I recently spent a fascinating few hours at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, going through the archives of Clydesdale Cricket Club. Among the treasures available, the star item is the extraordinary scrapbook kept by Archibald Campbell (above), who was not only founder of the club in 1848 but also the first president of the Scottish Football Association in 1873. Born in Hawick in 1824, he moved to Glasgow as a young man and was a key figure in city sport until his death in 1904.
   His scrapbook contains an extensive collection of early Scottish cricket material, including ephemera such as scorecards, tickets and posters from the 1850s onwards. There are even membership cards and fixtures lists from Clydesdale Football Club in the 1870s.
   While there will be plenty of material for future articles, I've taken a closer look at the very first item, a letter which captures one of the challenges in setting up a cricket club. It is addressed to 'Dear Baldy' from a friend in Edinburgh who was able to give him some good advice on where to buy essential equipment.

Edinburgh, 26th Dec 1848

Dear Baldy,
A happy new year to you old boy! How are you all? I have just returned from the Grange cricket ground and have succeeded at last in getting what I think you want. I found old Sparks remarkably civil, and he takes a lively interest in the success of your club. He furnishes bats, wickets and balls of the best manufacture much cheaper than anyone in Scotland, and all the clubs here get their materials from him. The Grange club saved £2 last season by taking their balls alone from him. Write soon and say if the Rules I sent you were of any use, and give us all the news.

Yours very sincerely,
Frank Lightbody

Lightbody (1824-1896) was a young civil engineer in Edinburgh, and although his personal connection to Campbell is not clear his advice was certainly useful. Which sent me off on a tangent - who was 'Old Sparks'? This turned into another story.
   John Sparks has a unique place in Scottish sport as he was the country's first cricket professional. Born in Surrey in 1778 he had played many times for the MCC and was brought to Scotland in 1834 by the Grange Cricket Club (which was founded two years earlier). He was recruited by Edward Horsman, a Cambridge cricket blue who was studying for the bar in Edinburgh, who wrote to his friend James Moncrieff: "Try to get up a good field on Tuesday. I am going to bring down Sparks with me. He is the finest slow blower in England, and is exactly the style of practice our men want. I have made an agreement with him that he is to bowl all day, bowl in our games on practice days if required, stand umpire in matches, and do everything for £20, he paying his own expenses to and front Scotland."
   Sparks had been a celebrated player in his younger days and was still able to bowl 'all day' as expressed in Horsman's letter. And he did so, often bowling five or six hours a day to members in practice, and when not bowling he was busy with his spade, levelling and repairing the turf. His style was 'slow round with much work from leg to off'.
   When Grange moved in 1836 to Grove Street, they gained possession of Scotland's first enclosed sports ground which allowed admission money to be charged (and helped keep out undesirables). John Sparks was installed in Grove Cottage, and as coach and groundsman he ran the show. It soon became known as Sparks's Cricket Ground.
   His income was boosted by hiring out the ground: to celebrate Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838 a grand cricket match was played there by the Holyrood and Caledonian clubs, while it was also used for sports as diverse as pigeon shooting, pedestrianism (1841) and football (1851). It was even a home for the schoolboys of Edinburgh Academy, who paid Sparks twopence each for the privilege of playing cricket on his ground.
   Sparks is only recorded as playing in a couple of matches for Grange, and when his practice bowling began to fail with old age the club invested in a bowling machine, the 'catapulta', then a succession of English professionals. However, he remained in place until his death in 1854.
   Sparks's Ground at Grove Street hosted the first international match, Eleven of England against Twenty-two of Scotland, in 1849. It remained the home of Grange CC until 1862 when the land was needed for city development, and the Fountain Brewery was built on the site.
   Little else is known of John Sparks, but there are comments on his fearsome character. Records show he had a family as in the 1851 census he is living with a daughter and grand-daughter. He was secretive and would never reveal his age; an anecdote in a Grange CC history reveals that even on his deathbed, when his age was required by a doctor to get medicines from a charitable dispensary, the only answer he would give as "Say I am a hundred".

Links: 
John Sparks cricket playing record
Archie Campbell, Hawick's forgotten sporting hero
Clydesdale Cricket Club archive references

A tale of heroism by one of Scottish football’s pioneers, James Weir, has come to light thanks to an anecdote by one of his contemporaries.
   Archie Hunter, a star with Aston Villa in the 1880s, wrote a series of reminiscences in which he described a drunken episode which ended with Weir being hailed as the hero of a major fire in Glasgow’s south side.
   Weir was capped four times by Scotland, including the first ever international in 1872, and won the Scottish Cup three times with Queen’s Park. He was known as the ‘Prince of Dribblers’, an accolade which Hunter said was fully deserved: “I think he was the best forward in Scotland, and when he once got possession of the ball no one could take it from him. If you could have seen him play you would have remembered it. He was a merry fellow, always ready for fun and when the game was over no one liked a frolic better than he did.”
   Hunter recalled a night out in Glasgow which would not be out of place among today’s footballers: “A few of us were going home together and Jimmy Weir was in a fine rollicking mood. He had been – well, celebrating a victory that day – and he was amusing us with his little pranks and his livery chatter. We were all in the best of spirits and made a merry little party.
   “All at once we were startled by a loud alarm in the street and a cry of Fire! Fire! The people, excited as they always are on such occasions, began to run in the direction indicated by a red glare in the distance and we followed them. Sure enough a house was on fire and the flames were getting a firm hold on the building. Worse than that, there were people in the house and already there was such a blaze that they found it hard to make their way to the doors.
   “Presently, amid all the smoke and flame we saw a face at one of the topmost windows – a face that looked ghastly in the glare and was full of horror and despair. There were no ladders at hand and the lower part of the building was ablaze. It looked as if the poor creature – whether man or woman we could not distinguish – must be burnt to death in that furnace.
   “Well, Jimmy was a carpenter by trade and I suppose he knew something about climbing up and down houses. What did he do but coolly commence to climb up a high wall, from which he could throw a rope to the poor creature who was in such terrible danger. We watched him go up and before very long – though it seemed a long time then – he managed to bring the poor thing down; and how he was cheered by the people to be sure! His heroism wasn’t soon forgotten.”
   It is a fascinating story, and what is more it is entirely true. I recently stumbled across a report of the incident in the Glasgow Herald of 26 February 1877.

Shortly after 12 on Saturday night, a serious fire occurred at No Man’s Land, whereby a fine tenement of shops and dwelling houses was burned, the furniture and fittings destroyed, and the lives of the occupants placed in imminent danger. The tenement was situated at the corner of Winton Terrace (Victoria Road) and Allison Street, with a frontage to each thoroughfare of about 90 feet, and was four storeys in height. The ground flat was occupied as shops – a general store, conducted on the American principle and carried on by Mr James Graham, and a fruiterer’s and two drapers’ premises. The flats above, which were divided into dwellings of four rooms and kitchen, and five rooms and kitchen, were fully occupied by five families. The fire originated in Mr Graham’s store, whence it spread with great rapidity.

The report explained how residents were alerted by the local police sergeant, Mr Taylor, who climbed the tenement stairs to the top level, shouting ‘Fire’ as he went. But he was not alone:

Mr Weir, well known in football circles, also lent admirable assistance in making the inmates aware of the alarming position in which they were placed – a task which was not accomplished without considerable difficulty. When there were still a number of persons within the building, the flames had burst into the lobby, but Taylor and Mr Weir succeeded in penetrating through them and a second time reaching the upper flats, where were found a number of people in a terror-stricken state. It was impossible to reach the street through the lobby.
   Fortunately, a balcony ran along the front of the second storey, and the sergeant at once stepped on to the balcony, and passing along to the south end he saw that if the parties could be landed on the window sill of a house in the adjoining tenement they would be safe. By a loud knocking on the window he attracted the attention of a young man who was within, and by his aid got the window opened.

Nobody was killed but the tenement was destroyed which is why the building now on that site in Victoria Road is a different style to the rest of the street. The paper praised the efforts of the rescuers: “There seemed throughout a generous resignation of self”.
   On the day of the rescue, Weir and Hunter had both played for the ‘Improbables’ in the Scotland international trial, which their team won 3-0; the match report in the Herald was on the opposite page to the story of the fire.
   Weir’s life was certainly not lacking in drama. In 1881 he emigrated to Australia, a course that would eventually lead to his death in the outback eight years later, a story I outlined in my book First Elevens. The death notice was in the Adelaide Advertiser:

WEIR.—On the 23rd April, at Warrina Hospital, Great Northern Extension Railway, after an illness of 3 weeks and 3 days, James Biger Weir, of typhoid fever and congestion of the lungs. Deeply regretted by his wife.

When the book came out, I did not know the identity of his wife but have since discovered her name - and that leads to another tale. They married in Adelaide on 3 November 1886, and the reason I know is that they celebrated rather too much:

His wife’s story is quite incredible, too. Born Emma Jane Tampion in 1858, she crops up regularly in newspaper reports. Her parents divorced in 1869, three years later she absconded from Adelaide Industrial School, and she married no less than five times. 
   James Weir was her third husband, and she wasted no time in finding a fourth as she married a Thomas Neylon less than two months after Weir’s death. There are reports through the 1890s of Emma Neylon being fined for drunkenness but she must have sobered up eventually as in 1907 she married her fifth husband and lived until 1937.

James Biggar Weir
Born 21 October 1851 in Gorbals, Glasgow.
Died 23 April 1889 at Warrina, South Australia.

Scotland hosting the Commonwealth Games is a good excuse for a celebration of the nation’s ‘historic purpose-built sporting architecture’. Historic Scotland is taking steps to ensure we treasure Scotland’s sports buildings, and to raise awareness of their importance it recently undertook a comprehensive review of the nation’s sporting buildings as well as commissioning this book.
   Scotland’s Sporting Buildings admits to being more of a primer than a definitive guide, showcasing buildings and pavilions chosen by author Nick Haynes (the book gives no explanation as to who he is, but a quick web search reveals he is a historic buildings consultant based in Edinburgh).
  He has compiled an interesting selection. Some are famous but many are not. They stand out in their environment for a variety of reasons: the innovative, the quirky, the imposing and the cute. The oldest surviving work of sporting architecture in Scotland is the royal tennis court at Falkland Palace (1539-41). There are some stunning swimming pools from the Victorian splendour of Arlington Baths to the Royal Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh. Bowling, cricket, golf and curling all have hidden gems, my own favourite being the Grange Cricket Club’s two tier pavilion.
   There is a lot packed into Scotland’s Sporting Buildings, but frustratingly a lot is also left out. Historic Scotland’s review itself is not referenced; in fact it seems not to have been published anywhere. Instead of the inordinately long (and obscure) bibliography, it would have been much more informative and useful to include at least an index of Scotland’s listed sporting buildings.
   The author chose to omit several sports, most surprisingly rowing which has an impressive architectural heritage, but even within the book’s stated scope there are surprising pictorial gaps. Hampden Park, our national stadium, is nowhere to be seen. For a book using the Commonwealth Games as its hook, where is Meadowbank Stadium and Velodrome? Also missing are Archie Leitch’s designs at Tynecastle and Dens Park, not to mention the fine stand at Firhill (actually Tynecastle appears in an aerial photo of Murrayfield but is not even acknowledged in the caption).
   They are certainly not omitted through lack of space. Despite the stated aim not to feature buildings less than 30 years old, there are images of the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome and Celtic Park, while several photos are not of buildings at all: an early tennis player, the 1877 Scotland rugby team, ancient trophies and portraits – all nice to look at but really not relevant. There are a few errors which a proof reader should have picked up: eg Celtic formed in 1877 (p52), and footnotes in the rugby chapter which don’t relate to their numbers.
   But what really struck me was the almost complete absence of human beings from the photos. The swimming pools, the football terraces, the bowling greens are all devoid of people, sterile and empty. Without players and spectators, what use are these buildings?
   For anyone interested in the subject of sports architecture, there will be an inevitable comparison with the Played in Britain series, and in particular Ged O’Brien’s Played in Glasgow, and it has to be said that this book comes off a distant second.
   Scotland’s Sporting Buildings is published at £11.99.

Response from Historic Scotland

Historic Scotland has provided this welcome feedback to the above review, which answers some of my criticisms:

As this is the first in a new series of books we are producing your feedback is very welcome and we will take it into account for future titles.
   You noted that the nationwide review of sporting buildings which the Listing and Designed Landscapes Team at Historic Scotland undertook and which informed this book has not been published. In fact it is published online in the form of the listed building records which were updated or created as part of the project. You can search for these on our website at:
http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/historicandlistedbuildings
 
I’ve pulled out a couple of examples below for your interest, the Grange Cricket Club which had its category of listing changed from B to A as part of the project in recognition of its national importance and Abdie Curling House in Fife which was newly listed at category B as a result of the project.
 
http://data.historic-scotland.gov.uk/pls/htmldb/f?p=2200:15:0::::BUILDING,HL:43497,grange
 
http://data.historic-scotland.gov.uk/pls/htmldb/f?p=2200:15:0::::BUILDING,HL:52182,abdie
 
We thought long and hard about having an index of listed sporting buildings at the end of the book. The issue for us in doing this is that as soon as it is printed it would be out of date. The list of buildings of special architectural or historic interest changes almost daily with buildings coming on to the list, being removed from the list or having their category of listing and/or descriptions changed. As the database of listed buildings is already searchable online we took the difficult decision that it would be a more appropriate source for that type of information.
   The remit of the review of sporting buildings and consequently the book was concentrated on public sporting buildings. This is because while there are a great many sporting buildings on private estates these need to be looked at in a slightly different way from more standalone public sporting buildings. Those on private estates are part of a wider complex of buildings often including such diverse structures as a large country house, lodges, walled gardens, stable blocks, home farms etc and in many cases there is a particular architectural style of period for those buildings and they need to be considered as a group in themselves. We decided that sporting buildings on private estates would best be reviewed as part of reviews of those individual estates. This explains some of what you mentioned as omissions, there are numerous listed boathouses on country estates for leisure (again not within the scope of the book as this is not a competitive sport) but very few and not enough to make up a chapter which are directly associated with competitive rowing.
   You mentioned disappointment that the Rossie Priory Cricket Pavilion is not in the book. It is in fact mentioned briefly on page 40. As it is on a private estate and would be best considered within that type as noted above it was not part of the study. It is not listed in its own right but might be considered by the local authority to be curtilage of one of the many listings on the Rossie Estate, the local authority would need to give a view on this. You can see the listings at Rossie Priory using the map-based search facility at Pastmap:
http://pastmap.org.uk/
 
However, anyone can propose a building for listing and if you would like to propose the Cricket Pavilion for listing we would be delighted to hear from you. You can download our proposal form here:
http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/index/heritage/historicandlistedbuildings/listingproposal.htm
 
In relation to the typo about Celtic’s date of founding we definitely hold our hands up to that one – proofreading will be as rigorous as possible in the next titles.

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog about the footballer Eadie Fraser; this was spotted by a distant relative of the player who contacted me with some extraordinary information: he had the player's diary, letters and photos. Consequently, I have pieced together this tragic story of the player's life and early death.


Early in 1886, Reverend Alex Miller hurried to a Sydney hospital where he had heard a family friend from Scotland lay dying. He was too late. The young man called Eadie Fraser had already passed away, and the minister could only undertake the sad task of conducting the 25-year-old’s funeral, before writing to his family - news which took six weeks to arrive.
   With this death in Australia, Scotland lost one of her most gifted footballers. The precocious talent known as ‘Graceful Eadie’ had broken into an exceptional Queen’s Park team as a teenager and won five Scotland caps along with two Scottish Cup medals. “His movements were perfect,” wrote the club historian. “His popularity was extraordinary. On the field and off it he was a thorough gentleman, and never descended to those tricks which tend to bring the game into disrepute.”
   The recent rediscovery of Fraser’s personal diaries has shed new light on a short but extraordinary life that spanned four continents: born in Canada, he grew up in Scotland, went to work in Nigeria and died in Australia.
   Born in 1860 to a deeply religious family in Ontario, where his father John (originally from Grantown-on-Spey) was a Presbyterian minister, he was named after Dr John Eadie, a professor of biblical literature. Two years later he came to Scotland when his father took charge of a congregation in the Gorbals.
   Young Eadie started out in football with Kerland, a team in Crosshill, and at 18 was invited to join Queen’s Park. After making the Glasgow select team he won his first cap for Scotland against Wales in 1880 and further international honours followed as he enthralled spectators with his effortless dribbling down the left.

   He even served as club secretary for Queen’s Park, but in the amateur age he also had to make a living and was offered a lucrative job in Africa with Miller Brothers, Glasgow-based traders in palm oil. He played his last match for the club in February 1884, a Scottish Cup semi-final victory over Hibs, and a few days later set sail for the Niger Delta (now in Nigeria), keeping a diary of his progress during the five week journey.
   There was almost a party atmosphere on board the SS Benguela as a group of 18 young men headed for postings in the colonies, putting on light entertainments and playing deck games. Fraser was the only non-drinker which gave him at least one advantage on the voyage: “The chaps are all up and many of them are wishing they had been like me last night and they would have no headaches this morning.”
   Stopping over on Madeira, he had a surprise encounter: “We were sitting on the roadside when two gentlemen on a bullock car passed us. I noticed one of them looked very hard at me. About a dozen yards further on the car stopped and the gentleman got out. He came back to us, and looking at me he asked “Is your name Fraser?” I felt astonished but said “It is”. “Is it Eadie Fraser?” he asked again. “Man, man, the last time I saw you was when your club the QP were playing against the Dumbarton at Boghead in the cup-tie last year”.”

  As the ship reached the west African coast, his fellow passengers were dropped off one by one at their posts, before it was his turn, greeted at the New Calabar river by the Miller Bros agent.
   Fraser’s first impressions were positive: “Opobo is a very nice place, indeed it is the prettiest and healthiest of all the rivers on the West Coast. There are five factories on the one side of the river, and ours is the only one on this side. I make the third white man in the employment. We have a splendid dwelling house – it is very airy and has a splendid veranda all around it. The food is very good. I have a black boy to wait on me alone. He works from 6 in the morning until 6 o’clock in the evening and we rest on Sunday.”
   The first year went well, his father sent him copies of Scottish Umpire to keep him up to date with football news, and in a lively letter home early in 1885 he talked of hosting a successful visit from the firm’s agent, Captain Hooper, who was “awfully well pleased with us and the way the business has been carried out”.
   Ominously, he also mentioned the oppressive heat reaching 130 degrees F (54C) and he soon fell seriously ill with tuberculosis, returning to Scotland to convalesce in a nursing home, before being advised to try the dry climate of Australia to effect a cure. Queen’s Park and Rangers played a benefit match to send him on his way and in September 1885 he bade a tearful farewell at Greenock, seen off by his brother Bob (who, although not so talented, would later win the Glasgow Cup with Queen’s Park).
   In stark contrast to his African trip, the three month voyage to Australia was a desperate trial as his health went downhill. The sole paying passenger on the cargo ship Ardmore, Fraser was utterly miserable and after catching a chill he collapsed, coughing up blood, and spent much of the trip in delirium, confined to his bunk, getting bedsores as he could only lie on one side.
   He was taken straight to hospital on arrival where, reviving briefly, he wrote what turned out to be his last letter home: “I hope to be all right in a couple of months. I am in the finest hospital in Sydney, best attention medical and nursing,” he said, but made it clear he was worried about finance: “I am paying £1 a week and I have only £8 altogether so I badly require money.” 
   Even on the other side of the world, Fraser was well known and was visited in hospital by David Walker, chairman of the Sydney YMCA and a keen footballer, who then summoned a Presbyterian minister, Alex Miller, who had studied divinity with one of Fraser’s Queen’s Park colleagues, WW Beveridge. He came too late, and Miller had the sad task of returning the young man’s belongings to his family.
   Miller also set up an Eadie Fraser Memorial Fund in Sydney to pay for a headstone at his grave, but the appeal failed to gather sufficient funds from local footballers; even a request for a contribution from Queen’s Park fell on deaf ears. Sadly, his final resting place in the city’s vast Rookwood Cemetery remains unmarked.
   Fraser’s African adventure and the struggles of the final voyage might have remained unknown had it not been for the rediscovery of his diaries and letters by his great great nephew Alex Cochrane. While some of the originals are too fragile to handle, they have been transcribed: “They were copied to my mother from a North American member of the extended Fraser clan,” he said. “The final letter is the most poignant with a description of the awful time he had.”  Mr Cochrane, who lives in Glasgow, also has photos of Eadie alongside some of the Queen’s Park greats.
   The diaries bring home the tragedy of a brief but much celebrated life, which one contemporary sports writer summed up: “I question very much if any forward of that time exercised such a potent influence over the spectators, and no style of play was more followed by the younger dribblers than that of Fraser.”

Malcolm John Eadie Fraser
Born 4 March 1860 at Goderich, Ontario
Died 8 January 1886 at Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney