McAndrew - shipping & football, Barcelona, Seville, Sevilla & Betis
In 1770 an eighteen year-old, William McAndrew, left Elgin for London, there to found his shipping line that would specialise in fast schooners carrying fresh fruit from Spain. That business was then kept in the family, his sons going on to divide operations between the Thames and the Mersey, but with the London operation drawing still on wider family from the Moray Firth. Steamers were introduced in 1853. By 1900 twenty-three ships were under Spanish-flag, seven under British, thirty in all. By then British and exporting subsidiaries and further shipping companies had also been established and family members, Scots and England-based Diasporans, were sent South and out to the Iberian Peninsula to oversee operations. And to the latter in particular also went the game acquired in the meantime and notably by Scots, Association football.
Earliest amongst those expatriates was to Southern Spain and in the person of Edward Farquharson Johnston, who with the following background story would be that country's fiirst officially recognised referee. In 1897 Alexander Johnston had founded a wool-mill on the banks of the River Lossie in Elgin, a business taken on by his son James and in time his elder grandson, Charles. But there was a second grand-son, Edward, who would join the maternal family-connected McAndrew Shipping Line and be posted to Seville.
And in that Andalucian city, where he would stay for over thirty years, in 1879 becoming in 1879 at twenty-five British Vice-Consul, whilst on the later foundation of its British Club be its first President. Moreover it would be in 1890 from the British Club, notably after a Burn's Supper so from Scots, that Seville Foot-ball Club but not as claimed the current Seville F.C. was founded, with Johnston, a well-known sportsman but by then aged thirty-five, again its titular head.
Seville Foot-Ball Club's first game, Spain's first officially recognised one, was to take place in March that same year, the result a home win, 2-0, reversed away three weeks later, and the opposition none other than what today is Spain's oldest club, Recreativo de Huelva. Seville captain that day would Glaswegian, Hugh MacColl. And the referee, note not yet the man in the middle but until 1891 the arbitrator still in the stand, was Farquharson Johnston. And he would continue in the role for some years to come. He is known to have been by then and now literally the man-in-the-middle as late as 1909 at the age of fifty-five.
Edward Farquharson Johnston would return to the UK at about that same time, but now to live in London. And it would be there at his home in Chelsea he would, a considerably wealthy man, die aged sixty-nine in 1924. But on his passing his body would be carried by train north back to Scotland, to Elgin to be buried there in the town cemetery.
However the Andalucian MacAndrew presence seems to have persisted. Seville Foot-Ball Club had been the city's first, Sevilla F.C., actually founded in 1905, became its second and Real Betis, in full Real Betis Balompie (Ball-Foot|) its third. It was a formed in two parts, Espana Balompie and Betis Foot-Ball Club, named for the Latin for the river, now known as the Guadalquivir, that flows through the provincial capital, and three stages, in 1907, 1909 and a merger in 1914. And its Scottish or rather Scots-Irish links started early and continue. The colours of the Andalucian flag are green and white. It is said a founder, captain and coach of the club had studied in Scotland and had come in contact with Celtic, previously playing not in hoops but green and white stripes. Betis play in green and white stripes, indeed switching from plain blue and white. Furthermore, amongst the players of the original Betis there was a tall, lanky man, said to be Alex Miller, a Scot and nephew, also employed by MacAndrew, of Edward Farquharson Johnston.
And between Edward Farquharson Johnston and Alex Miller there had been a far more obvious manifestation of the shipping company's footballing influence, this time in Catalonia and in Barcelona, a known member of one of the teams to have taken part what it said to have been the city's first ever match.
William MacAndrew, no "s", seems to have been a fourth-generation member of the eponymous shipping firm. He had been born in Hull in 1852, the son of Alexander MacAndrew, again from Elgin and a Steamboat Engineer, and by 1871 himself a Ship Owners Clerk, one who by 1881 was in the same job but living in Hackney, London. And in 1901 he was in the south once more but in Eastbourne and a Ship Agent before by 1911 being back to London, now as a Shipowner on Cavendish Square, four years before dying at the age of sixty-three back on the Sussex coast and a very wealthy man. Yet in 1891 he is nowhere to be seen. Nor is his wife of nine years as maybe Barcelona was their temporary home.
