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:
- The question is why would an obviously gay Briton found and give his name to a cup, a trophy played for by Argentine and Uruguayan footballers. The trophy is the Copa Lipton, which in Glaswegian sounds like an invitation to brew up, aptly so, since to know tea is know Liptons. Now hard to find in Britain except in specialist favours but still ubiquitous abroad Liptons tea was once a premium brand at home. In fact, a hundred years ago Liptons was also perhaps Britain's premium grocery chain, named after its flamboyant founder, Thomas Lipton.
- That Thomas Lipton was a character is something of understatement. He had become immensely rich from his shops and his wholesale businesses, was a dapper socialite and was not overtly but clearly queer or even bi-sexual at a time when homosexuality was punishable by prison. He was also immensely affable but competitive and enjoyed sport. Having been a merchant seaman in his youth yachting was his real game. He owned a series of fabulous boats that would spend the winters in the Mediterranean and on five occasions between 1899 and 1930 funded unsuccessfully challenges for the America's Cup. And he was also canny. He was one of the first to use sponsorship of sports events and competitions to promote his brand. The America's Cups are one example and the Copa Lipton might have been another as he perhaps tried to enter the southern South American market. But there might have been another and parallel reason all to do with the fact that Thomas Lipton, Sir Thomas Lipton as he became in 1898, was Scottish, born in Glasgow in 1848, the youngest of five with all of the others dying in childhood or relatively young.
- Actually to say Lipton, Thomas Johnston or Johnstone Lipton, was Scottish is not entirely true. He was Scottish-born to Ulster-Scots parents, that is from Northern Ireland and Protestant, who had arrived in Glasgow in 1847, probably forced across the water by An Gorta Mor, The Great Hunger, the potato famine. Indeed he never forgot his Irish origins. His America's Cup challenges were through the Royal Ulster Yacht Club, his racing boats were Shamrock I to V and his own was named Erin.
- On arrival in Scotland Thomas's father, also Thomas, worked at a number of jobs perhaps perhaps whilst the family lived on the north side of the Clyde. Thomas Jnr went to school close to Glasgow Green. However, by the early 1860s the family was able to open a small grocers shop definitely on the south side in Crown St. in The Gorbals. In fact Thomas never initially worked there. On leaving school he also worked at a number of jobs until he signed up as a cabin boy on the packet between Glasgow and Belfast and from there in 1864 sailed to America, returning in 1869 aged twenty-one and with money in his pocket, only then beginning his grocery career.
- To start with he helped in his parent's shop, then in 1870 opened the first of his own Lipton's Market still in Glasgow but in Anderston at 101 Stobcross St.. It became the first of many, firstly in Scotland and then throughout Britain. And all the while he remained in Scotland, that is until his parents died, his mother in 1889, his father the following year, after which a move to London followed. And during that time he is said also to have had a thirty-four year relationship with one of his employees, William Love, and also fathered a child, not with William, of course.
- And that might have been it except for the footballing puzzle. It is fact that the "father" of Argentine football, Alex Watson Hutton, was born in 1853 in Eglington St. , Glasgow. It is also in The Gorbals just 400 yards from Crown St. and his parents were also grocers. True his parents would move to Edinburgh shortly after his birth but they been married in The Gorbals in 1850, and in 1851 Watson Hutton Snr was in Nicholson St, 500 yards from Crown St. , listed as a general agent, i.e. a shopkeeper so there might have been five, six or seven years when the two families overlapped, if not through business then socially, at church or similar. And then there was Arnot Leslie Snr, the patriarch of the Leslie footballing family in Argentina, with his eldest boy, Arnot Jnr, the Alex Ferguson of the early Buenos Aires game and two of his younger sons future Argentine internationals. He had been born in 1840 in Tradeston and in 1851 both he and his future wife, Janet Easdon, were also living in The Gorbals, she on Wallace St., his father a tailor, so possibly with a shop. Indeed, in 1861 in Tradeston on Bedford St., his father still a tailor. Moreover, in 1864 Leslie and his wife were married again in Tradeston. Bedford St. is 400 yards from Crown St, 100 yards from Eglington St. and Wallace St. runs from Eglington St. to Tradeston St. and beyond. And literally to crown it all Arnot Leslie Snr's father like Alex Watson Hutton's parents was a Fifer. That the Huttons, the Leslies and the Liptons could not have known or known of each other through work or socially in such a concentrated community is almost inconceivable.
- So where does that leave the Lipton Cup? In that regard there is yet more apparent coincidence. Arnot Leslie Snr retired with Janet to Glasgow from Buenos Aires in 1899 to a house they called Argentina. Arnot Leslie Jnr travelled with them. Who knows if the Liptons and Leslies re-established contact then but it is possible. Even if Lipton were in London he still had his stores in the old place. Getting a message through would have been easy. Then Arnot Jnr returned to Buenos Aires in 1903 but was back in Glasgow the following year on the death of his father, subsequently returning to Argentina in 1905, the year the Lipton Cup was first played for, continuing to be competed for, if irregularly, until 1992. So here is the crux of the matter. There are three questions. Why was the Lipton Cup created at all? How did the Lipton Cup, which itself was made in London, get to Buenos Aires, where it is part of the AFA's collection? And finally, why also was it stipulated that it could, firstly, only be played for by international teams representing Argentina and its neighbour and traditional rival, Uruguay, which, secondly, included only players born in the respective countries. It meant John Harley did not compete for it but the Leslies brothers could have, had they still been active? And there are no answers, just speculation. The trophy might have been pure commercial acumen, a promotional tool, but equally it could perhaps have been intended as a last and lasting memento of an old Lipton family friend, Arnot Leslie Snr, on his death, a souvenir of old Glasgow times and parted ways touchingly to be administered by the old friend's son? It would be nicer to think it was the latter even if the reality is there were elements of both the personal and the commercial. Thomas Lipton was well known for never missing a trick, the America's Cup attests to that. It's what made him very, very rich.