In all the work that the late Colin Jose did in researching and mapping the history of Canadian soccer the one area that he did not really penetrate was the country's eastern seaboard, the Maritimes - New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island - and Newfoundland and Labrador. For him football's story began in Nova Scotia in 1913 and in Newfoundland in 1950. So this piece about J.C. Strang needs to be viewed as a wee addendum and up-date to the work Colin did for the Dominion as a whole.

John Strang, John Craig Strang, could said to be the equivalent of Alex Watson Hutton, the Scots "Father of Football" in Argentina, except, of course, his influence was neither to be in South but North America, nor in a place necessarily associated with what in Newfoundland's capital, St. John's, was and remains not a winter but a summer sport. There from sources probably not available to Colin the Association code was said from 1878 to be first organised around Terra Nova, a foundry started in 1875, its team also known as The Gemmells after one of its Scots owners. And as in many places the first matches were few and more often then not against visiting Naval crews. In fact the Newfoundland Football League, predating Colin's football association by over half a century and with its initial seven clubs, was actually not to be formed until 1896. Yet, in between after 1883 friendly club matches were already taking place with Strang not just said to have been at the centre of their organisation but with the start of the organised game coinciding more or less with his probable arrival around 1880. He was born in 1857 so would have been twenty-one in 1878 and thus on reaching maturity completely able to make his own decisions. And one of those, after what looks to have been an unsettled childhood, seems to have been to get away from Glasgow, for that was where he had been at least in 1871 at thirteen, working as a Messenger Boy, staying in Hutchesontown with an uncle and aunt, as interest in the new sport of football exploded around him. How could not have been infected?

Yet he had been born not in the city but in Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, the son of a joiner and a local girl, who with John and his two elder sisters had remained living at least until 1861 in the grandparents' house on Polnoon Street, his birthplace. But from that point matters seem to have become more difficult. In 1867 his father,   still in Eaglesham,  would die of typhoid fever. John would be ten. Meanwhile in 1871 his mother remained living with her mother and with a brother to John but ten years younger, John himself, of course, farmed out, and again by 1879 may well have herself passed away. John therefore had by then no ties, hence the opportunity to emigrate.