She had one of the most evocative names in football. Historians have speculated for years about the identity of Nettie Honeyball, the iconic Victorian pioneer of women's football, and most concluded that her name was a clever pseudonym. But a startling new discovery indicates she really did exist.
   Honeyball was founder and captain of the British Ladies Football Club which launched in 1895. In response to intense media interest, the 'moving spirit of the lady footballers' gave interviews, posed for photos, and for a brief moment in time was known throughout the land. Then, just as suddenly, she vanished.
   She was such a significant character in the development of women's sport that she is celebrated for her contribution, yet she has proved frustratingly elusive. Not only was she invisible in official records, her name sounded implausible, and one Victorian writer described her name as 'singularly ominous and Dickensian'. Today, most sources will tell you that Honeyball was a made-up name, a cover for one of the other players.
   However, the mystery has just taken a dramatic twist and may have been solved thanks to a newly-digitised newspaper on the British Newspaper Archive. 

On 11 March 1896, the Morning Leader published a brief announcement: 'I am desired by Miss Nettie J Honeyball, the hon sec of the British Ladies Football Association, to state that her address is not now 27 Weston Park, Crouch End, but 56 Lillington Street, Belgravia, S.W., where all communications should be addressed.'
   This is the missing link historians have searched for, as the Lillington Street address was the home of Anne Honeyball, a single woman in her twenties who lived there with her widowed father. Surely she must be Nettie?
   There are so many tangents to the story of the British Ladies FC that the answer is not yet conclusive, as I will explain, but in many respects she fits the bill.
   Anne Jane Honeyball was born in 1867 in Pimlico, the younger daughter of Francis, a carpenter and cabinet maker, and his wife Emma.
   She was baptised (as Annie rather than Anne) in the nearby church of St James the Less, and is recorded at 56 Lillington Street in most subsequent censuses up to 1911 with her family. Two brothers appear to have died young, her elder sister Fanny married George Stubbles in 1882, her mother died in 1892, and she remained with her father until his death in 1915.
   Only in 1891 is she not at home, but intriguingly a Janetta Honeyball, aged 21 and born in Pimlico, is lodging in Lambeth where she worked as a cashier for a grocer. The age is slightly wrong but as Janetta does not appear in any other records, is this Anne? Given her middle name of Jane, which also appears as Nettie Honeyball's middle initial, it does seem to be a strong possibility.

In late 1894 the first letters from Nettie Honeyball appeared in the papers, promoting the football club from an address in Crouch End, which was the home of the Smith family. The house at 27 Weston Park, which still stands, is a six-bedroom three-storey villa, so the Smiths would have had space for a lodger, and she proudly told one journalist that she had a room entirely for her own use.
   As the British Ladies FC captured the public imagination, Nettie gave numerous interviews in the first few months of 1895, in which she came across as assured, determined and forthright in her support for women's emancipation. She often posed for photos, including a full page plate in The Sketch, and gained a fair degree of notoriety or popularity, depending on your point of view. When the opening match was played at Crouch End on 23 March, she was a team captain and very clearly the figurehead of the club. ​

Honeyball continued to speak intelligently and assuredly on behalf of the team as they toured the country in April and May.
   Yet, despite her high profile, and the large crowds which the lady footballers attracted, there was trouble behind the scenes. In May she had to deny a press report that 'the lady footballers are at loggerheads among themselves, and the team is likely to break up in consequence'.
   However, there does appear to be truth in the rumours as by the end of May, just two months after the club played its first match, she was nowhere to be seen. Without her, the British Ladies FC continued to pursue a hectic schedule of matches, with a second team springing up in apparent rivalry.
   Nettie's name was still briefly quoted in the autumn as club secretary before Jessie Allen took over, citing an illness for Honeyball, then the rival captain Mrs Graham (real name Helen Matthew) said 'she is no longer connected with us in any way'.

What went wrong? It could have been the incessant glare of publicity, disagreements with other players, or maybe the household dynamics at Weston Park became a challenge, with too many involved in the team: Alfred Hewitt Smith, the team manager, would go on to marry Hannah Oliphant, who played for and administered the team right up until its demise a decade later; his brother Frederick was already married to Jessie Allen, named as assistant secretary; and their little sister Phoebe was also a player and club secretary.
   Whatever happened, Nettie Honeyball was out of the picture and left Crouch End to return to Pimlico, notifying her change of address to the Morning Leader. Apart from that brief mention, there were no further interviews and no more press interest in her.
   On the surface, the move to Lillington Street points to Anne Honeyball being Nettie but there are still doubts which are raised by a careful reading of her press interviews. Although she gave little away about her background, she made a telling comment to The Sketch in January 1895 that the other recruits to the team 'were all strangers to me, except my sister' Then in April she told the Maidenhead Advertiser after a match that 'I have been accustomed to athletics all my life with my brothers'.
   If these comments are true, Anne cannot be Nettie. Her sister was in her thirties, married with three young children; her brothers had both died young.

While much of the British Ladies FC press coverage must be taken with a great degree of scepticism, this opens the door to another possibility: Anne's cousin Nellie. Her identity was explored in detail by James Lee, whose well-researched book The Lady Footballers was published in 2008.
   Nellie, born in Pimlico in 1873, was the daughter of Frederick Honeyball, elder brother of Francis and also a carpenter. The family lived at 36 Tachbrook Street, which was literally a stone's throw from Lillington Street. Nellie had two elder brothers, which fits with those interview comments, and a younger sister Edith, although there is no record of her playing for the club.
   Perhaps most tellingly of all, the Westminster and Pimlico News of 12 June 1896 carried a report of a dispute that ended up in Westminster Magistrates Court, where Nellie Honeyball of 56 Lillington Street was bound over to keep the peace.
   Nellie is with her family at Tachbrook Street in the 1891 census, so she cannot be 'Janetta' but did she then go to live for a while with her uncle round the corner? He would have had a spare room after his married daughter Fanny moved out.
   So, the mystery continues. While Nettie Honeyball does appear to be a real person rather than a pseudonym, I can find no conclusive proof whether she was Anne or Nellie.
   And of course, I cannot entirely dismiss a third possibility, that the paragraph in the Morning Leader was a deliberate red herring. But she was well known to the paper, so I think this unlikely.

On top of the Honeyball identity question is conundrum as to how she got involved in football in the first place. The answers may lie in a book by Alfred Hewitt Smith, who managed the team's affairs. In 1896 he published The Truth about the British Ladies Football Club and sent it to journalists. Sadly, no copies are known to exist but perhaps one will surface.
   The Honeyball cousins had much in common: both were daughters of carpenters, both spent their lives in Pimlico, both remained single. Curiously, the Smith family’s father Arthur was also a carpenter. While carpenters and cabinet makers were skilled craftsmen, this tends to demolish the much-repeated claim that the football club drew its players from the 'upper middle class'.

Did Joe Harper really score five goals on his international debut? It is a question which has puzzled me ever since the Scottish FA decided to upgrade five Scotland tour matches in 1967 to full international status.
   The move, which provoked a heated debate among football historians, was essentially made to ensure that Sir Alex Ferguson would receive a full international cap in time for his 80th birthday. He duly came to Hampden in October 2021 and was presented with his cap at half time in the Scotland v Israel match, a gesture which was loudly cheered by the capacity crowd. Other players in the squad have been similarly recognised, and have appreciated the gesture.
   But back in 1967, the tour party was unequivocally not the full national team, and Scottish FA secretary Willie Allan made this abundantly clear. Although Scotland had just beaten world champions England 3-2 at Wembley, most of the regular players were not available, with Celtic and Rangers in European finals and various other call-offs.
   Allan was supported by the Glasgow Herald, which stated 'Under no circumstances should they be labelled a Scottish international team. Our newly-won prestige, both at international and club level, is too precious for that.'
   This stance annoyed some of the opponents, notably the Australians who wanted to test themselves against Scotland's stars, but the tour went ahead anyway under the guise of a Scotland XI.
   It has to be said that the ultimate decision on which Scotland matches are deemed to be worthy of a cap is the prerogative of the Scottish FA, even if they don't meet FIFA standards. There are several instances in the past when a match did or did not count for the award of a cap, sometimes for fairly arbitrary reasons.
   However, in upgrading some of the 1967 matches, the Scottish FA seem to have slipped up when deciding which ones. Despite claiming to have studied their archive, they either failed to do the research properly or were poorly advised.
   The first five games versus Israel, Hong Kong and three against Australia, were all against full national teams, whereas the last four games were not, the opponents being New Zealand Under 23s, an Auckland Provincial team, Vancouver All Stars and Canada Amateurs.
   Yet Hong Kong was ignored in the 'upgrading' review, despite them being FIFA members and selecting essentially the same team which played in the Merdeka Cup that year. 

On the other hand, the Scottish FA did decide to recognise the match against Canada, even though they were certainly not the full Canada international team. In fact they were all amateurs, who were preparing for Olympic qualifiers against Cuba later that month. Hence this match does not appear in Canadian records.
   It is probably too late now for the Scottish FA to change their decision, but the inclusion of the Canada match has thrown up a historical conundrum: Joe Harper's five goals on his debut, contributing to a 7-2 win.
   If that is correct, he equals the Hughie Gallacher's record for goals in a single Scotland match, and when he was interviewed recently Harper was understandably proud of his achievement. At first glance there seems little doubt about it, as every Scottish newspaper reported his five goal haul. Harper himself has been interviewed about his feat.
   However, there were no Scottish journalists on the tour, so every report for every match was supplied to our newspapers by local agency reporters rather than people who knew the team. They were accepted at the time but further research, using archive sources, raises several doubts about the tour statistics, and in particular Joe Harper's haul.
   Most notably, the Scottish FA kept its own record of the matches, and their minute book contains a surprise about this game. It states that Harper scored three, with the others being an own goal by Kauck, one from Bobby Hope and two from Willie Morgan.

​This is supported by the report in the Winnipeg Free Press, which gave a detailed account of all the goals, and it concurred: Harper got three, not five. The only aspect which it disagreed with was the identity of the Canadian who scored the own goal, suggesting it was Bob di Luca rather than Karl Kauck.
   Admittedly, the Winnipeg Tribune went along with Harper scoring five. So you have two men, presumably sitting alongside each other in the press box, but not conferring on the goalscorers.
   Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Harper did not score five, and that this was a fiction which only gained currency through an agency reporter. 
   Therefore, I have little doubt that Hughie Gallacher's five-goal haul against Ireland in 1929 should remain as the record for a single Scotland international.
   This was not the only tour match in which a question mark remains over a goalscorer. In the opening game, Scotland beat Israel 2-1 in Tel Aviv with a late winner, but who scored it could be one of three players, as even the Israeli press could not agree.
   Harry Hood was the man according to the Scottish FA minutes and Israeli paper Ma'ariv. Eddie Colquhoun scored according to reports in Davar, the Dundee Courier and the Press and Journal. And it was Alex Ferguson in Al Ha-mishmar and La Merhav in Israel as well as the Glasgow Herald, Evening Times and Evening Express back home. Which was correct? Unless film of the match turns up, we may never know.
   Meanwhile, the Scottish FA has yet to update its online archive to include the 1967 tour, over two years after the decision to upgrade the matches to full international status. So for now, the six players who won caps during the tour but at no other time are not even mentioned: Alan Anderson, Jim Townsend, Alex Ferguson, Harry Hood, Hugh Tinney and Harry Thomson. And Joe Harper remains on four caps, two goals.
   I have a small vested interest in getting this right this, as I set up that archive when I worked at Hampden two decades ago. It dearly needs attention to make it more accessible and to correct a number of mistakes.
  
Click here to read the full statistics of the 1967 tour, as far as they are known.

There's nothing like an early goal to set a match alight, and recently I have been looking into the fastest goals ever scored by Scotland's national team. There are several candidates for first minute strikes, but which of them was actually the quickest ever?
   In the absence of film footage and accurate timing, it is impossible to say definitively, but based on numerous newspaper reports these are Scotland's fastest:
   Archie Robertson v Austria, 19 May 1955. According to several reports including the Evening Express, he scored after just 15 seconds; the Evening Times said 20 seconds. Scotland went on to win 4-1 in Vienna on their end-of-season tour.
   Andy Black v Czechoslovakia, 8 December 1937. Most papers, including the Evening Express, Daily News and Evening Despatch all agree 20 seconds. And what is more, Black was making his international debut! This was the opening goal of a 5-0 win at Ibrox. 
   The record appears to belong to Robertson, but Black makes a strong claim.

There are several other first minute goals:
   Stevie Chalmers v Brazil, 25 June 1966. In a match best remembered for Pele's only appearance at Hampden, Chalmers fired home the opener in the first minute. Timings vary, with the Sunday Sun saying 30 seconds, the People judging it 45 seconds, and one fan who was trying out a new stopwatch recorded it at precisely 38 seconds. The game ended 1-1.
   RS McColl v England, 7 April 1900. Wearing Rosebery strips, the opening salvo of a first half hat-trick by 'Toffee Bob' came after 'less than 40 seconds' according to the Evening Standard, 'in forty seconds' thought the Belfast News-Letter, while the Lancashire Evening Post said 'at the end of 45 seconds'.
   John White v West Germany, 6 May 1959. This goal in a 3-2 victory was reported in most British papers as 'the very first minute' but I found a more precise time of 50 seconds in a German paper, Fussball Sport.
   Tommy Ring v England, 6 April 1957. Reports generally say first minute, but in this instance the goal can be timed precisely from video at 58 seconds. See this link.
   England captain Bob Crompton managed to score an early own goal for Scotland at Newcastle on 6 April 1907 which was timed variously as 'less than a minute' (Empire News),  'scarcely a minute' (Sports Argus), 'in the first minute' (Morning Post) and 'exactly sixty seconds' (Scottish Referee).
   Willie Lambie v Ireland, 30 March 1895. His opening goal at Celtic Park was described as 'less than a minute' (Dundee Advertiser and Belfast News-Letter) and 'in the first minute' (Morning Post), while others thought 'in a minute', 'only a minute', 'about a minute' and 'hardly a minute'.
​   The quickest in the current century appears to be Billy Dodds v Belgium on 24 March 2001 which was timed at one minute and ten seconds.

Goals against Scotland

Needless to say, Scotland has also conceded some quick goals with two prime candidates for fastest:
   Edgar Chadwick (England) on 2 April 1892 was timed at 30 seconds by the Lancashire Evening Post and 'less than a minute' in the Evening Standard.
   Dave Walsh (Northern Ireland) on 17 November 1948 was also clocked at 30 seconds in the Daily Herald, while other papers thought it was 40 seconds.
   More recently, Robbie Earnshaw's first of a treble for Wales on 18 February 2004 was timed at 42 seconds on Sky Sports and 43 seconds on the BBC.  
   Denis Wilshaw (England), 2 April 1955, scored in 45 seconds according to the Evening Times and Belfast Telegraph.
   And finally, Georges Aeby of Switzerland opened the scoring at Hampden on 15 May 1946 'in the first minute' according to most papers, but nobody gave a more accurate time. Similarly William Kenyon-Slaney scored the first ever international goal for England on 8 March 1873 in one or two minutes, but none of the reports was concerned with precise timings.
  That appears to be all the goals scored in the opening minute of Scotland matches, although it is possible that evidence will be found to exclude these candidates, or even to add another to the list.

NB I have only covered the Scotland men's team above, as few detailed records exist for the women's equivalent. However, it should be mentioned that Julie Fleeting twice scored in the opening minute, v Estonia on 3 September 1997 and v Portugal on 17 February 2001. So did Hayley Lauder v Israel on 16 June 2012, after 58 seconds. However, neither of them can beat Kathryn Morgan of Wales who scored against Scotland in just 13 seconds on 2 June 1996. 

Many places claim to be the true home of football, not least Sheffield, London and Glasgow. But had events taken a different slant, the title would undoubtedly belong to the capital of Scotland.
   Recently I gave a talk to the FootyCon football history conference in Manchester, in which I explained how, in the first half of the 19th century, Edinburgh was a leading exponent for the type of game that ultimately became association football. But the direction of travel changed dramatically in the summer of 1854, when two sports grounds opened in the same week, each hosting a different code of football. In brief, rugby won and the landscape of sport in the city changed.
   To read my PowerPoint talk detailing what happened and why, click here to open an illustrated pdf and read about a classic case of 'what if'.

To read more about the story of football in Edinburgh, and John Hope's involvement, read 1824: the World's First Foot-Ball Club. 

This month sees two significant milestones for Scottish football. It is the 150th anniversary of the first international match in the world, between Scotland and England on 30 November 1872. It is also the 50th anniversary of Scotland's first women's international, against England on 18 November 1972.
   Both these events provide a wonderful opportunity to celebrate our football heritage. It is also a chance to recognise all the players who have contributed to Scottish football's national teams over the years.
   That is why I am proposing the introduction of unique Heritage Numbers for everyone who has played for Scotland, men and women.
   Currently the Scottish FA has a Roll of Honour for players who have amassed 50 or more caps. When this scheme was originally launched in the 1980s there were just a dozen or so players, all men, who qualified. Today, however, with the increased number of fixtures and greater use of substitutes, it is far easier for players to reach that total and 50 caps is less of a measure of greatness. Indeed, it fails to include many fine players of the past who could never have reached that figure at a time when Scotland only played three games a year.
   When I speak to former players, almost without exception the most memorable international they played was their first cap. Representing Scotland is a supreme honour in itself, and earning the tag of 'internationalist' is something that lasts a lifetime. Hence I think that is the event that should be marked, rather than an arbitrary number of caps.
   It is not a new idea: several sports from cricket to rugby league have adopted the scheme, and some countries already have it for football. The Football Association in England, for example, launched Legacy Numbers for their men's team in 2019, and this year are extending it to the women's team following a major research programme.
   Scotland has yet to adopt the idea. For the men's team, all the information is available although there was a recent complication with the retrospective adoption of some tour matches from 1967 as full internationals, which added players to the list. Including those late additions, a total of 1,227 men have now played for Scotland, the latest being Calvin Ramsay who won his first cap against Turkey.
   One of the major stumbling blocks to compiling an equivalent record for the women's national team has been the lack of historic information, but that is no longer a barrier.
   In recent months I have been researching and gathering details about the women's national team and I believe I now have a full list of every woman who has  ever played for Scotland. The latest additions are Brogan Hay and Rebecca McAllister who made their debuts against Venezuela, taking the total up to 244 players.
   Most of that number were first capped under the Scottish Women's FA who ran the team up to 1997. I have to admit that it is possible that my list may have to be slightly revised, as not all the teamlines were recorded at the time and media coverage was minimal. Sometimes players were included in squads but there is no definitive record of whether they actually played (substitutions were a particular problem). However, by a careful examination of archive material and by asking many former players for their memories, I am confident it is 99 per cent correct and possibly 100 per cent. I would be delighted to hear from anyone with additional information.
   My overall point is that playing for Scotland is an achievement that should live for ever, and I believe that players deserve the unique recognition that comes with a Heritage Number. At a time of celebration for those anniversaries, there is no better time for the Scottish FA to act.

Click here for the full list of Scotland Men's Heritage Numbers.

Click here for the full list of Scotland Women's Heritage Numbers.

This month marks 50 years since the first Scotland women's football international, against England at Greenock on 18 November 1972.
   That anniversary prompted me to research the history of the national team, a subject which appears to have been woefully neglected by the football authorities and the media in the past. There are no match reports for many games, in fact some games were barely mentioned in the press at all. Allied to poor record-keeping by the old Scottish Women's FA, and a lax attitude at the Scottish FA after they took over in 1997, many players have been forgotten, and those records and statistics which have been published are frequently wrong.
   After months of research, I can now start to put that right by publishing a definitive record of every Scotland women's international from 1972 to date, a total of 370 matches in fifty years.
​   To see a full list of Scotland matches, click here (pdf).

I have also been compiling a full set of statistics for every match. This has proved a considerable challenge given the lack of contemporary reporting for the early games. 
   Quite often, a squad list would be published for a game or a tournament, but the team that played was not recorded or was missing the substitutes. It has not yet been possible to finalise the statistics for the SWFA years from 1972-1997, but I do have a complete record from the time that the Scottish FA took over.
   To see Scotland's full match record from 1998 to date, click here (pdf).  This includes a wealth of details including the number of caps each player had won, the substitutes and the time they came on, goalscorers and times of goals, and the venue, with attendance where known. [NB I have watermarked the file to discourage copying.]
   It corrects a number of mistakes which have been published online, even in sources such as the Scottish FA archive which could (and should) more more accurate.
   In particular, the number of caps won by certain players has been wrongly recorded, notably record goalscorer Julie Fleeting whose caps total came to 118, with 110 goals scored in those matches (most accounts claim 121 caps and 116 goals).
   My next step is to add to the record of the pre-1998 matches, and in particular I hope that the players who featured in those matches can be recognised properly for their contribution to Scotland's football history.
   The Scottish FA recently presented caps to the 1972 team, and it would only be right if all the other players were also awarded caps. I also support the introduction of 'heritage numbers' for every internationalist.
   There are now 243 names on the list of Scotland players, of whom 144 made their first appearance under the SWFA. However, I acknowledge that the number may have to be revised slightly if new information comes to light.

If you have any comments or queries about these statistics, please get in touch through the Contact Form.

In compiling these statistics, I would like to acknowledge the help and co-operation of a number of football historians, in particular Neil Morrison and Tommy Malcolm. I would also like to thank several former players for sharing their memories (and their press cuttings!), notably Margaret McAulay Rae and Elsie Cook.

Robert Guérin is hailed as the founder of FIFA, having hosted the meeting in May 1904 that brought football nations together in common cause. He then served as its President for two years and is rightly celebrated as a sporting pioneer.
   Yet there is an amazing mystery behind the man, as his true identity has been hidden for over a hundred years: Robert was his surname, not his first name, while Guérin was a suffix he adopted in adult life.
   I would like to introduce you to Maurice Robert. That was the real name of FIFA's first President.

When he was born in Reims in 1876, his full name was registered as Clément Auguste Maurice Robert. He was the son of Jean-Marie Robert, a cloth manufacturer and merchant, and his wife Louise.
   Little is known about the first two decades of his life but he must have learned English - a skill which was essential in years to come - as in 1898 Maurice Robert was accepted into the Society for the Propagation of Foreign Languages. By then he was working in commerce and living in Paris, in a narrow street in Montmartre that was to remain his home for the rest of his life.
   He joined Union Sportive Parisienne, a multi-sports club founded in 1896, but was not much of a player and became its secretary between 1900 and 1904. He was therefore mentioned regularly in the press as the club's contact for fixtures, which reveals that he was known as Maurice Robert until the end of 1900, then early in 1901 he changed his surname to Robert-Guérin.

Although his reason for change is not clear, the root of this addition can be found in his family tree: his grandfather Jean-Pierre Robert had married Reine-Antoinette Guérin, and the family firm of Robert-Guérin had exhibited its merino fabrics at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
   Maurice Robert-Guérin became more involved in sport and joined the USFSA, a national governing body for many sports, where he was in turn its treasurer and secretary, working from its base at 229 rue Saint Honoré in Paris. His first love at the time was football, refereeing several high profile matches, but he was also involved in a range of activities which no doubt helped him to make his way as a sports journalist.
   The story of the founding of FIFA is well known and Robert-Guérin recalled the spirit of the times for FIFA's 25th anniversary: 'It was not difficult to foresee in 1903 that football was going to become more popular all over the world. I decided to found the International Federation of Association Football, with the collaboration of very good friends.
   'I was rather surprised that the initiative was not taken up by England, where football was triumphing. I though that, by rights, the chairmanship belonged to the Football Association of England.'
   He went to London to meet Frederick Wall, the FA secretary, who listened but merely replied that he would refer the matter to the FA board. Robert-Guérin waited patiently for months but heard nothing, so he asked again and was invited back to London where, this time, he met Lord Kinnaird who was friendly but non-committal. 'It was like cutting water with a knife,' he recalled.
   Faced with English prevarication, 28-year-old Robert-Guérin felt he had no option but go ahead without them, and called the meeting at which FIFA was established on 21 May 1904. Reluctantly he accepted the role of President, which was not a role he cherished but he remained at the helm of the fledgling organisation for two years until Englishman Daniel Woolfall was persuaded to take over in 1906.

Meanwhile, as president of the association football section of the USFSA, he was effectively the manager of the France national team for its first 12 matches, from their 1904 debut against Belgium up to the disastrous 1908 Olympic Games in London.
​   His time included defeats of 15-0 and 12-0 to England amateurs, and ultimately the humiliating 17-1 crushing by Denmark at the Olympics.

In 1907 he married, and as his formal name had never been changed he signed the document as Maurice Robert. His wife was an Englishwoman called Edith Harris, who already had a two-year-old daughter called Rosetta. The marriage certificate specifically includes Rosetta so that she was legitimised and took the surname Robert. It is not clear whether Maurice was the father.
   For the rest of his professional life, he was known as Robert Guérin, with the ambiguity of Robert being a first name or part of a double-barrelled surname. I cannot find any instance of him using Maurice as a journalist, and he appears always to have described himself simply as Robert-Guérin, sometimes with a hyphen, sometimes not.
   In his private life, however, his surname remained simply Robert. After Edith died in 1926 he remarried the following year to Andrée Brunel and again he signed the certificate as Maurice Robert.
   Having given up sports administration in 1908, he worked for most of his life as sports editor of Le Matin, and although he continued to report on football he developed a passion and expertise in aviation, writing for several specialist magazines. He was highly respected in his field, and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 1922, then promoted to Officer in 1934.

Despite his prestigious reputation, Robert-Guérin appears to have kept a fairly low public profile. I was amazed when researching this article that only one photo of him appears to be available, and he left little in the way of personal reminiscences. 
   After Le Matin folded in 1944 (with its reputation sullied for taking a pro-German stance during the occupation) he was left impoverished, and that led to the only time he is known to have used another version of his name. A few years ago some of his personal letters came up at auction and they were apparently signed Clément Robert-Guérin. Written in the late 1940s, they revealed he was in difficult financial circumstances and losing his sight.

​Clément Auguste Maurice Robert, also Robert-Guérin

Born 28 April 1876 at 16 boulevard du Temple, Reims.

Married (1) 11 July 1907 to Edith Emma Harris.
Married (2) 27 January 1927 to Andrée Brunel
​
Died 14 February 1952 at 17 rue Germain Pilon, Montmartre, Paris.

A major fraud in Scottish football was uncovered in 1906 when the SFA Treasurer was found to have embezzled the equivalent of a quarter of a million pounds. But there was nothing anyone could do about it – the money was gone and the culprit was too ill to answer charges.
   The man who left the gaping hole in the Scottish Football Association accounts was Robert Dixon, a trusted accountant who had held office for over a decade. His clever fraud caused a scandal that shocked those who thought they knew him well.
   Dixon was a director of Morton and had a position of considerable influence in the game, yet he was living a lie. Born in Lockerbie, after his mother died he moved with his father to Greenock where he trained to become an accountant. He set up in business and threw himself into local life, becoming an upstanding member of the community as Treasurer of the Greenock Total Abstinence Society and Session Clerk of Mid Parish Church.
   But it was in football that he found his niche as a valued administrator because of his financial acumen, and in 1891 he was elected to the SFA committee as a representative of Renfrewshire Association.
   His club at the time was the wonderfully-named Greenock Abstainers, a short-lived organisation which only joined the SFA in 1889 and had a remarkable record in their three Scottish Cup campaigns, losing 0-8 to Port Glasgow Athletic, 0-13 to Newmains and 0-20 to Johnstone. Based at Upper Ingleston Park, the club folded in 1893, at which point Dixon moved to Bute Rangers (Rothesay) to retain his place on the SFA committee.

A year later, in 1894, he was elected SFA Treasurer as a director of Greenock Morton and remained in post until the fraud was uncovered in 1906. Meanwhile his influence continued to grow. He was elected president of Morton, then chairman when it became a limited company in 1896. He was on the SFA's international selection committee and through his influence, Greenock hosted the Scotland v Wales international in 1902, the only international ever to come to the town.
   However, all this time he had a secret and trouble was brewing. As Treasurer of the SFA he was trusted with their financial management, and when the Association decided in 1899 to invest £1,800 (the equivalent of about £250k today) he was left to make the arrangements.
   He put the money in 'Consols' (consolidated annuities, a type of government bond with no scheduled end date, which offered perpetual interest payments). He registered the Consols in his own name, which allowed him, a few months later, secretly to sell them and keep the money. He covered the fraud by retaining the original purchase receipt and paying the notional interest, about £42, into the SFA accounts each year. To any casual observer, even to the auditors, there was nothing wrong.
   This could have continued almost indefinitely but in 1906 Dixon fell ill. The SFA's initial reaction was sympathy for his inability to work and in April they awarded him an honorarium of £100 for his excellent service, then the following month he was re-elected treasurer despite his continuing illness.

That sympathy vanished in the autumn when the expected annual interest payment did not come through. In Dixon's absence the Finance Committee asked the Bank of England about the Consol investment, only to be told it no longer existed, nor had it done for several years.
   As it dawned on them that they had been duped, Dixon was removed from office and the SFA held a special meeting to decide what had to be done. There were heated calls for recrimination but with the culprit too ill to respond and reported to be penniless, they were left with no option but to write off the loss.
   Dixon never recovered and died of tuberculosis in 1909 aged 45, leaving a wife and three young daughters. The money was all gone, with his estate valued at just £86, which begs the question what he did with it. As an abstainer and a pillar of the church he could hardly have got away with a high-flying lifestyle, so it appears that the explanation was more mundane, and he used it to prop up his business.
   The SFA, on the other hand, realised its systems had allowed too much trust to be placed in one man, and it introduced checks and balances to ensure nothing like this could ever happen again. 


​Robert Dixon
Born Dryfesdale, Lockerbie, 4 July 1863
Died South Street, Greenock, 1 April 1909
​

All historians make mistakes. And now I have to put my hand up and admit I made a mistake in my Who's Who of Scotland Internationalists.
   When the book came out in the summer of 2021 there were many individual biographies which corrected the 'established wisdom' about player dates, so I was prepared for challenges and queries. A few came along, but in each case I was able to demonstrate that my research was correct. Until now.
   I had an email last week from Martin Donnelly, an assiduous researcher who has been tracking down the graves of footballers. He had just found the final resting place of Archie Ritchie, a Scotland internationalist in 1891 while playing for East Stirlingshire and an FA Cup winner with Nottingham Forest in 1898.

Ritchie was thought to have been born in April 1872, which meant he was just 18 when he was capped. However, his gravestone in Church Cemetery, Nottingham, tells a different story: installed after his death on 18 January 1932, it provides a precise date of birth as 21 October 1869.
   As soon as I heard this, I checked my research notes and I can only say I can't have done my job properly in following through his assumed date of birth by comparing it with later records. I found that the Archibald Ritchie born in Kirkcaldy in 1872 could not have been the footballer, as he died aged just 11 weeks of smallpox.
   However, there were no records for an 1869 birth under that name. It took further investigation to get at the truth, which was more complicated than expected as the date on his gravestone also turned out to be wrong.

Archibald Ritchie was actually born in Alloa one year earlier, on 21 October 1868, and in a confusing turn of events his surname was recorded by the registrar as Richardson, yet his father signed his name on the certificate as Ritchieson (which he had also used when he married).
   The Ritchieson family soon moved to Bainsford, a suburb of Falkirk, where there appears to be a gradual change in the surname as they were recorded in the 1871 census as Ritchie, in 1881 as Richardson, and back to Ritchie for 1891.
   1891 was also the year that Ritchie was capped by Scotland, aged 22 rather than 18 as previously thought. He had spent five years with East Stirlingshire by this time, helping them become the top team in the area, and on the back of his international status he turned professional with Nottingham Forest. 

Forest were on a recruitment spree that summer and signed a number of other Scots, including internationalists John McPherson of Hearts and 'Kiltie' Hamilton of Hurlford. Hamilton gave a flavour of the lifestyle of a professional footballer as he was paid £2 15s a week and wrote home: 'Wish I had gone sooner: fed on the best, drink of the best, smoke of the choicest – quite lionised. Never was so happy.'
   Ritchie went straight into the first team where he developed a fine partnership at full back with Adam Scott, and they remained at the heart of the Forest defence for most of the decade, famously winning the FA Cup in 1898 by beating favourites Derby County 3-1 at the Crystal Palace.

He ended his career with brief spells at Bristol Rovers and Swindon Town before retiring to Nottingham, where he married Emily Dodson in 1904. They ran pubs together for many years, the Porter's Rest then the Sawyers Arms, until his death in 1932. They had no children, she later remarried and died in 1971.
   One other thing I found about Archie Ritchie which was new to me was that in August 1897, at the peak of his football career, he was sentenced to 21 days in prison for intimidating a strike-breaker in Nottingham.
   I have amended my Who's Who for future purchasers, and can only apologise to those who have already bought the book. It may just be one wrong date of birth among 615 internationalists, but I am intensely annoyed to have found this error. However, nobody is immune from this kind of thing and, as the old adage goes, 'the man who never made mistakes, never made anything'.


Archibald Ritchie. Born 21 October 1868 at Kellie Bank, Alloa, Clackmannan. Died 18 January 1932 at Greyfriar Gate, Nottingham. One cap for Scotland, v Wales on 21 March 1891 at Wrexham.
​
 
NB a few typos in the book have been corrected over the past year, mostly minor grammar or spelling issues.

However, two key dates for the 1872 Scotland 'originals' have been updated:
For James Smith, I mistyped his date of death as 26 September 1876 when it should read 20 September 1876.
For James B Weir, the date I quoted (23 November 1851) was his baptism, whereas his correct birth date was 21 October 1851.

This year sees the 150th anniversary of the world's first football international, Scotland v England at Hamilton Crescent in 1872. This is the story of one of the players in that match, a pioneer of association football in both Scotland and England.
   Robert Smith was an important figure: a founder of Queen's Park, a Scotland internationalist, thought to be the first man to play the game on both sides of the border. Yet, until recently, little was known about him as he emigrated in 1873 and, as my title says, went off to the Rocky Mountains.
   Tracking him down simply would not have been possible a few years ago, but newly-digitised resources have transformed research.

Let's begin with what was known about him: he was present in 1867 at the starting point for Scottish football, in a room on the south side of Glasgow where a group of young men founded Queen's Park FC. It was the first club in Scotland to take up association rules.
   A couple of years later Robert moved to London for work, where he continued to play football with South Norwood, but retained his Queen's Park membership and played for them against Wanderers in the semi-final of the inaugural FA Cup competition in 1872. He also represented his parent club – and by extension the interests of Scottish football – on the FA management committee. In November that year, Robert and his brother James came back to Glasgow to take part in the first international. Then, in 1873, Robert emigrated and disappeared from view. 
   So, what else do we know? A key document is the first minute of Queen's Park FC from 9 July 1867. The original was lost in a fire in 1945, along with much of the club archive, but thankfully it was reproduced in Richard Robinson's club history, published in 1920. A word of caution, though, as his book is often used as the prime source of information for this period. Robinson was not there in person and made mistakes: for example, he thought Robert Smith was the senior of the brothers, whereas it was James. I'll come back to this document later.

Having left Scotland, Robert Smith soon faded from memory, with just a few less-than-complimentary recollections of him and his brother in the first Scottish Football Annual. Published in 1875, all they could write was: Gone to the Rocky Mountains.
   Another chronicler of early Scottish football, the journalist DD Bone, was also ambivalent about Smith's talents – 'he was not what could be called a brilliant forward' – and equally vague as to where he had gone.
   At first sight, it looked like it would be almost impossible to track down what happened to him. Not only is Smith the most common name, the Rocky Mountains stretch for three thousand miles from Canada to New Mexico. He could be anywhere.
   However, as with any research, there are clues, and the breakthrough for me was a snippet in Richard Robinson's book, where he described a club presentation to Robert Smith on the occasion of his marriage.
   He gave a precise date, 22 July 1879, and using the digitised Glasgow Herald, I trawled through the following day's personal announcements, and there he was, getting married in Glasgow. He was described as a merchant of Green River City, Wyoming, not exactly a prime destination for an emigrant Scot. Even now, Green River is a humdrum mining community in south-west Wyoming, its economy based on vast underground resources of 'trona', the raw material for soda ash.

In the 1870s, however, Green River was almost nothing, a frontier town of tents and shacks. It owed its existence – and still does – to the trans-continental railway, the Union Pacific Railroad. You can just see the train there, steaming out of town.
   I duly googled 'Robert Smith' and 'Green River', and to my astonishment his life appeared before my eyes as the New York Public Library had digitised and put online Progressive Men of the State of Wyoming, a collection of biographies published in 1903. There were copious details of his life, from his fairly humble family background – his father was a gardener – through his education at Fordyce Academy, his employment in Glasgow and London, his early experiences in Wyoming as a financial clerk with a mining company, and concluding with his glittering career as newspaper editor and politician. He founded a paper called the Sweetwater Gazette, which has since changed its name but is still going, and became Chief Clerk of the Wyoming House of Representatives.
   Then, in the Wyoming Newspaper Archive, another free online resource, I filled in more gaps. Smith left Wyoming in 1903 and sold lucrative mineral rights in what was then called Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma, until his death.

Yet one thing was missing in all this: football. It seems he had left it all behind. Eventually I did come across a report in 1883 when he got up a football team from Green River to face the nearby town of Rock Springs, but that was a one-off novelty for Independence Day. Scots may have introduced soccer to many parts of the world, but Wyoming was not going to be one of them.
   Sport apart, he certainly made an impact locally. Here is the famous put-down from Bill Nye, editor of a rival newspaper in nearby Laramie: 'We have nothing more to say of the editor of the Sweetwater Gazette. Aside from the fact that he is a squint-eyed, consumptive liar, with a breath like a buzzard and a record like a convict, we don't know anything against him. If he don't tell the truth a little more plenty, the Green River people will rise as one man and churn him up till there won't be anything left of him but a pair of suspenders and a wart.'   
   Anyway, Smith was undaunted by the criticism and the electorate were happy to be represented by him in the Wyoming legislature, so that eventually he became the Honorable Robert Smith.
   Taking the project further, I carried on piecing together the Smith family story. His son was a doctor in Chicago, his grandson was a US naval officer who survived Pearl Harbour unscathed. And finally I traced the footballer's great-granddaughter in Connecticut, and she has the family scrapbook and even an athletics trophy that Robert won in 1869. That gave me an outstanding source of material, pictured below.

And finally, Chicago's Graceland Cemetery sent me this photo of Robert's gravestone, complete with thistle to mark his Scottish roots. His death in 1914, while visiting his son in Chicago, prompted obituaries in the Wyoming press but nothing back in Scotland where he was forgotten. 

Robert Smith's story might end there, but in terms of my football research all sorts of doors were starting to open. I found what happened to James, his older brother and fellow Scotland internationalist, who had also played for Queen's Park and South Norwood in the FA Cup. Having worked in London as a salesman, sadly he suffered a stroke and returned to the family home near Elgin in the north of Scotland, where he died aged just 32, in 1876.
   Another key name at the birth of Queen’s Park was the club's first secretary, who wrote and signed the minute in 1867, in beautiful handwriting. He was called Klinger in Robinson's club history, but if you look closely at the signature you can see his name was actually Klingner, with an 'n'. That small difference made it possible to research one of the founders of Queen's Park: William Klingner was born in 1848 in Portsoy, a fishing village on the north-east coast.
   The other signature was Lewis Black, the first club captain, born in Cullen, which is just six miles west of Portsoy. And halfway between Cullen and Portsoy is Fordyce, where both Smith brothers and William Klingner went to the local Academy.
   So, you have three out of the four office bearers of Scotland's first football club – Black, Klingner and Smith – all coming from a tiny group of communities on the north-east coast. The exception was the club president Mungo Ritchie, who came from Perthshire. 
   What is more, that sense of togetherness remained as when Klingner moved to London, he shared digs in Lambeth with the Smith brothers, then followed Robert to America.

To cap it all, in 1878 a new store opened in Green River: Smith and Klingner. So, two of the founders of Queen's Park, and therefore of Scottish football, could be found selling oysters and fruit in the American west just ten years later.
   I could go on with these personal stories. But the next stage was to look at the bigger picture, and the obvious question was: who else got Scottish football going? You could write a book about it – and I did.
   The focal point, of course, is the world's first football international, staged on St Andrew's Day 1872, at the West of Scotland Cricket Ground in Partick. I recommend a visit as it has changed little in 150 years and it is easy to imagine the scene that day, with a section of the cricket pitch roped off, the football field running north to south. ​

This is one of nine pictures that appeared in the Graphic magazine, the only contemporary illustrations of the match, drawn by Glasgow artist William Ralston. There is a life-size model of this tussle in the Scottish Football Museum, and that's also where you can see the only known surviving ticket from the match, as well as an original Scotland cap, which belonged to JJ Thomson, who played in the first three internationals.

Here are the 22 players in that first match. But who were they, how do they compare? First, their occupations. It's something of a generalisation, but clearly the Scots could be described as white collar workers – clerks, salesmen and middle management – although some did go on to be very successful in their careers. The English, on the other hand, were almost all in the 'professions' and senior management – the only real exception being John Brockbank, who took the unusual path for a Cambridge University graduate of being a Covent Garden actor.

​The same goes for their educational background. As far as I can ascertain, not a single Scot stayed at school beyond the age of 15, and certainly none of them went to university, although they seem to have acquired a good standard of literacy and numeracy. The English, however, had the best education money could buy.

Perhaps the most glaring difference between Scots and English is their life span: on average the Scots died aged 55 against 68 for the English. In the England team, with the exception of Cuthbert Ottaway who died of pneumonia at 27, the youngest death was 47. Contrast that with the Scots, five of whom were dead by 40, mainly from tuberculosis.
   You can draw your own conclusions about the links between social status, health and life expectancy, but the obvious inference from all of this is that association football in Scotland arose from a very different set of circumstances to England. Free from the baggage of school rules and traditions, the Scots developed their own style of play, using passing and teamwork rather than dribbling and individuality. That suited their smaller stature, and what is more it was incredibly successful.
   Within five years of Queen's Park being established the Scots were able to match the English in that international of 1872, drawing 0-0. A few years on, they were virtually unbeatable: in 1878, Scotland won 7-2 against England and 9-0 against Wales.
   By coincidence that was also the year that Fergie Suter and Jimmy Love went south to Darwen, the first of the flood of Scots professors who would transform the English game in years to come. The pioneers such as Robert Smith laid the ground for the modern sport of football that we all know today.

I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot more about Scotland's football pioneers later this year when the 150th anniversary comes up. And if you want to read about them I do have a couple of books available which may interest you.