This well-known image, claimed to be the world's first photo of a tennis player, was taken by the pioneering photographers Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill in Edinburgh around 1843. It features in a major exhibition just now at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and is one of the key images used to market the exhibition.
   The subject is recorded simply as Mr Laing (or Laine, the writing is not clear) and has never been identified. So I set out to find who this dapper young sportsman really was, and why he should be holding a racket.
   The first thing to establish was that he was not actually a tennis player. Lawn tennis had yet to be invented, while the only real (or royal) tennis court in Scotland at the time was at Falkland Palace in Fife.
​   Less well known is the fact that Edinburgh had a thriving racket court in the city centre. It had been established as a fives court in Rose Street around 1800 by John Hallion, who ran the adjoining tavern and also used it to stage cock fights. The court continued in operation throughout the 19th century, subtly changing use from fives to rackets, and in the 1840s was leased by a Mr Wilson. As the advert below shows, he aimed it at the city's well-to-do, and even employed a professional for tuition.

The essential difference between rackets and tennis is that rackets - the ancestor of squash - is played in an enclosed court, with the ball knocked against a wall; in tennis the ball is played over a net between the players.
   As with many recreational sports, there were virtually no reports of matches in the daily papers, but regular adverts show that rackets was popular among young men in Edinburgh at the time. The Rose Street court even attracted royal patronage, as in 1864 Queen Victoria's second son, Prince Alfred, played a game of rackets there and was hit in the eye by a ball.
   It would appear, therefore, that Mr Laing is not a tennis player after all, but a rackets player. 
   There is, incidentally, another photograph of him, held at Glasgow University Library, which shows him in a different profile with outstretched arm. He is again holding the racket in an unnatural position, too far up the handle, but that can be explained by the requirement to keep still for a long exposure. The metal frame which helped to hold him steady has been painted out, but the telltale shadow is clearly seen. Even so, the smart sporty outfit makes him look quite the young athlete!

So, who was he? It is impossible to be certain, but I am confident he was John Laing, an Edinburgh artist who was not only the same age as Robert Adamson, he was also a near neighbour.
   John Laing was born in February 1821 (two months before Adamson) and brought up in the city. Although I have not yet found where he trained as an artist, by 1846 he was in business and advertised his studio at 5 Calton Hill, just a few yards from Adamson's studio at Rock House:

As a neighbour and as a member of Edinburgh's artistic community, he was ideally placed to be a subject for Hill and Adamson's pioneering calotype photographs. Indeed, Hill and Adamson took photographs of several Edinburgh artists. Among them was another neighbour, the sculptor John Steell, who was then at 20 Calton Hill but had previously lived in Laing's house at number 5. Other artists included James Drummond, John Maclaren Barclay, William Leighton Leitch, Kenneth MacLeay, John Stevens, James Rannie Swinton and William Borthwick Johnstone.
   While these connections alone do not confirm Laing's identity as the man in the photo, there is a further link. After Adamson's early death in 1848, Hill continued the business and at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London's Crystal Palace, he showed off the calotypes of Newhaven he had taken with Adamson. In the very same room, John Laing had an exhibit of his own, as this cutting from the Edinburgh Evening Courant (6 May 1851) shows:

Laing and Hill were also listed in the same section of the Great Exhibition's official catalogue.
   In the 1850s, Laing's art and design business continued to thrive and he opened two shops, at Leith Street Terrace and in Baxter's Place at the top of Leith Walk, while retaining his studio in Calton Hill. He had married Susanna Bryce in 1845 and they had eight children including Thomas who became town clerk of Leith.
   But disaster struck when Laing was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease which then had no known cure or treatment. After suffering for over a year he died at home on 23 September 1858 and is buried in Warriston Cemetery.
   As yet there is no conclusive evidence which confirms John Laing as the holder of the racket. But the available clues, including his close connection to the photographers and their studio on Calton Hill, point strongly to the painter as the likely subject.

Postscript, May 2018: I am immensely grateful to the Friends of Warriston Cemetery in Edinburgh, who not only tracked down the grave of John Laing and his family, but cleaned off the moss and took this photograph. He is buried with his wife and three of his children, and his artistic career is recorded beautifully and simply with the artist's palette carved on the headstone.
​

The exhibition A Perfect Chemistry, Photographs by Hill & Adamson is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh until 1 October 2017.

When Scotland meets England, patriotism comes to the fore, so it would take a strong personality for a Scot to wear an English jersey - yet several Scots have indeed played for the 'auld enemy' over the years. Some were due to accidents of birth or emergencies, others are harder to explain. 

Joe Baker spent just six weeks in Liverpool, where he was born in 1940 to Scottish parents, but despite his upbringing in Wishaw, Lanarkshire and a strong Scottish accent, it was enough to qualify him irrevocably for England. In the 1959-60 season, when he scored no less than 42 goals for Hibernian, he became the first player to be selected from a team outside England and made a scoring debut against Northern Ireland. It was the first of nine England caps. He was not the only one of his family to have an unusual international career - his elder brother Gerry was born in New York and played for USA.
   You have to go back to the nineteenth century for more examples of Scots being selected for England. Although one was born in England due to his father’s military posting, the others had no English heritage apart from their residence.

John Goodall was born in 1863 in London where his father, a corporal in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, was serving, but when his father died he moved to Kilmarnock as a boy (via Belfast where his brother Archie, a future Ireland cap, was born). Brought up in Ayrshire, he played for local clubs until moving south in 1883. After initially playing for Great Lever in Bolton, he went on to a glittering career with Preston North End and Derby County, and scored 12 goals in 14 appearances for England.
   Stuart Macrae, despite his fine Scottish name, won five caps for England in 1883-84. He was a son of Duncan Macrae of Kames Castle on the Isle of Bute, but was born in 1855 in Bengal, where his father was serving in the Indian Army. Stuart was sent back to Scotland for his education at The Edinburgh Academy, where he was captain of the school rugby team in 1872-73, and later moved south to Newark where he married into a brewing family. There, having switched to association rules, he played for Notts County and was duly capped by England. He also introduced golf to the town and was a decent cricketer for Gentlemen of Nottinghamshire.

Two Scots played against Scotland in the same match for England in 1877. William Lindsay was born in 1847 in Benares, India where his Dundee-born father was serving with the Bengal Native Infantry; his grandfather had been Provost of Dundee. After his parents were killed in the Indian Mutiny, he was educated at Winchester before entering the civil service. He won the FA Cup three times with Wanderers, and played first class cricket for Surrey, but despite representing Scotland in all five of the unofficial internationals of 1870-72, he was chosen once for England.
   Alongside him in the 1877 team was the only England player ever to have been actually born in Scotland. John Bain was born in Bothwell, Lanarkshire in 1854 to Scottish parents, but the family moved south when he was about ten. He went to Westminster College and Oxford University, where he won his blue at football in 1875, and earned a cap two years later. In the same month he played in the FA Cup final for Oxford – in opposition to William Lindsay.

And finally, two Scots were cajoled at short notice into playing for England during unofficial wartime matches. Jimmy McMullan of Partick Thistle, who would go on to captain the Wembley Wizards, played for England against Scotland in a charity match at Celtic Park on 8 June 1918.  Then on 2 December 1939, when two England players heading for Newcastle were involved in a car crash, the home team needed urgent replacements. One of them was Tommy Pearson, Newcastle United’s Scottish outside left. He later won two Scotland caps in 1947.

When England meet Scotland on 10 June there will be intensive, round-the-clock preparation, with every movement of the players planned and monitored. They are thorough professionals, their focus entirely on the match. They will fly into Glasgow the day before and leave immediately afterwards.
   It wasn’t always like that, though. We’ve been taking a dip into the archives to see how the players used to fill their time before the big match, and have found some surprising diversions which kept them occupied.
   First, Douglas Gorman tells the story of a magnificent signed sheet from the Turnberrry Lighthouse, then Andy Mitchell relates a few anecdotes of past visits.

When the England international team alighted from their train at Mauchline in Ayrshire on Thursday 13 April 1939 they were met by driving wind and rain, and a warning from the stationmaster that they would face 'an awfu licking' at Hampden Park on the Saturday.
   As they quickly transferred to a motor bus, Stanley Rous, FA Secretary, retorted 'We have a grand team and I am confident that we will win' and they travelled the twenty miles to their pre-match base at the Turnberry Hotel on the Ayrshire coast.  Tom Whittaker of Arsenal, trainer to the team, reported that his eleven was fighting fit. At this time the Football Association did not, and indeed would not, appoint a manager for its international team but Rous understood the need for proper preparation and probably worked with Whittaker to get the team together for a full day before the game. In earlier years some England teams had simply arrived in Glasgow on the Friday night.
   However, their preparation did not extend to packing a spare kit. The rain fell so heavily on Saturday that a drenched team needed to change their shirts, and had to borrow replacements from Queen's Park for the second half.
   This was one of the first all-ticket matches at Hampden Park and apparently when SFA President Douglas Bowie travelled from Ayr to welcome the visitors at Turnberry his first question to Will Cuff, Everton Chairman and FA Vice President, was did he have any tickets to spare!
 On the Friday the English team had the opportunity to relax and paid a visit to the Turnberry Lighthouse. We know this as eleven members of the party signed the visitors’ book, including some of the most famous names in English football: Stanley Matthews, Tommy Lawton, Stan Cullis, Eddie Hapgood among them. Also on the page are Tom Whittaker, Frank Broome (a travelling reserve), Vic Woodley, Joe Mercer, Len Goulden, Ken Willingham and Bill Morris.
 Not all the players signed, and perhaps they did not go: the signatures of Willie Hall, Pat Beasley (a late substitute for Eric Brook of Manchester City), Wilf Copping (the other reserve) and Stanley Rous do not appear.  Hall was a keen golfer so that may explain his absence, while Rous would have had administrative details to attend to, and indeed had to provide a late substitute for a talk he was due to give to Glasgow referees.
 Curiously, Stanley Matthews signed the visitors' book for a second time when he returned, this time with his family, in 1947.
   The Turnberry Lighthouse visitors’ book is preserved in the Northern Lighthouse Board archive, which is now held at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. The former keepers’ accommodation is now a luxury retreat in the Trump empire, which would take a footballer’s salary to hire at a reported £7,000 a night, while the lighthouse itself remains an important aid to navigation in the Firth of Clyde.

While we tend to think of the cross-border invasion being a Tartan Army thing, it also used to happen in the opposition direction.
   In 1939, over 40,000 England supporters reportedly travelled to the match, with the London Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS) running 33 special trains for 16,000 supporters, including 600 who 'invaded' Ardrossan early on Saturday morning on two excursions organised by Sheffield and Manchester newspapers.
   Each train had two kitchens which served supper on departure, breakfast on arrival at Ardrossan and, after a stroll around the town, lunch en route to King’s Park station near Hampden. It was all rounded off by dinner on the return journey. The on-board darts competition to pass the time seemed a risky endeavour!
   They squeezed into a packed Hampden and had an outing to remember, as England bounced back from a half-time deficit to win the match through Tommy Lawton’s late header. At the time it was a rare triumph for the visitors, but it would be 1962 before the next Scotland win at Hampden over the old enemy.

Saturday 15 April 1939
Hampden Park, Glasgow (149,269)
Scotland 1 (Dougal 20), England 2 (Beasley 67, Lawton 88).
Scotland: Jerry Dawson (Rangers); Jimmy Carabine (Third Lanark) and George Cummings (Aston Villa); Bill Shankly (Preston North End), Bobby Baxter (captain, Middlesbrough) and Sandy McNab (West Bromwich Albion); Alex McSpadyen (Partick Thistle), Tommy Walker (Heart of Midlothian), Jimmy Dougal (Preston North End), Alex Venters (Rangers) and Jackie Milne (Middlesbrough).
England: Vic Woodley (Chelsea); Bill Morris (Wolverhampton Wanderers) and Eddie Hapgood (captain, Arsenal); Ken Willingham (Huddersfield Town), Stan Cullis (Wolverhampton Wanderers) and Joe Mercer (Everton);  Stanley Matthews (Stoke City), Willie Hall (Tottenham Hotspur), Tommy Lawton (Everton), Len Goulden (West Ham United) and Pat Beasley (Huddersfield Town).
Referee: William R Hamilton (Belfast)

The Ayrshire coast remained a popular training base, for both countries, from the 1920s to the 1950s. The English generally stayed at Troon, sometimes arriving as early as Wednesday evening, and trained at Somerset Park in Ayr. The Scotland team base was not far away at the Marine Hotel in Largs, with training sessions at the local junior team’s Barrfield Park.

It reflects an era when internationals were more relaxed, but in the very early days, the England team barely had time to sample the Scottish air. This itinerary from 1906 show that the players travelled on the Friday, catching a train at their nearest suitable station, either on the east or west coast, joining forces at Carlisle, then on to Glasgow. They had afternoon tea in the saloon coach and arrived at Glasgow Central at 6.15pm, with dinner served in the St Enoch Hotel at 7pm prompt.
   There was no time to hang around. The Saturday schedule included lunch at 12.30, departure from the hotel at 2.30, kick-off at 3.30, and the post-match dinner back at the hotel at 6.30. The train south departed Glasgow Central just after 9pm, and dropped people off through the night at various stations en route to London where it arrived at 6.30 am. For those fearful a sleepless night, 'Arrangements can be made for sleeping accommodation to Euston if required, and at the Park Hotel, Preston, for those members who cannot reach home.'
   The next visit in 1908 saw a complete change of pace. The England team stayed at Dunblane Hydro, where former Scotland international Robert Christie (now a local architect) was delegated to look after them and was ‘assiduous in seeing to their comfort and fraternising with them.’ His programme for the guests included a visit to Dunblane Cathedral, where the players and officials were entertained by an organ recital. Changed days! But they must have enjoyed it as the team returned to Dunblane in 1910.

On occasion, the players even socialised together. In 1927, the Sunday Post took the above photo of the Scotland and England players over a billiards table.
   It was not just the players who enjoyed spending time in Scotland. We often think of the Tartan Army excursions down south, but it was the same in the other direction. The mass invasion by visiting England fans started early in the century and continued long after the War. In 1956, for example, there were 16 special trains from England, not to mention 11 plane-loads from London and Birmingham and hundreds of buses.
   As a final comment, have a read of my article about the Scots who felt at home in London, published in the Scotsman in August 2013: http://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/scots-footballers-history-with-london-1-3039856