A recurring theme of this website has been, first, that for sixty years Scottish football was different to English and, second, at a point in the 1930s Scotland abandoned its own game but not before it had already left home carried in the feet and minds of Scots emigrants to every corner of the World, where it not only survived but in this century has seen a successful return. And where is the evidence of Scottish footballing divergence and plantation? In small measure it, or at least the former, was already there at Partick in 1872, at the very beginning, but let us start with the dawning of the modern game in 1888.
In Scotland there was
Renton,
James Kelly and, at least in embryonic form,
The Cross. Within months Kelly, and with him the new formation, was in Glasgow at Celtic. If The Cross had been till then a purely one-club phenomenon, it was no longer. Nor would its principles remain confined to just two clubs or even to Scotland. That same year Bob Kelso would have taken them directly from Renton to Newcastle West End, which in 1892 with East End would become Newcastle United, then Everton and the following year to Preston. That next year
Andrew Hannah, again from Renton, would also arrive at Everton and then, once more from 1892, play for
Liverpool, captaining both. An English stronghold of football could not avoid almost an immediate introduction.
In addition, if those same principles had not been confined to Renton, the club, and were something that the Leven Vale clubs in general had a part developing or at least imitated then
Jake Madden
that same year might have from Dumbarton reinforced them at Celtic, and
James Cowan carried them to the English Midlands. Just 20 years old, Cowan, said to have played both for Renton and Vale of Leven, moved to Birmingham, initially to Warwickshire County F.C., rather like Archie Hunter a decade earlier ostensibly as an amateur, then a year later joined Hunter and as a player, Ramsay as manager and administrator McGregor at
The Villa.
Cowan, perhaps by nature a more defensive player than Kelly, was described as
"a formidable competitor and an imposing figure, his tackling was legendary for both its ferocity and accuracy. However, Jas, as he was affectionately known, was more than just a spoiler, and in addition to directing the Villa defence he was also an extremely constructive player."
but with him a second, English stronghold succumbed.
The moves to England were no surprise. 1888 was the year that the World saw professional, league football for the first time. The newcomers joined as existing cohort of countrymen, sixty in 1885, three hundred three years later. The Football League's first champions in 1889 were Preston North End; top scorer
John Goodall, a professional with the club since 1885, London-born because his mother happened to be there at the time but of Scottish parents and raised in Kilmarnock. Edinburgh-born
Jimmy Ross, also newly arrived, was Preston's second top scorer and it would be he, who would take the top-spot the following year as an injured Goodall moved on to Derby County.
Nick Ross, Jimmy's elder brother, also of Preston and since 1884, would be fourth as the club was Champion once again.
In 1891 still south of the border the Englishman, Jack Southworth of Blackburn, scored the most goals as Hannah and Kelso's Everton took the title. A recovering John Goodall was eighth and in third spot was a new name, at least to England. It was John Campbell, one of three namesakes that decade, who would figure amongst the top marksmen north and south of the border. It was also the same one, who three years earlier in Scotland had played in front of James Kelly in the 1888 “World Champion” Renton side. Now 21 years old he was had joined Sunderland. It would take the title for the next two years and in both of them he would score more goals than anyone, as he would again in 1895 as Sunderland took its third trophy in four years and the North-West became a third area in England after Merseyside and Birmingham to be initiated.
Again in 1891 but north of the border the leading scorer had been John Bell in a Dumbarton team that had taken the first Scottish title, ahead on goal-difference of Rangers. Bell would also be top scorer in 1892 with Dumbarton retaining the trophy, then move on, once more to England and Everton, with him taking a now more developed Cross. Meanwhile, on the wings at Celtic were still a certain Jake Madden and a new-comer, a second but Glasgow-born Johnny Campbell, whilst through the centre was Sandy McMahon, born in Selkirk, the first player of note from the Rugby-playing Borders. In 1893 Celtic would become champions for the first time with Sandy McMahon sharing top marksman with Johnny Campbell before Campbell too would make the move south, once more to Aston Villa.
In 1894 McMahon would be Scotland's top-scorer on his own as Celtic held the title. In 1895 Hearts became champions for the first time, also the first time north of the border a team with the top scorer had failed to win the title. That honour is said to have belonged to a James Miller of Clyde. He is something of a mystery, seemingly unacknowledged by Clyde, and may also have been known as John Miller, another to come from Dumbarton and have played for Liverpool.
In 1896 things returned to normal. A new name, Allan Martin, later to move on to Hibernian, scored 18 for Celtic as it once more took the trophy. McMahon backed up with 15, whilst in England Steve Bloomer, John Goodall's protégé at Derby County, was pipped by none other than Johnny Campbell. Sunderland's John Campbell was seventh in the list, Jack Bell eighteenth. Johnny Campbell and James Cowan's Aston Villa took the title.
The FA Cup in the period also throws a fascinating light on the flow of talent south. In the 1888 Final, with John Goodall, six and three-quarter Scots had taken the field for Preston, none for winning West Bromwich. In 1889 it was again six and three-quarters, this time in a winning Preston side and for Wolves again none. In 1890 the winners, Blackburn, fielded just two; Sheffield Wednesday none; but the two were both from the Leven Vale; George Dewar from Dumbarton, at, tellingly, centre-half, a Scottish centre-half, and Renton's Harry Campbell at inside-right. In 1891 Blackburn returned and won again. Dewar was still there, playing in front now of two Scots full-backs, including John Forbes from Bonhill on the other bank of the Leven to Renton, whilst at inside-left was Coombe Hall born in Leith but having played again for Dumbarton. Defeated Notts County also had their share; four of the five in defence including a certain David Calderhead at centre-half, and three of the forwards including the centre-forward and all of the right-side. On the field eleven of the twenty-two were north of Hadrian's Wall.
In 1892 only seven of those taking part in an all Birmingham final were from north of the border, three now for West Bromwich, where four years earlier there had been none, and four for Aston Villa. However, remarkably three of the Villa four, including James Cowan at centre-half, his left-half, John Baird, plus left-wing, Lewis Campbell, had played their football in the Leven Vale. In 1893 the number of Scots was only six, but all were in the Everton side that admittedly lost to Wolves. They included the two outside-halves, the centre-forward and the both right-sided forwards once more. And this time four of the six, Bob Kelso, Dickie Boyle, Alex Latta and Patrick Gordon came again came from the Leven Vale. In the four years from 1888 twenty-six of the eighty-eight players to have taken part in the FA Cup Final had been Scots and in the same period from nothing thirteen, one half of them, had come from a single glen five miles long and a mile wide. Can there be a more obvious demonstration of the impulse Renton, James Kelly and the Leven Vale generated?
In 1894 still in the FA Cup Bolton had seven Scots in its team, including all the half-backs, the winners Notts County just five with Daniel Bruce another from Bonhill, a record twelve all. In 1895 again with an all Midlands final, once more between Aston Villa and West Bromwich there were five and just two, still including Cowan, for the victors this time, Villa. However, in 1896 something seems to have changed, in England at least.
Whilst the 1896 FA Cup Final would feature six, perhaps seven Scots, none would be from the Leven Vale. It seems to have been trawled out. Indeed Renton and Vale of Leven as clubs would never recover. In the English league too it would be the point of divergence, the first divergence. It would be the last year for a generation that in England the team with the top scorer would take the league title, with in Scotland top scorers winning titles until 1912 and the last season for a decade when the English league's top scorer would be a Scot, for which there are perhaps five possible and perhaps coincident explanations.
The first is that eight years into league football anywhere with the necessity to win the amateur, attacking ethos had been eroded and replaced by a much more professional, defensive mindset. On that basis Scotland, starting its professional era five years later than England, should have experienced the same phenomenon around the turn of the century, yet it did not. True it would stutter in 1902 but recovered for the Scottish champions, unlike the English, to maintain a goals for-and-against ratio above two, with just one marginal exception, until the Second World War.
The second is that much of the best attacking talent, the Scottish part of it, returned home. Here there is some truth. Professional football in Scotland had achieved some maturity and stability. Crowds were increasing. The biggest clubs had money and became able to match the wages paid by clubs south of the border, retaining talent coming through, and even able to attract players back with resultant success. In 1897, as Renton's John Campbell moved from Sunderland to Newcastle and then retired, Celtic's Johnny Campbell left Aston Villa and returned to his former club. That same year George Allan too arrived back, from Liverpool, and Celtic duly took the crown. In 1898 Campbell and Allan were followed by John Bell, cast out by Everton for his activities as President of the Association Footballers' Union, and he also joined the Parkhead club as it again took the championship.
Yet that year, for all Celtic's success, with a remarkable goals for-and-against ratio of 4.3 and a watertight defence, the year's crown as top-scorer went to a new name. It was
R.C. Hamilton, who had joined Rangers from Queen's Park the previous year, having completed his time at Glasgow University. Until then he had been under the radar. Queen's Park, being amateur, had refused to play in the league and would do so until 1900 so the scoring feats of its players, including Hamilton, and then with R.S. McColl coming to the fore, were not included in the league tables.
1898 would be the first year of five that Hamilton would be top- or joint-top-scorer, on the strength of which Rangers would take the title the next season with an even more remarkable ratio of 4.4 and for the three next seasons as well. He would be thoroughly backed up at the club by Alec Smith, Tommy Hyslop, John McPherson and James Millar. Hyslop and Millar had been two others attracted back from England, the former from Sunderland and Stoke after a brief army career had seen him posted south and Millar again from Sunderland, where he had played alongside John Campbell. However, Smith and McPherson with Hamilton were examples, of the third factor; an increasing number of Scots players, who were now paid well enough at home with no wage cap to have no financial incentive to travel south and thus able to see out their entire careers in their own country. They were encouraged and so their style of play, a distinctly Scottish style, was both valued, then further developed and as a result preserved.
Here a small note needs to be added. Both Jimmy Millar and John Campbell would die in 1907, each aged just 37. Archie Hunter had had a heart attack on the pitch in 1890 and died in 1894 aged 35. His younger brother, Andy, had had to retire from the game in 1884 and was already dead in 1888 at the age of 24. Nick Ross also died in 1894 at the age of 31 and his brother, Jimmy, in 1902, aged 36. Andy Hunter and both Ross brothers had almost certainly succumbed to the scourge of working-class Scots, tuberculosis, two of many compatriots, who in spite of training, being increasingly well-paid and better fed had their careers similarly cut short by an impoverished childhood.
The fourth factor in this first divergence was possibly a tactical one, a result of a change in goalkeeping. The barging rule was amended in 1895. In 1898 Sheffield United won the league for the first and only time with the giant Willie Foulke in goal. His tactic, first used in 1896, and copied by others of bouncing the ball to the half-way line before launching it into the opposition goal area seems in England to have forced the game forward. The area in front of goal became very crowded. Off-side must have been rendered almost superfluous. Yet there was a dearth of actual goals. Certainly Sheffield's taking of the championship was with a very low ratio of goals for-and-against of just 1.8. However, in Scotland the same rule change seems to have had little or no obvious effect. Perhaps it was because no Scottish 'keeper was ever big enough. Perhaps it was stylistic or simply cultural. Different place, different attitude, different game, a mantra since repeated worldwide.
And the final factor in the divergence was Aston Villa, specifically
William McGregor. In the seven years from 1894 to the turn of the century the Villa would take the English league four times, in 1894 without Johnny Campbell's help, in 1896 and 1897 with it and in 1899 and 1900 again without it. Throughout the period plus before and after Ramsay was Secretary, i.e. manager. That input had not changed and would ot; what had was McGregor's day-to-day involvement with the club. Specifically in late 1892 after illness McGregor had stepped down as the first chairman of the Football League and been elected Honorary President. It allowed him to recover his health and then to spend more time on club matters. Meanwhile he had also been serving as chairman of the Football Association, a post he also stepped down from in 1894 allowing still more time at the club to the extent that the Football League even complained of his failure to attend meetings. Indeed it all came to a head and from 1899 until ill-health once again struck in 1910 he was required to take full part. Coincidence or not, precisely the same period that McGregor expended the least time and energy on the Football League and Football Association was that of his club's greatest successes, not repeated since. Furthermore, it was the period too that saw the income of the club rise most steeply enabling it quite simply also to recruit and retain better players throughout the team and invest in facilities. The club moved into Villa Park in 1897, whilst McGregor himself might not himself have affected matters on the pitch but the money he was indirectly generating did. Better forwards meant more goals scored and better defenders, fewer conceded. In 1893 Villa had scored 73 goals, conceding 62 in finishing fourth, a ratio of just 1.2. In winning the league in 1894 it was 2.0, 84 against just half that number conceded. In 1896 and a second title the numbers were 78 netted, with 22 to Johnny Campbell, and 45 let in, a ratio of 1.7. Post-Campbell in 1897 it was 73, a 1.9 ratio and another championship but just 61 in 1898 and a finish off top spot. That was until the combined English talents of Fred Wheldon and then Jack Devey and others would again produce goals in winning two more titles both in front of and against tighter defences. 76 and 77 goals scored against 40 and just 35 in 1899 and 1900, 1.9 once more rising to 2.2.
So it was into the new century. In Scotland in 1904 R.C. Hamilton after injury in 1902, when Rangers goals ratio tumbled from 2.4 to 1.5, and 1903 when he was only second top-scorer, was back. In 1905 he was there too but this time sharing the accolade with Jimmy Quinn of league winners, Celtic. And it would be Quinn, who would for much of the rest of the decade take over the Hamilton mantle of almost a goal a game. Hamilton himself, now aged 32, would in 1906 score 9 goals to Quinn's 20 before in 1907 spending a year at Fulham, leading them with eleven goals to the Southern League title, election to the Football League, a date with Jimmy Hogan and footballing immortality, a return to Scotland, to Rangers once more, Morton, Hearts and Dundee and eventual retirement in 1913.
In 1907 also, Sandy Young would in England be the first Scot since Johnny Campbell to score more goals than anyone else. He did it for Everton once more, having arrived from Falkirk a half-a-dozen years earlier, from where another goal-scoring machine, Jock Simpson, would emerge the following year and, like so many from smaller, Scottish clubs, be sold on south. Yet Young's feat would not be enough to stop
Newcastle, a team of Scots, home-born and Diasporan, taking the league title for the third time in five years with a goals' ratio of just 1.6. However, if smaller, Scottish clubs struggled to retain talent, the largest Scottish clubs still managed to retain their players. Jimmy Quinn, all five feet eight and half inches of on-field ferocity stayed put as at Rangers did ex-Celt, Robert Campbell, and Willie Reid, whilst two names from the past, R. S. McColl and R.C. Hamilton, enjoyed their Indian Summers. In England the only other Scot to top the goal lists would be David Mclean. Coming from Forfar and having been as a youth at Celtic from 1907-09, with Quinn in place he moved on aged 19 to Preston North End and then Sheffield Wednesday, where in both 1912 and 1913 before the Great War engulfed the game, he was league top scorer but without winning the title. Indeed in career that would not just begin at Forfar but end there too in 1931 after almost twenty-five years at the age of forty he would score three hundred and twenty-five times in five hundred and eighty-four appearances. Make that five hundred and eighty-five including his one Scottish cap, at centre-forward against England, a 1-1 draw in front of 127,000 at Hampden.
After the Great War football understandably somewhat stuttered into life. In England less fashionable West Bromwich Albion took the 1920 Championship and Burnley the next, both with a goals-ratio of 2.2, substantially higher than any year since 1905. Momentarily English defenders had forgotten themselves. Meanwhile, in Scotland in both those same years it was the same team, Rangers, with ratios that were almost twice as high as in England. But in neither case, although the Ibrox club netted more times in total than any other, did it have the league top scorer. He was by a distance Hugh Ferguson of Motherwell, who would go on to take the top spot again in 1923, be in the top three in 1922 and 1924 but again never win a title.
In fact throughout the 1920s there was not a year, in which in Scotland the team with the highest league scorer would go on to take the top prize. On the face of it the pattern of the English league twenty-five years earlier was finally being replicated. In reality no such thing was happening. There was in Scotland a split, a second divergence. The leading scorer would for almost a decade come not just from Motherwell but also St. Mirren, Dundee, Cowdenbeath and Falkirk, clubs on one side of the divide where the old football, the pre-War approach, the Old-Style was preserved. However, none apart from Motherwell even finished in the top three. On the other side of the divide was a phenomenon. It was Bill Struth's Rangers with eight titles in ten and where star goal-grabbers were subsumed by the work ethic of a new approach and goals came from throughout the team. Celtic and Airdrieonians, meantime, were somewhere in-between. The Parkhead club would take the title twice. Its Jimmy McGrory would top the goal-scoring list, twice, but not in title years and when in both years Rangers would finish champions. Airdrieonians would be runners-up four times in row from 1923, thrice behind Rangers and once Celtic, the title eluding them in 1925 with the same number of wins as Rangers by just three points.
That there was preservation of the Old-style under such pressure by example from Rangers might seem surprising. In reality it is not. Firstly the Rangers' system did not come fully-formed. After Struth took the reins in 1920 there was initially some learning and early clearing out. Jack Smith, for example, went to Bolton and in 1922 there was a stutter as Celtic took the title. Secondly the jury would also have been out for a few years until it became obvious the Rangers' way was the way. Moreover, thirdly it also appears in those same years that, as had been the case pre-War with the larger Scottish teams, immediately post-War the smaller ones were able to retain players as English clubs stayed away. In part it was a result of something of an explosion of talent, an over-supply, perhaps pent up by the War, that fed both the home market and burgeoning soccer in America but it was also chimera. Post-War it took a few years for English league clubs to find their feet, perhaps more than anything financially. Only then did they begin to assess the new, Scottish scoring talent before calling they came. Hugh Ferguson would already be twenty-seven when he moved to Cardiff in 1925 as was Scottish top scorer in 1925 and 1926, Cowdenbeath's William Devlin, when he arrived at Huddersfield the following year. And once the first overtures had been made other and younger players quickly followed. It soon became clear that resistance was financially impossible. Other talent was systematically picked off, and rapidly. David Halliday, top scorer in 1924, went from Dundee to Sunderland, where he replaced Charlie Buchan, and Hughie Gallacher from Airdrieonians to Newcastle, both again in 1925, aged twenty-three and twenty-one respectively. Even Rangers joined in taking Gallacher's erstwhile Airdrie partner, Bob McPhail in 1927. Sandy Hair arrived at Preston from Partick in 1928. And they were joined by others who fed their goal-scoring. Alex Jackson had already arrived at Huddersfield from Aberdeen once more in 1925 and also Alex James from Raith at Preston. Jimmy Mullen again from Partick went to Manchester City in 1926 and there were others; Phil McCloy again to Manchester City from St. Mirren; George MacLachlan from Clyde to Cardiff once more .
All the imports without doubt enhanced English football. Their Old-style approach was incorporated into several of the most successful English teams of the next five years, adapted but ameliorative. They made possible the Wembley Wizards, itself an adaptation and amelioration, however, their transfers had subsidiary effects. They came too cheaply or rather the financial compensation received by the clubs failed to produce fresh talent. The Scottish League teams, from which they came, were weakened, and Rangers in particular but also Celtic strengthened in comparison. The footballing treasure chest, from which they came, as had been the case with the Leven Vale thirty years earlier, was emptied and not replenished, leading to the eventual extinction of the very style itself. Goal-scoring, having been progressively devalued in England for a quarter of a century, in Scotland now suffered that same devaluation and, if anything, it went further.
In England in the 1920s the leading scorer in the English Football League won a Championship medal just twice and in the same period only two Scots were amongst them. In 1922, before the post-War influx it was Andy Wilson, a twelve-time Scottish internationalist, recruited directly from junior football with Cambuslang by Middlesbrough but pre-Great War and, post-influx in 1929 it was David Halliday. Neither was in championship-winning sides. Then in the 1930s there would be not one Scottish, leading scorer. It would be the decade of highly-organised, five-title Arsenal and bludgeoning centre-forwards in the form of five foot ten inch Dixie Dean and Ted Drake and Tommy Lawton at five foot eleven. The style of play in England was robust and direct. The style of forward preferred was big, strong and good in the air to the exclusion of the smaller Scots. Alex Jackson had been at some say five feet eight inches others five feet ten the tallest of Wembley Wizard forwards. Hughie Gallacher was just five feet five inches. Celtic's Jimmy McGrory and Willie McFadyean were both again just five feet eight inches.
However, north of the border for the two decades between the Wars in not one single year did leading scorer earn a Championship medal, although, both times in the 1920s, a Cup medal was twice won. It was the era of Rangers, the winning New-Style was increasingly systematic and the maverick need not apply. There had been a first divergence in the 1890s stylistically across a border between Scottish and English football, then in the 1920s a second divergence, this time within Scotland itself between Scottish football Old- and New-Style. Scotland, the Scottish international side, had a choice; to ape or not. It would with Bob Campbell at the SFA at first chose the latter. The Wembley Wizards would be the result. Then its hand would be almost forced by the decision of the English clubs. There was no question of being able to draw from the full talent-pool. It was almost a repeat of the situation between 1893 and 1896 when Anglos were excluded from selection with this time no-one able, not even Celtic as then willing to finance the alternative, the pulling of star-players like Jackson, Gallacher and Cheyne, disgruntled at their English club, or even Alex James, back north of the border.
In fact the vacuum that resulted from the English clubs’ decision was short-lived; just eighteen months but it nevertheless proved fatal in two, perhaps three ways. James would be side-lined. Jackson and Cheyne would go to France. Flair was excluded at which point Bill Struth's philosophy might have become Scotland's. It would have been no bad thing. It was both successful and home-grown. However, it proved impossible. Perhaps it was politically simply not allowed to fill the void but system nevertheless did, not the Rangers system but an imported, generic one.
In other words beginning in 1931 or 1932 there would be a fundamental change in the Scottish game. A sixty year outward flow of footballing innovation that had begun intellectually at Partick in 1872, England adopting 2.2.6 the following year, and physically just four years later with J.J. Lang, would be reversed. In the feet and minds of him and all the others, professional and amateur, gentlemen and players and in-betweens, in kick-abouts, in Cups and leagues, that would follow it had been carried across borders world-wide but now would be imported. It was on the face of it the parting of the ways of Scotland and Scottish football itself. The end of flair might be symbolised in 1936 by the retirement of Alex Jackson not in Scotland or even Britain but in France. Even the Rangers’ system would in the end be overwhelmed, although that would take almost another thirty years.
However, football even on the field is three dimensional and this is not a linear but a triangular story with football in Scotland just one side. The two others are not Scottish but Scots, and to my mind lived and live on in tactical innovation and even the spirit of the game. As Scotland turned into its cul-de-sac, the game it had called its own with its subtlety, finesse, skill, cleverness and even footballing beauty had emigrated and settled elsewhere, building new, state-of-the-art homes most notably in terms of style in South America and tactically in Central Europe. The Magic Magyars were Scots in vitro as were the Brazilians and as are the Argentinians, Uruguayans and Chileans, even to an extent the Spanish, all of whom dominate football coaching world-wide. Intriguingly too, there is even the possibility of its preservation at least for a generation in England. In Scottish teams of the 1930s two names are notably not especially for what they would do at the time playing for club and country but in the memory they took with them later into management.
The two are Bill Shankly and Matt Busby. Both were men of their time, born four years apart; Busby in 1909 in Bellshill, the home-town of both Hughie Gallacher and Alex James, and Shankly another to see life in 1913 in a village, Glenbuck, another that is as if it had never been. It was built on a coal-field and engulfed by the same. Both would have their early footballing education before 1931, the last to do so. Shankly would be just eighteen, a right-half, about to turn professional. Busby by then would at inside-right or right-half, recruited directly from junior football, as Shankly would be too, by Manchester City and Peter Hodge. Hodge was ex. manager at Raith Rovers, a man steeped in Scots Old-Style with a managerial record at Maine Road only bettered with Arab money at the Etihad in recent times.
And it would be Busby, who would across the city with Manchester United take three English league titles in the 1950s, then in the 1960s share four in a row with Shankly's Liverpool. Both teams would draw heavily, United, with its attacking game, increasingly, on Scottish talent that, paralleling the post-Great War period, emerged briefly with the maturing of the Second World War generation, the likes of Law and Baxter, Crerand and Bremner.