Did Joe Harper really score five goals on his international debut? It is a question which has puzzled me ever since the Scottish FA decided to upgrade five Scotland tour matches in 1967 to full international status.
   The move, which provoked a heated debate among football historians, was essentially made to ensure that Sir Alex Ferguson would receive a full international cap in time for his 80th birthday. He duly came to Hampden in October 2021 and was presented with his cap at half time in the Scotland v Israel match, a gesture which was loudly cheered by the capacity crowd. Other players in the squad have been similarly recognised, and have appreciated the gesture.
   But back in 1967, the tour party was unequivocally not the full national team, and Scottish FA secretary Willie Allan made this abundantly clear. Although Scotland had just beaten world champions England 3-2 at Wembley, most of the regular players were not available, with Celtic and Rangers in European finals and various other call-offs.
   Allan was supported by the Glasgow Herald, which stated 'Under no circumstances should they be labelled a Scottish international team. Our newly-won prestige, both at international and club level, is too precious for that.'
   This stance annoyed some of the opponents, notably the Australians who wanted to test themselves against Scotland's stars, but the tour went ahead anyway under the guise of a Scotland XI.
   It has to be said that the ultimate decision on which Scotland matches are deemed to be worthy of a cap is the prerogative of the Scottish FA, even if they don't meet FIFA standards. There are several instances in the past when a match did or did not count for the award of a cap, sometimes for fairly arbitrary reasons.
   However, in upgrading some of the 1967 matches, the Scottish FA seem to have slipped up when deciding which ones. Despite claiming to have studied their archive, they either failed to do the research properly or were poorly advised.
   The first five games versus Israel, Hong Kong and three against Australia, were all against full national teams, whereas the last four games were not, the opponents being New Zealand Under 23s, an Auckland Provincial team, Vancouver All Stars and Canada Amateurs.
   Yet Hong Kong was ignored in the 'upgrading' review, despite them being FIFA members and selecting essentially the same team which played in the Merdeka Cup that year. 

On the other hand, the Scottish FA did decide to recognise the match against Canada, even though they were certainly not the full Canada international team. In fact they were all amateurs, who were preparing for Olympic qualifiers against Cuba later that month. Hence this match does not appear in Canadian records.
   It is probably too late now for the Scottish FA to change their decision, but the inclusion of the Canada match has thrown up a historical conundrum: Joe Harper's five goals on his debut, contributing to a 7-2 win.
   If that is correct, he equals the Hughie Gallacher's record for goals in a single Scotland match, and when he was interviewed recently Harper was understandably proud of his achievement. At first glance there seems little doubt about it, as every Scottish newspaper reported his five goal haul. Harper himself has been interviewed about his feat.
   However, there were no Scottish journalists on the tour, so every report for every match was supplied to our newspapers by local agency reporters rather than people who knew the team. They were accepted at the time but further research, using archive sources, raises several doubts about the tour statistics, and in particular Joe Harper's haul.
   Most notably, the Scottish FA kept its own record of the matches, and their minute book contains a surprise about this game. It states that Harper scored three, with the others being an own goal by Kauck, one from Bobby Hope and two from Willie Morgan.

​This is supported by the report in the Winnipeg Free Press, which gave a detailed account of all the goals, and it concurred: Harper got three, not five. The only aspect which it disagreed with was the identity of the Canadian who scored the own goal, suggesting it was Bob di Luca rather than Karl Kauck.
   Admittedly, the Winnipeg Tribune went along with Harper scoring five. So you have two men, presumably sitting alongside each other in the press box, but not conferring on the goalscorers.
   Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Harper did not score five, and that this was a fiction which only gained currency through an agency reporter. 
   Therefore, I have little doubt that Hughie Gallacher's five-goal haul against Ireland in 1929 should remain as the record for a single Scotland international.
   This was not the only tour match in which a question mark remains over a goalscorer. In the opening game, Scotland beat Israel 2-1 in Tel Aviv with a late winner, but who scored it could be one of three players, as even the Israeli press could not agree.
   Harry Hood was the man according to the Scottish FA minutes and Israeli paper Ma'ariv. Eddie Colquhoun scored according to reports in Davar, the Dundee Courier and the Press and Journal. And it was Alex Ferguson in Al Ha-mishmar and La Merhav in Israel as well as the Glasgow Herald, Evening Times and Evening Express back home. Which was correct? Unless film of the match turns up, we may never know.
   Meanwhile, the Scottish FA has yet to update its online archive to include the 1967 tour, over two years after the decision to upgrade the matches to full international status. So for now, the six players who won caps during the tour but at no other time are not even mentioned: Alan Anderson, Jim Townsend, Alex Ferguson, Harry Hood, Hugh Tinney and Harry Thomson. And Joe Harper remains on four caps, two goals.
   I have a small vested interest in getting this right this, as I set up that archive when I worked at Hampden two decades ago. It dearly needs attention to make it more accessible and to correct a number of mistakes.
  
Click here to read the full statistics of the 1967 tour, as far as they are known.

As the first Scots-born Olympic gold medallist, Sandy Hall has outstanding credentials to be a national sporting icon. Yet this prolific goalscorer from Peterhead remains unheralded in his native land - because his greatest achievement came with a Canadian team.
   The son of a whale fisherman, Alexander Noble Hall was brought up near Peterhead harbour but spurned the sea to earn his living by cutting granite. The hard physical work kept him fit and he played centre forward for his home town team, but there were few signs of the glory to come, an Aberdeenshire Cup final being a rare highlight.
   That would all change when the young man travelled to Canada in 1901 in search of adventure, picking up work on construction projects. After a couple of years his stonecutting took him to Galt, west of Toronto, a small nondescript town which just happened to have the top football team in Ontario. With the added ingredient of Hall's goals, the Galt eleven would achieve an extraordinary triumph: Olympic gold.
   The 1904 Olympiad in St Louis was the first where medals were awarded in association football, the winners recognised by the International Olympic Committee even though the competition was limited to just three teams from two countries. Galt defeated the University of Toronto for the right to represent Canada, then headed south to Missouri in exuberant fashion on the Grand Trunk Railway. They were backed by 50 supporters, including the town's mayor, who paid $10.70 each for the round trip on a special train decked in red and white.
   Hall, the only non-Canadian in the eleven, scored a hat-trick in the opening match on 16 November, as Galt thrashed Christian Brothers College 7-0; the following day they defeated St Rose Parish 4-0. Without conceding a goal against these two local sides, the Galt players were duly declared Olympic football champions and trooped off to the Department of Physical Culture to be presented with gold medals. One of those precious prizes, won by fellow forward Fred Steep, is now on show at the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame.

Until then, the only athlete with Scottish connections to have won an Olympic title was strongman Launceston Elliot in 1896, but he was born in India and brought up in England. Sandy Hall thus became Scotland's first home-grown Olympic winner, and to this day remains our only footballer (the Great Britain gold medal teams of 1908 and 1912 were all English).
   Yet when Hall returned home a year later, his Olympian status counted for little, and after a trial with Aberdeen reserves he picked up again for Peterhead in local amateur football. There the story might have ended but he was spotted by Edinburgh side St Bernard's, who liked his direct bustling style, and they offered him the chance to play professionally. He made a sensational start to his senior career at the age of 25, scoring a hat-trick against Dumbarton, and his goals in 1906/07 were a major factor in Saints winning the second division championship.
   This scoring prowess brought him to the notice of bigger clubs, and there was none bigger than Newcastle United, who had just clinched the English first division title. They paid £200 to take him to Tyneside in 1907, and again he made an immediate impression with ten goals in three end-of-season tour games in Germany; but when it came to the rigours of the Football League he made little headway and played just six times, scoring twice. United were happy to sell him to Dundee before the season was out.
   Again he made an early impact, netting a cup double against Aberdeen on his debut, but Hall was used only sparingly as cover for Dundee's established forward line, and had to be content with banging in the goals for the reserves. His chance to shine eventually came in the 1909-10 season with an extended run at centre forward, replacing first the ageing John 'Sailor' Hunter then George Langlands. Hall scored a hat-trick that saw off Motherwell in the Scottish Cup quarter-final; but after failing to find the net in the semi he was dropped for the final, cruelly missing out on Dundee's epic cup victory over Clyde. He played his part nonetheless, as a fixture backlog forced Dundee to play 12 games in April, and he turned out in several league matches to keep the stars fresh for the final. There was no medal for him, but Hall's role as understudy was acknowledged with a place in the cup-winning squad photo.
   No sooner had the season ended than he was off to Portsmouth, where he was offered work as a stonecutter, but he failed to settle with just three goals as his team finished bottom of the Southern League. He returned to Scotland with Motherwell, ironically signed by their new manager John Hunter, who had taken Hall's place in Dundee's cup final team, but failed to find the net even once.
   While playing success eluded him, Hall hit the headlines for a different reason in the summer of 1912 while visiting his mother in Peterhead. Hearing shouts that a boy was drowning, he ran down the harbour embankment, shed his clothes, and swam out against a strong current to save 5-year-old Alick McKenzie. Both the Carnegie Hero Fund and the Royal Humane Society recognised his bravery.

   Back to the football, he joined Dunfermline, who had just been elected to the second division and needed experience up front. Hall rewarded their confidence with a Fife Cup victory in his first match and scored 18 league goals in his debut season. Also working as groundsman, he was into his third campaign with the Pars when war intervened and he signed up as an artillery gunner, travelling to the front to bombard the Germans. In a letter home, published in the Dunfermline Journal, he complained about squalid conditions and weak beer: "You can get a dozen into you and still belong to a temperance lodge." It was a tough existence and within months he became so seriously ill that he was sent home, suffering from rheumatic fever.
   The war inadvertently revealed that his family life was quite a tangle. Hall and his partner Elizabeth Gibson had had three sons, but although each time they stated on the birth certificates that they were married, in fact they only tied the knot late in 1915, perhaps with the realisation that there would be dire financial consequences for her in the event of his death.
   As it happened, he survived unscathed and after demob in 1919 was still fit enough to embark on a football swansong at home in Peterhead, coaching and playing well into his forties. However, while he won another winner's medal in the Aberdeenshire Charity Cup, the episode ended in farce in 1923 when most of his team refused to play Aberdeen in a Scottish Cup tie. They were upset at the club's decision to sell ground rights, and Hall led out a hastily-assembled makeshift eleven who suffered a record-breaking 13-0 thrashing at Pittodrie. It may have been a factor in his decision that summer to emigrate to Toronto with his family, this time for good.
   As Sandy Hall faded into distant memory, his death in Canada in 1943 went almost unnoticed in Scotland, even in his native Aberdeenshire. Yet the first Scots-born Olympic gold medal winner retains a unique place in our sporting history, and deserves to be remembered as a local hero in the truest sense of the word.

Alexander Noble Hall
Born Aberdeen, 3 December 1880
Died Toronto, 25 September 1943

Football career
Peterhead 1898-1901
Buckie Thistle 1901
Toronto Scots 1902-03
Galt 1904
Westmount, Montreal 1905
Aberdeen A 1905
Peterhead 1905-06
St Bernard's 1906-07
Newcastle United 1907-08
Dundee 1908-10
Portsmouth 1910-11
Motherwell 1911-12
Dunfermline Athletic 1912-15
Peterhead 1920-23

Honours
Olympic gold medal 1904
Scottish Second Division Championship 1906-07
Lanarkshire Cup 1912
Fife Cup 1912, 1914
Aberdeenshire Charity Cup 1921
Carnegie Hero Fund award 1912
Royal Humane Society award 1912
Wartime service medals


Article copyright Andy Mitchell. With thanks to Les Jones, Colin Jose, Gordon Baird and the Andrew Carnegie Hero Fund Trust for their input.

As regular readers of my blog will know, I am working on a new Who's Who of Scotland internationalists. The project is slowly making progress, and I am now down to just 20 footballers whose life details are still unknown (and for 12 of those I have a date of birth, at least).
   A breakthrough this week came with the discovery of what happened to John Walker, a forward who not only won five caps for Scotland but was also a key player with Hearts, Liverpool, Rangers and Morton. He won two League Championships and the Scottish Cup with Hearts - (he is pictured above with the 1897 Hearts side, fourth from left in back row) but is perhaps most famous for scoring the goal that clinched Liverpool's first Football League Championship. His goal against West Brom on 29 April 1901, the final match of the season, secured a 1-0 win for Liverpool, who won the league by two points from Sunderland.
   As with many players, the first challenge was that his widely-quoted date of birth (31 May 1874) is wrong. Thanks to Hearts historian David Speed, and with confirmation from SFA registers which provide his address in Woodend Rows, Torphichen, by Armadale, he was in fact born in Shotts on 24 August 1873. His parents were Thomas Walker and Elizabeth Reid.
   John Walker started his football career in Armadale and signed for Hearts in 1893, moving to Liverpool with teammate Tom Robertson in 1898. They can both be found in the 1901 census, boarding with the Liverpool trainer, James Chapman, who had also come from Hearts (centre of back row in above photo). The following season Walker returned to Scotland with Rangers, and three years later ended his career at Morton.
   What happened after that has long been a mystery, but after finding a reference in an Armadale history that said he settled in Canada, I had a new angle to follow. More searching finally turned up his name on a family grave (pictured below) in Woodend cemetery outside Armadale, just a stone's throw from where he was brought up. From that it can be confirmed that John Walker died on 17 February 1937 in the small community of Louise, Manitoba, where he had lived with his sister Lilias.
   Finally, the record can be put straight for another famous Scottish footballer.

Since writing this article, I have been made aware that there is a superb tribute to John Walker and his brother Thomas on the Military Museums of Calgary website. You can read it here:
​https://themilitarymuseums.ca/mmural/51-100/074/m074.html

I've just finished reading a fascinating new book on Canadian football, and while that may not immediately seem relevant to Scottish sport, there is a wealth of material unearthed by Les Jones in Soccer: Canada's National Sport.
   This excellent coffee-table size volume is packed with anecdotes and photos in its 250 pages. Of particular interest to Scotland there are the stories of pioneers such as Perthshire-born David Forsyth, considered as the father of Canadian football, and David Kerr Brown from Ayrshire, who promoted the ambitious 1880 tour of Canada by the Scottish FA (which was abandoned following the death of SFA secretary William Dick).
   Football was played in Canada by Scots long before the foundation even of the Scottish FA: as early as 1823, Hudson's Bay employees played a Christmas challenge; and in 1864 the St Andrew's Society of Ottawa organised matches. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the SFA's official annual contained detailed accounts of Canadian soccer, emphasising the links that were sealed by tours of the British Isles in 1888 and 1891. 
   And there is much more, through the tours of the 1920s and 1930s, to the modern era. It is, primarily, a celebration of the sport and all makes for an entertaining and informative volume.
   You can read all about Canada Soccer Stories at this link, and while airmail postage may make it expensive for UK purchasers, it does represent a worthwhile investment.

I was delighted to find a ship manifest on ancestry.com for the first overseas tour by a Scottish football select. Clubs had travelled abroad since the 1890s, but the Scottish FA had held back from international contact. Then, in 1921, Third Lanark were given permission by the SFA to play a series of matches in Canada and USA that summer, and instead of restricting it to club players it was open to a wide range of good quality Scots, some of them internationals.
   They played 25 matches in two months, travelling from coast to coast, winning the first 24 but ending up with a draw against Fall River. Full details can be found here. The US Football Association presented the tourists with an attractive trophy (pictured) which has the SFA crest as well as the Third Lanark badge, either side of the US logo.
   The players sailed out on the Cunard liner Cameronia, leaving Liverpool on 11 May 1921, and the passenger list (below) is full of interesting detail about the players, some of whom gave their profession as footballer, while others gave their 'day job' such as publican or joiner.
   With a bit more digging, I've also found similar lists for the first 'official' SFA tours across the Atlantic, in 1927 and 1935, as well as various club lists including Third Lanark's venture to South American in 1923. These are great examples of the kind of material that is now available to historians after many years being hidden from view.

I came across this photo of a Scotland team group from 1891 in an old scrapbook - except that it isn't really a Scotland team. This was the side that defeated Canada 5-1 on 3 October 1891 at Ibrox, part of a lengthy tour undertaken by the visitors in which they faced club sides and local selects from the end of August to early January, as well as national sides from all four home nations. These games are not considered official internationals.
    The people in this photo are (back, from left): JK McDowall, JM Marshall, M McQueen (Leith Athletic), A McCredie (Rangers), W Maley (Celtic), H Smith (Third Lanark), G Sneddon (SFA President), J Reid (Irish FA, referee); centre: J Hector (Battlefield), W Berry (Queen's Park), W Arnott (Queen's Park), A McMahon (Celtic), J Bell (Dumbarton); front: J McLaren (Dumbarton), J Hamilton (Queen's Park).