One of the joys of having blogged on Scots Football Worldwide for so long -it has been a decade now - is that contacts have been built up, perhaps even a little influence extended and people contact me. So, almost the full ten years ago I had posted a piece that mentioned in a little more than passing the part George Robb, Scot and school-teacher, had played in taking football to Argentina's second city, Rosario. Just then little more was known about him but just last week an Argentine colleague sent me an article published in March last in the Rosario paper, El Cuidadano, and written by a Leonardo Volpe.

The subject of the piece is in the trap-line -  George Robb, otro pionero del futbol en Rosario - "George Robb, the other Rosario football pioneer", covers the story with accuracy and in depth, creating a framework, from which more knowledge can be hung, filling in of some gaps to . George Robb was, as Leonardo states, was born in 1862 in Monymusk in Aberdeenshire. His father, James, was a somewhat itinerant tailor from Cruden. His mother was from Alford but by 1871 the family, as was, three sons, James Jnr, George himself, Alexander, and two daughter, Margaret and Mary Ann, had moved to Fettercaairn, then in Kincardine. But by 1881 they had moved on to Aberdeen with the addition of a fourth son, William, and two more daughters, Jessie and Jane, George already at eighteen a Public School Teacher but with twenty year-old James Jnr. gone.

In fact both James Snr and his wife seem to have died within a year of each other still in Aberdeen in 1900 and 1901 but the Volpe article suggests that Robb and other members of the family, including Mary Ann, might have travelled to Argentina as early as 1886. It is possible but seems unlikely, as Mary Ann would have been just seventeen at the time but with one proviso. Her younger brother William would travel to South America, when exactly unknown but in 1899 he is recorded in Peru as a farmer and marrying, his wife of Anglo-Peruvian origin.

However, it is known that, with Alex Watson Hutton having in 1884 founded his Buenos Aires English High School, George Robb would first be appointed from Scotland to the new establishment, in August 1888 in the city's Anglican church marry Margaret Russell, seven years his senior, the daughter of Edinburgh's Master of Works and a Music Governess and was in 1888 appointed Director of the St. Bartholomew Day School with effect from 1st October. It meant a move two hundred miles north to live on the same block as the school itself and close to the again Anglican church, from which it took its name.

At St. Bartholomew's, as Margaret ran the junior section, he introduced for the older boys football, previously played at Watson Hutton's school and brought to Rosario by another teacher, Isaac Newell, he from England, for whom in 1903 Newell Old Boys would be named. The introduction would translate into a Robb's School (Past & Present) team, which would in 1896 be part of a first manifestation of a Rosario Football Association League (RFAL) with Robb himself an initiator and referee, and again in 1897 and 1899 after it had been formalised at at meeting at the school with Robb as President. Moreover, in the Robb's School teams of 1897 and 1899 was Ricardo Olavarria Le Bas, who when the replacement of the RFAL, the Liga Rosarino de Footbol, was founded in 1905, was also its first president.

By then, however, George and Margaret Robb had both stepped back from St. Bartholemew's in 1904 founding their own school, the English Commercial College and it continued to run successfully until the same pressures that in Buenos Aires changed the game there, the reduction of the British community with the outbreak of The Great War, caused closure. The couple and their by then two daughters, their only son having died in infancy, returned to Scotland to live in Edinburgh at 12, Marchmont St. in Morningside, George working as an accountant. And it would be from that same address, survived by Margaret, who would die in Canada in 1933, he would pass away at the Royal Infirmary in 1928 at the age of sixty-six, another of a growing list of Scottish pioneers of the beautiful game across our World, all un-lauded in and by his homeland.

(With grateful thanks to Leonardo Volpe and the CIHF)