In 1935 the Scottish Football Association (SFA) decided that it needed a stadium with a realistic capacity of 150,000 in which to stage major matches.
   Matters had come to a head that year after crowd scenes in Glasgow city centre before the international match with England. Supporters, anxious to get to Hampden Park before the gates closed, crossed working railway lines at Central Station as a short-cut to the trains heading for Mount Florida. Incoming trams were boarded before they had reached their terminus to ensure a place was secured for the return journey to the ground. At the ground there had been over-crowding.
   ​Glasgow was already the football capital of the world, with Ibrox and Hampden each capable of hosting crowds of 120,000, with Celtic not far behind. It was still not enough.

It was clear to the SFA that something had to be done to safely accommodate and increase the number of spectators that could watch big games otherwise the Glasgow Corporation would take action itself on the grounds of public safety and order.
   The most likely threat from the Corporation would have been a significant reduction in the 120,000 capacity of Hampden Park and further changes to how the spectators entered the ground to avoid over-crowding. It is also possible that the Corporation may have looked at restricting public transport arrangements to avoid a repetition of the scenes in the city centre. These measures would have had a major financial impact on the SFA.
   The SFA itself thought that the major games should be all-ticket with no tickets on sale on match day at the ground. This would aid control of the vast crowds and reduce the numbers travelling to the ground many of which would be locked out.
   The SFA decided that the solution was to give one club sole right to stage the Scotland v England international and the Scottish Cup Final for a period of 21 years in return for committing to significant ground expansion plans.
   It appears that Celtic FC, with a current holding capacity of 92,000, did not put forward a proposal for Celtic Park.  In December 1905 the club had already withdrawn its own plans to host these major matches and supported the new (third) Hampden Park as the big match venue. It is possible that a survey of their ground revealed that they could not meet the SFA’s capacity requirement within their land or that plans would be economically unviable.
   This left the way clear for Rangers FC and Queen's Park FC to submit proposals.
   In 1930 Ibrox Park was certified to have a capacity of 136,941 but 120,000 was the match limit. Rangers had plans to increase the capacity to 150,000 together with spectator cover over the entire north enclosure. There were later reports of other plans to increase it further to 184,000.
   Hampden Park had a certified capacity of 141,765 although again the match limit was 120,000. Queen's Park FC put forward two schemes that would increase the capacity to 167,720 or 163,472. Both schemes would give a realistic match limit of 150,000.
   When the Council of the SFA met on 1 April 1936 to make its decision, there was a keen debate as there was little between the two proposals. Rangers' manager, Bill Struth, attended the meeting and asked many questions. He was keen to know what the position of the SFA would be if the Queen's Park FC plan was accepted but the club was later required to make a request for financial assistance - a pertinent question as you will find out. He also pointed out the Chief Constable's comments on the access improvements to Ibrox Park that would arise from the completion of the new Renfrew Road had been omitted from the report under consideration at the meeting.
   In the end, the deciding factor was not the stadium plans, but supporter access.  A letter from the London, Midland & Scottish Railway Company (LMS) informed the SFA that it could provide 20/25 special trains to Ibrox station on a match day but 45 using Mount Florida and King's Park stations near Hampden Park, with the latter leading to routes to the east. The company said that it could offer and manage a better service to Hampden Park.  The decision was made.
   Queen's Park FC agreed to provide the SFA with a stadium capable of holding 150,000 spectators for a period of 21 years. In return the club would receive one third of the receipts from the biennial international match against England, with a guaranteed minimum of £5,000 after deducting Entertainment Tax. The club would also receive 20% of the gate receipts from the Scottish Cup Final after deducting Entertainment Tax, match expenses, club guarantees and the percentage due to the SFA under the competition's rules. The SFA made it a condition that the admission price for the terracing for the match against England should be 2s (£0.10). One final condition was that if Queen's Park reached the Cup Final then the match would be played at Hampden Park, but Queen's Park would forgo its ground rent.
   The Queen's Park club selected its slightly smaller scheme and engaged the famous Scottish football ground engineer, Archibald Leitch, to undertake the work. Glasgow, like each Scottish burgh, had a Dean of Guild Court made up of local magistrates, which at the time was the public authority to which anyone intending to build had to apply for permission, which they duly gave on 29 May 1936.
   Construction started that summer and the extended ground was ready for occupancy on 15 February 1937 with the improvement costing £63,325. The original estimated cost was £40-50,000 but further unanticipated expenditure had been incurred to deal with safety requirements together with some other cost increases. It was a heavy financial burden for the amateur club and on 27 September 1937, after having received a deputation from Queen's Park FC, the SFA Council agreed to make a loan of £5,000, despite earlier requests for £10-12,500, to the club to be repaid over the period of the agreement to stage major matches. The annual interest rate was 2½%, paid half-yearly.
   ​How many people could be safely accommodated watching a match was not the same as the theoretical holding capacity calculated by the engineers. The engineers assumed that every seat was occupied and then made a calculation of the space available (around a width of 18 inches) for spectators standing in serried ranks on each step of terracing. This produced a total of 163,782.
   The engineers also calculated that an additional 19,906 spectators could stand in the gangways and that is the reason why a round 180,000 was often quoted at the time as the ground’s new capacity.
   The match capacity was set and reviewed by the Glasgow Corporation based on advice from the Chief Constable, responsible for crowd control, and its Master of Works who made his own calculations. His result was 149,969 that was based on 14,269 seats and standing accommodation for 135,700. In his calculations 1.77 square feet per spectator was allowed for on the east terracing and 1.79 square feet on the west terracing with no standing in the gangways. The layout of the ground and its entrances and exits meant that 150,000 spectators could be admitted in under 75 minutes and it could be safely cleared in just 19 minutes.
   When the expanded ground staged its first major matches in April 1937 new attendance records were set immediately. 149,547 attended the Scotland v England international on 17 April 1937, a new world record, which remains an all-time Hampden Park record and a European crowd record.
   A week later, on 24 April 1937, 147,365 watched the Scottish Cup Final between Celtic and Aberdeen. This set an all-time Scottish Cup Final record and is still a record for a European club match. It was also a world record for a club match until December 1963 when 177,656 saw Fluminense play Flamengo in the Maracanã.
   Soon afterwards a meeting of the Glasgow Corporation was held on 27 May 1937 to discuss concerns over safety at the ground and heard claims that the passageways were blocked and there had been overcrowding and swaying. The Corporation received reports from the Master of Works and the Chief Constable and were keeping in mind possible further improvements. Councillor David Brown, who had watched the International match from the east terracing, argued that the match capacity should be reduced to 135,000 and other aspects of crowd control and ground layout needed to be addressed. However, no change was made.
   In 1938 Hampden Park was not hosting the England match and the Cup Final opponents (East Fife and Kilmarnock) meant that ground capacity was not going to be taxed. The issue arose once again the following year. On 4 April 1939 the Glasgow Magistrates met and discussed the capacity for the forthcoming international match against England and the Cup Final. It was again suggested that it should be reduced to 135,000 to ensure safety and comfort but in the end it was set at 149,000. That was the capacity calculated by the Master of Works and subject to the installation of some more crush barriers before the international.
   149,269 attended the Scotland v England match on 15 April 1939.
   Hampden would never witness such large crowds again. For much of the Second World War the ground operated under a reduced capacity. 139,468 watched the Scotland v England Victory International on 13 April 1946 that was played a month after the Bolton disaster when 33 spectators lost their lives, and hundreds were injured. The public enquiry into the disaster made a number of safety recommendations and consequently, the Hampden Park capacity was reduced to 134,580 where it remained for many years.

For my final article to mark Black History Month, I look at the story of BAME players in Scottish football in the 20th century.
 

I have written recently about the early black pioneers of Scottish football, starting with Andrew Watson and Robert Walker in the 1870s, then Willie Clarke and John Walker at the turn of the century. It would be nice to think that their example inspired generations of other black footballers, and that their influence on the Scottish sporting scene was long-lasting. Yet the opposite was true: after Clarke's departure in 1900, Scottish football closed in on itself.
   A new book, Football's Black Pioneers, describes the challenging experiences of black players in England, and that has prompted me to research what happened in Scotland. I am going to take the story up to 1990. 

In the course of the 20th century there were a small number of black players from abroad, and I will detail them later, but the first Scot was Dougie Johnson, who made his league debut for Brechin City in October 1964. Born in Edinburgh to a Ghanaian father and Scottish mother, he had been on St Mirren’s books as a teenager, went back to junior football, then was given an opportunity at Glebe Park. He was a first team regular in a forgettable season which saw Brechin finish bottom of the league, and moved on to Albion Rovers where he made a handful of appearances.
   Meanwhile, Dougie's half-brother and friend Peter Foley (same father, different mother) was carving out a career in the English lower leagues at Workington, where he was top scorer, then at Scunthorpe and Chesterfield. The story of how Dougie and Peter came to find out their shared paternity is astonishing.
   ​After that breakthrough, in the next two decades there were a few BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) Scottish players, although nothing compared to the numbers in England.

The most high profile was Scotland internationalist Paul Wilson. Born in Bangalore where his father was stationed, and with Indian heritage through his mother, his dark skin tone sometimes made him a target for racial abuse. He made over 200 appearances for Celtic after his debut in 1970, and also played for Motherwell and Partick Thistle later in his career. His Scotland cap was won against Spain in 1975, when he came on as a late substitute.

Dave Smith made his debut for Dunfermline Athletic in 1975 in the old First Division aged just 17. He spent two years at the club before reverting to junior football and later became Scotland's first black manager at Whitehill Welfare and Montrose.

Victor Kasule, born to a Scottish mother and Ugandan father, caused a stir with his exciting play at Albion Rovers, where he was a first team regular for four years after his debut in 1983.
   He was transferred to Meadowbank Thistle in 1987 for a club record fee of £28,000, helped them clinch the Second Division title and moved on the following season to Shrewsbury Town where his exploits off the field made a few headlines. He later played for Hamilton Academical and a few other clubs.
   Also in the 1980s, Rashid Sarwar made 25 appearances for Kilmarnock and may have been the first Scot of Pakistani heritage to play professionally in Scotland, while Mike McArthur played three first team games for Aberdeen in April 1988 and had a similarly brief spell at Kilmarnock. 
   And that was about that, as far as black Scots were concerned. In Emy Onuora's superb book Pitch Black he wrote about the English experience: 'The early pioneers had been largely looked upon as exotic embellishments to what had always been considered a white working-class game'. From a Scottish perspective, it is hard to disagree with his view.
   Most black players seen in Scotland were in visiting teams, notably thanks to the new European Cup, such as Eugène N'Jo-Léa of St Etienne who featured on the front cover of the Rangers programme in 1957 and Paul Bonga Bonga of Standard Liège who played at Hearts the following year.
   They were rarities, and while they generally provoked curiosity rather than abuse, Scotland could be a hostile place. Ruud Gullit recalled 'the saddest night of my life' in 1983 when he experienced racism as a footballer for the first time, in a UEFA Cup tie for Feyenoord at St Mirren. In 1985 the Commission for Racial Equality criticised Scotland supporters for barracking black England players at Hampden, while Rangers disparaged the 'appalling stupidity' of their own supporters for booing a black FC Twente player in a pre-season friendly.

That hostility boiled over in 1988 when Mark Walters, a talented black English midfielder, made his debut for Rangers against Celtic. He was met with unremitting vitriol from the terraces, including bananas thrown on the pitch, and when that treatment was repeated two weeks later at Tynecastle it ended the lie that racial discrimination in Scotland was nothing to worry about, the poor relation of sectarianism.
   Walters stuck at it and was soon followed by Raphael Meade at Dundee United, Paul Elliot at Celtic, Wes Reid and Gus Caesar at Airdrie, and Richard Cadette at Falkirk. With tedious regularity, all these black players were abused on and off the pitch and their treatment was sufficiently shocking to launch the first anti-racist movement in football, Supporters Campaign Against Racism in Football (SCARF). It began in Edinburgh and set out an action plan for football clubs to combat racism. In turn, this led to the formation of wider campaigns such as Kick it Out and Show Racism the Red Card.

Then in 1992, what I believe was Britain's first conference on anti-racism in football was held in Stirling. Chaired by Stuart Cosgrove, it brought together a broad range of campaigners who articulated the issues and the way to combat them. I have digitised the conference papers and they make fascinating reading.
   Thirty years on, the game here is considerably more cosmopolitan and things have certainly improved, but Scottish football does not yet have a clean bill of health. There are still virtually no BAME referees, coaches and administrators, while abuse from fans still occasionally rears its ugly head. I hope this article helps people to understand where we have come from and why anti-racism campaigns are still necessary.


Players from elsewhere
 
Before Mark Walters arrived here in 1988, a number of black players from around the world made a fleeting acquaintance with the game in Scotland. I have listed them below, but I acknowledge this is a subject which is poorly recorded and there may well be others.

Walter Tull, formerly of Tottenham and Northampton Town, signed for Rangers in February 1917 but returned to active service and was killed in action before he could play. He is celebrated enough to be commemorated on a postage stamp, but in fact his elder brother Edward preceded him in Scottish football. Under his adopted surname Warnock, he played a couple of league games at inside right for Ayr Parkhouse in March 1909, scoring in both of them, and then turned out for Girvan.
   Three Egyptians played for Scottish clubs in the inter-war years, starting with Tewfik Abdullah at Cowdenbeath in 1922-23. Born in Cairo he played 6 league games and 2 Scottish Cup ties in a season interrupted by a broken arm. He had played for Egypt in the 1920 Olympic Games, joined Derby County, and after leaving Scotland went to Bridgend and various other clubs.
   Mohammed Latif joined Rangers in 1934 after playing for Egypt in the World Cup but spent most his time with the reserves in the Scottish Alliance. He made a single league appearance against Hibs on 14 September 1935, as well as a friendly at Falkirk on 30 April 1936, then returned to the national team to compete in the 1936 Olympics.

Goalkeeper Mustapha Mansour spent 1936-39 with Queen's Park while studying PE at Jordanhill College in Glasgow, and although primarily in the reserves to begin with, he was first choice goalkeeper in his third and final season. Like Mohammed Latif, he played for Egypt in the 1934 World Cup and 1936 Olympics, a team coached by a Scot, James McCrae.
   Mohammed Abdul Salim, an Indian from Calcutta, played two reserve matches for Celtic in the Scottish Alliance in 1936, scoring a penalty in the second against Hamilton Accies. He attracted a lot of interest as he played in bandaged feet rather than wearing boots, but decided to return home where he resumed his career with Mohammedan Sporting Club.
   During the war a young black striker called Fred Hanley, who had been on the books of Chelsea and Clapton Orient without making a first team appearance, was posted to Perth. He spent two seasons with junior side Jeanfield Swifts and made two appearances for Raith Rovers in March 1942 before heading to North Africa on active service.
   Outside the senior leagues, the story of Biawa Makalaga, brought here as a child from Matabeleland and who played in goal for Rothes Victoria in the 1920s, deserves to be better known.
   Also, referee Eustace Elliott from Sierra Leone took charge of non-league matches in and around Edinburgh, including a women's Championship of the World between Edinburgh City Girls and Dick Kerr's in 1939.

Perhaps the most famous post-war player  in Scotland was Jamaican-born Gil Heron, who joined Celtic in 1951. He made an immediate impact and played in four League Cup ties, scoring in two of them, but was then dropped and was only selected for one league match. He moved on to Third Lanark for 1952-53, again without gaining a regular place and his seven games for Thirds were all in the League Cup, although he did score five goals.

Among those who came to Scotland on trial were Madhi Salih, an Iraqi at Celtic in 1953, while Aberdeen signed Armando Buscarenhas of India in 1959 and Eversley 'Bo' Lewis of Bermuda in 1961 but none of them made a competitive first team appearance. Lewis was only 16 when he came to Scotland and went on to a pro career in Canada. Two decades later another Bermudan, striker Ricky Hill, played a couple of reserve games on trial for Hibs in 1981.
   The only other significant instance of black players from abroad came in 1965, when Scottish football enjoyed a brief influx of Brazilians. There were eight in total.
   Celtic gave trials to Marco di Sousa and Airton Inacio, both of Sao Paolo, who played for the reserve team. Then Jorge Farah and Fernando Consol arrived, but all four were released in September.
   Airton Inacio remained in Scotland after being released by Celtic and had a brief association with Dougie Johnson's Albion Rovers, scoring against Forfar Athletic on 29 September 1965 in his one match for them. He then left to play for Vitória Guimarães in Portugal and Stade Français in France but returned to these shores in the winter of 1967-68 and made three appearances for Clydebank.
   Dunfermline also had two Brazilians but only one of them, Francisco 'Chico' Filho, played in a league match, against Morton on 18 September 1965. He went on to a fine coaching career in France and at Manchester United, where he worked alongside Sir Alex Ferguson – who had been his strike partner in the Dunfermline attack in 1965. Another trialist, Alexandre Gabrielle, was released and had a further unsuccessful trial for St Mirren in a friendly against Neilston.
   Two other Brazilians went to St Mirren, where Fernando Azevedo (who was not black) played once against Morton on 11 September 1965 but left the following month and ended up in the USA. Roberto Faria played a trial for Saints alongside Azevedo in a Renfrewshire Cup semi-final.
   My impression is that all these players found it hard to settle in Scotland, and were given few opportunities to adapt their game to 'the Scottish way'. With a bit more flexibility and understanding on the part of Scottish clubs, our game could have been so much different.


If you can add any further names to this article, please feel free to comment below, or contact me directly.
​

Postscript: a big thank-you to Gordon Bell who has alerted me to his amazing story of the students from Hawaii who played for Rangers in the 1880s: The Sons of the Sandwich Islands.
​

This is the fourth of my articles for Black History Month 2020 on pioneering black footballers in Scotland.

Having written recently about early black players in Scotland, it occurred to me that I had never heard of any match officials. So I was surprised to come across a black referee called Eustace Elliott taking charge of matches here in the years before the Second World War, and what is more he did it in a time of acute discrimination.

Eustace Elliott was from Sierra Leone and had come to Edinburgh as a mature medical student in the 1920s. Although I have not found anything about his earlier life, Elliott clearly had a solid sporting background as he played cricket and tennis to a decent standard in Edinburgh.
   However, it was as a football referee that he stood out, and it seems likely that he learned the game in Sierra Leone, whose football association was affiliated to the FA in London. He was a familiar face at matches in the 1930s, respected enough to be appointed to referee a juvenile international between Scotland and England in 1936 as well as several cup semis and finals at venues including Celtic Park and Tynecastle.
   In a society that was overwhelmingly white, Elliott must have faced discrimination including the infamous 'colour bar' imposed by some Edinburgh bars and restaurants against African and Asian students. Although that racist ban caused such condemnation that it was soon withdrawn, it reflected a society where feelings were strong and Elliott spoke about this in later years.
​   A report of a YMCA meeting in 1948 reveals he gave a talk on 'The Colour Bar', and the article added: 'He will be remembered by many Broxburn football fans as the only coloured football referee ever to grace West Lothian Juvenile circles. He was a very competent official and woe betide those who questioned his decisions.' 

That observation is borne out by contemporary reports. In 1935 the Linlithgowshire Gazette commented: 'The referee literally added more colour to an already colourful tie. He is a coloured student from Edinburgh and shows a very keen grasp of the rules, which he interprets with an admirable contempt for any attempt at intimidation.' A few months later he was praised for his control of a juvenile cup-tie at Winchburgh, whose players included a young Willie Thornton, when fighting broke out on the terraces.

Perhaps his biggest match was in June 1939, billed as a World Championship between Edinburgh City Ladies against Dick Kerr Ladies. The Scottish and English champions met at the Gymnasium, St Bernard's ground, on a summer Saturday evening, and the Scottish team won 5-2 in front of a crowd of around 12,000. The Sunday Post reporter, former Scotland goalkeeper Jack Harkness, attended his first women's match and was particularly impressed by the legendary Nancy Thomson, praising her ball control and passing; he also noted that 'colour was added to the picture by Mr Elliott, West African student, who acted as referee.'

The same paper had featured him a few weeks earlier with a photo in cricket gear, saying that 'Scotland owes this coloured all-rounder a big debt' and outlined his impressive record of playing and coaching in a variety of sports. Although they thought he would return to Sierra Leone, in fact he settled here for life.
   In September 1939, just after war broke out, Elliott was appointed secretary of the Edinburgh Referees Association. I cannot find any more football references to him but he continued to play cricket.

For over a decade before the war he had featured for Edinburgh Indians and Portman CC, who played on the Edinburgh Meadows, and in 1944 he turned out for a Colonial team which included the great Learie Constantine.
   Elliott was born about 1894 in Sierra Leone, where his father was a chemist, and was already in his thirties when he came to Edinburgh University in the early 1920s. After finishing his medical studies he married Ellen Hastings, a widow, and worked as a laboratory assistant in the city until shortly before his death in 1963.
   Eustace Elliott may not have refereed at the highest level, but he is certainly a trailblazing figure in an era when black sportsmen were a rarity in the UK, and black officials were virtually unknown.
 
Eustace Egerton Elliott
Born c1894 in Sierra Leone to Anthony William Elliott, dispensing chemist, and Fanny Jackson.
Married 8 November 1938 to Ellen Hastings.
Died 25 March 1963 in Edinburgh.


NB as far as I know, the first BAME referees in England were Alf Buksh and Emerson Griffith in the 1970s, while the first in senior football in Scotland was Ramzan Bashir in the early 2000s.

While Andrew Watson is hailed as Scotland's first black internationalist, he was not in fact the first high profile black footballer in the country. 
   That honour belongs to Robert Walker of Third Lanark and Parkgrove, who played in the 1876 Scottish Cup final and was a trialist for Scotland.
   Once described as a 'curly-haired son of Africa', Walker was largely forgotten until his existence was highlighted in 2015 by Richard McBrearty of the Scottish Football Museum. However, with a common surname and a fleeting connection to Glasgow, his identity remained a mystery.
   I can now tell his story and give him his due place in football history.

​His full name was Robert Gustave Walker and he was born in Sierra Leone to a white Scottish father and a black local woman. He came to Scotland as a child and was brought up near Dumfries, then as a fresh-faced youth came to Glasgow where he became a member of Queen's Park FC.
   Although he played for Queen's Park Juniors he never got into the first team and in the summer of 1875 he moved to near neighbours Third Lanark. Aged just 18, his pace on the right wing was a great asset to the team in 1875-76, and he played his part as Thirds reached the Scottish Cup final, scoring against Western in the quarter final and against Dumbarton in a semi-final replay. They came desperately close to lifting the trophy in March 1876, taking the lead in the final only for Queen's Park to equalise, and the Hampden giants then won the replay 2-0.
   Walker's precocious talent was recognised as he was selected twice that season for Scotland international trial matches, for the Blues on 19 February and the Improbables on 1 March, without making the final cut. Perhaps if he had given a better showing he might have been our first internationalist.
   Like many footballers, in summer he took part in sports meetings, and in September 1876 at the Queen's Park Sports he came across Andrew Watson, perhaps for the first time. Walker placed second in the half mile race for members, while Watson competed in the high jump.
   Throughout the 1876-77 season Walker continued to feature on the right wing for Third Lanark, occasionally scoring goals, and again was asked to play in a Scotland trial in February, representing Mr McGeoch's team. However, that was as close as he came to an international cap.

In the autumn of 1877 he left Third Lanark, despite having been in their team for the opening match of the season against Lennox. In October he joined Govan side Parkgrove where he played for 1877-78 alongside Andrew Watson, who was just starting to make a name for himself. It was unusual for a player to switch clubs during the season, so was it a coincidence that the only two black players in Scottish football should join forces, or did they feel a common bond? Regardless, it was a successful combination as Parkgrove reached the Scottish Cup quarter final before going under to eventual winners Vale of Leven.
   I would love to have witnessed the fifth round tie between Parkgrove and Partick, which was full of players whose names still resonate today. The Partick team included Fergie Suter and Jimmy Love, whose move to Darwen in the autumn of 1878 would be the catalyst for professionalism in football.
   Parkgrove, meanwhile, had Walker and Watson who were black, their goalkeeper was Tommy Marten of Chinese extraction, with Wales internationalist Thomas Britten thrown in for good measure. It was a more cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse team than any other Scottish club in the next hundred years.
   The teams actually had to meet twice, a 1-1 draw followed by a 2-1 victory for Parkgrove, who were no doubt helped that between the two Scottish Cup ties Partick made a New Year trip to Lancashire for friendlies against Darwen and Blackburn Rovers.
   In 1878, Walker's football career came to an end when he left Scotland for Liverpool to pursue a career in marine engineering.
   This is one of several striking similarities between his life and that of Andrew Watson: they were the same age, both sons of a relationship between a white Scot working abroad and a local woman; they were both sent back to the UK for their education and barely knew their fathers; both took up football when they arrived in Glasgow as young men; and both retired to London when their maritime career was over.

​Thanks to Robert Walker's descendant and family historian Jan Dawes, the story of his eventful life can be told, and she has also kindly provided the only known photograph of him.
   His father was Alexander Walker, a Scottish merchant who spent most of his working life in Sierra Leone where he was a prominent figure, at one point president of the Chamber of Commerce. Alexander came home on leave to Dumfries in 1852 to get married to Jane Haig, but it appears it was a marriage of convenience as he soon went back to Sierra Leone without his new wife, and the following year the first of three sons was born to his black partner, Judith Jarrett. Their youngest son was baptised in Freetown on 23 January 1857 as Robert Gustave Walker.
   Robert spent very little time in Sierra Leone and he and his elder brothers Walter and Allan were brought up by their great aunt Agnes at Preston Mill, south of Dumfries, where he was known locally as 'Black Bob' and probably went to Kirkbean parish school (whose most famous former pupil was John Paul Jones, father of the American Navy). The boys may have finished their schooling in Dumfries.
   Their father continued to be based mainly in Sierra Leone, although latterly he worked as a shipping agent in London until his death in 1870. He left a comfortable legacy to his four surviving children (Allan had died young while he had a son and daughter from yet another relationship), albeit they had to wait until they were 24 years old to access it.
   Walter became a farmer near Dumfries and Robert (Bob) chose his own path. He came to Glasgow in 1874 but whether to study or to work is currently unknown. There is a family story that he may have studied medicine, but he is not in the matriculation lists of Glasgow University and student records of other colleges have not survived.
   After four years in Glasgow he went to Liverpool to embark on a maritime career. He married there in 1881 to Jane Watson, daughter of a Scottish engineer, and over the next few years on Merseyside he served on a variety of merchant navy ships and passed his exams as a Second Engineer and then First Engineer (exactly the same Local Marine Board certificates that Andrew Watson would take later in the decade).
   It was the springboard to a successful career as he rose to become Chief Engineer for the Elder Dempster line, which plied routes between Britain and Africa and no doubt gave him the opportunity to visit his birthplace in Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile his domestic life was complicated. He and Jane had five daughters followed by four sons but the relationship was on thin ice and in 1894 he put adverts in the local papers to say he would no longer be responsible for his wife's debts. While still married he embarked on a new partnership with Alice Stokes and had three more children.
   When his sea-going career was over he lived with Alice in London and died in Hammersmith in 1936, aged 79. Sadly, there is no gravestone to mark his last resting place in Hammersmith Cemetery.
   What of his legacy? Walker succeeded in football (and in his career) despite being black, and it is remarkable that Scottish sport in general was so ethnically diverse in the 1870s, a phenomenon which does not appear to have been replicated elsewhere in the UK.
   It was not just the footballers Watson, Walker and Marten: looking at the bigger picture, I have previously written about rugby player James Robertson and athlete William Forman, both black, while Scotland rugby internationalist Alfie Clunies-Ross was of Malayan descent. And those are just the ones we know about – there may well be more, waiting to be discovered.
   All of these black or Asian sportsmen appear to have been judged on their skill rather than their race, and were able to compete without any obvious discrimination or adverse comment in the press. This is in stark contrast to, say, attitudes towards the first women footballers, or the sectarianism and racism that became so pervasive in the twentieth century.
   Robert Walker is important as Scottish football's first black pioneer, and now that his story has finally come to light, his place in history can be assured.

While Andrew Watson is well known as the first black Scottish football internationalist, it may come as a surprise to learn that the second to pull on the dark blue shirt was Willie Clarke, who played for Scotland juniors in 1897.
      Clarke was the first black professional in Scotland and went on to a successful career in England, becoming the first black player to score a goal in the Football League.
   William Gibb Clarke (or Clark) was born in 1878 in the Ayrshire town of Mauchline. Just like Andrew Watson, he had Guyanese heritage: he took his colour from his father Alexander who had been born in British Guiana, the product of a union between a local woman and Duncan Clark, a Scot who had gone to the colony as a wood cutter. It appears that, after Duncan Clark died there in the 1850s, sufficient money was available to send Alexander to Scotland to complete his education. As a 16-year-old he arrived at the remote Barr School on the Kintyre peninsula, about 20 miles north of Campbeltown, and lodged with the schoolmaster. There may have been a family connection with the area.
​   Amazingly, there is a description of him in 1859: 'Among the scholars was a private pupil of the master's, a respectably-born black boy, who a fortnight before had arrived from the West indies, and whose tawny complexion and woolly head looked very remarkable among the red-haired and fair-visaged Highlanders.'
   Alexander settled in Ayrshire, where he worked as an engine fitter and married Jemima Cunningham. Together they raised a large family and their seventh child (of eleven) was William, born in 1878.
   When Willie was a small boy the family moved to Glasgow, and it was here that he took his first steps in football. From the juvenile side Kelburn in 1896 he joined Crown Athletic, a junior team whose home ground was Fauldhouse Park in the Gorbals. (Most accounts say he also played for Benburb, but this is inaccurate.)
   The Scottish Referee soon spotted his potential and wrote 'A very promising player is W Clark, the Crown outside right. He shoots on the run with great force and gets along smoothly with his new partner.'

In the course of an excellent season he was selected by the Scottish Junior FA for the team to face Ireland in Belfast on 27 March 1897, and played his part in Scotland's 3-1 win.  Although clearly a junior international is of lesser status than the full Scotland team, it does indicate his colour was not a hindrance when it came to on-field recognition.
   He was also due to play for the Glasgow Junior FA before events took a hand and he turned senior.
   Professional clubs had started to take an interest and in April he was invited for trials by Preston North End and Celtic, but had to decline both due to a bout of bronchitis. That opened the door for Third Lanark, and at the end of the month he played a trial for them in a friendly against Blantyre, making a good enough impression to be invited back. In May 1897 he played outside right for the Third Lanark first team in three Glasgow League games, once against Queen's Park and twice against Rangers, scoring in a 4-3 win over the latter. 

He signed for the club after the second of those games, becoming the first black Scottish professional player (beating John Walker of Leith Athletic by nine months), but little did he suspect that he would never make another first team appearance for Thirds. What is more, the form he signed would have a significant impact on his career much further down the line.
   He started the 1897-98 season in the Third Lanark reserve team but after just a handful of games, in October he fractured his collarbone in a friendly at Hampden against Queen's Park Strollers. This put him out of action for weeks, not just from the football field but would also have made it difficult to follow his profession as an upholsterer.
   He does not appear to have played again that season and Thirds released him to join Arthurlie, in the Scottish Football Combination. They were a good side and reached the Scottish Qualifying Cup final, losing to East Stirlingshire, while in the Scottish Cup they were knocked out by his old club Third Lanark in the first round.

East Stirlingshire clearly liked what they had seen and took him to Bainsford in the summer of 1899, where he became an instant crowd favourite with a hat-trick in a pre-season friendly. Shire played in the Scottish Central Combination but had greater ambitions and in 1900 were elected to the Scottish League.
   This posed a problem for the club as several players, including Clarke, were registered to Scottish League sides. Third Lanark still held Clarke's league registration and wanted a transfer fee of £25, so although East Stirlingshire would have preferred to keep him they simply didn't have the money and had to let him go.
   Under the rules of the time he was able to escape the requirement for a fee by moving to England, so quite by chance this was the launchpad to a fine career. He pitched up at Bristol, and never returned. 

His English career is covered in detail in the excellent new book Football's Black Pioneers, but in brief:
   He spent the 1900/01 season with Bristol Rovers in the Southern League, making 20 league appearances for the club as well as scoring a hat-trick against Weymouth in the FA Cup.
   This was the springboard to greater things and in 1901 he signed for Aston Villa. He spent four years at Villa Park, becoming the first black player to score a goal in the Football League on Christmas Day 1901. After a couple of seasons he drifted out of the picture and moved on to Bradford City in 1905.

They were in Division 2 but won the league title in 1908 and he scored their first goal in the top division. In the twilight of his career he had a year and a half at Lincoln City, before a final season at Croydon Common in the Southern League Division 2.
   Clarke served throughout the First World War in the Middlesex Regiment and the Royal Engineers. Having married for a second time in 1914 (his first wife died suddenly), he spent the rest of his life in Tunbridge Wells where he worked as a carpet fitter, and died there in 1949.

​
​William Gibb Clarke
Born 3 March 1878 Mauchline, Ayrshire
Died 25 January 1949, aged 70 at Kent and Sussex Hospital, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
 
Football career
1895-96 Kelburn (Glasgow Juveniles);
1896-97 Crown Athletic (Glasgow Juniors);
Trials for Third Lanark Apr-May 1897; signed as a professional June 1897.
1897-98 Third Lanark (played for reserves in the Scottish Football Combination; injured in October).
1898-99 Arthurlie (Scottish Football Combination; Scottish Qualifying Cup finalists)
1899-00 East Stirlingshire (Scottish Central Combination and Scottish County League)
1900-01 Bristol Rovers (Southern League).
1901-05 Aston Villa (Division One).
1905-09 Bradford City (Divisions Two and One).
Dec 1909-11 Lincoln City (Division Two).
1911-12 Croydon Common (Southern League Division Two).

This is the first of a short series of articles I am writing for Black History Month 2020, on pioneering Scottish black footballers.
 
 
John Walker was the first black footballer to play in both the Scottish League and the Football League, and also the first to command a transfer fee.
   Sadly an early death meant his career in football was brief, but he shone as a talented outside left, noted for his pace and ball control. Primarily, however, he stood out because of his colour.

The Scottish Referee commented: 'Walker is a coloured player from Leith Primrose of no little repute. He is the first 'darkie' to become a Scottish League player, and his appearance is certain to cause no little interest. Several stories reached me some time ago about Walker’s excellence, and I shall indeed be surprised if Mr Grant's latest selection does not turn out another capture for Leith.'
   That was a reference to Alec Grant, the Leith Athletic secretary, who was renowned for his astute talent-spotting.
   Walker made his Leith Athletic debut in a local derby against Hibernian on 12 March 1898, in the East of Scotland League, and marked the occasion with a first half goal in a 3-3 draw. Two weeks later he made his Scottish League bow at home to Linthouse, and in April he played in two more league matches, scoring against both Airdrieonians and Port Glasgow Athletic. He also played in five more East of Scotland games and scored in a Rosebery Cup tie against Hearts.
   He started the 1898/99 season with a bang as Leith won their first four Division 2 matches, with Walker scoring in three of them. There was speculation that Hearts were interested in signing him and in October, shortly after he played his last game for Leith at Motherwell, he put pen to paper for the Tynecastle side. Hearts paid his old club £50, which was a sizeable sum for a young player and the Edinburgh Evening News derided it as 'absurdly large' but it did mean he was the first black player ever to command a transfer fee.

He went straight into the Hearts team and on 29 October, in an echo of his Leith Athletic debut, made a scoring debut at Easter Road in a 5-1 win over local rivals Hibs. He retained his place and the following week made his home debut against St Bernard's, when the Scottish Referee said 'he was badly abused' but this appeared to relate to rough treatment on-field rather than racism from the terraces.
   He featured in every Hearts match for the next two months, taking his total to seven Scottish League games (it would have been eight but a game against Partick Thistle was abandoned due to fog) without scoring any more goals. As his early good form drifted the Evening News continued to be unimpressed, complaining: 'he wriggles where he should glide' and 'Walker has yet to show that his transfer was worth 50s, let alone £50'.

His last Scottish League match was at Celtic Park on 17 December, and after the turn of the year he was in and out of the Hearts team for the East of Scotland League campaign, playing five games and scoring once. As a bonus he won an East of Scotland Shield medal when Hearts beat Hibs 1-0 in March. His last appearance for Hearts was a friendly at Wishaw Thistle in May.
   That summer, Walker was allowed to leave and Lincoln City paid £25 for his signature, apparently beating off competition from Reading. The Athletic News clearly confused him with his better-known Hearts colleague Bobby Walker, stating 'he took part in the Scottish trial matches last year and is unquestionably a very fine player', a report which was ridiculed by the Evening News, who commented: 'There was something in the Walker transfer from Leith to Tynecastle some people could never quite understand.' One wonders if Lincoln City were equally mistaken, but for the player it was certainly an attractive move as he doubled his wages to £3 a week.
   He made his first team debut in Lincoln's opening match of the Second Division campaign, a 3-0 win over Middlesbrough on 2 September, and played again the following week against Chesterfield before being dropped to the reserves. After a couple more outings in the first team in October it became apparent that all was not well and in the middle of the month he was suspended by the club for his 'disobedience to rules'. He was reinstated after a week but played just two more league matches, taking his total to six first team appearances without scoring a single goal.

After his last game against Grimsby Town on 11 November he dropped out of the picture and his name does not appear in any reports for several weeks, first team or reserves. However, on 6 January he played for Lincoln City reserves in a friendly against local team Lindum, which should have been an innocuous match but it all went wrong. The local paper was not impressed by the players' behaviour: 'McDonald began to bait the referee in a most disgraceful manner, and Walker and one or two more imitated his example to a nicety. To a casual observer they did not seem to be a credit to Lincoln football.'
   This appears to have been the final straw for the directors and in mid-January Walker was one of six players released by the club. He returned home to Leith, but never had the chance to resume his football career as he was already ill and his health continued to deteriorate. On the first day of August he died of consumption (tuberculosis) aged just 24.

Although tributes in the press said 'his tricky play and dashing runs established him a warm favourite', Walker might have been forgotten entirely were it not for his skin colour.
   His father, also John, had come to Scotland from abroad but his origins are unclear as his birthplace is given in the 1881 census as West India and in 1891 as Spain. This indicates he may have been born in a Spanish colony in the Caribbean such as Cuba, Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, but that is just speculation. When he came to Leith, probably early in the 1870s, he met Glasgow-born Sarah Owens and they married at Leith Catholic Chapel in 1874. Both were illiterate and signed the register with a mark, with John giving his surname as Walking (which might be a phonetic spelling of a Spanish name such as Joaquin).
   When their son was born two years later in June 1876 he was registered as John Walkin and it was only in the 1881 census that the surname became Walker, which is how it remained.

​The boy certainly had a hard upbringing, surrounded by poverty and disease in the Leith slums. To make matters worse his father, who worked as a dock labourer, was convicted in 1884 of assaulting his wife in their home at Coalhill. However the family appears to have remained together although further research is needed as the parents, and John's younger brother James, do not appear in the 1901 census.
   It would be nice to think that Walker's example as a black Scots footballer was followed by others, but it would be no less than 64 years after his death before another one played in the Scottish League.
   However, he did have a black Scottish contemporary although they never met on the football field. Willie Clarke, of Guyanan  and Scottish heritage, signed professional forms at Third Lanark in 1897 and subsequently played at Arthurlie and East Stirlingshire, but never made an appearance in the Scottish League before a successful career in England. I'll be writing about Willie Clarke next week.


John Walker
Born 20 June 1876 as John Walkin at 20 Smeaton's Close, Leith.
Died 1 August 1900 at 5 Queen Street, Leith, aged 24.
 
Leith Athletic, March to October 1898 – 9 matches, 5 goals (Division 2).
Heart of Midlothian, October 1898 to June 1899 – 7 matches, 1 goal (Division 1); East of Scotland Shield winner.
Lincoln City, June 1899 to January 1900 – 6 matches, no goals (Division 2).
 
Click here for full details of his football career.

Parkgrove Football Club has a unique place in Scottish sporting history, as a hotbed of multi-cultural football as far back as the 1870s.
   At a time when society was overwhelmingly white, the team from Govan had no less than three ethnic minority players: Andrew Watson and Robert Walker who were black, and a goalkeeper of Asian heritage called Tommy Marten.
   His existence was highlighted in 25 Years Football, which was published in 1896 by the former Rangers player Archie Steel, writing under the pseudonym 'Old International'. He described his book as 'the most authentic and exhaustive treatise on football ever written', and his little paperback is indeed an invaluable resource with anecdotes of many clubs and players from the early years of Scottish football.

In his section on Parkgrove, Steel wrote how the club was 'a motley group, having at one time more than one coloured gentleman in their ranks', identifying Watson's 'dusky features' and Walker as a 'curly-haired son of Africa'.
   Steel, who played against Parkgrove in a Scottish Cup tie in 1878, also said: 'Their goalkeeper was by no means a lily, as Tommy Martin hailed from that land of toy ingenuity whose sons show a decided partiality for Glasgow University education. Tommy's flat nose and high cheek-bones indicated his Mongolian breed; still, he was rather a pleasant-looking son of Japan, and by no means a novice at goalkeeping.'
   The historian Richard McBrearty, of the Scottish Football Museum, first highlighted the importance of the Parkgrove trio in an article for Show Racism the Red Card.
   That inspired me to researched the background to Tommy Marten's life. It soon became apparent that Archie Steel's paragraph, although interesting, is somewhat misleading. He spells his surname wrong, he was not from Japan, and nobody called Thomas Marten (or Martin) matriculated at Glasgow University.
   Here, for the first time, is his story.
​
Thomas William Henry Marten was born in 1857 in Surakarta, a town in Java which was then part of the Dutch East Indies, now in Indonesia. His parents were an English shipping merchant called Elliott John Marten and his ethnic Chinese partner Oeij Sieuw Nio, who were unmarried at the time although they did eventually tie the knot in 1877. The wider Marten family had extensive shipping interests in the area.

​An only child, Tommy was sent to England for his education, boarding at the Weston School in Bath, known as Mr Browning's. He was an active sportsman there, playing cricket for the school, and was also a prize-winner at art, which suggests that if he did study in Glasgow it might have been at the Art School (which has no records of pupils in this era).
   Another reason for him coming to Scotland as a young adult could have been his family links: his uncle William Marten, who was also in business in Java, had married Elizabeth Rodger of a well-known Glasgow shipping family with strong links to the China trade. It would have made sense for Tommy to start his career in a family firm.
   The earliest mention of him playing football was for Parkgrove against Hamilton Accies in October 1876, when he kept goal in a team which was led by Andrew Watson. 

Marten clearly made an impression during his short time in Scotland, but sadly the trail he blazed along with his fellow black and ethnic minority (BAME) sportsmen in the 1870s soon went cold.
   The three association footballers at Parkgrove were emulated in that decade by prominent rugby players Alfie Clunies-Ross (mother from Malaya) and James Robertson (mother from Gambia). However, although those pioneer footballers were able to play in Scotland without any obvious discrimination due to their colour, nobody followed in their footsteps.
   It is a long story, but after Andrew Watson's departure in the 1880s Scottish football had an almost complete dearth of BAME players for generations. Apart from the brief appearances of Willie Clarke and John Walker at the turn of the century, Scotland's next homegrown black footballer was Dougie Johnson at Brechin City in 1964 and it is a sad fact that there were more BAME players in Scotland in the 1870s than in the 1970s.
   This makes it all the more important to recognise the coming together of Tommy Marten, Andrew Watson and Robert Walker at Parkgrove FC, and celebrate Scotland’s first multi-racial sporting club.

​
Thomas William Henry Marten
Born 19 February 1857 in Surakarta, Central Java.
Died December 1911 in Banyuwangi, East Java.

NB as he lived in a Dutch colony, his name is also recorded as Thomas Willem Henri Marten.

I have not been able to track down a photograph of Tommy Marten, and would be delighted if someone could find one!

Sometimes, sports history takes you on an unexpected path, to places you would rather not visit. This is one of those times.

by Andy Mitchell

When I was researching a talk on the history of sport in Dunblane, I came across the story of an ancient curling stone which was found in 1834. Buried in a cottage garden on the outskirts of town, it was inscribed with the year 1551 and was claimed to be the oldest stone in existence.
   The stone's age was later trumped by an even older example found in Stirling, and in any case it has since disappeared. It could have been merely a footnote in the town's sporting heritage but what intrigued me was the name of the property where it was discovered: New Orleans Cottage. Why on earth would someone in Dunblane call their home after a city in the deep south of America?
   My search for the answer revealed a shameful link to the American slave trade, as well as a bitter legal battle for the fortune that was amassed on the back of human misery.

New Orleans Cottage belonged to a man called Thomas Henderson. He was born in what is now British Guiana in 1808, while his father Patrick, originally from Dunblane, was a soldier in the British Army occupying Berbice, a Dutch colony which would soon be ceded to the United Kingdom.
   After Patrick died there in 1811 his family - wife Janet, son Thomas and daughter Jean - returned to Scotland where his widow remarried to John Maiklem, a former soldier now working as a weaver in Stirling.
   When Thomas grew up he bought a piece of land and built his cottage in Ramoyle, a small community on the edge of Dunblane. He could afford it because he had a rich uncle in America, his father's younger brother.
   Quite how rich his uncle Stephen was became clear when he died in New Orleans in 1838. He had somehow accumulated a fortune that was reported to be worth £318,750, the equivalent of upwards of £30 million in today's money.
   We sometimes have a conceit of ourselves in Scotland that the people who profited from slavery were the rich and powerful, the tobacco lords and sugar aristocracy, nothing to do with the common folk. Yet Stephen Henderson was a humble mason's son from Dunblane.
   Born in 1773, he had crossed the Atlantic to seek his fortune in the New World where, after a while, he joined forces with a man called William Kenner. They set up a trading company based in New Orleans and their firm of Kenner, Henderson & Co bought cotton and sugar from the Louisiana estates and shipped it to Liverpool, while for the return journeys they imported English and European goods to sell in local stores. Henderson was an astute businessman and became known locally as 'Monsieur Croesus' and 'the Scottish Marvel'.
   But that was not all he bought and sold. Behind those accolades the Scot had a dark mercenary attitude that exploited the laws on slavery. The direct importation of foreign slaves into Louisiana was outlawed early in the 1800s but it remained legal to bring slaves from elsewhere in the United States, a loophole which meant that slaves could still be transported and sold internally. Many were shipped from South Carolina to Louisiana to meet the plantations' insatiable demand for labour.
   The Kenner & Henderson sign announced their 'showroom' in New Orleans where planters could buy anything from building materials to human life. The slaves were packed into pens to await a purchaser, and for example in June 1806 the firm advertised the sale of 74 'prime slaves of the Fantee nation' (modern day Ghana) who had been brought from Charleston on board the schooner William, while in October that year they sold 66 'prime young slaves of the Congo nation' brought on the Carolina.
   Prices were inflated because of the legal restrictions and a single adult male slave might sell for upwards of $600. The slave market profits were enormous but so was the potential for misery, as while the slaves enriched their owners they were often treated appallingly. Conditions on the sugar cane estates which lined the Mississippi were known to be so brutal that slaves spoke with dread of being 'sold down the river', a phrase which resonates to this day.

To escape this life, and perhaps inspired by the success of the revolution in Haiti, in 1811 there was a widespread slave revolt in Louisiana, known as the German Coast Uprising. The rebels included those from an estate run by Kenner & Henderson, but the slaves stood no chance against a ruthless and well-armed white militia. Many were captured, tortured and executed, with the final indignity of having their disembodied heads impaled on wooden pikes to be eaten by crows. It was a savage gesture to discourage others from thinking of rebellion.
   Meanwhile Henderson continued to prosper and was already a very wealthy man when he took a step towards respectability in 1815 by marrying Zelia Destrehan, the daughter of a prominent plantation owner. Soon, he acquired her father's estate at Destrehan, which he added to his portfolio of properties, including estates in Louisiana (Elm Park, Forest and a half share of Mount Houmas) and elegant mansions in Virginia and New Orleans.

Zelia died in 1830 and, as they never had any children, when Henderson died he had no direct heirs to inherit his fortune. Instead he left a long and rambling will in which he wrote: 'My greatest object is to do the greatest quantity of good and to the greatest number of persons and to the poorest people.'
   Then, in a dying man’s crude attempt to rewrite history, he stated: 'I have always trusted my blacks with much indulgence and even personal kindness. I have always been opposed to slavery.' Essentially he claimed he had only gone along with it to fit in, ensuring that his own slaves were well treated. He specified that his slaves should be freed after his death and sent to Liberia, but there was a significant catch: most of them had to wait 25 years for their liberty.
   The truth is that Henderson left a legacy of misery: his 'property' included hundreds of slaves, while his money derived not just from their labour but from the profits of buying and selling their lives.
   He left detailed instructions about what was to happen to his money, scattering it with largesse, although he found space to slander his parents: 'My whole family may be considered as drunkards, and this misfortune must have come upon the side of my father; although that he was an antiquarian, learned and intelligent, to get drunk once a month was to him a jubilee. My mother was a Drummond, good natured but without much capacity. They were profligate and indolent; being poor, they were always in bankruptcy.'
   He showed he had not forgotten his roots as he wanted his home town to benefit from a large legacy. He allocated two thousand dollars a year to go to the poor of Dunblane, to be administered by the resident minister of the Presbyterian Church and the two highest civil officers of the town. He also left two thousand dollars a year for ten years for the erection of a school house in Dunblane and for the education of the poor. 'I feel no obligation for these acts of charity; it is only done to help the poor who like myself may be thrown upon the world without a penny or a friend,' he wrote.
   Even at the exchange rate of about five dollars to the pound, this money would have transformed many lives in what was then a poor community, described by a contemporary visitor as 'Dirty Dunblane'. But the money never came.

One of the executors of the will, Pierre Adolph Rost, crossed the Atlantic to meet the town’s Church of Scotland minister, Reverend John Grierson, who apparently told him that the people of Dunblane did not want the legacy as 'if a large fund was created for the support of the poor, the town would be become the receptacle of the poor of all the neighbouring counties'. Nothing was said about why he might have refused money for a new school.
   However, Rost stood to be a significant beneficiary of the will, having also married into the Destrehan family, and he had taken over the Destrehan estate (and its slaves) following Henderson's death. Conveniently, John Grierson died in 1840 so his story could not be contradicted; then a court in Louisiana ruled that Henderson was of unsound mind when he made his bequests, and that the money should go to his wider family instead, including nieces and nephews on both sides of the Atlantic.
   That might have been the end of it as far as Dunblane was concerned, until a court case in  Scotland in 1842 revealed some of the sums at stake. John Maiklem, step-father of Thomas Henderson and his sister Jean, successfully sued for ten per cent of their bequest from their late uncle. The case revealed that Thomas and Jean had already received £4,875, and were due a further £2,600, the equivalent of well over half a million pounds today.
   This alerted James Boe, the new minister in Dunblane, who together with the Sheriff Substitute launched a legal bid to unlock a substantial windfall for the people of the town. They appear to have had no knowledge of (or had no qualms about) the slavery origins of the money.
   It was a complicated case, fought at every step by the Henderson relatives, and the wheels of justice moved so slowly that a final decision was not reached by the Court of Session until 1862. By a majority, Scotlands law lords ruled against the Dunblane claim, which ended the matter.

Thomas Henderson and his sister, now Mrs Buchan, were able to keep their legacy and they lived comfortably in Stirling for many years. Thomas sold New Orleans Cottage and in time it became known simply as Orleans Cottage. It had a succession of owners until it was finally demolished in the 1920s and the site is now underneath a much larger house.
   The bulk of the legacy appears to have remained in Louisiana, claimed by the extended family of Henderson relatives, although they would likely have lost it in the American civil war.
   Today, Stephen Henderson's role in promoting and profiting from slavery has been airbrushed in a kind of collective amnesia. An epitaph on a grand churchyard memorial near New Orleans talks of his 'moral worth' and claims that he passed through life with 'an unblemished character'. His old estate at Destrehan, which was used to shoot scenes for the film 12 Years a Slave, is now a tourist attraction which focuses largely on the lifestyle of the white planters although it does make an effort to interpret the slave experience. Another of his grand houses at White Sulphur Springs in Virginia is part of the Greenbrier luxury resort, known as the President's Cottage after it was stayed in by several US Presidents.
   There are no known portraits of Stephen but he did leave a little-known memorial in Dunblane Cathedral. His 'profligate and indolent' parents were originally buried in the kirkyard but in 1831 he paid for them to be disinterred and reburied in crypts below the medieval building. Two large stone slabs on the floor, hidden underneath the carved oak pews, mark their final resting place.
   One wonders how life for the people of Dunblane might have been transformed if Henderson's legacy had been spent in the way he intended. Perhaps it is better, after all, that the town was untainted by the profits of the untold misery he inflicted on thousands of his fellow human beings.

NB Dunblane Cathedral also has a memorial to William McCowan, a local man who opposed slavery and signed up to fight for the Union in the American Civil War. It is the tallest monument in the cathedral graveyard. You can read the article I wrote about William McCowan here.

The summer of 1980 was something of a crossroads for Scottish football. Aberdeen had just broken the Old Firm monopoly by taking the league title outside Glasgow for the first time in a generation, while crowd behaviour was in the spotlight after the Scottish Cup Final riot. Crowds were dropping and money was tight.
   This prompted the Scotsman newspaper to commission an in-depth survey of the state of the game, entitled Scottish Football: the Pride and the Poverty. It was published over six days and, as a young fan, I cut out every article and kept them for posterity.
   Now, 40 years later, the articles make for fascinating reading. I have digitised the full set of features into a single pdf, which you can download here.

Edited by Arnold Kemp and David Hearst, with contributions from Hugh Keevins and various academics, it was a serious and robust project that went into much greater depth than newspapers usually have the time and space for.
   There is detailed analysis of what makes clubs tick, including their financial figures and their wage bills. They asked clubs large and small what their plans were, how they approached football as a business and how they balanced that with the desire to win matches and competitions. It reveals how clubs as varied as Aberdeen, St Mirren and Montrose cut their cloth according to their circumstances, how Rangers were the most profitable club at the time, how Hibs and Hearts were finding life tough.
   Unusually for the time, the authors even commissioned research into what the fans thought: why they watched football (or didn't), what they thought of hooliganism, the structure of the game and whether the national team mattered.

There is an interesting graphic on how turnstile operators could cheat the clubs they worked for, coupled with an interview with the legendary Tom Fagan of Albion Rovers about how he confronted that particular problem.
   All in all, a fascinating read. The challenge now is for someone to produce something similar for 2020 and compare the results.

I was researching something else when I stumbled across this report from 1876 on a professional athletics meeting in Kirkcaldy: 'Special interest was taken in this race as one of the competitors was a coloured man, as black and shiny as a well-polished boot, W Foreman by name and hailing from Leith; he was the winner, and received a cheer for his pluck.'

I had never seen any reference to a black athlete in Scotland in the Victorian era, and an internet search produced no results. So, who was he? I felt I had to find out more.
   Thanks to the British Newspaper Archive, I established that William Forman (or Foreman) was a regular competitor at professional sprint events in Scotland over several years. He was not a top level runner and did not win many prizes, but was confident enough to enter the famous New Year Sprint handicap at Powderhall.
   Unfortunately there was also a dark side to his life: three times he was convicted of assaulting his wife and he served time in prison.

When William Forman married Isabella Davis at St Thomas's Church in Leith in 1874, neither of them were able to sign the marriage certificate as they were illiterate and they marked their names with a cross. His parents were recorded as Dickson Forman (blacksmith, deceased) and Harriet Thomson, and the next census revealed that he was born around 1853 in the USA.
   Isabella was also black although born in Leith in 1850, the daughter of another American immigrant called John Davis and his Scottish wife Christina Paterson. Isabella already had an illegitimate daughter, but there were no further children with William.

Within months of their marriage, William was up at Leith Police Court, charged with assaulting Isabella. According to the Evening News 'the prisoner was in the habit of constantly ill-using his wife' and he was sentenced to 20 days with hard labour. He was convicted again later the same year, and early in 1877 was given a two month sentence for a particularly violent attack. Yet despite all that, the couple were still living together in the 1881 census.
   Throughout this time, his name cropped up in reports of races in Edinburgh and Leith, competing for cash prizes. Sometimes he won a heat, for example earning 7s 6d in that meeting at Kirkcaldy, but never a main prize. His last recorded race was in 1882, when the New Year event was held at the Royal Gymnasium, coming second in his heat for the 250 yards handicap.

However, apart from the years between 1874 and 1882, I have been unable to find any reference to Forman in newspapers, censuses or genealogy records. There are also no known photos of him. Large gaps remain in his life story and perhaps records will be found in due course.
   Looking at the bigger picture, it has to be pointed out that in the 1870s Scottish sport had at least four black sportsmen: Andrew Watson and Robert Walker in football, James Robertson playing rugby and William Forman competing in athletics. The same decade also saw two with Asian heritage, Alfie Clunies-Ross representing Scotland at rugby and Tommy Marten playing football alongside Watson at Parkgrove.
   Yet after their sporting careers ended there was a yawning gap in black and ethnic minority participation in Scottish sport for over a hundred years. Apart from a few fleeting footballers, these black sporting pioneers were not emulated by subsequent generations as negative social attitudes and racism blanked any opportunities.

NB I am currently researching the lives of 1870s footballers Robert Walker and Tommy Marten, mentioned above, and hope to publish my findings soon.