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:
(This piece could not have been written without meeting, talking to and receiving the help of Michael Black, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, John Scott and members of clans Reid and Gemmell in Valparaiso and at the Prince of Wales Club, Santiago.)
The first football pitch in Chile is said to have been laid near the top of “Happy Hill” in “Paradise Valley”, that is on Cerro Alegre, perhaps better translated as "Mount Pleasant", in Valparaiso. The city is today still its country's main port but sprawls untidily along the coast and is more than a little down-at-heel. Yet a century and a bit ago it was an entirely different place, one that had been the base for the Fifer, Admiral Thomas Cochrane, Chile's naval liberator from the Spanish, as well as if not the first then the main replenishment-point for ships passing from the Atlantic to the Pacific around Cape Horn and continuing northward to the west coast of North America, not least at the time of the 1848 California Gold Rush. That was before the city was substantially destroyed by an earthquake in 1906 and before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.
Thus it was that in the last years of the 19th Century Valparaiso, Chile's then largest city, was still thronged with sailors and merchants from all corners of the World, not least from Britain. The British Arch erected in 1910 in the centre of the city is testament to all their former presences. Of those who settled, perhaps 32,000 in total at its maximum, a large proportion were Scots and already in 1857, Ayrshire-born, Peter Mackay, had arrived to be head-teacher of the Valparaiso Artizan School, set up precisely by those local Scots to educate their and other children of Britons. Then in 1861 Mackay was joined by Wick-born, George Sutherland, and in 1877 the two opened their own Mackay and Sutherland School.
Having said that, there is no question that either Peter Mackay or George Sutherland directly introduced football to Chile. Sutherland's game was tennis and both had left Scotland long before before the contagion first took hold but that football followed them is without doubt. By 1880 ad-hoc games were said to being played in the city and nearby Vina del Mar and the school was now established on Cerro Alegre. Indeed the school created a pitch of sorts on the hill and in 1882 the Mackay and Sutherland Football Club was formed, although like many clubs of the time what form of football it played is unverifiable. If it was the Association variety it makes it the first football club in South America.
Mackay and Sutherland was at first a junior club. Senior football in Chile began in 1889, when Leandro Aguila and recently arrived, Scots-born journalist, David Scott, came together to form a new football team. However, they had to wait. Delayed for two years by revolution, civil war and their aftermath moves towards formal foundation did not take place until 1891. David Scott had even returned home in the meantime, a journey that would take the best part of two months in each direction but by early 1892 it had, as an offshoot horse-racing's Valparaiso Sporting Club, been formalised as Valparaiso FC. Indeed, although the football club no longer exists the sporting club very much does with its race course in the nearby city of Vina del Mar.
After foundation events then moved more quickly. Valparaiso F.C.'s founding team played its first game, a friendly game against employees of local merchants, Casa Rogers. Robert Bailey was the referee and the team itself of MacNaughton, Scott himself and Reynolds, Crangle, Drummond and Roberts, Norton, Millie, Fullerton, Melrose and Simpson seems with perhaps nine, even ten of the eleven to have been drawn very much from the local Scottish community. And no doubt more ad hoc friendlies followed until just over a year later, in August 1893, Valparaiso received an invitation from the Santiago Cricket and Athletic Club to play a game against a selection of players in and from the Chilean capital. And the game, an entirely British event, took place. It was played at the Parque Cousino, now Parque O'Higgins, on the then edge of the city close to the horse-racing track that is still there and the main railway station. Valparaiso having travelled to Santiago by train. The again largely Scottish Santiago team consisted, with perhaps some Valparaiso ringers, of more Scotts, P. and V., MacColl (perhaps McColl), Coat(e)s, Madden, Rogers and Anderson, Hood, Melrose, Jones and Allan. Valparaiso once more included MacNoughton, Crangle, Simpson, David Scott now at at centre-forward, plus Fleming and was three up at half-time, Scott and Fleming both scored hat-tricks, Simpson the other goal, with the score 7:2. Yet Santiago, clearly a scratch team was not put off. A month later there was a return match, played not in Valparaiso but in Vina del Mar, with Valparaiso F.C. winning once more; 5:0, and now with newly-arrived Andrew Gemmell in the line-up.
Chile's first intra-national games was quickly followed by its first “international”. A selection, largely based on Valparaiso F.C., played an Argentine one from Buenos Aires and in Buenos Aires. It ended in a 1:1 draw but was clearly a labour-of-love. How they did it is unclear. The railway-line on the Argentine side had been completed just months earlier, which made its possible, but the Chilean side was not until finished a decade later so there was still 50 miles to the border from Los Andes by other means and the whole journey would have taken 3 days each way. However, enthusiasm was high, and still high enough the following year, 1894, again in Valparaiso, a city now with a population of 130,000, for David Scott once more to call a meeting of his club and the six others that had in the meantime formed. The meeting was chaired by a Mr. R. Bailey, Robert Bailey, the erstwhile referee and said to have been the first person to have imported a football to Chile. It saw the foundation of the country's Football Association, the CFA. David Scott was elected President. Robert Reid, a second journalist, employed by the Valparaiso, English-language paper, The Chilean Times, and a second Scot was appointed Treasurer and a third Scot, 25 year-old Andrew Gemmell, Secretary.
Of Andrew Andrew Gemmell quite a lot is known. He was born in 1868 in Drainie Lossiemouth. 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 1892, when young Gemmel arrived at the age of 23 in Valparaiso. He came initially as the result of a prize won, whilst at Glasgow University, probably to the Chilean Naval Academy, where he taught English. It then seems he returned to teach in Britain for a year, possibly in Govan, before from there seemingly being recruited back to Chile and Valparaiso this time by the Mackay and Sutherland School there from mid-1893 to teach mathematics, perhaps sport, and in his leisure time certainly to play in and captain the football team and lay a full football pitch in the grounds of George Sutherland's house next to his tennis court.
But after that had been something of a mystery, now solved by research in and from Chile itself. Remaining in Chile by 1898 he seems to have again to have been working for the Naval Academy, becoming "Superintendent of Games". He also at some point around this same time met Alicia Condon, Chilean-born of Irish ancestry and from the southern city of Lota Alto near Concepcion. They married in December 1901. She was twenty-one, he thirty-two. And by then, even though he and his wife appear perhaps to have returned briefly to La Lota, there in 1902 to set up an "English School", they remained largely living in Valparaiso, he seems then to have retired at least temporarily from footballing activities. He had other interests. He was an active Mason and had been so for a decade. He also seems to have become heavily involved in the the introduction of formal athletics to his adopted country. In 1903 he took part in the Great Naval Athletics Championships, involving the Naval Academy itself, the Naval Engineering School and the School of Accountancy, also giving classes at the last two. They, he and Alice, would also 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. He became be a noted referee in the city. It would be he who in Chile first translated the London FA's rules from English into Spanish. and in 1910 he was 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. There would be other changes too. Peter Mackay had died in 1905 and had been buried in Valparaiso. George Sutherland retired from the school that bore his and Mackay's name in 1912 and George Robertson, born in Pitlochry, a Perthshire man, who on his arrival in Chile in 1894 had played alongside Andrew Gemmel in the Mackay and Sutherland team, having married Sutherland's daughter, took his place. He would run the school until his retirement and a return to the UK in 1928, at which point the school closed but, happily, was reopened in 1946 and, now sited in Renaca, north of Vina del Mar, continues to this day.
Of David Scott more is also now known form research in Chile 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, if only for a short period. Recorded elsewhere as David N. Scott, he married in 1896, stepping down from the Presidency of the Chilean FA after just a year , having little or no further involvement with the game. Nevertheless he remains the pivotal figure, who started the ball rolling as it were. So who was David Scott? What is certain is that too remained in Chile. The “N” in David Scott's name is Napier and John Alexander Napier McNab Scott, his great-great grandson, who lives today 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.
This it seems 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. But there was, of course, a third Scots footballing Musketeers, Robert Reid, specifically Robert H. Reid, of whom 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. Now Robert Reid is not an uncommon name in Scotland but the story again in Chile was that he was Robert Harvey Reid. In fact he was Robert Harvie Reid, born in 1844 in Dalry 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, so seemingly named after the town. The eldest son, David, had been born in Scotland in 1871 with then John, Robert and Irvine and their five sisters born some in Scotland and some in England.
Harvie Reid was, indeed, a journalist. In 1861 he had been a printer's apprentice, in 1871 a 26 year-old reporter in Ardrossan, where football arrived in the 1870s. Then from 1880 he was on the move, editing a newspaper in Paignton in Devon, hence the English-born children, 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 once more but to Valparaiso. There he settled, working for the Chilean Times until in 1905 accepting the post of night-editor of The Buenos Aires Standard, moving to Argentina, and then becoming editor of The Herald in that same city. So, it seems that in addition to a Berwickshire man and one from Moray Valparaiso and ultimately Chilean football owes a third debt of gratitude to an Ayrshire man born and bred.
Back in Paradise Valley after the formation of the Chilean Football Association in 1894, the 1895 season must have consisted of friendlies. Only in 1896 did the association’s first Challenge Cup take place, won 8:0 by Scott's Valparaiso Wanderers against local rivals, Victoria Rangers. What then happened initially in 1897 is unclear. No games officially seem to have been recorded, friendlies not counting, in what was the first year of a decade’s stewardship of the Chilean FA by Alfred Jackson of Valparaiso Sporting Club. Yet there was clearly activity. In 1898 the two 1896 Challenge Cup finalists, Valparaiso Wanderers and Victoria Rangers, together with with San Luis, Escuela Naval, the naval school where Andrew Gemmell had taught on first arrival in Chile, Badminton F.C., Britannia, Valparaíso F.C, with Mackay and Sutherland a notable absentee, formed one of Chile’s two first leagues.
However, Mackay and Sutherland was clearly saving itself for the other competition to be initiated that year and played for by a dozen teams in all. It was the McClelland Cup, again Scots by origin. In about 1883 Peter Hannay McClelland had in Valparaiso married Aurora Williamson. She was from the family that part-owned the Valparaiso-based trading company, Williamson, Balfour & Co. And it had been Alexander Balfour, who like Stephen Williamson, was a Fifer, who had founded The Artizan School, the forerunner of Mackay and Sutherland. Indeed, Mackay and Sutherland was one of several teams not in the Chilean Football Association’s league yet still taking part in the McClelland Cup. Santiago Wanderers was another. It, in spite of its name, was a not Santiago but a Valparaiso team. It still is. In fact its is Valparaiso's team in today's Chilean top-flight, with its stadium, perched on the top of the headland that overlooks Valparaiso's bay, in front of the old Escuela Naval.
The origins of Santiago Wanderers somewhat idiosyncratic title are simple. It was a team deliberately without British connections, a working class team from the port, formed of players, mainly from elsewhere in the country, who had come to the Valparaiso for work. And in 1898, in a way that paralleled, even predated Argentina, it was playing not for a cup nor in the Chilean Football Association league but in the National Football League, a separate, a rival but definitely non-national organisation of its own making.
The following year, the last of the old century, saw signs of something of a reconciliation between the Chilean Football Association and the National Football League. Santiago Wanderers appears to have had matches, in Cup or league, it is not clear, against Valparaiso F.C., Victoria Rangers, Chilean F.C., Valparaiso Wanderers, National F.C., Athletic, Mackay and Sutherland and from the city of Santiago itself National Athletic and Santiago Rangers.
However, by 1900 differences seem to have reappeared and Santiago Wanderers was still ploughing its own furrow, participating in a new Anti-alcoholic League, which seems to have continued independently for several years more. The club did not become Valparaiso league champions, after several years of its domination by Valparaiso F.C. and Badminton, until 1907, the year after earthquake had flattened the port city beginning the decline of the port itself and a shifting of power, economic and footballing, permanently to the country's political capital, Santiago.
As for the three Scots musketeers, Andrew Gemmell would, it seems, abandon football after 1913 and his presidency of the CFA, or perhaps it abandoned him as the organisation ceased to be British and became crillo. He would also leave Valparaiso. His son, Edwin, was to die young there in 1915 and it must have been fairly soon after that the family left what was by then Chile's second city and moved permanently to La Lota. Their third daughter died there in July 1916, a fourth was born there in October 1917 and a fourth son in 1922. Andrew Gemmell was by then fifty-four. He would live to eighty-two years of age, dying in Concepcion in 1950. Alicia, his wife, would survive him by six years, dying in 1956 but their children would return to live in Valparaiso and Santiago with their descendants, including Athol, Derek and Alexander and continuing their Scots and Irish heritage, living now not in La Lota or Concepcion but Vina del Mar and Northern Chile.
In 1912 aged 68 Robert Reid retired, he, his wife and eight of the children returning from Argentina to Glasgow, His wife died there in 1915. His death followed in Milton aged 75 in 1919, still described as a journalist on his death certificate. John, his second son, born in 1876, remained in Chile, married there and also died there, in 1942. David, the eldest son had died young, in Buenos Aires in 1912, Victor was killed in action in the Great War in 1917 and Robert and Irvine both returned not to Chile but Argentina and lived out their lives there, where there are still descendants.
And that leaves David Scott. He was probably the 38 year-old Mr. Scott in 1902 recorded travelling from Valparaiso to Liverpool with his Chilean wife and two children, aged 5 and 2. They had had a son born in 1897, a second child in 1900, and a third would be born at the end of 1902. And like Gemmell he remained in Chile and his descendants, John Scott amongst them, are still here, prominent members now not of Valparaiso's but Santiago's Anglo- and Caledonian-Chilean society.