This well-known image, claimed to be the world's first photo of a tennis player, was taken by the pioneering photographers Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill in Edinburgh around 1843. It features in a major exhibition just now at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and is one of the key images used to market the exhibition.
   The subject is recorded simply as Mr Laing (or Laine, the writing is not clear) and has never been identified. So I set out to find who this dapper young sportsman really was, and why he should be holding a racket.
   The first thing to establish was that he was not actually a tennis player. Lawn tennis had yet to be invented, while the only real (or royal) tennis court in Scotland at the time was at Falkland Palace in Fife.
​   Less well known is the fact that Edinburgh had a thriving racket court in the city centre. It had been established as a fives court in Rose Street around 1800 by John Hallion, who ran the adjoining tavern and also used it to stage cock fights. The court continued in operation throughout the 19th century, subtly changing use from fives to rackets, and in the 1840s was leased by a Mr Wilson. As the advert below shows, he aimed it at the city's well-to-do, and even employed a professional for tuition.

The essential difference between rackets and tennis is that rackets - the ancestor of squash - is played in an enclosed court, with the ball knocked against a wall; in tennis the ball is played over a net between the players.
   As with many recreational sports, there were virtually no reports of matches in the daily papers, but regular adverts show that rackets was popular among young men in Edinburgh at the time. The Rose Street court even attracted royal patronage, as in 1864 Queen Victoria's second son, Prince Alfred, played a game of rackets there and was hit in the eye by a ball.
   It would appear, therefore, that Mr Laing is not a tennis player after all, but a rackets player. 
   There is, incidentally, another photograph of him, held at Glasgow University Library, which shows him in a different profile with outstretched arm. He is again holding the racket in an unnatural position, too far up the handle, but that can be explained by the requirement to keep still for a long exposure. The metal frame which helped to hold him steady has been painted out, but the telltale shadow is clearly seen. Even so, the smart sporty outfit makes him look quite the young athlete!

So, who was he? It is impossible to be certain, but I am confident he was John Laing, an Edinburgh artist who was not only the same age as Robert Adamson, he was also a near neighbour.
   John Laing was born in February 1821 (two months before Adamson) and brought up in the city. Although I have not yet found where he trained as an artist, by 1846 he was in business and advertised his studio at 5 Calton Hill, just a few yards from Adamson's studio at Rock House:

As a neighbour and as a member of Edinburgh's artistic community, he was ideally placed to be a subject for Hill and Adamson's pioneering calotype photographs. Indeed, Hill and Adamson took photographs of several Edinburgh artists. Among them was another neighbour, the sculptor John Steell, who was then at 20 Calton Hill but had previously lived in Laing's house at number 5. Other artists included James Drummond, John Maclaren Barclay, William Leighton Leitch, Kenneth MacLeay, John Stevens, James Rannie Swinton and William Borthwick Johnstone.
   While these connections alone do not confirm Laing's identity as the man in the photo, there is a further link. After Adamson's early death in 1848, Hill continued the business and at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London's Crystal Palace, he showed off the calotypes of Newhaven he had taken with Adamson. In the very same room, John Laing had an exhibit of his own, as this cutting from the Edinburgh Evening Courant (6 May 1851) shows:

Laing and Hill were also listed in the same section of the Great Exhibition's official catalogue.
   In the 1850s, Laing's art and design business continued to thrive and he opened two shops, at Leith Street Terrace and in Baxter's Place at the top of Leith Walk, while retaining his studio in Calton Hill. He had married Susanna Bryce in 1845 and they had eight children including Thomas who became town clerk of Leith.
   But disaster struck when Laing was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease which then had no known cure or treatment. After suffering for over a year he died at home on 23 September 1858 and is buried in Warriston Cemetery.
   As yet there is no conclusive evidence which confirms John Laing as the holder of the racket. But the available clues, including his close connection to the photographers and their studio on Calton Hill, point strongly to the painter as the likely subject.

Postscript, May 2018: I am immensely grateful to the Friends of Warriston Cemetery in Edinburgh, who not only tracked down the grave of John Laing and his family, but cleaned off the moss and took this photograph. He is buried with his wife and three of his children, and his artistic career is recorded beautifully and simply with the artist's palette carved on the headstone.
​

The exhibition A Perfect Chemistry, Photographs by Hill & Adamson is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh until 1 October 2017.

Almost two hundred years ago, the world’s first football club was established in Scotland by a young lawyer and his friends in Edinburgh.
   The Foot-Ball Club remained active from 1824 until 1841, with around 300 recorded members. As the world’s first known organisation dedicated to football it is a crucially important episode in the development of football, yet its full story has never been told.
   Now, I am working with John Hutchinson on a detailed history of the club, together with a biography of its founder, John Hope (pictured above). It is not just a story about football’s early days, it also looks at the players and their impact on Scottish society.
   Hope is not given enough credit by historians for his contribution to the early development of football, where the focus is often on the founding of the Football Association in 1863, on the public schools, on Sheffield and so on. For example Sheffield FC, founded in 1857, have actually incorporated into their crest a claim to be ‘the world’s first football club’. It simply isn’t true. They might be the oldest surviving club, but the first? No way.
   For a definition of what constitutes a sports club, this is what Hope himself had to say in a letter:

The football club resumed in October; the fun first-rate.  I played for three hours on Saturday.  Had business not kept me from the field this winter, I would have been in splendid wind.  As it was. I am pretty swift, and am still a good hand at rolling down my opponents. Mr Esplin is very keen, and the life of the club.  He brings out the men.  He plays first rate.  He gives a splendid ground kick - so sure.  We mutually respect each other, but we are daily approaching to a keener contest.  He has had more practice that I, and carries six years less than I do.  He is short, and there is no upsetting him; but I hope to roll him next Saturday.  The club gave occasion to some very spirited caricatures by my brother Jamie, I being, of course, the principal butt.  We got new caps, very neat, improved by Esplin, like jockey caps.’

There, in one quote from the 1830s, are embodied all the essentials of a sporting club: the playing, the physical contact, the organisation, the team uniform, the rivalry, the respect for fellow members, the hope that it will all be better next week, the futile attempts to regain lost youth, the regret for not training enough and the laughter and camaraderie of a group of healthy and energetic young men united for one specific athletic purpose.

The next event for which we have hard evidence dates from 1851, when the students of Edinburgh University challenged the 93rd Highlanders, garrisoned in Edinburgh Castle, to a match. The losers were to present the winners with a silver medal. Won by the soldiers, that medal is preserved in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders collection at Stirling Castle, and is of enormous sporting significance – the world’s oldest football prize.
   The link to John Hope? The silversmith who designed the medal, James Mackay, had a son James who was schoolmate of John Hope and a member of the Foot-Ball Club – so he was no doubt able to advise on the correct manner of play for the image.
   John Hope wasn’t done yet. In 1854 he opened a playground in Stockbridge, where he encouraged boys as well as girls to play football. He laid down the rules of play – which bear similarities not just to his 1833 rules, but also to the future codes for association football. There was no hacking, no handling, and goals were scored between the posts.
   Then, when association football finally came to Edinburgh in the 1870s, John Hope founded one of the city’s first clubs for the soldiers in his volunteer regiment, the 3rd ERV. He actually kicked off their first match, and was presented with the trophy when they won their first cup.
   When Hope died in 1893, he left most of his fortune to the Hope Trust, which preserved his papers, over 200 boxes of them, in our national archives, now called the National Records of Scotland. The football records were discovered by the historian Dr Neil Tranter, of Stirling University, who first wrote about the club in the 1990s, and we are now researching it in greater detail, a far reaching project which will culminate in a full scale book later this year.
   Meanwhile, we have recently published an article in the academic journal Soccer & Society. It is a subscriber publication which can be accessed at this link, but for those who do not have a subscription please get in touch via the contact form on the home page.
   A report on our findings has also been published in Scotland on Sunday, and can be read via this link.

Sometimes an autograph book has a sad story to tell, and this was really poignant: I found this photo of the Edinburgh Academy rugby team from 1914, taken at the start of term just after the Great War broke out. Opposite the photo are the signatures of the players, all of whom joined up to fight straight from school. 
   The attrition rate was high, as six were killed in action: they included an early victim of the Red Baron, the Dux of the school, and a boy killed within days of his brother. Four more were wounded and only six came through unscathed.
   I have now donated the autograph book to the school in the hope they can use it for research and education. Here is a look at the sixteen players in the squad, starting with the fallen:

Andrew Blyth McCulloch Bogle (Lieutenant, Royal Scots) Killed on 14 July 1916 at Delville Wood, he is buried in Quarry Cemetery, Montauban.

William Graham Notman (2nd Lieutenant, 3rd Highland Light Infantry) Dux of the school, he was killed on 13 August 1916 and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, also on a family grave in Edinburgh’s Dean Cemetery.

Thomas Arthur Ritchie (Lieutenant, East Lancs Regiment) Missing, presumed killed in action on 18 October 1916.

Ian Gilmour Cameron (2nd Lieut, Cameron Highlanders, attached to Royal Flying Corps) Shot down on 9 November 1916 by Manfred von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’, over the Somme at Beugny.

[Thomas] Ian [Thomson] Sloan (2nd Lieutenant, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders) Killed during an attack at Roeux on 23 April 1917. He was a piper in the school band and the Ian Sloan Cup, commissioned by his brothers, is awarded to this day as a piping trophy at the Academy.

James MacLaren (Captain, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders) Having survived a gas attack at Ypres in 1915, he was killed on 21 November 1917 during the Battle of Cambrai, just two days after his brother William.

Four were wounded:

Patrick Millar Matthew (Lieutenant, Royal Field Artillery) Invalided out after being wounded and gassed in 1917, suffering from shellshock. He took over the Victoria India Rubber Company from his father and died in 1977.

John Lindsay (Captain, Black Watch) Captain of the rugby XV and also a member of the cricket XI, he was son of a minister in Bathgate. Joined Black Watch in 1915, won the Military Cross, and was wounded and taken prisoner in 1918. Died 1972.

John Hyndford Carmichael (Lieutenant, A&S Highlanders) Wounded in France 1918, awarded the Military Cross, he remained in the army, serving in India until his retirement as Lt Col. Died 1968.

Alan Dunlop Foster (Lieutenant, King's Own Scottish Borderers) Captain of the XV in 1915/16 he was commissioned in the KOSB on leaving school and was wounded in France 1918. Went to Durham University where he played in the cricket and rugby teams, and spent most of his career on hydro-electric schemes in Iran, dying there in 1948.

The remaining six all came through the conflict without injury:

William Playfair Vassie (Captain, Black Watch) Later a poultry farmer in Essex, he died in 1945.

Claude William Macgregor (Lieutenant, Royal Navy) Remained in the Navy after the war, becoming a Commander. Died 1956.

Alan Daniel Mackinlay Gordon Laing (Lieutenant, 114th Mahrattas, attached to RAF). Qualified as MRCVS (vet) and emigrated to Wellington, New Zealand. Died 1975.

Henry Munro Somerville (Lieutenant, Royal Scots) Won the Military Cross. Became a Chartered Accountant in Leeds and died in 1977.

Thomas Gibson (Captain, Tank Corps) Qualified as Doctor of Science (in agriculture), died in 1973

George Alexander Bain (Captain, 3rd Gurkhas) Remained in the army, rising to Brigadier, made an OBE. Retired to Chagford, Devon and died in 1982, the last survivor of the team.

Edinburgh Academy was, of course, not alone in losing so many young sportsmen. Here is a story about its counterpart in Glasgow: http://www.glasgowacciesrfc.com/glasgow-academicals-1st-xv-1913-14/ 

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

With the approaching 150th anniversary of the founding of the Football Association, I've been digging into the origins of the men who attended those meetings in the autumn of 1863 - with some surprising discoveries.
   The first is that two of the 15 attendees at the inaugural meeting on 26 October 1863 were Scots. They had even been to the same school, Edinburgh Academy, before coming to London. My story about WJ Mackintosh and WH Gordon is in the Scotsman today, and the cutting is attached below.
   Going further, there seems to be a wealth of previously unknown detail about the founders of association football. A total of 43 players attended at least one of the six formative meetings, and many have never been identified before, perhaps not surprisingly as there are some very obscure and elusive individuals among them. More stories are underway, but as a taster: there is an Australian; a man who was responsible (later in life) for hunting tigers in Bengal almost to extinction; a brewery owner; and a large number of people whose primary sport was rowing.

When I recently digitised the 1928 Hearts booklet Tales from Tynecastle (now available for download on my Sporting Anthology page), I was intrigued by some of the adverts. 
   Two of them featured former players George Sinclair and Paddy Crossan, which adds an extra dimension to the interest of the booklet. Much could be, and has been, written about the relationship between football and alcohol, but it is fascinating how many players went into the pub trade, perhaps using a testimonial pay-off to set themselves up.    Paddy's Bar felt obliged to advertise that it offered 'sitting accommodation' for 'connoisseurs of the finest wines, beers and spirits' which is probably a reflection of how basic some pubs could be in the 1920s. It remained an institution in Rose Street long after the player died in 1933, in fact until recent living memory, but has since changed identity a few times and is now the Black Rose.    Sinclair made a surprising choice of location for a Hearts player, as Montrose Terrace is at the top of Easter Road, but promised his customers 'prompt attention, excellent quality and civility' with Dryburgh's Starbright Ale always in the best of condition. It was obviously a good business as he kept it until his death in 1959. The bar retained his name to about the end of the century but now it is a rather douce coffee and deli bar called Just the Ticket.