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:
Pioneers
For this wee piece grateful thanks are due to Peter Kunz and his epic analysis of football Down-Under for the ninety years from 1859. It is called Chronicles of Soccer in Australia, should be available at all good bookshops - it was in mine - and be bought by all in copious quantities.
And in the first chapter of Peter's work he chronicles two things. The first is the change of the naming of organisations set up to govern the game in its new Australian home from "English
Football Association", specifically The New South Wales
English Football Association, founded in 1882, to "British Football Association", the exemplar being already from 1884 The Northern New South Wales British Football Association, with the reason being the influx of Scots, mainly miners but also steel workers, with their distinctive game and passion for it. It signalled, until from 1898, as "Australian" nationalism then emerged and British too was dropped, a "Northern-British" point being made and had meant in at least one but large a part of the emerging country that the sport in the two years, barely a breath, had become what in England had taken two decades, i.e. predominantly working-class.
The second is that he names names and in doing so shines the spotlight of praise on those who had and went on to found clubs and administer, ordinary men, definitively not the greatest of players, otherwise they would have stayed in Scotia, but ones prepared to get Aussie mud or at least dust on their boots. To Granville, New South Wales, now a Sydney suburb, a number of blacksmiths had been recruited to an engineering business. The year was 1882. They came from Kilmarnock and Glasgow and included John Neilson and William Bailie, the latter bringing a brand new ball in his luggage. John Reid Neilson had been born in Dalry in 1859, so twenty-three on arrival, his father a joiner. He had been raised in Killy itself, would marry Matilda Taylor in 1883 and with her have seven children, be a founder of The Granville and District Soccer Association, play not only for club but state, die in 1929 in nearby Parramatta and be buried there in the Mays Hill Cemetery with his wife. William Baillie had been eighteen when he arrived, also to Granville, would in 1890 marry Minnie Brydon, and die in neighbouring Auburn the year after Neilson, to be buried in Rookwood General Cemetery.
Then still in New South Wales but ninety miles to the north there was the then mining-town of Minmi outwith Newcastle. In 1884 and formed once more by Scottish immigrants there was the area's first club, Rangers. It was the same year that the Northern New South Wales British Football Association was created and was followed in 1885 in the Newcastle suburbs by the foundation of Lambton Thistles and Glebe Blackwatch, then in 1887 by Wallsend, Greta Bluebells and Carrington Blackwatch and finally in 1889 by Adamstown Rosebud. Its initiator was Peter Finlayson. He had been born on the Clyde in 1868 at Dalserf between Larkhall and Wishaw, would marry Janet Burns 1891 in Hamilton, NSW not Lanark, raise their four children there before moving to Sydney, dying in the state-capital in 1946.
But back to the Minmi story. News of the un-played 1884 Scottish Cup Final had reached the town. prompting the remark that "Minmi would have rushed the chance", that is if it had a club, to which the obvious response was to form one. The following day, and I quote, "a deputation comprising (a) Winning, (a) Frame and (a) Wilson saw the Colliery Clerk, Bill Ritchie, after work the next day. The up-shot was that the Pit Manager, Mr. Gardiner, came out, on being told what was happening donated a sovereign from his own pocket, tellt Richie to donate another from the cash-box and and the deputes went straight to Gillon's shop to order three balls. Winning was John (Jack) Winning born in 1863 in Glasgow, raised in Paisley, who had arrived in Australia in 1882, married Susan Williams (they had at least one child) and died still in Minmi/Kurri Kurri in 1934. As to Bill Ritchie, he was perhaps William Robertson Ritchie from Aberdeen, born in the Granite City in 1866 but brought up in Peterhead, the son of a Ship's Carpenter, marrying in 1892 in Sydney and passing there in 1943. And finally there was Sandy Gillon, the shopkeeper, born in Shotts in 1854. He had emigrated first to Queensland in 1876, married Clara Payne in Minmi in 1881 and would die, presumably in retirement by the sea, in Swansea, NSW, in 1935.
But Newcastle in the north of New South Wales was neither the only mining area in the state, nor the only football-playing part of it. To the south of Sydney there was Balgownie, then called Cramsville. The Scots influence can first be seen in the name in the name itself, the Gaelic for Smithtown. It would in the 1910s and 20s be the home village of Judy Masters, the country's star player either side of The Great War. But it had all begun with a football being kicked around at the corner of Lang and William Streets and with Peter Hunter. He is said to have played junior football in Scotland and been by 1883 the first to take a ball to the "South Coast".
But, if little more is known of him and his the same cannot be said for one of our football pioneers six hundred miles to the north by Brisbane in Queensland. The Anglo-Queensland Football Association had been formed in 1884, "Anglo" again being a moot point. The first game at Kangaroo Point across the river from town was between Queen's Park and St. Andrews. To them was then added Rangers, then a split-off from St. Andrews, Thistle, plus in 1888 Swifts and from the nearby town of Ipswich, Bundamba Rovers and Queenslanders, founded by mainly Welsh and English miners.
And one of the earliest to be involved from the very start was Donald Gemmell. Donald Strathearn Gemmell had been born in 1861 in Dumbarton but grew up in Glasgow and then Carmunock. But by 1883 and twenty-one he had sailed to the other side of the World. And there in Brisbane he married Jessie Peattie, with whom he was to have five children, raised at New Farm. He and his second son, Thomas, are pictured above. And he himself would die there in 1945 to be rememberd with Jessie, a daughter and a son-in-law at Mount Thompson, an Australian shopkeeper to trade, a Scots carrier of the Scottish football contagion by birth and as yet just one of our un-lauded, soccer pioneer in Oz by default.
