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:
Curiously for a country, to which a fair number of Scots have been drawn to over the years Scottish involvement in South African football proved hard to find. Perhaps it was the kind of Scot that went. Perhaps it was what they were required to do. There was mining but not digging of coal, at least not by white men. Nor was there the need to clear land in the same way in country with proportionately a much larger, native population than Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And then, of course, there was the competition that came from rugby. It arrived in Cape Town in 1875 followed in 1878 by William Milton, a former England Rugby international. He would become Administrator of Mashonaland, present-day Northern Zimbabwe, but before that had preached the oval-ball game in Cape Colony and also in 1888-9 be a member of the first South African Test cricket team and its captain in the second.
By then at least five football clubs existed in Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town and 1888 had also seen the foundation of the first in Johannesburg. However, the main initial impetus to the game had come not from settlers but soldiers based in the region with football's formalisation as a civilian sport only in 1892. The South African Football Association was founded that year, affiliated to the FA in London, then temporarily joined FIFA in 1910, notably before Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but disaffiliated once more in 1924 and re-joined only in 1952. It is a chronology that presented two major problems. The first was that the South African Rugby Board had already been formed in 1889 three years before its football equivalent. Its first representative team had even travelled in 1891 to Britain. In addition the Boer population had also already started its ongoing love-affair with rugby, beginning in 1883 with the foundation of the Stellenbosch club. The second was that the SAFA was all-white. It meant football remained a sport mainly for South Africans solely of British origins until the South African Indian Football Association in 1903 and the Bantu and Coloured Associations only in the 1930s. It was fully a decade from the SAFA's formation before a South African representative football team first played, highly successfully as it happened with just one defeat, a twelve match tour of South America in 1912. Argentinian-Scot,
William Leslie, was the referee in two of the encounters. However, the South African players were entirely middle-class civil servants, bankers and engineers with only a couple of Scots names. South African football was not only ostensibly white but also seemingly bourgeois, amateur, mainly English, not Scots and therefore nor by any stretch working-class.
Yet by 1912 a player born in South Africa had long played international football and a second serendipitously had just done so. The first, William Rawson, born in Cape Town, had been had been as long ago as 1874. It had been for England in the fourth ever international game, the fourth against Scotland. The second, almost thirty years later, and the first for Scotland had been in March against Ireland at right-half. He was Alex Bell of Manchester United, who had actually been brought up in Ayr but was also Cape Town-born. Then post-Great War there was the slightly mysterious Gordon Hodgson, said to be born to English parents in Benoni just east of Johannesburg but not only with a Scots Christian name but who would spend a large part of his summer career as a cricket professional in Scotland. This was whilst in winter he played from 1925 for more than a decade as an inside-forward for Liverpool, signed with two others from South Africa, Arthur Riley and Glasgow-born James Gray, and also three times for England in 1930-31, against Ireland, Wales and Scotland. However that, something which perhaps brought his England international career to a rapid end a la
Joe Kennaway and
Barney Battles, had been having already taken the field twice in 1924 for South Africa, including against Ireland in the country's first recognised, full international and scoring in the second against The Netherlands. And finally there was John Hewie, born in Pretoria, who between 1956 and 1960 took the field once more for Scotland nineteen times, during a playing-career of almost five hundred games league games over seventeen seasons with Charlton Athletic.
However, the Ulwazi indigenous project, so not White but Zulu history, provides another slant. It states simply that,
"History tells us that the game
(soccer) was first introduced to the Eastern Cape by the Scots."
with British settlement beginning there in the early 1880s adding to the original Dutch, two decades before it took place in the interior of the country and,
"...was brought to Natal by British troops in the 1880s."
Durban being the capital, the Natal Football Union being formed there in 1882 and consisting of five teams. And Eastern Cape, Eastern Province with Port Elizabeth as its capital, incidentally its highest point the 3,001m Ben Macdui, would follow soon enough. 1898 would see in Walmer, a Port Elizabeth suburb, the formation of the Caledonian Football Club, the Callies. Players would include Duncan, Chalmers, Linton, Simpson, Robertson, Mackay, Hay, MacDonald, Ireland and MacPherson and the team would the EPFA, Eastern Province FA, League Cup in 1899 and again two seasons later. It is a club that continues to this day.