When Edinburgh hosted an International Exhibition in 1890, the organisers knew that they would have to put on special entertainment to draw the crowds through the summer and autumn months.
   Alongside the displays of new technology, the balloon rides and the fireworks, a key part of their strategy was to stage a series of top class football matches at the exhibition’s recreation ground at Meggetland, in the west of the city. Over a dozen attractive fixtures featured all of Edinburgh's clubs as well as guests from the west of Scotland and from England.

This built on the success of the Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art, which was staged on the Meadows in 1886 and concluded with a short series of football matches.
   In 1890, football was a much stronger element of the Exhibition and the large crowds of visitors could be whisked to the ground by electric railway from Haymarket Station, or by launch on the Union Canal. The series kicked off in August with two local derbies, Hearts v Hibs and Leith Athletic v St Bernard's, before branching out to include teams from far and wide.
   It was still the amateur era in Scotland so the organisers made sure the players were rewarded with something tangible. The winners of the first three matches – Hearts, Leith Athletic and Dumbarton – were presented with silver cups, the first of which is in the Hearts Museum at Tynecastle; also, the players in every game were awarded medals, a couple of which have come up at auction in recent years.

Another collectable souvenir of the matches was the daily events programme which contained full line-ups of all the big games including Hearts v Nottingham Forest and Rangers v Sunderland Albion, not to mention those featuring Dumbarton, Queen's Park and Third Lanark.
   A bound volume of the programmes is held in Special Collections at the National Library of Scotland, and for several of the clubs these issues represent their oldest known match programmes. If any individual programmes ever turned up at auction they would surely fetch a high price.
   Hearts, who won all three of their matches, even played a home Scottish Cup tie at Meggetland rather than Tynecastle and their 3-0 victory over Methlan Park (from Dumbarton) in October is in the programme collection.

For Hibs the Exhibition was less memorable as the club was then struggling for existence due to the recent exodus of players to Celtic and the impending loss of their ground. Their 2-0 defeat to Hearts was followed by a humiliating 9-0 reverse at the hands of Queen’s Park, and few were surprised when Hibs effectively went out of business before the year was out (they re-formed in 1893).
   Among other interesting ties, the organisers scheduled matches to coincide with local holidays elsewhere in Scotland, which explains why Rangers came to Edinburgh on a Thursday afternoon, and the same applies to visiting teams from Kilmarnock, Moffat, Dundee and Kirkcaldy. Some games were distinctively parochial, such as those featuring local butchers and grocers, while the Exhibition staff pitched in to provide the opposition for three games, including one where Kirkcaldy FC failed to turn up against Raith Rovers.
   Although football was the main attraction, the Exhibition also hosted a rugby match in September between Hawick and Stewart's College, while the pioneering Lady Cricketers played a three day match in August.

Edinburgh Exhibition matches 1890
 
6 August: Heart of Midlothian 2 Hibernian 0
13 August: Leith Athletic 3 St Bernard’s 1
20 August: Dumbarton 3 Leith Athletic 1
27 August: Queen’s Park 9 Hibernian 0
30 August: Third Lanark 2 Our Boys 1
10 September: Butchers 1 Grocers 3
15 September: Heart of Midlothian 1 Nottingham Forest 0
17 September: Kilmarnock 8 Wishaw Thistle 1
24 September: Exhibition Attendants v Leith Butchers
2 October: Rangers 2 Sunderland Albion 0
6 October: Exhibition Attendants 0 Raith Rovers 7
9 October: Moffat 6 Kirkintilloch Athletic 4
13 October: Lochee 4 Edinburgh Postal 1
17 October: Dumfries Wanderers 8 Exhibition Attendants 0
18 October: Heart of Midlothian 3 Methlan Park 0 (Scottish Cup tie)
29 October: Cameron Highlanders 0 Lancashire Fusiliers 1 (Army Cup tie)

The pages above show the team pages from the daily events programmes at the 1890 Edinburgh Exhibition. They are all held at the National Library of Scotland. Note that the numbering of matches is not correct!

Below, some programme covers from other exhibitions in Edinburgh and Glasgow, all of which featured football.

One of Musselburgh's earliest football trophies, the Simpson Shield, has come home after turning up at auction recently.
   I was lucky enough to be the winning bidder and have sold it on to Musselburgh Athletic president Kevin Liston, who has put it on permanent display in the clubhouse at Olivebank.
   The Simpson Shield was presented in 1891 by local publican William Simpson for Midlothian junior teams and it soon became a prestigious annual prize. Simpson ran the Forester's Arms in Fisherrow which is no longer there but stood on the corner of Bridge Street and North High Street.

The first winner of the Shield was Niddrie Blue Bell but local sides soon got in on the act with Musselburgh Windsor in 1894 and Musselburgh Fern in 1897. Other famous teams had their names inscribed on it including Arniston Rangers, Bonnyrigg Rose and Newtongrange Star before it returned home with Musselburgh Athletic – in a previous incarnation – winning it three times in 1912, 1914 and 1915.

There is a wonderful team photo after the 1912 victory, with the legendary Hearts captain and Scotland internationalist Bobby Walker sitting in the centre as honorary club president, with three trophies in front: the Dalmeny Cup, the East Lothian Cup and the Simpson Shield.
   However, the last of Musselburgh Athletic's wins, a 2-1 win over Loanhead Mayflower at Tynecastle on 22 May 1915, was played in a sombre mood as news was just coming in of the Quintinshill Rail Disaster that morning. It was the worst rail disaster in British history, leaving 226 dead, mainly from the 7th Battalion of the Royal Scots, most of whom came from Leith, Portobello and Musselburgh.

After Simpson died in 1922 the shield competition was wound up and the East of Scotland Junior FA donated the trophy to the local juvenile association, who continued to use it until at least the late 1950s. Records are sketchy but local winners included Musselburgh Imperial in 1932 and Inveresk Athletic in 1945.
   William Simpson left a local legacy that extended beyond football. He served Musselburgh town council for 33 years, many of them as Treasurer, and for a while he was Provost. He spent his life in the pub trade and gave up the Forester's Arms in 1895 when he married Catherine Montgomery, the owner of the Volunteer Arms, a wonderful historic pub now known as Stagg's and which was recently voted as CAMRA Scottish Pub of the Year.

Next time you hear someone singing Football's Coming Home, ask them where they think 'home' is. They might answer London, Sheffield or Cambridge; maybe even Glasgow.
   They would be wrong, as there is no single 'home of football' and many places can stake a claim. But one thing is certain: the world's first known club dedicated to football was founded over 200 years ago in Edinburgh. 
   Modern football can trace its roots to a winter's afternoon in 1824 when John Hope, a young law student, clubbed together with some friends to buy a leather ball and a bladder. They hired a grassy field in the suburbs, set up goalposts and started playing the game they loved.
   They called their new club, appropriately enough, The Foot-Ball Club and over the next seventeen years hundreds of young men joined in, paying a subscription to kick a ball about and enjoy vigorous exercise once or twice a week. It was a vibrant organisation whose influence spanned far and wide.
   Those football pioneers give Scotland's capital city every right to be celebrated as a 'home of football'. The sport thrived in Edinburgh decades before the Football Association was founded, long before the first attempts to codify the rules of association football, but although the Foot-Ball Club has tangible links to the modern game we know today, it made few waves at the time. Despite its popularity, the club kept such a low profile that there is barely a single mention of its activities in the newspapers of the day.
   It might even have been lost to history but thankfully John Hope was an obsessive hoarder who filed away every scrap of paper during his long life, an accumulation which amounted by the time of his death to over 200 boxes. They were carefully preserved by a succession of conscientious Edinburgh lawyers, and tucked away in those boxes were the football membership lists, the club accounts, correspondence with his fellow players and even a handwritten set of rules.
   The Foot-Ball Club records now rest in the National Records of Scotland, where they were rediscovered by Dr Neil Tranter of Stirling University in the 1990s. He waded through mountains of uncatalogued papers, some of which had not been touched for a century, and published his findings in an academic paper which opened to door to many other researchers, including myself.
   Today, much of John Hope's archive, including everything related to the Foot-Ball Club, has been digitised. It represents a treasure trove of immense historical significance, one which few other sporting organisations can emulate; for example, there is no equivalent archive for Hibs, Hearts, Rangers or Celtic.
   The papers are a vital part of Scotland's national heritage, as sporting history is not just about who scored which goal and when, it takes us into all sorts of unexpected places: Hope's club represents a wider picture of affluent society in the city of Edinburgh, the people who lived there, and their influence on the world about them.

The founder
 
John Hope, the instigator of the club, was an influential character in 19th century Edinburgh in many fields: a social reformer, a philanthropist, a town councillor, a fighter of causes and of course a sportsman.

Born in 1807 in Dalry House – which still stands, not far from Haymarket – Hope went to school and university in the city and became a lawyer like his father, following in his footsteps as a Writer to the Signet. He lived almost his entire life in the New Town, he was extremely wealthy, never married, and devoted his fortune and his boundless energy to causes he believed in.
   Some of his beliefs will be judged by today's standards as extreme, bigoted or blinkered. His views on religion, for example, included ferocious and sustained attacks on Popery, and he became so obsessed with abstinence from alcohol that he insisted his staff sign the pledge, and even fell out with churches over their use of fermented wine, rather than the unfermented variety, for communion.
   But he was also a passionate social reformer who spoke up for the poor and the downtrodden, for example leading a campaign to introduce the Saturday half-holiday for workmen in Edinburgh, organising regular excursions to the countryside for thousands of slum kids, and providing education to help them escape those slums.
   When he died in 1893, he was one of the city's richest men, having accumulated a fortune which would be worth about £50 million in today's money. He left most of his wealth to the Hope Trust, a religious charity, leaving his extended family distraught at getting nothing. They mounted a legal challenge which claimed he suffered from insane delusions when he wrote the will but after six years of wrangling, the family lost and the Hope Trust continues his work in temperance and religion to this day.
   Hope believed firmly in the benefits of sport and exercise, and could loosely be described as an advocate of Muscular Christianity, although of a particular Scottish variety.
   Most of all, though, he stands out today because he loved and promoted football. Hope and his friends had all played the game at the High School of Edinburgh, where generations of boys were actively encouraged to participate in sport and exercise. There are numerous references of football being a popular game in the school yards, back to Walter Scott's time.
   In the confined spaces of the High School Yards – an environment which has hardly changed in two hundred years since – there was a hard surface bounded by stone walls, where football evolved on a similar pattern to that enjoyed by boys at Charterhouse and Westminster in London. Right from the start of football history, players from these urban schools tended to favour the non-carrying game as full body tackling was likely to cause injury and damage to clothing, hence they became early advocates of association-type football.
 
Why form a football club?
 
At the dawn of the 19th century, football was generally considered a game for boys, not for responsible adults. John Hope and his friends broke that convention when they decided to carry on playing after leaving school, whether going up to University or into the world of work, and soon found that plenty of others were of the same mind.
   As well as a love of football, other key factors were the established sporting culture in Edinburgh and the fondness for middle and upper class men in the city subscribing to clubs where they not only played sport, they socialised together.
   There are a number of sporting world firsts for Edinburgh: in this city we had the first archery club (Royal Company of Archers, 1676), the first golf club (Burgess Golfing Society, 1735), the first gymnastic club (1786) and then, thanks to John Hope, the first football club in 1824.
   And where there are clubs, there are rules and competitions, cups and trophies. So again the city boasts several world firsts: in golf the Company of Gentlemen Golfers laid down rules which governed the Edinburgh Silver Club, both in 1744; in bowls the Edinburgh Society of Bowlers rules in 1769 led to the Edinburgh Silver Jack; in curling the rules of the Duddingston Curling Club were written in 1811; and – as we shall see – the earliest known rules of football.
   The template of organised sports clubs in Edinburgh was therefore well established by the 1820s, a decade which saw a national movement towards athletic and more vigorous sports. In this context, the formation of the Foot-Ball Club makes sense.
 
How did they play?
 
The Foot-Ball Club papers are a treasure trove of names, accounts, receipts and letters. Perhaps most important of all, there is a set of fledgling rules, written by John Hope in 1833. This represents the earliest known attempt at football codification, although the players must have had some kind of unwritten understanding before then. 

​His six brief instructions to players indicate a kicking game between opposing sides, with a defined playing surface and using goals as a method of scoring.
 
The first two rules indicate a concern for safety and a desire to avoid injury:

Single soled shoes, no iron
No tripping   

Rules three and four introduce the method of scoring, and a defined playing area:

Ball to pass imaginary line
A free kick if ball out of bounds  

Rule five indicates a controlled amount of physical contact:

Pushing is allowed. Holding not illegal  

Rule six appears to mean that the only time the ball could be handled was when it was out of play:

Allow the ball to be lifted between fields  

While there are no records of inter-club matches – these were guidelines for club members playing amongst themselves, wearing caps to distinguish the sides – there is a strong indication that John Hope and his friends played a precursor to what became association football. It certainly bore little relation to rugby, which permitted handling, carrying and running with the ball.
   A flavour of what it was like to play for the club can be found in the correspondence which is extensive, albeit largely limited to letters which Hope received, rather than those he sent. For example, in 1825 Henry Logan, a founding member who had gone to London, wrote to say how much he missed the action: 'How I envy you the pleasure you must have had the day there were 39 members out, such kicking of shins and such tumbling.'
   The style of play was also determined by the playing equipment, which can be discovered through the accounts. One receipt from James Christie and Son of George Street, shows that if you wanted a football in 1831 you had to have a leather case made specially and pay handsomely: the costs start at two shillings and sixpence.

The cases contained inflated pig bladders, which burst regularly so the club required a regular supply of fresh ones. This aspect was outlined in more detail in the accounts for 1834, in which the costs of the paraphernalia for playing football were itemised: three bladders at threepence each, six laces at a penny each, a tin pipe and wire. It went on to detail the purchase of oil, a cloth brush, a canvas bag, yet more bladders, and somewhat incongruously a bottle of whisky – which was used to clean out the bladders.
   The players also needed a regular venue so there is payment of ground rental, called 'grass rent' as the club played on a field which might otherwise have been used for grazing cattle. They moved several times during the life of the club, hiring fields which are now the suburbs of Dalry and Bruntsfield.
   And there was also payment to an attendant, to allow the players to focus on enjoying themselves. Right from the very start of the club, a boy was paid a shilling a week to blow up and repair the footballs, put up the goalposts and look after the equipment.
 
Who played football?
 
In 1824 John Hope was seventeen years old and had just matriculated as a student at Edinburgh University but while he was typical of the founders, the membership books record around 300 men over the next decade. They include students, schoolboys, soldiers and professional classes, and by researching their names, it has been possible to shed light on who these trailblazers were: where they lived and worked, where they were educated, and what their position was in society.
   Some men had a fleeting membership, some played for years, and three of them were members throughout the club's existence. The club had a buoyant first decade with upwards of sixty members each year before falling away to less than half that number.
   The early membership lists give only a name, then in the 1830s they also included an address which means it has been possible to identify who most of the members were, where they came from, and what they did with their lives. Not surprisingly, they were mostly young men who had been at school within Edinburgh. There are strong links to the High School, where most of Edinburgh male society in the early 19th century was educated, including John Hope and his father.
   But another school which features largely is the Edinburgh Academy, which opened in 1824 in direct competition to the High School, and over one third of those we have identified went there. The Academy subsequently played a crucial role in introducing rugby football to Scotland in the 1850s, yet it is clear that Academy boys played football for many years before then, and it was of the kicking rather than the carrying variety.
   A sizable proportion of members were schooled further afield before making their way to Edinburgh. Within Scotland, they came from the Scottish Borders to the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland, and many in between.
   There was also a scattering of English members. At that time Oxford and Cambridge universities only accepted Church of England conformists, so non-conformists and Roman Catholics were obliged to seek their higher education in Scotland or abroad, and Edinburgh University was a popular choice.

When these young men came to Edinburgh to study or to work, the fact that they chose to join the Foot-Ball Club infers that they had already played a form of football at home or school.
   For example, George Witham, an English member of the club in its first two years while a medical student, was a Roman Catholic who had been educated at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit school in Lancashire, which had a tradition of playing a form of football known as The Grand Match, with a pancake as a prize for the winners.
   The addresses in the membership rolls include virtually every major street in Edinburgh's New Town and less than ten per cent were in the suburbs. Apart from three in the vicinity of the University, none were in the historic Old Town, indicating that football was not yet a working class game.
   As for careers, while most members were students when they joined, almost all went on to be professional men such as lawyers, doctors, army officers, commerce and the church. There is no evidence of lower middle class occupations such as shopkeepers and clerks.
   Given Hope's family and professional connections, it is little surprise that the majority of the members whose careers have been identified became lawyers, and of those, most became Writers to the Signet. Then as now, Edinburgh was a city of lawyers, and many lawyers had the time, the affluence and the social status to join clubs and indulge in recreations.
   Among strong connections to medicine are a number of prominent surgeons and doctors such as Alexander Wood, who invented the hypodermic syringe, while six club members (or their brothers) became Presidents of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons or Physicians.
   There are numerous other stories about the club members as they made their way in life. Just as one quick example, several posed as subjects for the pioneering photographers, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in the 1840s. There are pictures of John Hope himself, James Rannie Swinton, Robert Dundas Cay and James Moncreiff, probably the first ever photographs of football players.
 
What was the club's legacy?
 
The Foot-Ball Club can be shown to have had a significant influence on the development of the game of football, with close links between its members and the next generation of footballers later in the century, men who played in the early codified games of rugby and association football.
   For example, there are two notable links to the captains of the first Scotland international teams, association and rugby, who were both sons of Foot-Ball Club members. James Kirkpatrick, captain of Scotland in the first unofficial association football international of 1870 and an FA Cup winner with Wanderers in 1878, was a son of Charles Sharpe Kirkpatrick, a member in 1831-32. Francis Moncreiff, Scotland's captain in the first international rugby match against England in 1871, was a son of James Moncreiff (a future Lord Advocate) who was a member in 1832-33.
   If you believe that sons learn from their fathers, that is a remarkable legacy, and the principle was repeated, with several other sons of members playing football in the 1860s and 1870s at school and at university.
   Despite this, John Hope is rarely given much credit for his contribution to the early development of football. Historians who research the origins of association game usually focus on the founding of the FA in 1863, on the public schools, on Sheffield and so on. For example, Sheffield FC, founded in 1857, claim to be 'the world’s first football club' and have actually incorporated the slogan into their crest. It simply isn't true. They might be the oldest surviving club, but the world's first? Not at all. That honour belongs to Edinburgh, and more specifically to John Hope.
   Unfortunately, Hope's organisational skills would prove to be a double-edged sword. Having run the club single-handedly, when he got too old to enjoy playing there was no-one suitable to take his place. The final item in the club's archive is a letter dated February 1841 from John G Campbell of 7 Great King Street, asking if three or four of his friends could join. Campbell knew the club well, having been a member ten years previously, but he was too late: around that time the Foot-Ball Club was wound up.
   There is currently little evidence of organised adult football being played in the city for the next few years but the 1850s witnessed another burst of football activity.
   In 1851 the Edinburgh University Football Club challenged the 93rd Highlanders, garrisoned in Edinburgh Castle, to a match. The losers agreed to present the winners with a silver medal, which is preserved in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders museum at Stirling Castle and is the world's oldest football prize. It depicts clearly a kicking, association-type, form of football, and that is backed up by newspaper reports which describe positional play, teamwork and organisation.
   As the 1850s progressed, John Hope continued to be a catalyst for football in the city. In 1854 he created a playing field at Stockbridge Park, where he encouraged boys to play football, writing 'the game is strongly recommended as giving most exercise and fun in a short time'.

He even printed rules of play which bear strong similarities not just to his 1833 rules, but also to the future codes for association football. For example: goals scored between the posts, no handling of the ball, teams wearing distinctive colours, and an insistence on sporting behaviour with no hacking (the great divide between rugby and what became association football).
   Unfortunately he could not renew his lease of Stockbridge Park, and this inadvertently opened the door to the handling game because in the same year, rugby football was introduced at the Edinburgh Academy. Rugby was soon taken up by the other principal schools in the city where it became the dominant code.
   However, the non-handling game continued to prosper among the working classes, and the laying out of the Meadows as a recreational space provided an accessible and free resource for young men to play football. There is plenty of evidence that the game was popular there throughout the 1860s.
   When the rules of association football finally came to Edinburgh, thanks to the missionary efforts of Queen's Park FC, it was John Hope who saw the potential and he encouraged the soldiers in his volunteer regiment, the Third Edinburgh Rifle Volunteers, to form one of the city's first clubs in 1874. He actually kicked off their first match, and when they won their first trophy in 1876, the Edinburgh Shield, it was presented not to the club captain, but to him.
   The Third ERV later evolved into St Bernard's FC, who won the Scottish Cup in 1895, and although John Hope wasn't around to see that triumph, having died two years earlier, he is part of a thread which runs all the way from the formation of the Foot-Ball Club in 1824 to victory in the national cup competition. It is a formidable legacy.
   John Hope and his footballers became not only significant figures in the ranks of 19th century Edinburgh society, they also made a major contribution to the game's progress. Scotland's capital really can make a claim to be a true home of football.
​

To read the full story, buy the book: 1824, The World's First Football Club is on sale from Amazon price £10, post free in the UK.

One of the pioneers of Hibernian Football Club, which was founded exactly 150 years ago today, has literally left his mark on the city's streets. But you have to look carefully to find him. 
   Pat Cavanagh was at the club's founding meeting on 6 August 1875 in St Mary's Street Hall and soon became an integral part of the team formed from Edinburgh's Irish Catholic community. A natural leader, he was elected captain in 1879 and inspired Hibs to their earliest triumphs, winning three consecutive Edinburgh FA Cups, followed by the Edinburgh FA Shield twice and the Rosebery Cup.

For that alone he deserves respect as a Hibs legend, but after he hung up his boots in 1884 he went into the construction business. A plasterer to trade, his company specialised in laying floors and pavements, and became a leading contractor for Edinburgh Council when they undertook street improvements towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Warriston Close was reopened in 1902 after being formed in granolithic concrete by Cavanagh, and his work was praised by the Council's Streets and Building Committee who said it had been 'very satisfactorily carried out'. Testament to that is the condition of the steps which remain sound after over 120 years in use. Cavanagh's plate is one flight up, between the central handrails. ​

There is another example of his work just south of the Meadows in Hatton Place, a quiet suburban street, at its junction with Tantallon Place. His brass sign is set proudly in the concrete, which Cavanagh's men laid in the 1890s and is still in good condition.
​   However, another sign a couple of streets away in Palmerston Road has been cut in half, probably due to the laying of a modern interloper such as an internet cable. Tellingly, however, the Cavanagh half is in better condition than its modern cement replacement.
   How much longer will these evocative remnants of Edinburgh’s Victorian past survive? It may only be a matter of time before they are resurfaced and signs of Pat Cavanagh's endeavours are obliterated for ever, although there is a glimmer of hope that their significance to the city's heritage will be recognised.
   Edinburgh Council's Street Design Guidance acknowledges the historic importance of granolithic concrete, and states 'There should be a presumption in favour of retaining and repairing areas of historic paving'.
   Keep an eye open for any more brass plates celebrating Pat Cavanagh. His company was responsible for laying pavements all around Edinburgh so there must be more of them. Where are they? Let me know what you find.

Today I gave the second of my talks on early sport in Scotland's capital, with The Birth of Rugby in Edinburgh.
   It covers the origins of the handling game, from medieval beginnings through the haphazard games of the early 19th century, to the rapid developments that kicked off in the 1850s.
   Rugby football arrived in Edinburgh in 1854 almost by accident, and by the end of the decade it had been adopted by the major schools because of the influence of Tom Brown's Schooldays and the cult of Muscular Christianity. 
   The event at the City Art Centre was part of the Edinburgh 900 celebration, and attracted a large audience.
   For anyone unable to attend, I have now put the full illustrated talk into a single pdf document, which can be opened by clicking on this link.
   You can also read my first talk, on The Birth of Football in Edinburgh at this link.​

Today I gave a talk on The Birth of Football in Edinburgh, describing the early development of the sport in Scotland's capital up to the formation of the city's first association football clubs in the 1870s.
   It is a fascinating story which ranges from medieval times to developments in the Victorian era, covering not just those pioneers who played football in the 19th century but the social changes that brought the game to a wider audience. The 1850s were crucial, as the Meadows were opened up to the public for sport, while the Saturday half-holiday gave working men the time to play.
   The event at Edinburgh's City Art Centre, part of the Edinburgh 900 celebration, attracted a large audience - all tickets were allocated several months ago.
   For anyone unable to attend, I have now put the full illustrated talk into a single pdf document, which can be opened by clicking on this link. 
   I will be giving another talk next week, on the birth of rugby in Edinburgh, and will also put it online afterwards.

This month marks the bicentenary of the world's first football club, founded in Edinburgh in December 1824.
   To celebrate Scotland's role in helping to create the modern game of football, I gave talks in Edinburgh and Glasgow to reveal how members of The Foot-Ball Club played the game and wrote the first known rules of the game (pictured above).
   While football has been played for centuries, the Foot-Ball Club was the first known organisation devoted to the sport. Precisely two hundred years ago, on a winter's day in 1824, the founders bought a football – a leather casing with an inflated pig's bladder inside – and set up goalposts in a field just outside the city boundaries.
   They met once or twice a week for almost two decades, and the city's young men flocked to the Foot-Ball Club to play the game they loved. Some of them went on to influence the early development of our most popular sport, long before it split into the different codes like rugby and association football.
   The club's founder, John Hope, managed the Foot-Ball Club throughout its existence until it was wound up in 1841. Because he was a pedantic hoarder, the club records survived within his unique and extensive archive, now held at the National Records of Scotland where the first of the talks took place. The second talk was at the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow.
​   Please join me in celebrating the birthday of The Foot-Ball Club!


To read the text of the talk, click here for a pdf of my presentation.

To view my talk in its entirety, click here for the National Records of Scotland's YouTube channel.

And to buy the book '1824: The World's First Foot-Ball Club' by John Hutchinson and Andy Mitchell, click here.

When Argentina lifted the World Cup in 2022 and retained the Copa America in 2024, the roots of their success were traced back to a Scottish pioneer, Alexander Watson Hutton.
   He overcame tragedy and challenges in his early life to be celebrated as the 'father of Argentine football' thanks to his work in establishing the game as a national obsession. Having set up a football league in 1893, then created a dominant football club, Hutton's footballing story is fairly well known (more so in Argentina than his native land, it has to be said) but his life in Scotland remains something of an enigma.
   That prompted me to research the formative years of a boy orphaned before he was five years old, his entire family wiped out by disease, who found his vocation in education and sport.
   Hutton's life events detailed below shed light on his family, childhood, school, university and early teaching career.

Family origins

Alexander Watson Hutton was the second son of Robert Hutton, a grocer, and Helen (or Ellen) Watson. His parents were originally from the Dunfermline area in Fife but Robert moved to Glasgow in the 1840s to work as a grocer at the heart of the bustling Gorbals community of Laurieston, just south of the River Clyde in Glasgow. In time he opened his own shops, first in Bedford Street, then Norfolk Street and Nicholson Street.
   Meanwhile Helen had been living with her family in Edinburgh, but after she married Robert on 12 November 1850 they set up home in the Gorbals in a tenement flat at 29 Eglinton Street. At first, everything went well: their first son, also Robert, was born in August 1851, while the grocery business prospered. Robert Hutton was able to employ shop staff and he opened a new outlet at 55 Eglinton Street, just along from the family home.

Their second son Alexander was born on 10 June 1853 at number 29, although it is no longer standing as few original buildings in that area have survived. His birthplace was demolished in the 1970s as part of the great Gorbals slum clearance which transformed (some would say destroyed) the area; it is approximately where Bridge Street Underground station now stands.
   He was baptised the following month at Eglinton Street United Secession Church, which has also gone: it was converted to a cinema in 1921 and then destroyed by fire in 1932; it is now the site of the O2 Academy.
 
Multiple tragedies
​
Fate dealt the first cruel blow to the family as Robert Hutton fell seriously ill with tuberculosis and had to give up his shops. In January 1855 he moved with his wife and sons to live near Helen's family in Edinburgh, but it was a lost cause and he died there on 25 February. In an extraordinary twist of fate, the following day Helen gave birth to their third son, George.
   Alexander, then just 20 months old, would never return to Glasgow as his father's death marked the start of a series of tragedies to hit the family. Younger brother George died aged 2 in May 1857, then his mother succumbed in January 1858, both from tuberculosis. They were buried together with Robert at Warriston Cemetery, although there is no headstone.
   This left Alexander and his brother Robert as orphans, and they were taken under the wing of their grandmother (Helen's mother), Helen Bowman Watson who lived in Logie Green in Edinburgh. Sadly, the arrangement did not last long as she too died of tuberculosis early in 1862.

On his ninth birthday in 1862, Alexander followed Robert into Daniel Stewart's Hospital, which was then a charitable boarding school for about 60 destitute boys. When he was admitted school records show that he 'could read words of two syllables easily' while his 'cautioner' was his uncle, George Hutton of Cupar.
   The Hutton brothers did well at the school, with Robert being a medallist in 1866, and Alexander was never to forget its positive influence; in the 1920s he endowed the Robert Hutton Prize for Modern Languages in memory of his brother, and also created a similar prize in his own name at George Watson's College.
   Alexander left Daniel Stewart's in 1867 when he turned 14, with a solid grounding that would enable him to embark on adult life. He is recorded in the 1871 census as an apprentice grocer - the same trade as his father - but then switched his focus to education. That may have been prompted by the death of his brother Robert, who had been living with his uncle George in Cupar where he worked as a clerk but succumbed to tuberculosis and died in October 1871. Alexander was now the only survivor of the entire family.

Alexander appears to have taken a teaching diploma as by 1874 he was advertising his services as a teacher of shorthand and in December was appointed to a full-time post at George Watson's College Junior School. Perhaps it helped his application that the headmaster of Watson's was George Ogilvie, who had been head teacher of Daniel Stewart's Hospital during his time there. Regardless, he had found his vocation and he would flourish in the role.
 
A new family

Equally importantly, he also found a new family in Edinburgh.
   By 1871 he was lodging in Brown Square, off Chambers Street, with Mrs Alexandrina Waters and her children Elizabeth, Catherine and William. Alexander became so close to the Waters family that when they moved in 1874 to 4 St Patrick Square, he joined them there and remained in the household until he emigrated. 
   After he went to Argentina the Waters family followed on and their lives remained intertwined in work, football and marriage: the teaching staff at the Buenos Aires English High School included Elizabeth and William, Mrs Waters was later on the staff as a house superintendent, and Catherine became his second wife.
 
University degree
 
Despite holding down a teaching job at George Watson's, Alexander was determined to further his own education and in 1877 he embarked on a four year Arts degree at Edinburgh University. It must have been a challenge to combine work with study, but he was helped by winning the Dundas Bursary which provided about £20 a year to fund his course.
   His progress at the university can be followed by the class results published in The Scotsman: in April 1878 he passed his exams in Mathematics, a year later in Mental Philosophy, then in 1881 he graduated with an MA in Philosophy, gaining Second Class Honours.

Eager to progress as a teacher now that he was better qualified, the opportunity came in November 1881 when a small advert appeared in The Scotsman: 'Headmaster wanted for the Scotch School in Buenos Ayres. Guaranteed salary £450 per annum.' He made an application to Professor SS Laurie of Edinburgh University and Alexander soon heard he had been appointed to the role that would change his life.
    Before he left, however, he needed a recruit. In December he placed his own advert for a female teacher to join the Scotch School as Infant, Junior and Sewing Mistress. The job went to Margaret Budge, also a teacher at George Watson's, and as he went on to marry her, the suspicion is that they were already close and he used the opportunity to ensure she could travel out with him.
   The last mention of Alexander in the local press came in mid-January when he advertised for sale a 50 inch Hillman & Herbert 'Premier' bicycle, which conjures up images of this pioneer riding round the streets of Edinburgh on his penny-farthing.
   Leaving his life in Scotland behind, he set sail for Argentina, arriving in Buenos Aires on 25 February 1882 to start work.
 
Football in Scotland
 
Despite uncovering so much detail of his early life, there is one thing missing: football. A detailed search of the Scottish press has so far failed to turn up any mention of him taking part in a football match, or indeed any kind of sport. Later interviews he gave in Argentina simply said that he played football as a young man in Scotland without giving any specifics, so he may have been enthusiastic but he was clearly not a top level player.
   In some respects it is curious that he was so passionate about football after an Edinburgh upbringing (he had no real connection to Glasgow apart from his birth). During his schooldays at Daniel Stewart’s there was no organised recreation for the boys, while George Watson's did have a sporting ethos but the emphasis was on rugby in the winter and athletics and cricket in summer. As he taught at the junior school, presumably he supervised recreation for the boys in his charge, but he had no recorded involvement in school sporting activities or team games.

​Life in Argentina
 
After two years at the Scotch School he left to found the English High School in 1884 where he had the opportunity to encourage sport for the pupils. He built an open air swimming pool and is said to have imported the first leather footballs to the country.
   In a lengthy interview he gave to El Grafico in 1933 to mark his 80th birthday, 'Alejandro' reminisced about the early days, and told how the balls were impounded by customs officials who demanded to know what they were for.
   That may have coincided with the arrival of William Waters to work at the school, which some accounts date to the summer of 1886 although he was already a member of staff the previous year. Born in 1865, William (known as Guillermo) certainly made an impact on the football field as he went on to captain St Andrews, winners of the country's first league competition, before his early demise in 1906.
    Also on the school staff was Margaret Budge, who Alexander married on 27 March 1885 at St Andrew's Church in Buenos Aires. They had three children: Arnold Pencliffe Watson Hutton 1886-1951 (who became a prominent footballer and an Argentina international), Edith Elena Watson Hutton 1888-1971 (married name Stocks), and Mabel Lilian Watson Hutton 1890-1979 (married name Mitchell).
   Margaret died in August 1893 of pancreatic cancer and Alexander remarried Catherine (or Kate) Waters on 19 June 1902, with no further children.
   By the time of his retirement from teaching in 1910, the English High School was said to be the largest, the best ventilated and the healthiest private school in Buenos Aires.
   While he remained in Buenos Aires, he retained close links to Scotland and returned several times for visits. He died on 9 March 1936, age 82, and was buried in British Cemetery at Chacarita, where his grave remains a place of pilgrimage for football fans.

Football legacy
 
Hutton's legacy as the 'father of Argentine football' relates to his prominent role in establishing the sport on a sound footing. In February 1893 he was appointed President of the relaunched Argentine Association Football League (an earlier attempt in 1891 had foundered with the death of the President, Frank Woolley), which later became the Argentine Football Association. Then in 1898 he backed the foundation of the English High School football team (later Alumni) which won the First Division ten times by 1910 before it was disbanded.
   The football fame of Alexander Watson Hutton belongs to his adopted country, and his impact can be explored in more detail through the links posted below. But his story really started back home in Scotland, and I hope this research contributes to a better understanding of the challenges he overcame. 

Further links and research
 
A film of his life, Escuela de Campeones, was made in 1950 (see poster below) and is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmU3nD3y4Pc
 
A new book Alumni - El Mito [The Mythical Alumni] tells the story of Hutton's football club. Superbly illustrated, it is published in Argentina by Martin Emanuel de Vita who has made it available as a free download: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/3c5bfe5b66.html
 
Hutton first came to national notice in Scotland thanks to Dan Brennan's article in The Scotsman in 2008: https://www.scotsman.com/sport/argentine-football-returns-to-roots-of-its-scottish-founder-2474037
 
Scots Football Worldwide has a detailed account of Hutton and the other Scots who brought football to Argentina: https://www.scotsfootballworldwide.scot/argentina
 
In 2023 adidas launched the Argentum 1893 as the official ball in Argentina, in celebration of Hutton's legacy (pictured above). You can watch a short promo video here: https://x.com/GustavoYarroch/status/1691446667709390849
 
A memorial plaque, donated by the Argentina Football Association, is on display in the Scottish Football Museum: www.scottishfa.co.uk/news/the-scottish-trailblazer-who-paved-the-way-for-maradona-and-messi/
 
Alexander Watson Hutton is also commemorated on the Scottish Diaspora Tapestry: https://www.scottishdiasporatapestry.org/au03-alexander-watson-hutton/

Many places claim to be the true home of football, not least Sheffield, London and Glasgow. But had events taken a different slant, the title would undoubtedly belong to the capital of Scotland.
   Recently I gave a talk to the FootyCon football history conference in Manchester, in which I explained how, in the first half of the 19th century, Edinburgh was a leading exponent for the type of game that ultimately became association football. But the direction of travel changed dramatically in the summer of 1854, when two sports grounds opened in the same week, each hosting a different code of football. In brief, rugby won and the landscape of sport in the city changed.
   To read my PowerPoint talk detailing what happened and why, click here to open an illustrated pdf and read about a classic case of 'what if'.

To read more about the story of football in Edinburgh, and John Hope's involvement, read 1824: the World's First Foot-Ball Club. 

St Andrew Boat Club, founded in 1846 in Edinburgh, is Scotland's oldest open boat club and recently celebrated its 175th anniversary.
   The club was only two years old when seven of its members members appeared in these photos, which were preserved within the albums of the Edinburgh Calotype Club. Those books are now held by the National Library of Scotland, and the albums were fully digitised for the Pencils of Light exhibition.
   Photography was in its infancy: the calotype process was invented by Henry Fox Talbot in 1841, and taken up in Edinburgh by Hill & Adamson a couple of years later. They took the first known sports photos of John Laing, a tennis or rackets player, who I have already written about.
   It was a step forward from having a single subject who was standing motionless for a long exposure, to taking a photograph of a group, and the challenge was taken up by Hugh Lyon Tennent. He was a member of both the Calotype Club and the Rowing Club, and is credited with taking the photos, perhaps with the assistance of his brother Robert. The venue is almost certainly the club house at Fountainbridge, on the Union Canal.
   Identifying the seven men was a challenge, as the caption for the first photo simply named the rowers as 'T Dickson, Hastie, Hugh Lyon Tennent, Rd Campbell, Seton, JS Tytler, Arbuthnot'. The second photo has the same subjects but Tennent has moved to the right of the group.
   However, the recent publication of a history of St Andrew Boat Club has helped, not only to confirm all their identities, but also to pinpoint the date.

The club history published a list of members, starting with the 18 founders in April 1846, and detailing all who signed up in succeeding years. The Ordinary Members are those who lived in Edinburgh, while Extraordinary Members are mainly those who were in the military and therefore only in the city for a short time.
   Dickson, Campbell, Tennent and Seton were all founding ordinary members in 1846, while Tytler joined the following year. The other two were only in Edinburgh for a short time and joined as extraordinary members: Hastie in 1848, and Arbuthnot for 1847-48. The date of the photo can therefore be pinpointed to the latter year.
   The seven men in the photo can now be identified with some degree of certainty:
 
Thomas Goldie Dickson (1819-1905), an accountant who lived at 3 Royal Circus. Educated at Edinburgh Academy, he was also a member of John Hope's Foot-Ball Club in 1836. He was later notorious for his involvement in the Ardnamurchan clearances.
 
Charles Nairn Hastie (1809-1868), a solicitor from East Grinstead, Sussex, he was only in Edinburgh briefly and stayed at 136 Princes Street. In May 1848 he joined the Boat Club and was elected a Member of the Highland Agricultural Society.
 
Hugh Lyon Tennent (1817-1874), an advocate of 9 Lynedoch Place. Educated at Edinburgh Academy 1826-32. Related to the Tennents of brewing fame.
 
Ord Graham Campbell (1816-1890), a lawyer and Writer to the Signet, of 102 George Street. He was also a prominent golfer, member of the Royal & Ancient, and the Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers.
 
George Seton (1822-1908), an advocate of 13 Coates Crescent. Educated at Royal High School, then Edinburgh and Oxford Universities, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an expert genealogist and served in the Royal Company of Archers.
 
James Stuart Fraser Tytler (1820-91), a lawyer and Writer to the Signet, of 27 Rutland Square. Educated at Edinburgh Academy and Edinburgh University, he became a Professor of Conveyancing at the university.
 
Charles George Arbuthnot (1824-1899), Born in Ireland and educated at Rugby, he was a Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, based at Leith Fort. He went on to a prestigious army career, serving in Crimea, Afghanistan and India, becoming Lieutenant General Sir Charles Arbuthnot.

St Andrew BC remains a vibrant organisation, which only last week opened a new boathouse at Meggetland in Edinburgh. Rowing legend Dame Katherine Grainger, who has represented the club throughout her career, did the honours.
   The history of the club is a fascinating read with many interesting photos, a 90 page paperback which is available from the club, price £10.
   For further research, the club's extensive archives are held at the National Records of Scotland (Ref GD418).