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:
Calabar and Luke
Formal colonial ingress into what we now call Nigeria began in the 1870s with the amalgamation of various trading concerns into the National African Company. In 1881 it was renamed the Royal Niger Company and in 1890 it was transferred to British Government ownership. It was effectively nationalised and in 1900 combined with the separate Niger Coast Protectorate, founded in 1884 as the Oil River Protectorate, with as it capital, Old Calabar, to form the Southern Nigeria Protectorate.
And it was in Calabar that in 1895 the school, the Hope Waddell Training Institution, was founded by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland with by 1900 some forty pupils, a number that would grow and come to include boys not just from the local native populations but also elsewhere in Nigeria and eventually even surrounding countries. It would be the church, which provided the Principals of the college and in that capacity 1902 saw the arrival for five years of the Rev. James Luke.
In fact, although the United Presbyterian Church was Scottish in origin, it was also heavily involved in missionary work in the West Indies, particularly Jamaica and it was from a parish in the centre of that island that James Luke arrived in what is now Nigeria for a second time. And he came with a belief in the value of sport for general physical and mental health, the fostering of cooperation and for self-discipline. In particular he believed not in rugby but Association football. Moreover, against some opposition from parents, who thought it was time-wasting, he insisted that it be introduced into the curriculum.
That James Luke was a player at the time of his arrival in Africa is unlikely. He was forty-two when he took up his Calabar posting. That he might have been is quite probable since, firstly, he was not from the Caribbean but Scotland and, secondly, he was born in 1856 so was not quite twenty and moving from his birthplace, Lochee by Dundee, as the footballing contagion really took hold. He was the third of nine, perhaps, ten children of George Luke, a stone-cutter, and Agnes Constable. In 1861 he was at school, in 1871 at fourteen a message boy and in 1881 he was boarding in Saltcoats in Ayrshire, where football had already been played for half decade at least, and described as "Missionary for the Town". In other words he had already started work with the church, which would see him ordained within a few years. He was married in July 1885 to Christina Watson in Falkirk, where her father had been Provost. By then Luke was twenty-nine and already a Minister of the Gospel. And they, he and Christina, then sailed for Africa, first to Calabar and in December 1885 to the Creek Town Station across the river. Indeed it was in Old Calabar that the first two of their children, Margaret and George, were born.
They must, however, have returned to Britain by 1889, when their third child, a son, Borthwick, named for his Falkirk grandfather, was born in Bridge of Allan. And they probably remained in Scotland for two years. Their fourth child, a daughter, Agnes, named after his mother, was born also in possibly in Falkirk but perhaps according to Douglas Kerr, a descendent, in Musselburgh in 1891, shortly after which they transferred to Jamaica. James Luke was to take charge of the Bryce Church in Christiana in the centre of the island and to remained there for the best part of a decade, at least from 1894 until 1899. There there is, however, no record of football being coached by him or anyone else. The game seems to arrived a decade later via Kingston's cricket clubs. But in Calabar it was to be another matter entirely not so much in terms of results but because, when he was there and after he moved on, football continued to be taught and by then carried by former pupils as they went to work in other parts of the country, notably Lagos, which in 1906 had become the Southern Nigeria Protectorate's capital. There they formed football clubs that, true, came and went just as Lagos' first league did too in 1923 but the contagion had been and would continue to be passed on.
As for James Luke it seems in 1907 he returned from Calabar to Britain from where in December that same year he sailed with his wife and daughter to Natal in South Africa, staying there until 1913. Meantime, daughter Agnes seems to have returned to Britain so that when James and Christina passed through en route once more to Kingston she, aged twenty-one, joined them for the last leg. In fact she would marry in Jamaica in 1915 and that is where at least for few years James Luke seems to have stayed perhaps until retirement but still with an interest in the Caribbean. In January 1924, as the ball in Nigeria outwith Calabar really started to roll, aged sixty-seven he can be seen, described as a Clergyman, sailing alone from Bristol to Kingston, returning in March and giving his address as 50, Moidart Road in Craigton in Glasgow, although both Christina and he would die in England, at Whitley Bay, in 1938 and 1939 respectively. Indeed, Moidart Road is little more than a stone's throw from Ibrox. He might even have gone to games with thousands looking on but could he ever have imagined World Cups, Nigerian participation starting in 1994 and how his contribution would be crucial in making it happen?