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.
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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.

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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 his own story, 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 Stephen 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, Scotland's 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 this 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 (published in the Stirling Observer).