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 Twelve
Peter McWilliam was never involved officially in football again. The Second World War finished on 1st September 1945. He was sixty-five, turning sixty-six three weeks later. Arthur Turner, who as Tottenham club secretary had seen the club through the period from the resignation of Fred Kirkham in 1908 and the appointment in 1912 of McWilliam, had now seen the club though the War, at the end of which Joe Hulme, who had played on the right-wing three hundred and thirty-three times at Arsenal under both Chapman and during McWilliam's time there, was appointed as the new manager. Given his history it would be hard to believe McWilliam did not have an input but one wonders why Harry Lowe had not been promoted. He did, however, go into management, with some success with Bournemouth for three years and Yeovil Town for two more. And, of course, Hulme had literally to rebuild the team. He began with a squad of just fourteen. However, they included seven from before the War, amongst them both Buckingham and Nicholson and by the time the League recommenced in August 1946 had been increased to twenty. Players returned, including Ron Burgess. There were ten more or less new faces, amongst them goalkeeper Ted Ditchburn, Gillingham-born and yet another Northfleet graduate, who in 1939 and aged just eighteen had been brought into the White Hart Lane envelope by McWilliam.
In fact in that first post-War season, with the addition of George Ludford, four of fifteen senior players had come through the Kent club. Spurs finished sixth in the Second Division. The following year it was eighth, then fifth. It was good but not good enough, as elsewhere another former player and graduate of Northfleet had in the Southern League been tearing up trees now as a manager and at Chelmsford City . It was Arthur Rowe, even Tottenham-born, a youth player under McWilliam first time around and team captain for a year under him the second time around before injury ended his career.
And in 1949 Hulme was replaced by Rowe. He made an immediate impact, in spite of losing both Buckingham and Ludford through retirement. Tottenham took the Second Division, helped by Les Medley being top-scorer from the wing and one special signing from Southampton, that of full-back, Alf Ramsey. Not only that the same team with one addition went on in 1951 then to win the top division at the first attempt. In doing so they used the one-touch, “Push-and-Run” style that Arthur Rowe himself confirmed was based on training routines, no doubt adapted from those of James McPherson, but introduced twenty-five years earlier at the club by Peter McWilliam. McWilliam himself lived to see both promotions, dying in Redcar shortly after his seventy-second birthday on 1st October 1951. He died a reasonably wealthy man, leaving the equivalent of half a million pounds in his will. Nae bad fa' a wee laddie fra' Inversneck. However, it is noticeable that his death was just six months after that of his wife, who had by then been ill for some time but without whom he clearly struggled.
However, neither his story or his footballing influence was to end then. “Push-and-Run” was a mode of play based on short passes to team-mates then running past markers to receive the return pass. As such it was not new. It had been standard Scottish practice for wingers and inside-forwards for certainly more than half a century. It had even been introduced to Brazil four decades earlier by Paisley's Archie McLean and there became the Brazilian style, A Tablinha and by the time of the Newcastle team, of which McWilliam had in the first decade of the 20th Century been an integral part, it had been extended to wing-halves and wingers, not least by McWilliam himself. Now under Rowe it was further extended to the rest of the team with the ball moved at pace in an, that word again, integrated system, where players' positions were fluid and responsibilities equally so. It was not yet Total Football but perhaps 75% there.
It is fair to say that Rowe's innovation took the English First Division by surprise. It initially overwhelmed the wing-to-wing style that was still mainly used elsewhere. However, football always reacts to counter innovation. For the remaining four years of Rowe's management Spurs did well but without winning a further Championship. In 1952 his team finished as runner-up. In 1953 it was tenth and in 1954 and 1955 sixteenth. Then Arthur Rowe would step down due to ill-health with the pressure of management bringing on a mental and physical breakdown, from which he would never fully recover. It was not, however, the end of the story. In England there was to be another flowering, perhaps two, and as there would be of the seeds that had already been planted abroad, flowerings that could be argued to have not ceased to this day.