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:
It was 25th 1950. The place was the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Officially almost 30,000 were looking on as the two captains came together for the hand-shake and toss. Unofficially there might have been as many as 20,000 more. It was the first game of Group 2 of the World Cup. In fact it was England's first ever World Cup game. On one side of the Dutch referee stood Billy Wright, the English captain. On the other was the captain of Chile. He was a Scot, or partly so at least. His name was Livingstone, Sergio Livingstone, many say Chile's best ever goalkeeper, some South America's best ever, who was to go on to play a total of fifty-two times for his country in a thirteen year international career. On retirement in 1958 Sergio Livingstone would become one of his country's best-known sports journalists, a second career that would take him from newspapers to television anchoring and punditry, as the country's much-loved, foremost commentator with Chile's state broadcaster, TVN. When he died in 1912 at the age of ninety-two he would be given what was almost a state funeral.
So back to the Maracana. On that day in 1950 England would win 2-0 with goals either side of half-time, one by Mortensen, the second from Manion. Alf Ramsey was at right-back. Stanley Matthews was on the bench, as was Bill Nicholson. It was four days before another match that also involved a Scot and would see England fail to qualify from the topsy-turvy group. In a final game of three it would lose to Spain, the group winners, and having already met disaster. Four days after the Chile game England would lose to the United States, a team captained by Greenock-born, Ed McIlvenny. And to add to the confusion Chile would then hammer the USA 5-2 with both McIlvenny and Livingstone again on the field.
Sergio had been born in 1920 in Santiago in Chile, the son of Juan Enrique, which translates as John Henry. John Livingstone had also been a noted player. In the first decade of the 20th Century, football's formative years in the South American country, he had been on the left-wing for Santiago Nacional. In 1909 he had turned out for the Universidad Catolica in the country's first inter-university game against the Universidad de Chile. He was studying architecture at the former. He then turned to his other sporting love, boxing, as a promoter and referee, and to football refereeing. He was a Chilean official at the 1917 South American Championships in Montevideo, refereeing in front of 40,000 the final game, in which Uruguay defeated Argentina 1-0 to take the trophy, and said again to have been the Chilean official at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. However, there he seems not have taken part in any games either as referee or linesman. And he would also be involved in organising horse-racing meetings and in journalism, working as a writer, editor and newspaper publisher.
It was quite a career for a man, who is said to have had a difficult start in life. Juan Livingstone, according to his birth certificate, was born in 1889 in the town of Los Andes, a little to the north of Santiago. His mother was Ana or Anna Eves, aged twenty-four, living in Chile but described as English. His father was also Juan (John) Livingstone with no age given but also described on that same birth certificate as “ingles”. However, it could have been a typical example of South American bureaucracy not understanding the difference between English, British and certainly Scots or even between British, American or Canadian. Two of the Santiago
Ramsay brothers' birth certificates state that both parents were born in Scotland and then call them English. In the case of Juan Livingstone Senior it may well have been a similar type of misunderstanding.
And then there is family history by word-of-mouth directly from Sergio Jnr and Mario, son and nephew respectively of Sergio, and very much alive and well, still living the capital city with a pride in their Scottish origins and stories to tell. Livingstone is a name not without status in Scotland. The name of David Livingstone has a certain reputation and there was a thought by the Chilean Livingstones that there might be a connection between them and the explorer. It is feasible, although the evidence is circumstantial and impossible to prove but still worth exploration.
The explorer, David Livingstone, had an elder brother named John. He emigrated to Canada, where in 1847 and 1852 he had Henry and John, the second and third of his five sons. The names Henry and John were in the family. Henry Livingstone moved from Canada to California in 1876. There he had two boys, also Henry and John, born in 1884 and 1896, so too young to father Juan Enrique. The other son, the middle John, however, remained in Canada, married in Ontario in the mid-1870s and died there in 1940. He had three children, two shortly after his marriage and a third after an interval of nine years. He is recorded in the Canadian census of 1881 and again of 1901 but not in 1891, a gap suggesting he may have worked away for considerable periods, with Chile perhaps an option. For a moment it seems it might be him. However, he was a "Druggist", a pharmacist, not a mobile profession and in any case he was also to be found, still in Canada, still a druggist, still in the same town but under the name of Levingstone. It makes the explorer connection extremely unlikely.
Meanwhile, shortly after his birth the Juan Enrique story takes a turn for the very complicated. His father was said to be working in Chile on the railways, so not as a pharmacist, and to have done so also in America and Argentina. He is then said to have left the country for California soon after his son's birth. He might have had a reason, his contract perhaps at an end, but the suggestion has been he was effectively abandoning his son and the baby's mother. She then is reported to have died young. Quite when and where is unclear. But it seemed a very young Juan Enrique, perhaps even still a baby, might have found himself effectively orphaned and then is said to have been taken into some sort of care in the northern Chilean mining town of Iquique, where there were certainly Livingstones. However, again there are problems with this version not least before Juan Enrique's birth and his mother's apparent death there is no other specific record of her.
However, that is not to say there were not Eves . There was an Adelina Eves in Santiago in December 1887, aged 21 so born in 1865-6 at about the same time Ana Eves is said to have been and Adelina was English, the daughter of Henry Eves and Betsy "Silby". Moreover a decade later in 1897 she, as Adelina Eves "Selly", a thirty-one year-old widow so married in the interim, would wed a Chilean, Benjamin Howard, still in Santiago. And they would have three children, two daughters and a son in short order. Furthermore, in the meantime there had been the death of cholera in 1887 of Thomas Hill, English-born and married to an Adelina Eves. The death explains why she had been widowed and provides coherence, in spite of slight distortion of her name. Adelina Eves had in 1897 wed Thomas Hill and lost him almost immediately. She had then a decade later re-married to Benjamin Howard and with him had a family.
Moreover, there was also a wedding, again in Santiago, in March 1889 and another death in November that same year. The bride was with another slight name variation Georgina or Georgiana Ana Eves "Selbey". Aged twenty-four and single, her father was once more Henry Eves and mother, Isabel "Betsy" Selbey, aka "Selby", "Silby", "Selly". She was Adelina Eves Selby's younger sister. And this time the groom, also single, was a twenty-seven year-old Scot, Juan Livingstone Pringle, a name which in Scotland would be written John Pringle Livingstone. The coincidence of the Livingstone name is obvious. The possibility of Georgina Ana being known simply as Ana is equally so. And there are other explanations resulting. Firstly, the reason for the wedding is clear. With Juan Enrique born in June 1889 she was already six-months pregnant on her wedding day. Secondly, Juan Enrique, if Georgina was Ana, was born to a wedded mother. The marriage certificate say so. And, thirdly, there is a possible clarification of his name. He was called John after his father and Henry after granddad Eves. What it does not explain is why the birth took place in Los Andes not Santiago and why his father was absent. But once more there are explanations. His work almost certainly took him elsewhere and Los Andes was a more discreet place to have a borth that socially was more than slightly early.
And so to the death. It took place not in Santiago or Los Andes but in Valparaiso, in the English Hospital there. The cause was a virus, the one who succumbed was "English" and married and his name was John Livingstone. If he were Juan Enrique's father he had not quit the country, to California or elsewhere, as alleged but eight months after his wedding and just five months after the birth of his son had involuntarily and unexpectedly quit this World.
So who was John Pringle Livingstone? From the wedding documents we not only know Georgina's parents but also the groom's. They are named as Peter and Cristina. They were not hard to find. A Peter Livingston, not Livingstone, and Christina Pringle married in Inverkeithing in 1860. They were Fifers, he a General Merchant born in Dunfermline, she in North Queensferry. Their eldest son, John, was born in 1862, making him exactly the right age, twenty-seven, in 1889. A sister, Christina, had been born a year earlier, 1861. A second son, William, followed two years later, 1864, and then Margaret and Jessie again at two year intervals, in 1886 and 1888. In 1871 Christina Snr was still married, still in Inverkeithing and a grocer but Peter was not there. Yet a decade later still they were gone from Fife, living in Edinburgh, John still there but again no Peter. Moreover, although where she was in 1891 is unknown, in 1901 Christina Snr. was back in Fife in North Queensferry, where she had been born.
Thus it was that Ana Eves seems to have been a widow at twenty-five. So it seems too was her alter ego, Georgina, because recorded again as Georgina Ana Selby in December 1890, a year and a month after John Livingstone's death, she marries once more, aged twenty-six and back in Santiago, and to another Scot, possibly of Irish descent. His name was James Dean. However, again it does not last, at least if Ana and Georgina are the same, for a decade later Ana remarries once more in 1901, now thirty-five, still in Santiago and once more identified as a widow. It is to John Macdonald, a third Scot it seems and in 1910 they have daughter, who will die in infancy, Ana herself dying in Santiago in 1933 aged 67. And Juan Enrique instead of growing up in Iquique might have been in Santiago all along.
Whatever the truth of Juan Enrique's birth and upbringing he emerged as a gifted young man, physically and intellectually. Indeed it may have been in part for his physical talents, as a boxer, athlete and footballer that two decades later he received a scholarship to study in Santiago. He marries there in 1918 and had two boys, the younger of whom was Sergio.
Nicknamed “El Sapo”, “The Toad” because of his goalkeeping stance, not particularly tall but agile, Sergio Livingstone would sign for Union Espanola aged just fifteen and make his senior début in 1938 as an amateur for Universidad Catolica, his father's old university. From 1943 he played in Argentina for a year, on marrying returning to Universidad Catolica until 1956, taking the national league title in 1949 and 1954, go on loan to Colo-Colo in 1957 and finish his career again with the university team in 1959. Between 1941 and 1954 he would make his 52 appearances for Chile, including again from 1941 six South American Championships and the 1950 World Cup. His father would live to witness most of his famous son's exploits. He would after a full life die in his South American homeland in his mid-sixties in 1955 providing a Diasporan link from the arrival there of a Scots passion for the game in the year he was born through the 20th Century and via his son well into the 21st.