, before returning once more, spending perhaps two years at home and then again moving abroad. But this time they went to Italy and the reasons may well also have been firstly war and secondly textiles, perhaps linen once again.
The return of the whole Davidson family to Arbroath was almost certainly due to the Franco-Prussian War. It broke out in July 1970, ending in May 1971 with the Germans at the gates of Paris. It is not clear if the Davidson family returned to France after the war but it is known that by 1873 they were in Italy. However, they were not here in Genoa. According to the family they first settled in Novi Ligure, perhaps originally attracted because it was developing as a centre for textile manufacture. Yet the family say that there it moved into the sale of sealing products. The reason may have been simple. Ships had required sails. However, the first iron steamships made their appearance in the 1820s. They were paddle-steamers. Propeller-driven ships developed in the 1860s but they still also had auxiliary sails. Those sails would be done away with in the 1880s but from the 1870s the days of the sailmaker and the manufacturer of linen sailcloth were numbered, something that George Davidson Snr seems to have realised and therefore decided to diversify.
Afterin the late 1870s or early 1880s the Davidson family moving to Genoa, Geo would spend his teenage years on the Ligurian coast. There he developed his cycling prowess, as well as reputations as an athlete and a fencer, and also went into the ship-provisioning business, the port connection, doing well. It was said that it won a number of contracts with the British Navy. Moreover Davidson's business interests continued to prosper into the new century. And it was then that the Englishman, Alan Rhode joined his company. His arrival allowed George Davidson to hand over its day-to-day running and devote more time to other interests and a private life. He married. He and his Italian wife, Adelina, had two daughters, Giorgina in 1907 and Helen in 1910. Giorgina was to marry a well-known Italian footballer. Helen would wed Rhode's son and it is the Rhode's descendants who still live in Italy, still in Genoa, still both Italian and British. Additionally the Davidson family between 1909 and 1912 also built a summer villa at Borgo Fornari a short train ride into the hills north of Genoa. At the instigation of his wife a nursery was erected close by, which is still known today as the Asilo Infantile Adelina Davidson and has been replicated elsewhere in Liguria.
Meantime, George Davidson's other interests also diversified. His involvement in football, now a decade on, seems to have deepened and he clearly had developed new approaches not towards the Italian game itself but his club. Genoa, after initial success with teams that were a mix of British, Swiss and local Italian players that were without doubt amateur, had initially then followed the trend to utilise an increasing number of Swiss and German players. It was hardly surprising with presidents of Swiss origin between 1904 and 1911. However, in 1910 Internazionale's championship-winning squad of twenty included eight Swiss and some at least of whom were no longer amateurs, but shamateur, being paid to play, if unofficially. At this point Genoa again might have followed suit but instead it went one better. Its reaction was both distinct and simple. It brought in players not from the country where football had begun on the Continent, Switzerland, but where it had begun period, where it had been openly professional for thirty years years and where, as a result, the best and fittest players were to be found. That country was, of course, Great Britain, specifically in Genoa's case, England.
It is fact that from seemingly perhaps one import directly from England, Fred White, in 1909, the year of the reversal of the ban on foreign players and the return of Genoa to the Italian Football Association fold it went to three or four in 1910 and then under the new, non-Swiss president to four or five in 1911 and perhaps six in 1912. How it happened, how it was realised must have required someone in the club to be the motive force. It is unlikely to have been Luigi Aicardi but had to be someone on the Board, a power behind the throne. In fact, only one person had the requisite skills, George Davidson. Normally speaking Genoese dialect, but completely bilingual in Italian and English he is known during the period to have travelled on business regularly to Britain. He also came from the world of Italian cycling, which had been uncompromisingly professional from the time he was winning races and, being the businessman he was, would have been aware of the very big business professional football, after its amateur phase, had from 1885 become in Great Britain.
Given too that Davidson's business trips would have taken him into Southampton, where the boats from the Mediterranean landed, and then to London it is hardly surprising that Genoa's first British imports seem to have come in the main from southern England, again from Fred White onwards. Given such circumstances also it is also hardly surprising that in the summer of 1913 Geo Davidson, certainly an increasingly prime-mover and perhaps already de facto club president for at least a year, took on the role officially. As Board membership had been his reward for finding the Ponte Carrega ground, the pitch was laid out inside the cycle-track, on which he is said to have raced and won, so the Presidency for a decade, longer than any predecessor, was the reward for what he was at the club, i.e. uniquely qualified to recruit British players and William Garbutt.
However, as President Geo Davidson might have then sat on his laurels. In fact he clearly had a plan and in three parts, of which the recruitment of British players from England was only one. The second was to set about strengthening the club structure. He had to. In January 1911 Genoa Football and Cricket club, having left 9,000 capacity Ponte Carrega, had officially opened a new, ground at Marassi, closer to the city centre and again British-style. It is still the club's ground, shared today with its city rival, Sampdoria and had to be paid for. Its capacity, then 25,000, now 36,000 had to be filled, not least because Davidson is rumoured to have lent the club money for its building. And to do that required the third part, the strengthening of the playing squad still more.
In strengthening initially by importing British players Davidson had ratcheted up professionalism in football in Italy to a significant degree. Now he would go still further. However, it would not be by targeting and recruiting more foreigners. He probably had recognised that short-term importation would only be a stop-gap solution, unless the player quality were considerably higher and therefore more expensive. It had in any case been frankly less than successful, Genoa not having won a title for the best part of a decade. Instead he would quite deliberately and almost immediately look to recruit home-grown talent, Italian players from local and other rivals in contravention, it was said, of Italian FA rules.
Renzo de Vecchi, later Italian captain, hired from Milan in the first year of Davison's Presidency, was a case-in-point, as were Santamaria and Sardi, poached from local Genoan rivals, Andrea Doria. The teams in question and others, of course, objected. Proof of financial inducement in what was after all an officially amateur sport still was sought and it was found. The newly “poached” ex-Andria Doria players had been paid for their change of loyalties. It was done with cheques signed by Davidson, even though he was not yet president at the time. It need not have been. In addition they were drawn on a local bank, the manager of which was a supporter of Andrea Doria. He saw the cheques and reported it to the club. The club in turn reported to the Italian FA. Genoa was challenged. The two local players were barred for two years, fined but somehow retained. The rulings in turn were challenged, the matter taken to court in 1913. Genoa won its case and the bans were halved, that is effectively annulled.
However, the Scot was neither cowed nor satisfied. Indeed, it looks from this distance as if the open signing of the cheques might have been a deliberate act of defiance that he had wanted to be noticed. He was laying down a marker that said he had no intention of abiding by “amateur” rules, which were in any case being constantly circumvented, and in 1914 he signed Felice Berardo from Pro Vercelli and Angelo Mattea from Piemonte, two more major, rival clubs. Genoa Football Club itself was now fined. Marassi, its ground, was put off-limits. For six months the team played instead on a field close to Genoa's Brignole railway station but ultimately it did not matter as the Great War intervened. Football was disrupted at a national level for the next four years, by which time there would be no going back.
Davidson, in the interim, whilst still President of Genoa F.C. had in 1915 also become President of the Italian Cycling Union and for five years would wear two sporting hats, "calcio" and "ciclismo". That was until 1920, when job largely done, hole largely punched, he stepped down as Genoa club president and away from direct football involvement. Nevertheless he would, as a result of his efforts, be able to watch what he had so forcibly started in football would come to fruition both on and off the field. Genoa would take the first united northern Italian Football Championship in 1922-3 and 1923-4 and was runner-up in National Division in 1928, as Italian football, or more accurately again northern Italian football, would post-Great War become fully and openly professional. Juventus, already largely shamateur, was the first, officially to do so in 1923. In 1929 professional Serie A was founded with Genoa, now temporarily renamed under the fascist regime of the time as Genoa 1893, again runner-up in its first year, as in 1927 under the managership of Davidson's recruit as a player over a decade earlier, Renzo de Vecchi.
On stepping down Geo Davidson returned to his first sporting love, cycling. He remained President of the Italian Cycling Federation until 1927. He was even a judge for the sport at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, said to have finally had to take out Italian citizenship to do so. And he, Adelina and his still young family settled just along the coast from Genoa in Rapallo, where he was known as Papa Geo and became the driving force behind the town's cycling club. And it was under his stewardship of that club that two decades later the first of the now sixty, annual Milan-Rapallo races took place in 1946, his force of personality ensuring that War-bombed bridges were repaired to allow it to happen. And it is there and with cycling that the family's sporting loyalties have largely remained. His descendants, the Rhode family, still live in Italy, still in Genoa. In fact, they are still heavily involved in the Rapallo cycling club, La Societa Ciclistica Geo Davidson, and the organisation of Milan to Rapallo cycle race. George Davidson's grandson, Roy Rhode, was himself the club President from 2009 to 2013, his great-grand-daughter, Isabella, is vice-President.
And so to the final lap. Adelina Davidson died during the Second World War. George would live until 1956, dying in Rapallo, and is buried in the Davidson tomb in the Staglieno cemetery just on the outskirts of Genoa. It's a magnificent resting-place for Scot or Italian alike.