Many years ago I bought this attractive belt buckle at an antique fair, engraved for presentation to Hugh McColl junior by the members of West End Cricket Club for the highest bowling average in 1871.
   At the time I had no idea where it came from, in fact initially I thought that West End may have referred to one of the ancestors of Newcastle United. But recently I finally uncovered the full story about Hugh McColl, and his little buckle has taken me on a fascinating journey of cricket and football from Scotland to South America.
   Thanks to the online digitisation of old newspapers and other publications, I established that West End was a Glasgow cricket club which took up football in the winter months and was one of the early members of the Scottish Football Association. McColl was not just a player at both sports, the SFA's first annual in 1875 listed him as the club contact, which was an important breakthrough as it gave his home address.

By a strange quirk, I found that Hugh McColl was later credited with being one of the pioneers of football in Chile, while his namesake Hugh MacColl had come to notice as one of the founders of Spanish football in Seville. My initial thought was that this could possibly be the same man, but it turned out to be a remarkable coincidence with a slight variation in spelling. So, who was the West End man, and how did he end up in Chile?
   Hugh McColl was born in 1852, the fifth child of Hugh McColl and Lillias Inglis Mackie who had married in 1841 and lived in Glasgow. His father was a skilled tradesman as an engine pattern maker, and the family home was in Richard Street in Anderston, now long gone but at the time a respectable area of town.
   As a young commercial clerk Hugh enjoyed cricket in his free time and around 1870 was one of the founding members of West End Cricket Club. He was clearly a decent player, as the following year he won the prize for bowling, but just how good is hard to tell as West End was a minor club whose matches rarely appeared in the press, nor did they trouble the Scottish Cricketers' Annual.
   In 1873 the club took a big step forward by securing the lease of Burnbank, the Glasgow Academicals ground on Great Western Road, and also formed a football section for the winter months. That spurred them on to join the Scottish FA, which enabled West End to enter the Scottish Cup in 1874, beating Star of Leven in the first round before going down 7-0 to the mighty Queen's Park in the second.
   They had to leave Burnbank in 1875 (with Rangers taking over the lease for a year), which appears to have prompted the cricket section to wind up, but West End carried on as a football club and took up residence at Avenue Park in Cowlairs.
   Hugh McColl was not just a player, appearing at full back, he held an integral role as club secretary for 1875-76. West End continued to enter the Scottish Cup and in 1876 they reached the third round after defeating 4th RRV and Govan, but were thrown out of the competition following a 1-1 draw with Edinburgh side Swifts, as the SFA ruled that West End must be disqualified for not scheduling the match on the due date.
   Like many clubs of the day, West End’s existence was brief. Their final Scottish Cup tie was in September 1877, a 5-1 loss to Strathclyde, and the club's last known fixture was in March 1878. They disbanded at the end of the season.
   That might have been the end of Hugh McColl's involvement with football, as he embarked on a career in the import/export trade, got married and started a family.  However, a decade later he crossed the Atlantic and set up in business in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso with his family.

There was already an established British community in Valparaiso with a long-standing cricket club, and that gave him the opportunity to resume his enthusiasm in football, which presumably had never gone away. In 1889 he was a founder of the first organised football club in Chile as an offshoot of the cricket club. Although details are sketchy it appears that Hugh McColl was a driving force, elected as its first president, one of several Scots involved on and off the field.
   The Valparaiso club took a while to settle, not helped by a civil war in 1891, then in 1892 was established as a standalone entity and began to promote football in the port city. The following year it elected a board of directors to became the first constituted football club in the country, and went on to be a founding member of the Football Association of Chile in 1895. Valparaiso was undoubtedly the most important team in the nascent football association, known simply as 'The Club' or 'The Senior Club' until the outbreak of the First World War forced it into a hiatus, as most of its players left to defend the British Empire.
   Meanwhile, Hugh McColl played an active role not just in Valparaiso but in the early development of football in Chile's capital, as he is seen in a photo of the first Santiago football eleven, which had been founded in 1893 by the Santiago Cricket and Athletic Club to play in the first intercity match between Valparaiso and Santiago. It is not clear how he was involved, and perhaps had been recruited to coach the new team. This is presently the only known photo of McColl.

Not long after, Hugh McColl and his family returned to Glasgow, having spent at least five years in Chile, with his daughter Lillias born there in 1891. Back home, he went into partnership in a shipping agency with John Crosbie Rogers (1839-1921), who had spent a long time in Chile before returning to Glasgow, where he was Chilean vice-consul. The business prospered and that meant several return trips to Valparaiso for McColl over the next two decades, as he developed trade between Chile and the UK. His company McColl and Rogers were described in the Glasgow directory as ship and insurance brokers, commission agents, export and produce merchants.
   After the War, the company became known as McColl and Sons, operating from an office in Wellington Street until his death in 1928.
   At the time, nothing was said about his role in football, and even today Hugh McColl is one of those little-known exporters of Scottish football, who learned the game at home before taking it abroad.
   He is now recognised as one of several Scots who were pioneers of Chilean football, and it is remarkable that his story has come to light thanks to a chance find at an antique fair.
 
Hugh McColl
Born 28 April 1852 in Glasgow
Died 13 October 1928 in Glasgow


With sincere thanks to Chilean football historian Sebastián Núñez Mardones for his input. Director of CEDEP, the Chilean Centre for Sports Studies, his book Selección Chilena 1910 - Duelos del Centenario is the definitive story of the first Chilean international team. 

See his comprehensive article on the early years: The background to the founding of Santiago Wanderers

Further reading:
Scots Football Worldwide - Valparaiso.
Scots Football Worldwide - Santiago.
How John Hamilton played for Chile in 1910.