William Maxwell, William Sturrock Maxwell, was born in Arbroath in September 1875, not 1876 as reported elsewhere. And he was born sporty. As a young man he played both football and cricket for the town. Angus is one of  Scotland less than numerous hot-spots. Arbroath F.C. was founded in 1878 and has played at the wonderful Gayfield Park since 1880. It had been a rubbish tip when the club acquired the land, is Europe's closest ground to the sea and the coldest place on earth to watch a game, not least when the waves are crashing on the shingle beach that runs along it east side.

But the town is where Maxwell would learn his game and for the 1893-4 season would, as an almost eightteen year-old amateur and otherwise training to be a solicitor's clerk, first seriously ply what would soon become his living in one way or another for the rest of his life.  Something of an early Jamie Vardy he, as a young player, a forward, was  reliant on speed for his success that saw him also turn out briefly for Hearts and then for a season at Dundee. And it was there that he spotted by Stoke City goalkeeper, Bill Rowley, clearly on a scouting mission for the club. The result was that in the summer of 1895, and not quite twenty he moved south to the Potteries and a team that had just come through Test Matches to avoid relegation from the First Division. 

Having debuted and scored in the opening match for much of thee rest of the season he had to bide his time behind established Scottish internationals, Billy Dickson and Bryce Scoular, aka Tommy Hislop. But they both moved on, the former into retirement locally and the latter back to Scotland and Rangers. It left him at the beginning of the 1896-7 season as the club's leading attacking threat and he did not disappoint netting sixteen times 

And he would remain Stoke's leading scorer for the next four seasons with eleven, nineteen, eleven again and sixteen goals respectively, during  which time in 1898 he received his one Scottish cap, at centre-forward against England but unfortunately in a 1-3 defeat at Hampden Park. He would also taste defeat and by the same score the following year to Derby in the FA Cup semi-final and later that same year received a knee injury that would, as the club decided he was surplus, end his time in the Potteries after one hundred and fifty-three appearances and a goal almost every other game. It proved to be a mistake. For two seasons Stoke remained in the top flight by the skin of its teeth as meantime Maxwell returned north of the border.

But he did not go alone.  In the early summer of 1901 he had in Stone, still in Staffordshire just south of Stoke, married Mary Wetton. The ceremony had taken place at her local Christchurch, still there on the north corner of town's one-way system. Her family lived down the way between Crown St. and the canal at the Boatyard. The yard is still there too and her father was a canal inspector.    

In Glasgow Maxwell was able to recover his fitness and turn out for Third Lanark, finishing 1901-2 as the Scottish League's top scorer. That took him south once more the following season and to the English League champion, Sunderland but his stay was to be short and not hugely successful; just three goals in only seven games before  once more, he, they, were on the move. It was out of the Football League to Millwall, then still on the Isle of Dogs and on the face of it a step down but actually financially sensible. In 1898 football league clubs had imposed a maximum wage. The Southern  League, of which Millwall had been a founding member, had not. It meant that, whilst in 1895-6 two hundred and twenty-one Scots players had featured for the former and sixteen for the latter, a total of two hundred and thirty-seven, in 1903-4 the figures were 158 and 50 respectively, the Southern League total having increased three-fold.

Willie Maxwell would stay at two seasons, pay fifty four times and net an impressive thirty-four times, even in a team that struggled somewhat, and it again seems to have attracted the attention of league clubs, notably Second Division Bristol City. He  joined them in 1905, scored twenty-seven times in his first season and saw them promoted and nineteen times more in a 1906-7, failing to take the First Division title by three points, beaten only a what was then a Newcastle team at its peak.

Maxwell was by then almost thirty-two, clearly settled in Bristol and still keeping his connections with Stone. His and Mary's first child, Molly, had been born there in 1903 but the second daughter, Edna, and two boys, William and Kenneth that followed were born Bristolian.  And meantime in 1904 he had featured as an amateur in a single game of Minor Counties cricket for Staffordshire, whilst in the south-west he turned out at club level for Bedminster. Meanwhile as a professional footballer he played on a for one further season at Ashton Gate, which had previously been the home of Bedminster F.C., scoring twelve times as his team fell to tenth before retiring, if not quite hanging up his boots. 

Retirement seems to have lasted  a year before in 1909 he must somehow have received an offer to be player-trainer at Leopold F.C., a club not in Britain but Belgium and founded by in 1893 Brussels bourgeoisie. It is a club that still exists playing in Belgium's fourth tier but then it was in the country's First Division, finishing in tenth place. In fact Maxwell's probably season at the club seems to have made little difference except perhaps keeping it up. It again finished tenth in 1909-10, then ninth, relegated, promoted and relegated once more and this time definitively. However, in the meantime Maxwell seems to have remained in Brussels but was training not only another club, Daring of Molenbeek and from 1910 the Belgium national team.  

Daring would take the Belgium championship in 1912, be runners-up in 1913 and take it again in 1914. Belgium would before The Great War would play twenty-seven times including two tours to England, thirteen wins, three draws, at which point Maxwell returned home. But he would re-cross the channel once more by 1920, when, although the Belgian national squad was at that year's home Olympics in Antwerp officially under the charge the military aristocrat, Raoul Dufresne de la Chevalerie, he would in reality be the driving seat. It was a  squad that included two Leopold players and two more from Daring that would reach the final. One of them would even play in that final and what a match it was, the Battle of the Scots.

The opposition that day was Czechoslovakia, effectively Prague with twelve squad members from Sparta, coached by Eaglesham's John Dick, recently of Airdrieonians and Woolwich Arsenal, two from Slavia and five from the two Zizkov teams, Viktoria and Union. And, although officially in the charge of Josef Fanta the team was actually under the direction of Jake Madden, ex. of his home town club, Dumbarton, and Celtic amongst others. Moreover neither side saw half-time. The game was abandoned in the thirty-ninth minute when after a Madden's men marched after a later disputed penalty was awarded to the home team for hand-ball, then an also disputed goal followed and the Viktoria Ziskov player, Steiner, was sent off, having been accused of hitting the penalty-scorer. But there was more to the events that meets the eye. The accusation was that the referee was not unbiased and there was also doubts casts on one of the linemen, possibly not helped, at least in Madden's mind, by all the officials being English, the linesman in question being his mid-fifties and the man with the whistle, John Lewis, sixty-five.

But no matter what the circumstances Willie Maxwell still came away with his effectively the best national team in the World and Belgian football well and truly on that glabal map. The first World Cup would not take place for a decade. And he was on the basis of it, qualification for the next Olympics in Paris four years later  and beyond, eleven wins but a run of defeats to the 1928 Games, which saw him replaced by the Prague-born, Austrian international, Victor Loewenfeld.

Nevertheless Maxwell stayed in Belgium, becoming coach at KV Mechelen and in 1931 taking the team to second place in the top-flight, second place behind Antwerp coached by Loewenfeld. And he remained there until 1938, at largely mid-table Mechelen for nine years and final season at Cercle Brugge. It had also been a top-flight club until relegation in 1936 and then a year in limbo before he took over and  promotion was achieved within the year and status retained until the outbreak of World War II.

In meantime Maxwell clearly returned to Britain but not to Scotland or Stone but Bristol. The family home remained there, Mollie with her mother in 1939 and dying there in 1998, Edna marrying in 1938 and dying there too in 2001, William marrying in 1932, his father listed as football coach, and dying in Clevedon in 1988 and finally Kenneth, marrying in 1947 and dying still there in 1986. And it was in Bristol too, although they are buried in Stone, that both Willie Maxwell and Mary would end their days. Hers was in 1957.  His, reported elsewhere as in Kirkcaldy on 14th July 1940, so comparatively soon after Bruges, and at the age of not quite sixty-five, was actually on that date but some three hundred and eighty miles south, a football wanderer to his last.