Many fine football careers have been launched in the Junior ranks, and two sports historians have recently taken a close look at the players who first made their name in three internationals played at West Bromwich Albion's ground, The Hawthorns.
   Robert Bradley and Douglas Gorman have been assiduously researching the history of football in the Birmingham area, and they have written an account of the England v Scotland junior games of 1908, 1925 and 1935. Their fascinating account, entitled The Hawthorns Series, reveals what happened to the players in the annual matches between the Birmingham and District FA and the Scottish Junior FA.  Famous names such as Peter Nellies, Dougie Gray and Jock Brown are included, as well as many lesser lights who still had a worthwhile professional career.
   Robert and Douglas have published the article here on this website to give it a wider audience, and I would welcome submissions from any other researchers who have written new and original work on Scottish Sport History.
   Click here to read The Hawthorns Series (pdf).

NB article updated, most recently June 2019.

Further details about the life of Andrew Watson, the first black international footballer, have come to light with the digitisation of shipping manifests on the genealogy website ancestry.
   It was already known that he qualified as a First Class Engineer in May 1893, and these fascinating new records reveal the work he was able to obtain over the next few years while he had his home in Liverpool. Not only do they show his address (he seems to have moved several times) and his pay, they are all personally signed by him.
   The first was an 18 day journey on the Louisianan in October 1893, and he went on to make five voyages on the same ship over the next year as Second Engineer, paid at the rate of £11 per month. There is then a gap before his first voyage on a ship called, appropriately enough, the West Indian in January 1896; however, the register for the first voyage says his most recent ship had been the Waesland. He had 13 voyages on the West Indian, travelling four or five times a year, and during this period was promoted to Chief Engineer, with a pay rise to £15 per month.
   The only other surviving shipping record is an intriguing one from 1901 which shows Andrew Watson, together with his wife Eliza and their two children Henry and Phyllis, sailing from Liverpool to Philadelphia. They were on their way to visit a friend called JD Caswell in New Orleans, presumably for a family holiday. The ship they travelled on was the Waesland, which was one of his former employers.
   Although these are an incomplete record of Watson's maritime career (most of the manifests do not even reveal the ships' destinations), they do help to fill in some gaps in the life of one of football's most important early characters.

A researcher's workload can be laborious but rewarding, as I found this week when transcribing 26 years of Dunblane FC player records from the Scottish Football Association archive.
   The big leather-bound registers, which are held within the Scottish Football Museum at Hampden Park, are a treasure trove, detailing names, addresses and appearances of every player since 1888 who has taken part in a cup competition: the Scottish Cup, the Scottish Qualifying Cup and the short-lived Scottish Consolation Cup. The inclusion of addresses allows further research by cross-checking against census records, so that dates of birth can often be established. This effectively means everyone who has played senior football can be traced - a great resource not just for sports researchers but also for family historians who have a footballer amongst their ancestors.
   As far as Dunblane (my home town) is concerned, the work had a natural limit as the club ceased to exist in 1914. But even in those 26 seasons, I now have a massive spreadsheet with 184 players listed. They range from the famous, such as the Christie brothers (internationalists Bob and Alex, plus their younger brother Sydney), to the obscure. Some became professionals, such as Archie McGeoch who was with Arsenal and Dundee, William Robertson at Hearts and Dundee, or Jamie Kinnaird and William Weir who both went to Sunderland Albion. Most have local addresses, some even in my own street, but in later seasons, when the club had no league and only took part in cup-ties, it is clear they had to cast their net wide with players coming from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Fife.
   Ultimately I will work on building up a complete record of all matches and players at the club. The registers will also allow me to research those players who lost their lives in the First World War, who I first wrote about in my last Dunblane blog.

I recently came across an interesting little article in the Lancashire Telegraph about yet another Victorian football personality whose gravestone has been restored. Thomas Brown Mitchell is not well known but has quite a pedigree as the secretary-manager of Blackburn Rovers in the 1880s and 1890s when they won the FA Cup repeatedly, and also as the first professional manager of Arsenal.
   Like so many influential people in 19th century Lancashire football, he was a Scot. Born just north of Dumfries in 1843, Mitchell initially worked in Glasgow before travelling south in the 1860s, and married a local lass in Blackburn in 1866.
   At some stage, possibly in time for their 1884 FA Cup victory, he became involved with Blackburn Rovers and was with them as secretary-manager and club director for further triumphs in 1885, 1886, 1890 and 1891. He had a year as manager of Arsenal from 1897-98 before returning to Lancashire to live out his days; he died in Blackburn in 1921.  
   His football career is well described in the Arsenal History blog, but some aspects of his life are a bit murkier - not least the fact that he was a convicted fraudster before he became involved in football. Thanks to the British Newspaper Archive his criminal past has come to light with detailed reports of his trial and conviction for embezzlement early in 1880. He was a salesman (and former business partner) with William McKie & Co, wine and spirit merchants, and was accused of taking many hundreds of pounds although the court case was based on three specimen charges for much smaller amounts. Found guilty by a jury (which recommended mercy), 36-year-old Mitchell was sentenced to six months with hard labour.
   Evidently he served his time and carried on as though nothing had happened, as in the 1881 census he is back living with his family, described as a commercial traveller. 
   However, Mitchell was no stranger to the courts and in 1884 was found guilty of assault (fined 10 shillings). In 1888 he was implicated in a pheasant poaching case (case dropped), then again two years later Nottingham Forest brought an action in the High Court against him and other Blackburn directors for poaching players. 
   Somehow, Mitchell not only rose above his criminal past but did well for himself. He drew a salary of £14 from Blackburn Rovers and was described in the 1891 census as living on his own means, while ten years later he was a retired secretary of a football club. There are gaps in his life story but what remains without doubt is that he was an influential Scot in the early days of English professional football.

* And in case you are wondering, he is no relation to the author!