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:
Short & To Foot - The True Tale of the Origins of Uruguayan Football
(This article could not have been written without the help and brilliant genealogical research of Robert Wells)
People, even peoples, like tales to have a clear-cut beginning. Their desire is for the simplicity of “once-upon-a-time”. But tales in real life, true stories, rarely have a single starting-point but several and thus not one but multiple strands. The origins of football in individual countries are no exception, except, perhaps, in one, England, and the day in 1863 when thirteen mainly London clubs made the minority decision to propel a ball only with their feet. However, Uruguay is particularly notable for the complexity, or rather the obfuscation of the origins of its version of the game and therefore its, their game's, worldwide importance, firstly, stylistically and, secondly, racially.
Uruguayan football has its true chronological origins somewhere between 1885 and 1891. Physically, that is in terms of personnel, the origins were, in Kent in England, Castletown in County Laois in Ireland, Aberdeen, Thurso, Glasgow, the Borders and Cathcart in Scotland, at a stretch Alsace on the French-German border and in Uruguay itself. The Aberdeen and Kent connections are simply explained. The latter was the birthplace of the man most commonly recognised as the Father of the game in Uruguay, not, importantly, to be confused with the father of the specifically Uruguayan game. The man in question was William Leslie Poole, an “Englishman” who wasn't one on more than one level. He was born in 1866. Association Football was three years old. He was a teenager when it began the first of several explosions of popularity. But then that explosion did not take place in England where he lived, either in Kent or Cambridge, to where the family had moved, but in Scotland. But then Poole still had a vested interest. His mother was English but his father was not. He was a Scot, the Edinburgh-born son of a long line of Aberdeenshire doctors, hence Aberdeen, yet born far too early to have had himself any youthful enthusiasm for the new game. His other interest was God for not only was he a doctor he was also a minister of the church. However, for his son it was different. He was a the right age and the only question might be, given his English schooling, why Rugby was not his sport of choice. Perhaps it was simply his Scottish-ness.
William Leslie Poole arrived in Montevideo in 1885, to be a school teacher. He was eighteen. He is said to have been a graduate of Cambridge University, which given his age even in those times was virtually impossible. If it had been he who had made the claim then it was a little, white lie. He had certainly signed up as an undergraduate. To do what is not clear. He and his two brothers all signed up. They could by right because by then the family had moved to the town. Their father's church was on its outskirts. However, only one of the three actually graduated. And it was not William Leslie.
However, what
is true is that a very young Leslie Poole did teach, at the English High School in Montevideo. It is also certain that he introduced his pupils to Association football. He was after all a player, who also involved himself in football at the Montevideo Cricket and Rowing Clubs, where it had been played for some time. It is just that it is not obviously clear whether it was entirely of the Association variety or Rugby or even some amalgam. What is clear, however, is that it was one, perhaps two, of his English High School pupils, who might be said to have set rolling the round and not oval ball that Leslie Poole had perhaps placed on Uruguayan ground for the first time and certainly at their feet.
The one who was without doubt Leslie Poole's pupil, although for how long is not clear, went by the name of Enrique Lichtenberger. On the face of it he was certainly not English nor even British. His father is in fact said to have come from Alsace via Brazil. The other was more identifiable. His name was William John Maclean and his roots are clear. His family was from Thurso in Caithness in Scotland's far northeast. His forebears are buried in the town's graveyard.
Enrique, Henry, Lichtenberger had been born in 1873 so he was just seven years younger than Leslie Poole. William John was still more a Poole contemporary. He had been born in 1870 so in age sat more or less between the two. In 1891 Enrique and William John, aged eighteen and twenty-one respectively, several other former pupils of English High, and a number of others, seemingly all or the vast majority British, decided to form a football club, which they called Football Association. The founders were drawn from a number of commercial activities. What the Lichtenbergers did for a living is not entirely clear. They were probably merchants. But the McLeans were shipping agents, Leslie Poole was in education and others worked on the developing, British-owned railway system.
Football Association, the club, did not last long, a matter of weeks, but from it emerged a second, which was named Albion F.C. Willie John MacLean was its first President, Henry Lichtenberger its Vice-President and J.S. Stewart its first captain of football. Who J.S. Stewart was is difficult to fathom. Perhaps he was James Sterling Stewart, whose future lay in Argentine agriculture but two things seem certain about all three. The rules of Albion stipulated that all its members had to be both Uruguayan-born and of British origin. It meant MacLean, Lichtenberger and Stewart were by birth native. It meant too that MacLean, whilst not Anglo-Saxon, with his Scots background, complied, as for the same reason probably did Stewart but the obvious Lichtenberger question remained in the air.
In fact the solution to Enrique Lichtenberger's British conundrum is relatively simple. Like all of us he had two parents. When he died in 1934 he was buried with one of them and it was not his father. Yet the main name on his grave in the British Cemetery in Montevideo is not his own. It is Anne L. MacDonald. She was born in 1849, died in 1908, was without doubt Enrique Lichtenberger's mother but with the question begged, why the difference in names?
It is a strange story not least because in the cemetery registry she has yet another name, Anne Carroll de MacDonald. Nevertheless it does provide Enrique with the British background he needed. However, that background was not English and therein lies the tale. It begins in Castletown in the centre of Ireland. In 1847 a Thomas Levins married a farmer's daughter, Anne Carr. He was 28; she just 18. The following year still in Castletown they had a son, Patrick. He was followed still in Ireland by Anne junior in 1849, from when there was with the Famine raging a gap and the family in the next five years moved on, across the water to England. Their next children, at least recorded, surviving children, Agnes and Ambrose, were born a decade later and in Liverpool. There in 1861 Thomas Levins was an elementary school teacher with his wife Anne and just three children at home, Anne Jnr., Agnes and Ambrose. There is no record of either Patrick, who would by then have been fourteen, or a third daughter, Mary, baptised in Liverpool in 1855 so in 1861 theoretically five or six.
It may have been that same year or the following one, 1862, that the Levins family seems once again to have been on the move and also that the father, Thomas, died. He seems not to have passed away in Britain. He may have done so en-route or soon after arrival in South America but what is certain is that by 1863 Anne Levins Snr. was in Montevideo, she was a widow, she was running a boarding house and she remarried.
The groom was William Rodgers, an engineer, and the ceremony at the British Consulate was witnessed by one Patrick Levins, unlikely to have been the son but seemingly related to her former husband, a brother perhaps, and by a Mary Carroll. The Irish connection was clearly still strong in terms of the witnesses. However, Rodgers was not himself Irish. He was Scots-born in Galston in Ayrshire, later a footballing hot-spot, as William Rodger, the son of a miner, George, also known as George Thompson. George and his first wife, Helen, had had five children but she had died and he in 1841 had remarried. William was then thirteen and by the next census a decade later and at twenty-three he was on his way, from Galston certainly and seemingly from Scotland.
The older Anne Levins, now Mrs Rodgers, had clearly brought with her from Liverpool to Montevideo at least three of her children, the same three as recorded in the English port, and they would grow up in the Uruguayan one. Ambrose would become a ship's mechanic. In 1895 at the time of Argentina's census he would be recorded on a boat moored in Buenos Aires' harbour. Agnes, known as Ines in Uruguay, would there marry another Scot, John Darragh. Born in Glasgow he was also at least in part of Irish origin, the engineer son of an engineer. Interestingly his middle name, his mother's maiden-name, was also Thompson so he and Ines may have distant cousins, their marriage, as was often the case at that time and in distant climes, within the community and not infrequently the family.
Ambrose Levins may in later life have moved to the United States. The Darraghs would have several children, remain in Montevideo, where there are Darraghs to this day, which leaves the younger Anne Levins. In 1863 she turned fourteen. A decade later she had the second of her four Lichtenberger children, Enrique. What happened in between is largely unknown, notably where and how she met the father of those children, Antonio Lichtenberger. However, what happened to him is now clearer. He, confirmed as a Brazilian, died in 1877 in Montevideo and of gunshot wounds. Whether it was an accident, suicide or murder is not yet certain but he was thirty at the time and Anne Levins the younger, Ana Levins was at the age of twenty-eight and not for the last time, a widow .
The oldest and the youngest of Lichtenberger-Levins children were girls, Emilia and Anna. Neither survived into adulthood, Emilia dying in 1885 in Montevideo aged fourteen, Anna the following year aged just ten and in Rio de Janeiro. Only Enrique, born in 1873, and his younger brother, Alberto, born three years later would survive. Both could be said to be Alsatian or perhaps German by their father. Both might also have been said to have been Brazilian. Yet both would be British by their Irish, indeed Irish-born mother and both also be prominent in early Uruguayan football as players and administrators not because of their Alsatian, German or even Brazilian ancestry or connections. Their prominence would be entirely due to their Irish-ness, then also British-ness, and what it gave them.
Like William Leslie Poole's father neither Enrique and Alberto Lichtenberger's step-grandfather, William Rodgers, or uncle, John Darragh would as they grew up in Scotland have been young enough to have been affected directly by the “football virus”. However, through them as with Poole the two Lichtenberger boys would have had an entry into what was a substantial and growing Uruguayan-Scottish community just as through their mother they would have links with the Irish one. And it was in Scotland and not England, just as the boys were born, that football was taking hold and becoming a passion. England had Rugby, Association Football and Cricket. Working Scotland had just football and, whilst middle-class Scots traded globally, working-class Scotland was also beginning to travel the World in increasing numbers constructing ports and railways, sewerage systems and factories. Moreover, wherever they went they sought out fellow Scots and would talk about “home”. News would be sought and arrive. Rogers, Darragh, the Macleans and others would inevitably have been its conduit and football would have been unavoidable as one of its themes as in late 1870s and early and middle 1880s the Scottish national team swept the other Home Nations aside. There seems little doubt that as the Lichtenberger boys and Willie John Maclean reached their teenage years in the mid-1880s they would already have been football-primed, if indirectly and remotely, this just as William Leslie Poole, a man most definitely infected by the virus directly, arrived and took them under his wing, passing on through practical participation the contagion to ready and willing recipients.
However, football is always a game of two teams. Without opposition there is literally no match and a sport can fail to catch on or flourish only briefly before shrivelling on the vine. Had Albion been the only club in town that might have been the case but across Montevideo away from the port and the merchant houses there was the kernel of the competition that in Uruguay would ensure it did not happen.
The Central Uruguayan Railway (CUR) was the largest of five that would serve the country and the only one to have its terminus in Montevideo. British-owned, operations had begun in 1878 but the greatest expansion took place between 1884 and 1889. It was then that the company decided to move its administrative and technical activities to Penarol, then a village just to the north of the capital city. The building of a yard, engineering works, offices and houses was begun in 1890. A new man, Frank Henderson, the younger brother of the main shareholder in the company in Britain that owned the Uruguayan operation, arrived to oversee the work and with him came more countrymen, railway engineers and technicians.
Although English-born Frank Henderson too was from a staunchly Scottish family arriving in London from Langholm in The Borders via Edinburgh. Henderson's elder brother, Alexander, would one of the great railway investors and would make a fortune from his activities, a reputation and a fortune that continues to this day. Alexander Hamilton himself would in 1916 be created Lord Faringdon, a peerage that continues. Henderson Global Investors, founded on his death with that fortune, now known as Janus Henderson, remains one of the World's major investment companies.
However, back in Uruguay with a rapidly expanding British workforce at Penarol the new arrivals did what they did everywhere; in 1891 they formed a club, specifically a sports club and more precisely still a cricket club, CURCC, the Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club. It would after Albion be the second element in the mix. The third would be that within weeks of foundation it was suggested that within CURCC there should be a football section, one which rapidly became more important than its cricketing equivalent. And the fourth would be the repercussions of Albion F.C. rules, which excluded anyone not born in Uruguay and without a provable British connection. It meant that several founder members of Football Association were excluded. One was William Leslie Poole. He continued to play but for Montevideo Cricket Club. Another might have been Enrique Lichtenberger’s younger brother, Alberto, who possibly had been born in Brazil. And finally there were British employees of the Central Uruguayan Railway amongst them John Woosey, who from that point had no option but to channel their footballing energy and enthusiasm entirely through CURCC as their obvious alternative.
It was a turning-point. Throughout Scotland football was very predominately a working-class game and soon to be almost entirely professional. In England football was by 1890 a working-class, professional game in the North but still a mainly middle-class, amateur game in the South. Elsewhere, even in South America, it would mean separate, competing, clubs mostly of British origin founded on class- and/or national lines and thus in each country the same underlying differences of ethos. However, in Penarol, in contrast to its rivals, it meant that everyone who worked for CUR and who wanted to play football regardless of class, ethos and origin was almost forced into same CURCC structure and hence team. They had no alternative. Albion was precluded to all, who were not Uruguayan-born of British origin and railway-men were immigrants, whilst the Montevideo Cricket Club was largely English and, since it is the English and Welsh rather than British who largely play cricket, Scots and Irish were marginalised.
Thus in the CURCC football team it was from the beginning clear from where much of the driving-force came. It was Scotland. Frank Henderson, albeit as mainly a figurehead, was and would remain as a Diasporan Scot an involved President until his departure for Argentina almost a decade later. Moreover, the first Captain of Football was John McGregor, a thirty year-old, working-class mechanic from Govan in Glasgow, who would be amongst the first of the railway men to make Uruguay his permanent home. He would marry there, raise a family, die there in 1945, is buried in Montevideo’s British Cemetery and would be the first of three Scots, who would through the Penarol railway yard make their indelible mark first on its club football, then on the Uruguayan game and eventually on World football itself.
John McGregor would from inside-left captain a team that in truth was not very successful, certainly not against Albion. He would step down briefly in 1894, his replacement would be the first non-British skipper, Julio Negron, then, after a trip home, resume until 1897. However, 1896 had seen the inclusion of a second player, whose time with CUR would coincide with an improvement in playing standard that would see CURCC match, or at least almost match Albion. His name was James Buchanan and he may well have been a player of considerable reputation and possibly pedigree.
James Buchanan had arrived at CUR in 1895. A centre-forward he quickly became and remained CURCC's star player until his departure in 1900. He may have arrived from Argentina. After Montevideo he certainly went there and in 1909 was playing in Buenos Aires for another railway company team. It is one that exists to this day, Ferrocarril Oeste, and there he would literally be a vital link in bringing certainly the most important Scots player, if not the most important player, ever to have graced a Uruguayan pitch, arguably even the most important player in World football ever.
By 1909 Buchanan was probably well into his forties, Even in CURCC team photographs of a decade early he is a large man not in the first flush of youth, perhaps in his thirties, wearing a cap as was often still the habit of players a decade earlier still. What became of him after 1909 is unknown however his original home was certainly Scotland and is said more precisely to have been Cambuslang, then a village close to Glasgow and now a Glasgow suburb.
Between the middle of the 1880s and professional football in Scotland being legitimised in 1893 Cambuslang F.C. was one of the most powerful of Scotland's club teams. From 1886 to 1891 it provided six players for the Scottish national team, James Gourlay twice, Andrew Jackson, William Semple, Robert Brown, James Low and a Buchanan, John Buchanan. The club's best season was 1888, when it reached three Cup Finals. It won one and lost two. Victory came in the Glasgow Cup Final, defeating Rangers 3-1. The losses were both to
Renton, the team which within weeks of the second match would by defeating the English F.A. Cup holders, West Bromwich Albion, be crowned, if unofficially, the World Champions and for good measure then beat Preston North End, which would the next season be invincible in both English Cup and the inaugural English Football League. That second loss was in the Glasgow Merchants Charity Cup Final 4-0. The first and most importantly of all was in the Scottish Cup Final, a 6-1 defeat. And for Cambuslang in the Scottish Cup Final the forward line read as Buchanan, Buchanan, Plenderleith, Gourlay and Gourlay. One of the Gourlays was the internationalist, James, the other Hugh but they were unrelated. Plenderleith was James Plenderleith. One of the Buchanans was John, again the internationalist, and the other was James.
It has to be said that, although Argentinian football history indicates that the James Buchanan they know hailed from Cambuslang, there is nothing so far to prove that the James Buchanan, who played in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, is the same James Buchanan that took the field in those three Cup Finals. But then there is equally nothing that disproves it. There is equally nothing that shows that John and James Buchanan were related but there were John and James Buchanans of about the “right age” in Cambuslang, who were.
So what is the “right age”? In those days good, local players got into their local teams young. Eighteen was not unusual. Often such players came through in clusters and matured together and early. Cambuslang as a team began to emerge as a force from 1883. It reached the Scottish Cup quarter final in December that year. The following season it reached the semi-finals and the first of its players were capped. Then it was the quarter finals in 1886-7 before the 1888 Final, suggesting then an average team age of about twenty-four. In fact James Gourlay in 1888 was twenty-five, Hugh Gourlay was three years younger, James Plenderleith was twenty-three, which leaves the John and James Buchanan, only one of each of approximately the right age can be found. In the 1881 census the John is fourteen so would have been twenty or twenty-one in 1888. James, then a weighing clerk in a steelworks, would on the same basis have been twenty-five or twenty-six, which means that in 1895 he was thirty-two or thirty-three, the age the Montevideo Buchanan looks in the photographs, and in 1909 and at the end of a very long career, forty-six or forty-seven. And John and James Buchanan were brothers. It means that, whilst CURCC's Buchanan never played for Scotland, he might have had a brother who had.
James Buchanan's style of play with CURCC might best be described as robust. But it was not without skill and it was effective. In 1894 the Penarol club had not won a game; six played; all lost; three to Albion; three to Montevideo C.C. In 1895, the year of his arrival, it played only three games, again all defeats. In 1896 with him in the team it drew for the first time with Albion and was successful against the crews of three visiting British Naval ships. In 1897 it beat Albion for the first time and by the end of 1899, the year before he moved on, it was winning more than losing.
In 1900 the Uruguayan Football Association was formed. Enrique Lichtenberger was its first Vice-President. A league was started. CURCC with Buchanan in the squad for at least part of the season topped it with ease, winning six games of six, scoring thirty-six goals and conceding just two. Buchanan himself was league top-scorer with six goals. Albion was runner-up but from that point its star began to wane. Although CURCC continued to be very successful until 1907, winning three of the intervening six championships and finishing as runner-up in the other three., it did so as its first rival, in spite of finishing in mid-table finally dropped out of the league altogether, yet did not disappear. Albion continues to today but as an amateur club in the lower divisions and never again in the top flight.
There appear to be be two reasons for Albion's decline. One was its rules. In spite of a change in 1896 that allowed recruitment of players not born in Uruguay, a change that allowed William Leslie Poole and possibly Alberto Lichtenberger to join the team, the requirement for a British connection still restricted the scope for recruitment from the growing number of non-British, crillo i.e. native-born players, who had caught up in terms of playing standard. And then there was simple ageing and some players having changing priorities. Football administration tempted Enrique Lichtenberger and life moved on in other ways. In early 1899 Willie John Maclean had married. Later that same year Lichtenberger did too and in doing so the close personal, social and footballing links between the pair of them became familial. The very new Mrs. Lichtenberger was the new Mrs. Maclean's younger sister.
However, as well as the demise of Albion as a top-flight club 1908 also saw CURCC finish only seventh of ten. It did return to form in 1909, as runner-up once more, but it had been and was recruiting. CURCC's apparent if temporary decline had had several causes. It had left the 1908 championship after the 10th match because of what was seen as biased refereeing, but it had also lost its star player, Juan Pena. His father had been the groundsman at the Montevideo C.C. He had learned both cricket and football early and had joined CURCC aged just sixteen in 1899. A right-winger, on Buchanan's departure in 1890, he had become not the Scot's positional replacement but the star of the team. However, at the end of the 1907 he left to play in Argentina, a sure sign of the growing, actual, if illegitimate, professionalisation of South American football, and, although he would return Uruguay and once more to Penarol, it would not be until 1914.
In part the loss of Pena as a figurehead of CURCC had been compensated by the arrival for the 1907 season of Leonard Crossley. He was born in 1884 in England, in Bury in Lancashire and he had railway connections. His father was a fitter in a locomotive works. At the age of sixteen in 1891 Leonard himself was a railway clerk and, five years later a goalkeeper, who was told by Everton F.C. that he was clearly promising but too small for the top professional game in England. There the preference was before the change of rules in 1911 for giant 'keepers like William "Fatty" Foulke. Nevertheless to Uruguay Crossley was able to bring modern, bravura 'keeping techniques, diving at feet, positioning, gathering of the ball, accurate distribution. This was before they were the standard in England and were a mixture of what Crossley might have seen at Everton, where in 1904-5 perhaps the best goalkeeper of them all before the First World War, the well-built but athletic Leigh Roose, renown for his bravery, was between the posts for a season and the agile, scientific 'keeping that had at the turn of the century been pioneered by the much lighter-weight but agile and astute
Harry Rennie in Scotland.
However, Crossley would not have been able to turn his new club's fortunes on his own. Talent was also needed further up the pitch. The departure of Pena saw the arrival of another local player, Jose Piendibene. 1908 saw him make his debut, aged eighteen as a direct Pena-replacement on the right-wing but he soon moved into central attack, where he played for twenty years for his club and forty games for Uruguay. Yet still clearly a piece was missing. It was filled the following year and more than likely on the recommendation of James Buchanan. His name was John Harley.
Harley was on his second visit to Argentina. In 1906, aged twenty, he had arrived to work on the railways but in Bahia Blanca, a town four hundred miles to the south of Buenos Aires. A year later he returned home to Scotland but was soon on his way back to Argentina once more and this time to Buenos Aires itself. There he found employment with the Southern Railway, the Argentine sister company to CURCC, and then, since he was playing for its works' team, presumably with the Western Railway, Ferrocarril Oeste. Thus it was, with CURCC withdrawing from the 1908 league, arranging a number of friendlies and travelling to the Argentine capital for them the two teams came face to face. It was a contest CURCC won easily, 5-0, but Harley still stood out, possibly already having been pointed up by a team-mate and compatriot, none other than James Buchanan. As a result Harley was made an offer of a job at Penarol. He accepted, crossed the River Plate and the following season went straight into the CURCC team.
Harley had been born in 1886 in Cathcart to the south of Glasgow. He had lost his mother at a young age and had been sickly as a child. He was not like Buchanan a big, powerful man. He was much shorter and slighter but with a technique that had somehow, perhaps because of his lack of power, been overlooked in his native country, where he did not play professionally, but was perfect for the position he played in drier, less heavy, South American conditions. Here it is important to emphasise that John Harley was an attacking, Scottish not a defensive, English centre-half, i.e. his role was tackle as needed but mainly to be the link between defence and attack, the main distributor of the ball, long and particularly short. He was the fulcrum of the specifically Scottish system of play,
The Cross, with its wide full-backs, wide but dropped-back wingers and narrower half-backs with inside forwards, behind and in front of the centre-half. This was in contrast to the English system based on narrow full-backs and wide half-backs. As such he was one of a line of players about which James Buchanan might have known more than most. The first of that line had been
James Kelly, the pivot of that
Renton team, which had twice beaten Cambuslang so convincingly in 1888 and perhaps changed the direction of Buchanan's football and indeed life. Buchanan might have had a career as a professional in England had his team team beaten Renton even once.
With Crossley in goal, Piendibene in attack and now Harley essentially in mid-field the spine of a new CURCC team seemed complete. Yet success was not instant. Although soon after arrival Harley was made captain and he would remain so until 1916, the club could only take second place in the league at the end of the first season. The following season it was second again. Only in 1912 did it achieve top spot. However, in the meantime there had been teaching to be done as the club's footballing style was changed and that of the Uruguayan national team, for which Harley was also playing, was also well on its way. Harley, instead of a mish-mash of long balls and dribbling, replaced it with intelligent combination, controlling the ball and passing shorter and short along the ground to feet, the basis of a style with which Uruguay over the next fifteen years would sweep away all opposition worldwide.
It is clear that once John Harley arrived in Uruguay he quickly became more footballer than draughtsman, the job he had officially been recruited to do at the Penarol workshops. He was “shamateur”. It is clear too that the team, his equally shamateur team, was costing money and was soon confronted by the implacable desire of CUR to reduce those costs. It led in 1913 to funding being cut completely, the creation of a new, amateur CURCC football team, which lasted a season, and a change of status of the original CURCC to a club independent of CUR and its renaming as Penarol. It is that team that continues to this day.
However, the change of name was, although important, little more than superficial. The team had informally been known as such for some time. Far more important were other changes to come, not least firstly the professional search for better players outwith the team's spine and secondly team continuity. The first of the best new arrivals was in 1914. The return of Juan Pena. The second was in 1915 on the other wing. It was Isabelino Gradin. He would serve Penarol for six years, play at the top flight for another seven, leaving Penarol when Harley did, and win 24 caps for his country. And he was different. Said to be the son of an escaped African slave he was Black, yet there seems, in Uruguay at least, to have been no question or at least no allowance of prejudice at club and then international level.
But then it is perhaps not surprising that it was under Harley's stewardship that 18 year-old Gradin came into the team. Harley wanted the best and he had a precedent. A Black player was already an important part of Scotland's football history, indeed mythology. In 1881 and 1882 Andrew Watson had played in the Scottish National team. Moreover, he had captained his country in one and played in what had been the two best victories against England ever. Furthermore he too had been born in South America, in what is now Guyana and was also the grandson of an African slave; one that had been freed. Gradin was Uruguay's Watson. However, elsewhere was not as enlightened. Whilst at home Gradin was accepted at the 1916 South American Championship of Nations he was not. His country was accused by Chile of playing “Africans”; Africans was because Gradin was not alone. John Harley was not there and his place had been taken by Juan Delgado. Different to Harley, he was tall and beefy and at twenty-five, having learned his game in the Uruguayan second division and playing for Boca Juniors in Argentina, in 1917 he transferred to Penarol to join and specifically to cover and with Harley's acceptance replace him. And he too had African blood.
Delgado and Gradin would have the last word short-term, Isabelino in particular. As Chile's objection were rejected and Uruguay took the trophy he would be top scorer. And as it happened Jose Piendibene would be in joint-second place. But perhaps more important were the long-term implications. Gradin, closely followed by Delgado and at the behest of Harley, were the predecessors of Black Uruguayan players to this day. They undoubtedly blazed the trail for Jose Leandro Andrade, the “The Black Marvel”, who in terms of Penarol was one who had got away. He had trained with the club as a teenager, when Harley was there, was considered not good enough but, again once Harley had left, found his place first at Bella Vista and then Nacional and went on play in the Uruguay teams that would win the 1924 and 1928 Olympics and the 1930 World Cup. Delgado himself was the conduit through whom the Harley approach specifically to centre-half play would be continued indirectly through to those same Olympic Games via Jose Vidal and Juan Piriz and directly to that World Cup through Penarol's own Lorenzo Fernandez. This whilst all three were also carriers of a more general team style made possible by Harley's introduction and implantation of the Scottish short-passing game, what from Spanish in Uruguay translates as “short pass, to foot".