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:
Peter the Great- football's quiet revolutionary
Chapter Ten
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In the early hours of 6th January 1934 Herbert Chapman died of pneumonia at home in Hendon in London. The death was as sudden as it was unexpected. He had travelled north on a scouting trip on New Year's Day, stayed for two further nights and returned with what seemed no more than a cold. It was to prove fatal.
Chapman was fifty-five years old. He had been manager of Arsenal since 1925 and before that at Huddersfield and in thirteen years in the top-flight become the most successful and influential manager in English football. He dominated the game as a personality and tactically as Bill Struth was doing in precisely the same north of the border. In four seasons with Huddersfield, Chapman had won the FA Cup once, in his first year, and the League Championship twice and would within nine years accomplish the same at Highbury.
And he would do the latter at least with a particular model in mind. Speaking before his move south to the London club, he had told the press his ambition was,
"to build a Newcastle United there."
and the Newcastle that had made such an impression on him was none other than that of twenty years earlier, precisely the one which had had Peter McWilliam at left-half.
Yet both Chapman's Huddersfield and Arsenal successes had come within a hair's breadth of never having been possible. Whilst at Leeds City between 1912 and 1918 and in his first wholly managerial position he had seen the club fold around due to financial wrongdoing, to be replaced by present-day Leeds United, and be himself banned from all football by the FA. At that moment the future, or at least the footballing future must have looked bleak after what had briefly been a very successful, first player/management and management position with Northampton following a playing career as an inside-forward that had had its moment but ultimately was less than distinguished.
Born in Kiveton Park on the Yorkshire-Nottinghamshire border in 1878 what playing success Chapman had found had initially been with fairly local Sheffield United in the First Division in 1902-3, twenty-two games but just two goals, and two seasons from 1905 until 1907 sixty-three games but a much better twenty-seven goals for Tottenham Hotspur. It may have been only in the Southern League but it was with a team that had won the FA Cup just three years earlier and was jockeying to join the League. It was in addition formative. Chapman played in the position that
John Cameron, the player-manager Scot with his philosophy of deep-lying inside-forwards, had until 1904 called his own. It had been the Cameron, who had lead Spurs to Cup Final victory in 1901. It was the Cameron, who clearly saw something in his interim protégé that others did not as Chapman went from five games on his arrival in 1905, plucked late in the season from Notts County and a loan to Northampton Town, to thirty-eight in 1905-6 and twenty more in 1906-7. And it was to Northampton Town that Chapman returned somewhat fortuitously, himself as player-manager, in 1907, just as Cameron precipitously ended his association with White Hart Lane.
At the time of Chapman's death Arsenal was top of Division One. Joe Shaw, Lancashire-born but ex. playing Gunner, ex. coach and ex. reserve team manager, took over as caretaker. He guided the team to the Championship, at which point the Board set about finding a permanent replacement for his late boss. They chose George Allison, the club's former Secretary, the then Managing Director and probaly crucially, a Board-member. Allison had no direct background in top-level football. Bernard Joy, a somewhat peripheral footballer, joining Arsenal from Fulham in 1935, but later a very distinguished football journalist would say of him.
"[He was] tactful, friendly and good-hearted. But he fell short in his handling of footballers and lacked the professional's deep knowledge of the game."
In fact Allison had been one of the first sports' broadcasters for the BBC. Thus he, whilst continuing to control finances, left coaching and training where they had been, with Shaw and Tom Whittaker. Whittaker had also been a player with Arsenal from 1919 to 1925 but his career was cut sort by a broken knee-cap. He then retrained as a physiotherapist and became Chapman's First Team trainer in 1927. But importantly, although he was born in Aldershot barracks he had grown up in Newcastle, with a certain Peter McWilliam a local hero.
However, there was one more appointment that was also made in that summer of 1934. A new chief scout, becoming the best-paid one in the Football League, was recruited not internally but from outwith the club. It was a position that the club must have identified as one which had been a Chapman strength and which Allison, Shaw and Whittaker could not themselves fill. It required not just an ex-professional's deep knowledge of the game, which both Shaw and Whittaker both had in abundance, but also the ability to judge a player in terms skill, role and monetary value and an ability to persuade, not that joining the Arsenal of that era would have needed much cajoling. And the man accepting the post, the man both able to judge and effectively charm, said to have been made and declined an offer to become manager, alone to fill Chapman's shoes, perhaps because with his children grown-up his wife, Florence, was unwilling to uproot and move south again away from her extended family, was none other than Peter McWilliam.
No no doubt the eventual appointment as scout was helped initially by Allison, who, having been born in Hurworth-on-Tees, up-river from Middlesbrough, had during the 1904-5 season before moving to London been assistant to the Secretary of the Ayresome Park club. McWilliam and Allison may not have spoken quite the same language but they understood each other and each knew the strengths of both. That Whittaker was a Geordie too, one who had grown up on Tyneside in the era of Peter the Great, would not have harmed the process. And perhaps too there was a residual memory of Chapman's stated intention at Highbury to build a team in the image of McWilliam's Newcastle. On his death Chapman might or might not have believed he had already done it but with the arrival of McWilliam was there in all seriousness a better man either to compete or continue.
Whether or not it had been part of the Chapman plan or not the season ending immediately after Chapman' death had seen a team drawn mainly from seventeen players. The first season of the triumvirate saw mainly fifteen used with three of those newly arrived from elsewhere and found by McWilliam. The following season it was seventeen once more with four new McWilliam faces. Then in 1937 the number had increased to nineteen with five new arrivals and for the first time Margate notable as one of the source clubs. And the reason was that Arsenal had entered into a formal agreement with the Thanet club, it having just joined the Southern as well as remaining in the Kent Leagues, to supply its squad with young players and players recovering from injury, i.e. for it as a team to act officially as an on-field nursery for Highbury. The agreement was that the Margate pitch would be reduced to exactly the same size as Highbury's, Arsenal would pay 60% of the salaries of players sent to Margate plus the London club would pay the full salary of and provide the manager. He was Jack Ramsay, a Scot, an inside forward, who had joined the Gunners from Kilmarnock in 1924, playing seventy-five games until December 1926, when he returned to Kilmarnock and continued playing there until the end of the 1930-31 season.
Chapman clearly had not thought too much of Ramsay. It was he, who had moved him on, but someone else did, perhaps even bringing him down from Scotland specifically. The year that Margate became Arsenal's feeder club, following almost precisely the Tottenham and Northfleet model, the year Ramsay was appointed, was 1934, the same year that Peter McWilliam joined. Moreover Margate was to cease formally to be Arsenal's official nursery in 1938, the year McWilliam would leave Highbury.
However, it was perhaps not all coincidence. The Arsenal-Margate connection was an arrangement that may have developed on an informal basis prior to 1934. Two incidents point to the possibility.
The first was in 1930 when a Dutch player crossed the North Sea to the Kent club. His name was Gerrit Keizer, a goalkeeper. And he came from Ajax. He had joined the Amsterdam club in 1927 under Sid Castle, become number two keeper in 1929 under a returned Reynolds and it may have been Reynolds who was the catalyst for Keizer's next move and perhaps even for the one after that. Reynolds had had his most settled period as a player at Watford then New Brompton, now Gillingham, for five seasons in the Southern League from 1907 at precisely the same time as Herbert Chapman was playing and managing in the same division at Northampton. They would have known each other. Their paths would have crossed, albeit as adversaries. Reynolds might even have given Chapman the nod about the young keeper and then, having arranged to run his eye over the prospect, Chapman responded and positively. For the first twelve League games of the 1930-31 season Keizer was in goal for Arsenal. He proved flamboyant to point of erratic and, having kept not one clean sheet, was dropped, at the end of season moved on, interestingly, to Charlton and then returned to Holland, Reynolds and Ajax, where he remained the club's keeper for several years.
The second incident was two years later. When manager of Huddersfield the last player of note that Chapman had signed before moving to Arsenal was Alex Jackson. Jackson was to prove himself to be one of the great players of the decade. At international level he would be with Alex James, ex-Raith and Chapaman's Arsenal key component, an integral part of the all-powerful Scotland team of the period. At club level his new team retained the League Championship in 1926, was runner-up for the next two season but when, after the club reached the 1930 FA Final due to Jackson's goals, having lost the 1928 Final, and was defeated again, the Scot engineered a move. It was to Chelsea as captain after a good first season proved a mistake. To cut a long story short Jackson fell out with the club, which behaved poorly but with a suggestion of Jackson also manoeuvring over money. There was a wage-cap and Scottish players in England were being denied extra income from international games because in 1931 English clubs decided to release only English players for such games. Jackson pushed the point, wanted a transfer but Chelsea refused to release his registration.
Jackson reacted by playing for a few games for Ashton National from Ashton-under-Lyne in non-league where Chelsea's registration had no validity. Ashton North End, a defunct club from the same town, had been Herbert Chapman's first club. Then Jackson moved on to second club outwith the Football League's orbit. It was Margate. Although unproven and unprovable, it suggests Chapman might have had a hand in both moves. He could certainly have been interested in acquiring the services of a Jackson at his peak to combine with those of James, who was already at the club. It might explain Chelsea's fearsome opposition to the release of Jackson, especially to so close a rival, a reaction strong enough to convince Chapman that nothing could happen and for Jackson to move on once more from Kent to end his career in France.
In fact it may have been the Jackson saga that, if anything, strengthened the Arsenal link, smoothing McWilliam's formalisation, from which already in 1934-35 Margate began to profit. It finished 3rd in Southern League Eastern and the Kent League, 6th in the Southern League Central. Then the following year it won both its Southern League Divisions, the Kent Cup and reached the 3rd Round of the FA Cup, finally losing to First Division Blackpool. The club's exploits, in fact, led to “nursery” clubs from the following year being excluded in future from the competition.
At the end of 1936 Jack Ramsay resigned. On the back of so much success quite why is unclear. He was replaced by Jack Lambert, who had played one hundred and forty-three games and scored ninety-eight goals for the Gunners, had been transferred to Fulham in 1933 and was playing for Margate in 1935-6. Success on the field continued but the club had increasing financial problems. In spite of winning the Southern League outright two seasons in succession it returned to just the Kent League for the 1937-38 season, at the end of which the Arsenal nursery agreement was terminated, presumably, with Peter McWilliam leaving the club that same year, on the say-so of George Allison.
However, Margate had not been Arsenal's first attempt at excursion into feeder clubs. When ex. Tottenham, ex. McWilliam player, Jimmy Seed, had from Sheffield Wednesday joined Clapton Orient as manager in 1931 it had been at the suggestion of Herbert Chapman. He had told Seed that the Highbury club was looking for Orient to become its nursery but not on the basis of an inter-club agreement but by outright purchase. In the end it did not happen because it was made very clear to the Gunners by the Football Association that such a move was illegal. Thus, having perhaps flirted with Margate informally in 1929-30, then Chapman in 1931 wanting a definitive arrangement with Orient, which proved impossible, the machinations in 1932-33 around Alex Jackson again with Ashton and then Margate, on Chapman's death and the appointment by Arsenal of McWilliam the McWilliam, Tottenham solution of a formal arrangement with an independent club, again Margate, was in 1934 adopted at least for the duration.