Sometimes the trigger of an enquiry comes out of left-field and this is one such case. In researching "The Leven Legacy" an unexpected name came out of the ether, a search for Duncan McLean of Everton and later Liverpool, indeed one of the Team of the Macs, throwing up the name Charlie McLaren, Charles Bissett McLaren. The reference itself appeared in the Liverpool Echo of 18th January 1890. It reported the arrival of the 10st 6ib, 5' 6", perhaps crucially, "twenty-one year old" forward not from Renton, like McLean, but neighbouring Vale of Leven and not to one of the Merseyside clubs but Southport. Organised amateur football had come to the coastal, Lancashire town at least by 1881, the professional game already in 1888 in the form of Southport Central, the name today's Southport F.C. would use until 1921 and the joining of the Football League. And it was Southport Central that McLaren was joining.

But there is no sign that Charlie McLaren had been a first-teamer at Vale of Leven, hence perhaps his arrival at Southport rather than a larger club. Like so many of his footballing peers at and in The Vale in 1881 he was a print-field worker, aged fourteen, so born in August

1866, living at home at Milton, half-way between Bonhill and Jamestown , with a Bonhill-born, dyer father, Allan, and a Renton-born mother, Elizabeth. And whilst his parents would live out their lives in Scotland, Charlie would never return. Not recorded anywhere in 1891 he married a local girl in Southport in 1894, in 1901 was house-painter in the town, as he was in 1911, and he died in the town 1936.

But there are clearly problems. The first is that a player born in 1866 would in 1890 have been not twenty-one but twenty-three or even twenty-four. Moreover, stating that he was twenty-four on his marriage-certificate, with indeed a dyer father called Allan, was a continuation of the same lie. The second is that Charlie's elder brother, Alex, also Milton-born, also untraceable in 1891, in 1895 married a local girl in Manchester, started a family and in 1901 and1911 was working still there as a Stevedore . So it may have been our Charlie had come south to Lancashire by 1890 or even earlier, perhaps with brother, to try his hand as a professional footballer, had failed somewhat at the larger clubs and simply ended up at Southport. Indeed the difference in Charlie's given and actual age and therefore birth-date may even have been football-related, an attempt to make him seem younger than he was.

However, there was a second result of deeper enquiries into Charlie McLaren, another name, Robert McGown. It is reported that the story of the foundation of Southport Central began with a meeting on 12th June 1888 in the town's Chapel St, in front of Southport Station. It was followed by another meeting a week later at the Railway Hotel, at which the said McGown proposed the name of the "Southport Central Association Football Club". He had been Secretary of local High Park, a football club, which exists to this day and he appears also to have been a Scot. Moreover, it appears that, whilst he had married in Southport in 1879, lived just to the north of the town and died still in Lancashire perhaps in 1899 or maybe 1925, it is not clear, in 1861 he had been a bleacher to trade and in 1851  had been living, a wee bairn, on Burn St., all in none other than Bonhill, which is where in 1849 he had also been born.

So, when on 29th August 1888 at a further meeting where the objects of the new club were outlined and it was confirmed that "foreign talent" would be introduced by paying players, is it surprising that one of the first of those professionals to arrive, albeit perhaps circuitously, is said to have first learned his trade at Milburn Park, the Vale of Leven F.C. ground, just down the river not only from his own Scottish birthplace but also across from that of one of the leading lights of the new, English club he was joining?

And there is one further aside. The person to have made the August announcement was Mr. J. B. Watson and a John Brydone Watson, Gentleman, would die on Ash St. in Southport in 1895, aged sixty. He had been married in Wales in 1858 but he had been born in 1825 in Tranent. He was also a Scot.