Whilst it may have been the 10 of 11 team of Scottish jute-spinners from provincial Orizaba that would take the Mexican football championship, the Primera Fuerza in 1903, the contribution of the other teams, four in all and all-British should not be taken likely. Beside the contribution of the Cornish miners from equally provincial Pachuca there were three from the country's capital itself, Mexico City, the British Club, Mexico Cricket and Reforma, the first runners-up. It had been founded in 1894 as sports and social club, it is said by English migrants but again the names of those involved give a truer picture. For example in 1901 the players included James Walker, A.J. Campbell, A.T. Drysdale and F. Robertson, it then seems James Walker would in 1903 be the Vice-President of the British Club under the Presidency of J.M. Anderson. Moreover, Walker might be further identifiable. He seems to have been one of two brothers, the other being John, the pair of whom came to Mexico and lived out their lives and died there. However, both had been born in Tillicoultry and later had lived in Paisley, John originally a Wool Warper and James a Clerk.

 And so the story of Scots involvement continued.  In the three seasons from 1901 to 1904 one of the major players at Mexico Cricket had been the double Diasporan James John Mungo MacFarlane. In fact he had been born in Wales on the border with England but his father came from Fochabers and his mother from Aberdeen. Furthermore, in 1901-2 he had taken part in games alongside and against James Caldwell born in Greenock and a second Anderson, David Hay, born in Edinburgh. Indeed, there was one major event of the early football scene specific to Mexico's capital that give further perspective to the degree, home and abroad, of Scottish passion for the beautiful game  and to the degree of Scots involvement in its arrival specifically in Mexico City. Despite England having a population ten times that of Scotland it was possible five thousand miles from home to raise teams from both countries. In fact, from the start of the Mexican League in 1902 until 1911-12 the season's culmination was a Scotland-England game with its first playing even preceding the League itself. 

It had first taken place at the beginning of June 1901. The Scots had taken the lead but eventually lost, 3-2, but not without controversy. The team consisted of Dewar in goal, full-backs, F. Hogg and McKean, half-backs, Cant, Troup and Easton and forwards, a second Hogg, possibly J., James McNabb, Kinnel, presumably Alex Kinnell, McCormack and a newly arrived David Honeyman, who seems to have suffered with the altitude, Mexico City being at almost 7,500 ft, but came with some footballing reputation. Of them Dewar, probably J. Hogg and Kinnell all came from Orizaba. One wonders if McCormack was not McComish. And as for the game itself Cant suffered a knee injury in first half and had to go off. So the Scots played with ten men for much of the game, clearly ran out of legs and England's second goal was from a fiercely disputed free-kick. It was not Scotland's day but where and when have we heard that since.

Clearly the tracking of these players is difficult but there are possibilities. We know something of the Kinnells and in addition Easton is perhaps Frank. A Frank Easton would die in Mexico City in 1972 at the age of eighty-eight so born in 1884, the son of Alexander Easton. It means in 1901 he was seventeen years old. In addition we know where he was born. It was Bellahouston Villa in Govan, Glasgow. Moreover, in the case of McNabb we probably have a better answer than might be expected, more of which anon.

Meantime, there was through-put. The 1904 Scotland-England game in January that year would feature five players from Mexico Cricket. One was McFarlane and he had been joined by Findlay, Saunders, Nesbit and a John Cruikshank, albeit one with a range of spellings.. Nesbit was probably AS Nesbit, with origins perhaps in North Berwick and once more Edinburgh. And later that year as the league season kicked-off and for the next season too they would be joined by Charles Gordon Paterson, the Reforma outside-left. He would die in still Mexico City in 1944 and, although he was born a Brazilian, in Salvador de Bahia, he was the son of John Lidgewood or Ligertwood, a doctor born in Aberdeen. Moreover, he in Mexico would marry Anne Waters, whose father and mother were both again Scots-born, she in Paisley.

And Anne Waters' brother, J.B., John Bow Waters, would feature in the League in 1906-7 to be followed at Reforma once more in 1908-9 and 1909-10 by Frederick McLean Patterson, both parents from Edinburgh, Douglas Stewart and in 1909 Colin and John Robertson at British Club as the League began to teeter on the brink break-up. Orizaba was already long-gone. Mexico Cricket had ceased to play competitively in 1908. And whilst Pachuca and Reforma continue to this day, the former as a professional club still in the League and the later as an amateur one outwith, by the end of 1912-13 even British Club dissolved, albeit as some of its players had already gone on to form Rovers FC, which continued for another four seasons. In fact the League itself was only saved by the addition of two clubs, which were not yet Mexican but formed with or by Spanish immigrants. On 6th October 1912 Rovers would play one of them, Espana.  At the end of the season the other, Mexico FC, would be champion.     

But let us now return to a decade earlier, to Mexico's first ex-patriot Scotland-England, to the first 1902-3 season and to a player, who featured in both and throughout much of the next decade and who so far mention has been cursory. His name is James McNabb, in fact James F. McNabb, about whom we have the following, simple, Mexican quotation:   

"James F. McNabb: Reliable data from the 1902-3 season suggest he was the top-scorer..... the first, great centre-forward in the history of Mexican football, a lethal finisher with foot or head."

But who was he apart from a Briton, an Englishman, Welshman, Irishman or Scot, albeit one greatly locally recognised, who took association football to Mexico, not to Orizaba and Pacheco but specifically to the country's capital, Mexico City itself. In fact Jimmy McNabb was James Fairgrieve McNabb in some sources. MacNabb in others. And he was, of course, it emerges, a Scot, an Ayrshire man, born in Fairlie and in 1875. Moreover, we have a description of him. Six feet tall, fair-skinned, auburn hair, green eyes. A biggish man for his day. A potential, powerful forward. Furthermore we now know his mother, Margaret, hailed from Fairlie itself, his father, a joiner to trade, also James, from Ireland, but they, with a brother, Duncan, and a sister, Mary, lived most of his young life down the coast in Irvine. They began at 2, Hill St. before moving to 21.  It is a wynd that is still there and which at a little stretch, were he alive, he might even still recognise. 

In 1891 Jimmy McNabb is recorded in Irvine as an apprentice Law Clerk. In 1901 he is not recorded at all, at least not in Scotland. By then he is living, still a clerk, in lodgings in Camberwell on London. which suggests that not long after he was on his way to Central America and football fame, albeit not in his own land and with the British Club. Formed as a social club in 1899 its first football team appeared in 1901. In that first season only friendlies were played, against the Reforma Club. That was until in September the following year, 1902, when the Amateur Association Football League was founded with Mexico's first football championship kicking off three weeks later. I repeat five teams took part; from outwith Mexico City, Scots Orizaba, the eventual champions, and Cornish Pachuca and from the city itself the British Club and Reforma with the addition of the Mexico Cricket Club. The British Club team that season is shown above. It is likely that Jimmy McNabb in the photograph but which he is is not known.

James McNabb would play until 1907-8, when the British Club was finally champion, and continue until at least 1909 but he would return, at least to England, once in the interim. In 1904 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London he married Edyth Olive Barton Behr, an American from New York State and returned to Mexico with her. Indeed they could be seen travelling regularly to the USA and Britain, he listed variously as clerk, an accountant or a merchant, for another twenty-five years. That was before moving first to New York City by 1935, when he would have been sixty years old, and by 1939 returning to Britain finally, to live in Surrey, where he would die in 1951 and is presumably buried un-lauded. Edith MacNabb would outlive him by four years, dying in Paris in 1955. They seemed to have had no children. On her death everything was left to her brother and sister back in the USA. And if there are any other relatives they are probably across the Atlantic too. Duncan McNabb seems also to have emigrated from Scotland across to Canada or the United States and never returned.