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:
In the picture of the Lomas Athletic team that won the Argentinian league in 1893, the one shown above, there are three Leslies. In the centre suited and booted is Arnot, Arnot Jnr, the team manager. At his feet and two to his left are William and George, recently arrived back from school in Scotland. Arnot was twenty-two, William was eighteen, a full-back, born in 1875, and George fourteen, a forward, born in 1877.
All three had been born in Buenos Aires, sons of Arnot Snr born of Fife parents in The Gorbals in 1840, a tinsmith, who had arrived in Argentina in the mid-1860s, had there built a successful plumbing business and would retire in 1899 to Eastwood in Glasgow and a house called "Argentina". Arnot Jnr. would return with him but between 1893 and 1898 for five seasons in a row with him as manager and his brothers in his teams he would be the Alex Ferguson of his time, never losing an Argentine championship, at least with the league in its second iteration, the one that exists today.
Arnot Leslie Jnr, born in 1870/1, had in the first Argentine league been a playing member of the Old Caledonian team that had finished joint top with St. Andrew's, captained by
Alex Lamont, who was also the Secretary of the league from its inception in 1891 for a year and then again for another year, when it reformed in 1893. That was until 1894 and his departure to Brazil. Leslie and Lamont are said to have been close friends, even though St. Andrews had defeated Old Caledonians in a championship play-off, after which Leslie seems to hang up his boots. In fact he seems eventually to have turned his attention to another sport as well as to football management. The main man's golf trophy at the Mar del Plata Golf Club, Mar del Plata a coastal town south of Buenos Aires, was on its first playing in 1912 won by him and remains named after him.
It had been out of the first Argentine league and its abeyance after a year that the Lomas club had arisen. Buenos Aires's Presbyterian Church, then and today called St. Andrew's, around which the eponymous football team had been formed, was being required to move. In 1892 that process, which would physically take a couple of year, had begun and in the interim Lomas in no small part filled the gap not in the religious sense but in terms of a social club. From it emerged the Lomas Athletic football team and briefly educationally Lomas Academy, from which equally briefly before it closed its doors in 1895 emerged a second football team and of that same name, which Arnot Jnr also coached.
And during this period the league was not the only game in town. There were friendlies between select XIs, Allens, T. F. Allen of Lanus, versus Negronis, Andersons,
Juan Anderson
being Argentina's first football captain, including the Leslie brothers against the
Browns, and any other combination that could be thought up. For example, “England” played “Scotland-Ireland-Wales”, the latter winning 7-0 with a team that included almost all the best players of the era, McKechnie, Moore, the Leslie brothers once more, the Stirling brothers, William and Walter, Dunn, Buchanan, Murphy, Anderson and the oldest footballing Brown, Jorge. This, whilst at a junior level English High with four of the younger Brown brothers in the team played the Barker Memorial School, which effectively from 1897 replaced Lomas Academy and had two Dodds in its line-up, young relations of both the Dodds of St. Andrew's Church and the founder of Lomas.
However, in 1899 with the retirement of Arnot Snr to Glasgow and the return with him of his wife, Jessie, Arnot Jnr, Arnot's younger brother, Alexander and his sister, Grace, the seemingly unchallengeable Lomas run came to an abrupt end. The Arnot-less team would only finish third of four and would start to break up. In 1901 a select XI representing Argentina, the one captained by Anderson, played a similar one from Uruguay in an unofficial international and in 1902 the first official international took place. In the 1901 match, won 2-3 away in Montevideo, George Leslie, still with Lomas, played and scored the first of his team's goals. In the 1902 encounter it was William, now with neighbouring and rival club, Quilmes, who took the field in 6-0 win.
Nevertheless, 1900 had seen a slight improvement in Lomas's results. It finished second but with fewer than half the points of champions, English High School, and it was a false dawn. In 1901 it propped up the table and did so again in 1902 even though new team, Barracas, had joined. And it was also in 1902 that Arnot Leslie returned from Scotland. Now there is nothing to indicate that Arnot Leslie Jnr on his arrival back in Buenos Aires involved himself with football again yet Lomas did in 1903 recover somewhat, finishing mid-table and was safely there again in 1904, the year that not only did Alumni not top the league but that Quilmes, with William Leslie still in the team, would finish last.
1904 was also the year when in October Arnot Leslie Snr passed away at the family's Glasgow home in Monreith Road in Newlands, by
Cathcart. Arnot travelled immediately as did William in the summer of 1905. There were matters to be sorted and their mother was still living in the house. She would die there in 1910. And it was not until well into 1905, perhaps with the arrival of William, that Arnot was able to come back to Argentina. Meantime Lomas again had slipped to penultimate spot and looked again to be in trouble in spite of George no longer playing but for the year being the club's Honorary Secretary.
Then something remarkable happened. The league system was reorganised into two parallel First Divisions and coincident with Arnot's return the following season Lomas topped its half with Henry Lawrie one of the joint top-scorers. It looked, even though it would lose the play-off to Alumni, English High School by another name, as if it were back and as organised as it had been in 1902 and 1903 and even pre-1899. However, it was not to last. In 1907 it was 9th of eleven, in 1908 9th of ten and then it was gone. In 1909 it finished in last place, in the Competencia Cup was beaten 18-0 by Estudiantes, the largest margin of loss ever in a top-flight, Argentine game and gave up football, turning to rugby instead, the game it plays to this day.
Where Arnot Leslie was at the time of Lomas's footballing ignominy there is no indication, except that given his past record of record he seems unlikely to have been anywhere near a football field. Perhaps he was already on the golf-course. However, there was perhaps an explanation. In the meantime there had been a second footballing matter, on which his mark is possible and might even point to a reason for his non-participation, by choice or not, in the game, on which he had made such an impact. It is the Copa Lipton, the Lipton Cup, a trophy that would be played for off and on until 1992 but the origins of which are something of a mystery.
The Copa Lipton was first played for in 1905 and was from the beginning only to be competed for by Uruguayan and Argentinian national teams made up solely of players born in those countries. It had been paid for and bore the name of
Sir Thomas Lipton
but looked as if, although he was Britain's grocer, it had been organised specifically to exclude British players. Cathart-born
John Harley
was not eligible play for it for Uruguay. Buenos Aires-born George and William Leslie could have, had they been still active, for Argentina. The question is why the differentiation, the suggestion being that there was not just the known and growing animosity between English- and Spanish-speaking football authorities particularly in Buenos Aires but also some of the same between British-born footballers and their British-Diasporan equivalents, somewhat bizarrely expressed through a competition supported by a millionaire, Scots grocer six thousand miles away. It is this aspect and the relationship, the connections between the older Leslies, Lipton and indeed Alex Watson Hutton that I have explored more fully in
Lipton and the Leslies. Suffice it to say they were all Scots and specifically had lived within literally yards of each other in Glasgow and at much the same time.
But back to the Leslies themselves. In 1895 the four brothers, Arnot, George, William and Alexander, are living with their parents in Buenos Aires. George Leslie seems to be only one, of the boys at least, to marry and he did so twice. The first time was in 1902 to Isabel Dodds, the grand-daughter of James Dodds of St. Andrew's Church, who arrived in Argentina in 1844 from Scotland in a second wave of immigration, the daughter of one of the founders of Lomas, Thomas, indeed the club's first president. The ceremony actually took place at St. Andrews Church. Fife via Glasgow had married Berwickshire via Argentina's original Scottish colony, Chascomus, and was followed in 1903 by George with his new wife travelling to Scotland to see his parents, her new parents-in-law. And George and Isabel Dodds must have remained married until at least 1913. They travelled to Britain together that year but with no sign of children. Then she simply disappears. Perhaps she was a victim of the epidemic of Spanish flu that swept South America in 1918 and 1919 but whatever happened in 1923 George remarried. His second wife was Olive Gray, with whom he had three children, two girls and a son, Gordon. George Leslie died in 1934 in Buenos Aires, before which the family had returned on several occasions to the old country.
As to the other Leslies, of William there is no record after 1940, when he perhaps travelled alone to Britain and an address in Torquay, having also done a similar journey on a number of occasions before that date. The proviso is that there was just then and born at about the same time, 1880, another William Leslie in the city. We know too the non-footballing brother, Alexander, died in Buenos Aires in 1947. Which leaves Arnot Jnr. He was on the Mar del Plata links in 1912 and can last be seen travelling to the UK in 1931. He too seems never to have married and between those dates also travelled a number of additional times but after that nothing, although there is the possibility that he had moved to Montevideo and simply off the footballing radar or any other. It was as if, in modern terms, Alex Ferguson had simply called it a footballing day perhaps at 29, perhaps 36 and was never heard of again.