It is an interesting way of categorising a man, indeed a person, as "he or she was raised as a Scot". But in this story that is precisely how one of the protagonists is cast, whereas another who married a Scot, who died in Edinburgh and is buried in Scotland and was of proven Scottish origin is always referred to as an Englishman. But, in truth, that is an aside, a particular grate I have, when in any case the story is strange enough without it. It brings together in Manchester the sons of a "preacher-man", to quote the song, and a joiner, who as a widower struggled through The Great Depression, one born in Yorkshire and the other, as it is  quaintly put, in the "British Raj". Which part will become clear soon enough.  But that is only one part of the story, perhaps no more than a quarter of a story that weaves together Glasgow and Gunga Pur, Elgin, Kirkcaldy, Stirling, Leeds, Leith, Lochgelly and Leicester, Manchester and Middlesbrough, Banffshire and Burnley, Bolton and Budapest, Middlesbrough with a dash thrown in of Tyneside and Sunderland, Edinburgh, Paisley and Wembley.

At some point between October 1864 and March 1865 it seems a mason cum bricklayer and his new bride, Jane, moved from Glasgow, perhaps Springburn, to by Hebburn in Co. Durham.  Certainly they were there in 1871 by then with sons, John, Donald and William, all  of them Durham-born. And in 1881  they were there still now with in addition Neil, Maggie, Grace, David and a little Jane, in 1891 too with John having left home, and again in 1901 with all but Maggie gone, the head of the house now a chemical engineer on the third iteration of his surname and with a domestic servant in the household. He had begun in Scotland as Reevie, had been Reavis and was now Revie, Donald Revie.

Meanwhile, in Leith in Edinburgh in 1871 a son, Peter, named after his grandfather, would be born to  William and Helen Hodge, he from Dunfermline and she from Elgin. They would have two more sons and a daughter, the youngest two born back in Dunfermline. Indeed Helen Hodge would die there  in 1888 aged 39, William remarrying in 1891 and having five more children, and it was there too that Peter Hodge grew up just as the game of football grabbed the Scottish psyche.  By 1890 he was  playing for a local youth team in that same year, aged eighteen or nineteen, became Secretary of  Dunfermline Athletic, taking them as more than just an administrator to the 1897of the Scottish Junior Cup, and became a referee, officiating at Scottish league games for decade. In 1906 he was made Honorary Secretary of Dunfermline and the following year was appointed Secretary of Kirkcaldy's Raith Rovers, succeeding in getting the club elected to the Scottish First Division in 1910.

However, he was ousted in 1912 and it was not until 1914 that he was attracted not to another Scottish club but south of the border to Stoke City, taking at the end of the season the Southern League Division Two and seeing Stoke elected to the Football League.  Then came the Great War. He returned north and to Raith, spent the war years there but at the end of hostilities was drawn south once more, but this time to Leicester, replaced in Kirkcaldy by Jimmy Logan, who by the end of the 1921-22 season would take the club to third place in the Scottish First Division, the best achieved before or since.  In doing so and in finishing fourth two seasons later he would build not just one but two teams. In the second would be a certain Alex James, in the former the Duncan brothers, Johnny and the younger Tommy, with , it is said, the three playing alongside each briefly. It seems unlikely. James made his Raith debut in September 1922. Johnny Duncan played his first game in the English league on 26th August and Tommy on 4th September with presumably time for them all to bed-in at their respective clubs some three hundred and forty miles apart. In fact James was , if anything, a left-footed replacement for right-footed Raith Johnny Duncan, the services of whom with his brother's none other than Peter Hodge of Leicester had looked to his old club to buy. Hodge was intent on imbedding at Filbert St. the Scottish passing style that he knew like so many of his Scots contemporaries and saw the Duncans, as the fulcrum of a plan that not only succeeded, particularly through Johnny, and some might argue has never gone away. In 1922 the club had finished ninth in the English Second Division. In 1923 it was third. In 1925 it was promoted and in 1926 seventeen in the First Division as Hodge moved on but Duncan stayed. In 1927 now under the managerial guidance of ex-Celtic , Willie Orr, with Duncan, J., captain it was seventh, in 1928 third and in 1929 runners-up when the following was said about him and his team.

"The best football team have been Leicester City, who have approached nearer to the pre-war (Great War) standard than any other in individuality and constructive cleverness. I attribute this largely to the influence of their Scottish captain, John Duncan, who has insisted that the way to success was by expert use of the ball than by helter-skelter methods."

"Tokey" Duncan retired from the game in 1930. In fact he had agued with the club over, essentially, money.  Leicester had slipped to eighth and by then he was thirty-four. Yet the following season the team without him were nineteenth and there or thereabouts they stayed, this in spite of the return of Peter Hodge for two seasons until the disaster of his sudden death in the summer of 1934. And finally in 1935 Leicester was relegated.   

Between his two stints at Leicester Peter Hodge had spent the six years at Manchester City. Within two seasons of arrival and as he had done with Leicester his new club was again promoted to the First Division and in 1929 finished below his former club but still a credible eighth in the top flight.  And the following year it was third. But perhaps the action, for which the Hodge tenure of Manchester is best remembered is the signing, again from Scotland but this time the junior game, of a certain Matt Busby. 

 However, let us back-track just for an instant to the aforementioned Donald Revie. He would die in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1916 at which point the spotlight now falls on his second son, John. He would marry  Elizabeth Place, a girl from a small village near Durham, they would  have three children, Donald, also after the grandfather, Jane and George, still in Hebburn then move to Stockton-on-Tees and there have six more, John, Grace, Margaret, Laura, Norman and little Elizabeth. Elizabeth, mother that is, would die in 1941 in Durham with the place and date of John's death remaining unknown but by then our attention had moved on to their eldest son. In 1921 in Middlesbrough he, Donald, married locally-born Margaret Haston. They wed late, both in their early thirties, and he on his death in 1961 would outlive her by twenty-two years. Yet together they had three children, the eldest of whom would also be called Donald, in fact Donald George, born in 1927 in Middlesbrough, when it was still Yorkshire and at eighteen and the end of World War II show early promise as a footballer.

Post-World War II league football on both sides of the border would stutter into life once more. Matt Busby would be appointed a manager in Manchester, not City but United, of course,  and Leicester turned to Johnny Duncan.  Busby arrived seemingly without an obvious footballing philosophy, whether from his time as a player at City or Liverpool. Duncan came still with an approach still based on Hodge. Both would do well enough, if in different divisions. In addition United would take the FA Cup in 1948, defeating Blackpool, whilst  Leicester would from the Second Division lose the same final the following year to Wolverhampton Wanderers but without a key-player, the club's promising but still young inside- cum centre-forward. However, it was perhaps that defeat and a low finishing position in the league that lead to friction. Said to be over transfer policy, he saying he didn't believe in close season deals, as he couldn't judge a player's current form, it resulted in the sack, the Board taking temporary control and the almost immediate departure of that same forward, who would later write.

 "Until you have heard Johnny Duncan talk about Soccer then your Football Education is sadly lacking."

It was in that same year, 1949, that Wrexham recruited a player/manager. In the season that followed he played his last league games, saw the club drop eleven places in the division just avoiding re-election yet with clearly little experience and no sign of success as recruited by the team he had left only twelve months earlier, notionally two divisions above the Welsh club but about to be relegated from the top flight. 

As an appointment it seems bold in the extreme, almost random. It was undoubtedly unexpected, following the sudden death of former manager, the manager who replaced Peter Hodge, and club secretary, Wilf Wild. But it worked. Five new players were brought in, seven left and the club, Manchester City, was promoted straight back at the end of the first season.  In fact it was to give a further dozen years at the Maine Road helm for the man from Gunga Pur. That man was Leslie McDowall.

It is measure of something underlying within the English psyche that Les McDowall is often shown with the Indian flag beside his name but Raheem Sterling, born in Kingston, is not Jamaican. In football, like life in general, what you are is a result of choices made, personally and by others. Sterling was brought by his mother to London, aged five, and it was there he learned his football. Les McDowall was brought, aged six, by his parents, who settled in the Paisley/Johnstone area, and it was with that accent that he spoke and there too that he learned the game, the Scottish game but with a twist perhaps as a result of his part Anglo-Indian background. His father was the Reverend John McDowall, born probably in 1873 in Paisley itself the son of William McDowall, a "warp dresser" and Elizabeth Sinclair. He entered the church and was sent as a missionary to India. There, in Madras, he met and married Grace Tremenheere, part of an extensive Anglo-Indian family and their first child, a son, named William, was born in 1905. 

It can then be seen that the family clearly returned to the UK some five years later because in 1911 John and Grace plus William, Margaret Maud, Arthur and the infant Ewart, all listed as Scots, sailed for Colombo in Sri Lanka. They must have returned to India, probably for the duration of the war, as in 1919 with their parents Margaret Maude, Ewart and now Leslie, Sydney and a little Grace can be seen arriving in London, seemingly to stay. Both John and Grace would die in 1958 and be buried in Paisley's Hawkhead cemetery.  Meanwhile, Leslie McDowall had clearly been taken up with football but, surprisingly, not with Johnstone or St. Mirren. He was involved in the foundation of Glentyan Thistle F.C., Glentyan an estate by Kilbarchan by Paisley, the club in its present iteration also based in Kilbarchan., this whilst working as a ship-yard draughtsman. And it was from Glentyan that in 1934 at the age of twenty-one he, a wing-half cum centre-half, was signed by Sunderland, managed by Johnny Cochrane, Paisley-born, once a Johnstone player, club secretary and manager and ex-manager of St. Mirren, who clearly still knew his home scene.    

In fact in three seasons Les McDowall was to make just thirteen league appearances for the Wearsiders. It was a first team with five Scots in it, including the entire, experienced half-back line, for which he was young cover. It was only in 1937 at the age of twenty-four that he moved, not just from a team that had been league champions a season earlier and had just won the FA Cup but nevertheless marginally upwards to one that had just topped the league and finally into the first eleven. With the war years included between his arrival and the  1948-49 season and the Wrexham sojourn, by when he was thirty-seven so hardly first team, he would notch up a steady 120 appearances.   

Les McDowall today has something of a reputation as a maverick, managerial innovator but in truth his early years in the role show little or no sign. In fact the early 1950s in footballing terms might best be described as stodgy with perhaps two sources of a little light. The first was the topping by Spurs of the league in 1951 and second place the following season with Arthur Rowe's push-and-run style, which he owed to the ball-using, training-techniques of the manager, who pre-war had brought him through at Tottenham and to whom Arsenal owe much more than ever seem to be willing to admit, Peter McWilliam.  The second was the runner-up in the league that year and the winner the next, the first Matt Busby team. And in truth when Manchester City achieved promotion it was with little impact. In 1952 it was fifteenth and in 1953 twentieth and only s single place from going down once more.  

Jock

But of course on 25th November 1953 things changed. Hungary came to Wembley and English football, Scots contribution included, was forced to take a good look at itself.  For some it was cursory. For others deeper. And the Scottish game was not immune. Jock Stein was at that Wembley game and no doubt he was at Hampden the following year when the Magic Magyars came and did almost precisely the same to Scotland and in 1955 repeated it in Budapest. And at Manchester City McDowall reacted.  In 1951 he had recruited a certain inside-forward cum centre-forward from Hull and now he set about remoulding him and the team around him.

If that inside/centre-forward had weaknesses they were pace and, perhaps surprisingly given what would come, a lack of robustness. His strengths were his passing ability and his movement. In fact Donald Revie, Donald Revie the third to be exact, now married to the niece of none other than Johnny Duncan and with a young family, including a son born in 1954 and named Duncan, might, have he been his grandfather, have been a strong candidate for Scottish, attacking centre-half. And it was perhaps this and something else that Les McDowall saw in him, the something else being R.C. Hamilton, Robert Cumming Hamilton, the Scots blueprint for Hungary's deep-lying centre- cum inside forward, Hidegkuti.   

Although Hamilton and Hidegkuti never met as far as we know, the connection between them clear. It is Jimmy Hogan, the Irish Englishman, who began to coach in Europe through his Bolton connections and finished his footballing education at Fulham as inside-forward to Hamilton's deep-lying centre-forward. In fact the Hungarians were openly at pains to acknowledge Hogan as their guru but Budapest was the end of a chain that took in first Holland, then Switzerland and Austria, from where with Hogan's input had emerged the first Hamilton footballing lookalike, Sindelar.  He had impressed in his games against Scotland in 1931 and England the following year but his impact then was nothing in comparison with 1953, 1954 and 1955.  Nor had it prompted imitation in the way it resulted from the four, some might say, debacles, but what were ultimately wake-up calls not least under one of the very few managers in the British game willing to give it a shot.    

As to whether it was actually the November '53 Wembley, 3-6 game that was ultimately the tipping-point, it is difficult to tell. In fact there is a good argument that it was actually the 7-1 return fixture in Budapest in May 1954, following almost immediately on form a 2-4 English victory at Hampden. But legend has it the Manchester change was first implemented on 24th August that year.  It was an away game at Preston, where wing-backs were employed as was a deep-lying forward between two strikers and in front of the "mid-field". The latter was not in itself revolutionary. Arsenal had done much the same twenty year earlier with Alex James and that had been modelled by Herbert Chapman from thirty years earlier still at Tottenham Hotspur with Chapman himself playing alongside its instigator, John Cameron.  The wing-backs were however new. And the result was a 5-0 defeat.

In fact its is very clear that McDowall's innovation worked more often than not but on several occasions failed badly. There was a learning process with one player entrusted with the new role. That player was Donald George Revie. It would in 1954-55. earn him six England caps as the national team tried the same tactic but fundamentally McDowell was not happy. Indeed by the end of that first season when Manchester City finished seventh he had looked north of the border and from Hibernian n March 1955 brought in Bobby Johnstone,  described as the brains of the Edinburgh club's Famous Five forward-line, putting him straight into the first team. He played at 10 in losing the Cup Final that year. Revie wore the Number 9 shirt but, it is said, only because a late injury to another player . Then the following year he was number to 7 to Revie still at number 9. And then Revie was gone.

He had fallen out with McDowall. The reason stemmed from the Cup Final itself. Revie was Man of the Match. He had provided the pass for Hayes to score in the third minute and Manchester to take the lead. But Birmingham had equalised twelves minute later through their inside-right and there were clearly problems down Manchester's left. It is then said that Revie, shall we say, "offered" Ken Barnes, left half an on-field solution, which Barnes took on board and the Maine Road team won the game and trophy 3-1. The only problem was that Revie had not discussed the change with the manager and McDowall was less than pleased. It is said as a result Revie the follow season was moved to right-half, took umbrage and he and club, i.e. McDowall, parted by 'mutual consent'.

However, there are two problems with this story. The first is that Don Revie was by then in his thirtieth year, had never been the fastest but was a canny player. A move to right-half might therefore have been the perfect. And there he was replacing Roy Paul, the thirty-six year-old team captain for the previous seven years, who would retire from league football at the end of the season. In fact the move to wing-back looks in retrospect more like promotion than slight with Revie more at fault than not..

Nevertheless Paul's aging and Revie's departure took its toll. Manchester City tumbled to eighteenth place but nevertheless recovered as Johnstone bedded in and stepped up. However in the process the Hidegkuti experiment was largely abandoned. Instead Johnstone resumed a more conventional role until on reaching thirty he too moved on, returning in the summer of 1959 to Scotland and Hibs, by which time McDowall had already gone back to the well. In May 1959 Andy Kerr, Scottish international centre-forward had been bought from Partick. Already twenty-nine he was clearly something a stop-gap, played just ten games, did not settle and also returned north to Kilmarnock. Manchester City then seems to have little choice but to play out the rest of season with what it had including a rserve centre-forward.

In fact it was not until March 1960 that a possible replacement was found in the shape of a twenty-one year-old Aberdonian, who in the next twelve months would play forty-four games and find the net twenty-one times. But he would for much of the season not do it alone. In the summer McDowall went north once more, this time to St. Mirren and returned with a twenty-two player, apparently an American, but who spoke with a broad Lanarkshire accent. Thus it was that the Granit City's Denis Law and Wishaw's Gerry Baker linked up with the latter, finally slotting in for Revie but not Hidegkuti, scoring fourteen goals in thirty-seven appearances, thirty six for the pair.

However, having lifted the club three places in the league the young pairing was not to last. In the summer of 1961 an offer came in and from Italy. Four years earlier the Welshman, John Charles, had made the move from Leeds to Turin and his five years at Juventus would be a great success. Now the club's city rival, Torino, wanted to join the party and double the stake. It wanted two players. One was Denis Law and the other was the Hibernian centre-forward, a Scot, who could only play for England. He was Gerry Baker's younger brother, Joe.     

The story of Gerry and Joe Baker is ultimately sad, both for them and for the Scottish national team. I deal with it in another piece, Baker and Law. Suffice it to say just now that two Wishaw boys were trapped by accidents of birth. And the events around them and Denis Law, three close friends, effectively marked if not the end then the beginning of the end in football management for Les McDowall. With Law and his brother in Italy and a vacancy at Hibernian Gerry Baker became restless and in November 1961 a move to Leith was agreed and the manager was once more left with what he had, which this time included no centre-forward at all. And whilst the following season he again went north and returned with the 3rd Lanark pairing of Alex Harley and Matt Gray, centre- and inside forward respectively, this time it did not work. In spite of 23 goals from the former at the end of the 1962-63 season Manchester City was relegated, McDowall was gone from the club, dropped a division to spend two seasons at Oldham and then at the comparatively young age of fifty two left football management forever.      

In the meantime Donald George Revie had spent two years at Sunderland, signed by long-term and Aberdonian manager, Bill Murray, still in the First Division and not without impact. Looking certain for relegation a seven-game unbeaten run saved the club from the drop but not without cost. It was accused, quite probably correctly, of illegal payments to players, Murray was made to resign and was replaced. The manager, not a Scot, wanted a different, more physical style, to which Revie was, ironically given what was to come, not suited and at the end of the season, now despite relegation for the Wearsiders from the First Division for the first time ever, Revie was moved on. Again ironically he might have joined hometown Middlesbrough, where he would have played alongside a certain Brian Clough and in front of an equally certain Peter Taylor, but instead chose to return to the top-flight and Leeds. 

It was August 1958. Revie was appointed captain of a team that was struggling, having finished in 17th place, and with the exception of him and the arrival of an experienced goalkeeper was being refreshed. Three had left. Nine had come in, seven twenty-four or younger. The team steadied, ending the season in 15th but that was to be as good as it got. In spite of again six coming in, four under twenty-three years of age, the legs of the team and Revie had gone. In April 1960 both were relegated, the manager hung on for another year, brought in ten including five Scots, three young, two experienced, then left in March with Revie, still officially on the playing staff in June 1961 taking over notionally as player-manager.     

In fact Don Revie's step-up was anything but climactic. From having been a First Division team a year earlier at the end of the 1961-62 season Elland Road was just three points off seeing Third Division football. Draws kept them up, as well as a thirty-one year-old ex-Scotland goal keeper persuaded out of retirement, Tommy Younger, the experience of thirty-one year-old Cliff Mason at full-back and another Scot from Hibernian, who Revie described as his best ever signing, 30 year-old Bobby Collins, all new arrivals and the clubs two top scorers, Billy Bremner and Jackie Charlton. Charlton as a twenty-two year-old had already been at the club when Revie had arrived, yet, despite being played, was on the brink of being let go. Bremner had arrived as a forward the year after Revie as a seventeen year-old direct from Stirling and junior football. At eighteen he was in the first team. At nineteen was marginalised, at twenty was almost on his way back to Scotland. Revie rejected a bid from Hibs. At twenty-one he was again marginalised as in the 1962-63 season Leeds rose fourteen places to fifth. And at twenty-two he was moved to wing-back, into mid-field alongside a new arrival from Manchester United, Johnny Giles.     

It proved to be, after the arrival of Collins, a second turning-point as behind the scenes a revolution was underway. 1962 saw the arrival of eleven new faces to the first team squad at Revie's Elland Road. John Charles had returned from Juventus would soon return to Italy to Roma and he and his immediate replacement Don Weston were the only ones over twenty-two.  Three were Scots, Jim Storrie, Charles' eventual replacement, from Airdrionians, from St. Mirren once more, Tommy Henderson, Billy Bremner's pal, and again direct from junior football this time in Dundee, Peter Lorimer. But also in the eleven in order of age but all still teenagers were Jimmy Greenhoff, Paul Reaney and Norman Hunter. Leeds were promoted but in the background not just a squad but a future team was forming fast, added to the the following season by twenty-two year-old Giles and three others, the experienced Alan Peacock and two local teenagers, Paul Madeley and Terry Cooper.

With a team that at the beginning of the season rounded up to an average of just twenty-four years-of-age and finished a year fewer by April 1964 the divisional title was won. Moreover, twelve months later it was both a league title and an FA Cup Final , albeit losing and to make matters worse, in extra time. The winner was, of course, Shankly's Liverpool and on the field that day were eight Scots, Bremner and Bell, Storrie, Tommy Lawrence,  Willie Stevenson, Ian St. John and both team captains, Collins and Ron Yeats. Post-Second World War it has never been bettered. Only in 1973 was it equalled. Leeds was again involved, as were Revie and Bremner, plus Lorimer, Glaswegian Eddie Gray, who in 1966 had arrived at the club again directly and David Harvey, the Leeds-born son of a Scottish father. The opposition was one of Revie's old clubs, Sunderland, Leeds would lose once more  and a year later Revie would moved on to manage England. But he went at least with the consolation that with those same Scots the same trophy had against Arsenal in 1972 at least been taken once.