In 1894 there was a football association formed. Its first three major office-bearers were David Scott, Andrew Gemmell and Robert Reid. Scott was President, Gemmell Secretary and Reid Treasurer. There is on the surface nothing unusual in that. In that era football associations had and were being formed in many places, in Britain and given the names specifically in Scotland.
However, this was not Scotland, nor even Britain. The meeting at which the three were elected was in South America, in the port city of Valparaiso in Chile and the new entity was the Chilean Football Association, the CFA. Put simply Chilean football was formalised by three relatively new arrivals and they were all not just of Scots origin but Scots-born.
Of Andrew Andrew Gemmell quite a lot is known. He was born in 1868 in Drainie by Lossiemouth so was twenty-five in 1894. His father, a teacher and then headteacher, was from the Ayrshire-Dumfries border, his mother local. His childhood and youth were spent mostly in and around Glasgow as his father moved there for work and football became the city's dominant sport, that is until his arrival in 1892 at the age of 23 in Chile to Valparaiso, still at the time the largest city in the country.
He came initially, it is said, as the result of a prize won, whilst at Glasgow University and probably a year as an elementary school teacher in Glasgow. He might initially have gone to the Chilean Naval Academy to teach English, then seems he returned to teach in Britain for a year, possibly to Govan to teach once more, before from there being recruited back to Chile and Valparaiso by Mackay and Sutherland School, its Scots school now located in Renaca, north of nearby Vina del Mar, to teach mathematics, and on the field to play in and captain its football team. And off it he is also thought to have been instrumental in the laying the school's first football pitch in the grounds and next to the tennis court of the school's joint-owner, George Sutherland, before foundation of the first official footballing body in the country that would be come his permanent home.
But after that it was something of a mystery, now solved. At some point about 1898 he seems to have resumed working at the Naval Academy, there becoming “Superintendent of Games”. He also met Alicia Condon, Chilean-born with Irish roots but from the southern city of Lota Alto near Concepcion. They married in December 1901. She was twenty-one, he thirty-two. Even though he and new his wife appear about that time to have been living in Valparaiso, he seems then to have retired albeit temporarily from footballing activities. In public life he became heavily involved in its and Chile's first development of athletics. In 1903 he took part in the "Great Naval Athletics Championships", between the Naval Academy, the Naval Engineering School and the School of Accountants, also also teaching at all three.
He was also an active Mason and had been so for a decade. In private life he and Alice would have their first child, a daughter, in 1904, one of eight in total, five of whom would survive. A second daughter would be born in 1906, a son in 1908 still in the port city and by then he had once more become involved with the game. It would be he who in Chile first translated the London FA's rules from English into Spanish. He also became be a noted referee in the city, indeed internationally, and was in 1910 the treasurer of the Valparaiso Football Association. By then a fourth child, a third daughter had been born. In early 1913 a second son, Edwin, followed, both in Valparaiso and it was in 1912-13, that Gemmell, its first Secretary, became the Chilean Football Association's last British President.
Of David Scott more is also now known of his early life. Like Gemmell he grew up at a time when football became a passion in the old country. Like Gemmell too on arrival in Chile he was young enough to play as well as administer, but not for long. Recorded elsewhere as David N. Scott, he married in 1896, stepping down from the Presidency of the Chilean FA after just a year. He can even been travelling to Britain in 1890 and then once more in 1901, this time with his Chilean wife, Margarita, and two young Chilean-born children.
The “N” in David Scott's name is Napier and John Alexander Napier Mcnab Scott, his great-great grandson, who lives in Santiago, confirms that his great-grandfather, was born in Berwickshire, in Earlston, in 1862. In fact, his parents, John Marshall Scott, a coachman working for the great estates, and Mary Napier, were both born in East Lothian and married there before moving to the Borders. However, when Mary died in Earlston in childbirth in 1865, John remarried and moved back nearer to his roots to work at Tyninghame House, outside Dunbar. Thus we have so far Chilean football founded by a man from Moray brought up in and around Glasgow and another from Berwickshire brought up East Lothian.
Of the third of the three, early, Valparaiso Scots footballing Musketeers, Robert Reid, specifically Robert H. Reid, nothing initially was really known except that he was, although Treasurer, regarded by some as the real, initial administrative force behind the early Chilean game. There is no mention of him as a player, which suggests he was older, but he is said to have worked both as a journalist and in 1898 in known to have published the The Illustrated Sporting Annual of Chile.
Robert Reid is not an uncommon name in Scotland but the story in Chile is that he was Robert Harvey Reid. In fact he was Robert Harvie Reid, born in 1844 in Ardrossan in Ayrshire, the son of John Reid and Janet Harvie and so was already forty-nine or fifty years old in 1894. That he was not a player is confirmed. In 1870 and still in Scotland he had married Janet Irvine, born in nearby Kilbirnie a year earlier than he and she gave birth to five sons and five daughters. The youngest, a son, Victor, was born in Chile, in Victoria in 1889, would return to British in The Great War and be killed in 1917 at Passchendaele. The eldest son, David, had been born in Scotland in 1871 with then John, Robert and Irvine and their five sisters born in Scotland or England.
Harvie Reid was, indeed, like Scott a journalist. In 1861 he had been a printer's apprentice, in 1871 a 26 year-old reporter in Ardrossan with football being played in the town in 1874, Reids amongst the players. Then from 1880 he was on the move, editing a newspaper in Paignton in Devon, and said to have arrived in Chile in 1885-6 to take up a newspaper post, possibly in Santiago. He seems certainly to have been in the Chilean capital in 1889 but after a short spell in Victoria aged in his mid-forties he moved to Valparaiso. There he settled, working for the English-language Chilean Times until in 1905 accepting the post of night-editor of The Buenos Aires Standard, also English-language, moving to Argentina, and then becoming editor of The Herald, equally English-language, in that same city before retirement, a return to Scotland, settling in Milton in Glasgow and dying there at what was 90, Cambridge Street in 1919 at the age of seventy-three.
So, it seems that in addition to a Berwickshire man, who aged just 50 would die in 1912 still in Chile in Providencia, now a suburb of Santiago, but be buried in Valparaiso in a family grave crowned by a Celtic Cross and one originally from Moray, who would live in La Lota and die in Concepcion in 1950 at the age of 81 to be buried in that city's Cementerio General and also leaving Chilean descendants, Valparaiso football and ultimately the whole Chilean games owe a third debt of gratitude to an Ayrshire man born and bred, who would apparently end his working days in Argentina, where there are said still Reids, but return to Scotland to live out a decade of retirement. Where is his, indeed their recognition?
