Continuing on my recent theme of the 150th anniversary of the creation of association football in 1863, I've now completed an identity parade of all 43 men who attended at least one of the six founding meetings of the FA.
   One of the key discoveries was the identity of James Turner of Crystal Palace, who was elected onto the FA's first committee and is therefore considered to be one of the FA's "founding fathers". Unfortunately, the FA and their researchers from University of Central Lancashire failed to identify him despite several months of a high profile campaign - but I'm happy to oblige.
   His story is published in his home town today, in the Croydon Advertiser, at this link. I also publish the full article below:

The FA’s first money man: James Turner of Crystal Palace

When the Football Association held its jubilee dinner in 1913, a big fuss was made over two surviving ‘originals’ from 1863, Ebenezer Morley and Alfred Mackenzie, who had a seat of honour on the top table and were presented with silver caskets.
   There should have been another man alongside them. James Turner of Croydon had played a key role in founding the FA, but his contribution to the early days of football was overlooked in 1913. Now, a century on, the FA still could not track him down for their ‘founding fathers’ project, but this pioneer footballer can finally be given the recognition he deserves.
   For four years Turner held the purse strings of our fledgling national game, having taken over the role of treasurer from a disgruntled rugby player. Yet when the inaugural meeting of the FA took place on 26 October 1863, Turner had other things on his mind as his eldest son had been born just two days earlier. However, he contributed to the next three crucial meetings as the rules were thrashed out and found himself elected to the FA’s first committee.
   Three office bearers had been chosen to lead the FA, Arthur Pember as president, Ebenezer Morley as secretary, and Francis Campbell as treasurer. Once the rules were agreed after six mammoth sessions, Turner was appointed as one of four additional committee members, alongside JF Alcock, GT Wawn and HT Steward.
   These men are now considered the Founding Fathers of the FA, but it was no easy birth. An irrevocable division between the kicking and handling codes caused the withdrawal of Blackheath, and that meant their rep Francis Campbell would soon stand down as treasurer. Campbell had so little involvement beyond those acrimonious early debates, that Turner can be considered as the first ‘proper’ treasurer of the FA.
   Not that looking after the accounts was a particularly taxing role: there were no gate receipts or sponsors, just subscriptions from a small number of clubs. The FA held few meetings (none at all between October 1864 and February 1866), and its membership dwindled to just ten clubs. In 1868, new blood was recruited to the committee and Turner stepped down.
   His club was Crystal Palace – no relation to the current Barclays Premier League side – who were formed out of the cricket club of the same name before football was codified, initially to give the cricketers some winter exercise. With a ground at Penge, their colours were black and scarlet striped shirts and socks, with dark blue serge knickerbockers. Drawing their membership from the merchants, accountants and stockbrokers of the suburban middle class in south-east London, Crystal Palace were hugely influential as founders of the FA, with representatives present at all six of the inaugural meetings. Later, the first two captains of England, Cuthbert Ottaway and Alexander Morten, would play for the club before it ran out of steam and folded in the mid-1870s.
   Turner’s dedication to football went far beyond financial matters in an era when administrators were also players. He is first recorded playing for the side in March 1862 against the Forest Club, which featured Charles Alcock and his brother. He took part in a special match to demonstrate the new laws of the game in January 1864 at Battersea Park, playing for an FA President’s team which defeated the Secretary’s select 2-0, and further honours came his way in 1868 when he was selected for Surrey against Kent.  Turner continues to appear in club line-ups throughout the 1860s, often as captain, and was still there when Palace met Hitchin in the first FA Cup competition in November 1871. He also sometimes opened the batting for the Crystal Palace cricket team.
   He was born in Croydon on 6 December 1839, son of Thomas Turner, an eminent vet who was first president of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. Educated at the nearby Streatham Academy, he was so close to the Crystal Palace club that he married Rachel, sister of the Lloyd brothers (Robert, Theodore, Henry and Alfred) who were all regulars in the team. In fact, Henry and Theodore accompanied him to a couple of those FA meetings in the autumn of 1863.
   James lived all his life in Croydon and built up a successful business in the wine trade. He and Rachel had eight children and ironically, having seen off the rugby faction at the FA, two of his sons, Howard and Errol, played rugby at county level for Surrey.
   After his wife died in 1907 he retired to nearby Addiscombe, while the family home for over fifty years, Netherton in Wellesley Road, was bought by the Croydon Labour Party and renamed Ruskin House. It was demolished in the 1960s, along with much of Croydon town centre, to make way for office blocks.
   James Turner was one of the last surviving founders of the FA, outlived only by Ebenezer Morley, and died aged 82 while visiting Eastbourne on 27 July 1922. He left over £9,000 in his will to his five surviving children.

Palace Originals

As well as James Turner, the original Crystal Palace FC was represented by a number of members at the FA’s six founding meetings in 1863, who were all prominent local businessmen.
   Club secretary Francis Day (1838-1886) was owner of the Bermondsey Brewery, and there were the Lloyd brothers Henry (1841-1869), an insurance agent, and Theodore (1834-1904), a stockbroker who refereed the 1873 England v Scotland match.
   The others were wine merchant Frederick Urwick (1842-1915), indigo merchant John Louis Siordet (1839-1882), and an accountant, Lawrence Vivian Desborough (1844-1892).

Did you hear about the Scotsmen, the Australian and the rowing club members? They all got together 150 years ago to found the Football Association.
   Of the 15 men who gathered the Freemasons’ Tavern on 26 October 1863, some are well known, but it has never previously been established who they all were. The FA has been researching their origins, and today unveiled a plaque at Wembley in their honour, but it only records those on the first committee. 
   I have taken that further and for the first time have identified everyone at the meeting. 
   The results will raise a few eyebrows for those who thought the FA had purely London origins. In fact, only five were born in the London area, the rest coming from the places as far away as India and Australia. Although not all their schools are known, there is a wide variety including two educated in Scotland. These factors would actually have helped the FA in its discussions, as the representatives had experience of football in many different forms – and there were many.
   The careers and backgrounds of the men were firmly in the affluent middle class bracket: army, civil service, legal profession, stockbrokers and architects. Several were in the drinks trade and there is a plantation owner.
   They were keen sportsmen, with no less than five being rowing devotees – Morley, Steward, Wawn, Bell and Gregory were much more active with their rowing clubs than in football – while others were keen cricketers. Their age is noticeably younger than the administrators of today, with twelve of the fifteen under 25 while four were still at school. Ebenezer Morley was the oldest at 32.
   Working out their identities has been a challenge to historians. The first newspaper report in Bell’s Life missed two men and noted there were also ‘several other gentlemen present who, although players, did not definitively represent any club’. The FA minute book lists more, but although they were named by Geoffrey Green in his monumental 1953 history of the FA, he compounded the error by misreading the copperplate script - for example, H Bell rather than Th Bell.
   Yet they deserve recognition as their impact on sport in this country has been immeasurable. They put in place a forum for agreeing how football should be played and, in the first of seven resolutions, agreed unanimously ‘that the clubs represented at this meeting now form themselves into an association to be called The Football Association’. With those words, they created the world’s first national football body.

Here are the 15 founders:

Arthur Pember, No Names (Kilburn)
Born Lambeth, 1835-1886.
The son of a stockbroker, the captain of NN Kilburn was first president of the FA. He emigrated to the USA in the mid-1860s and had an interesting career as an investigative journalist before his early death in North Dakota.

Ebenezer Cobb Morley, Barnes
Born Hull, Yorkshire, 1831-1924.
A driving force behind the founding meetings of the FA, Morley was elected secretary for three years, then president until 1874. A keen rower, he helped found the Barnes and Mortlake Regatta as well as Barnes FC. Brought up in Hull, he moved to London as a young man and worked there as a solicitor.

Thomas Dyson Gregory, Barnes
Born Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1835-1904.
A corn merchant in partnership with his brothers Frederick and George, he was on the committee of London Rowing Club (along with EC Morley) and treasurer of the Barnes and Mortlake regatta. He was also a founder of Barnes Football Club in 1862.

Francis Maule Campbell, Blackheath
Born Blackheath, Kent, 1843-1920.
First treasurer of the FA, but soon resigned his club after failing to agree on hacking. A wine merchant, like his father (who died before he was a year old), he expanded his business to become a merchant of continental produce. Married twice, first at the age of 58, and the second time just three months before his death.

Frederick Henry Moore, Blackheath
Born Perth, Western Australia, 1839-1934.
Brought up in Australia, he came to London as a 14 year old to finish his education, and worked as a wine merchant with Dalgety and Co, his uncle’s company. One of the founders of Blackheath club, he remained in England until 1864, then returned to the southern hemisphere where he was an insurance agent and company director in New Zealand, Tasmania and Sydney.

George Twizell Wawn, War Office
Born West Boldon, County Durham, 1840-1914.
On graduating from Durham University he moved to London in 1860 to work for the War Office as a Clerk. Having rowed for his university, he also joined London Rowing Club. From the War Office he joined the African commissariat in 1873, with postings in Sierra Leone and Ghana, retiring in 1889 with the honorary rank of Major.

Herbert Thomas Steward, Crusaders
Born London, 1838-1915.
Educated at Westminster School, he was an architect and surveyor. His primary passion was rowing and he was president of Leander Club, and wrote the history of Henley Regatta.

John Forster Alcock, Forest (Leytonstone)
Born Bishopwearmouth, County Durham, 1841-1910.
After leaving Harrow, he entered the family business as a ship owner and insurance broker. He has been overshadowed in football by his younger brother, Charles Alcock, but was a useful player and founder of pioneering club Forest.

Alfred Westwood Mackenzie, Forest (Leytonstone)
Born Leytonstone, Essex, 1840-1924.
An insurance manager with Guardian Assurance, with his brother Sir Morell Mackenzie he was one of the founders of the Throat Hospital in London. Attended the FA’s jubilee dinner in 1913 and was presented with a silver casket.

Francis Day, Crystal Palace
Born Westerham, Kent, 1838-1886.
Owner of the Black Eagle Brewery in Bermondsey, succeeding his father as a partner in the company of Day Noakes & Co, together with another Crystal Palace player, Wickham Noakes. Was also a good fast bowler for West Kent.

Theodore Bell, Surbiton
Born Uppingham, Rutland, 1840-1923.
Educated at Uppingham, where he was captain of football 1857-58. Although he represented the short-lived Surbiton club at the first meeting of the FA and signed them up for membership, he was better known as a rower and was for many years the secretary of Kingston Rowing Club. A solicitor, he had a legal practice in Epsom. [NB 

George William Shillingford, Perceval House School (Blackheath)
Born Purneah, Bengal, 1844-1896.
He and his brothers came to England for their education, but spent the rest of their lives back in Bengal where they ran an indigo plantation and were responsible for hunting Bengal tigers almost to extinction in the latter half of the 19th century.

Bertram Fulke Hartshorne, Charterhouse School
Born Cogenhoe, Northamptonshire, 1844-1921.
The only public school representative at the meeting and the only one to decline to join the FA. A barrister, he graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford, joined the Indian Civil Service in Ceylon, then became a District Auditor for the Local Government Board.

William John Mackintosh, Kensington School
Born Calcutta, Bengal, 1845-1923.
Born in India where his Scottish father was a merchant, he was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Kensington School. A career soldier, he won a commission with the Royal Artillery in 1867 but there is no evidence he ever saw action in 20 years’ service. He retired in 1887, with the rank of Lt Colonel, and lived out his days in Devon.

William Henry Gordon, Blackheath Proprietary School
Born Edinburgh, 1845-1929.
Educated at Edinburgh Academy, Cheltenham College and Blackheath Proprietary School, then took a degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. Qualified as a barrister, changed his surname to Lockhart Gordon and emigrated to Canada, where he was director of a major timber concern, the Canadian Land and Emigration Company.

One of the great joys of the 1872 international - 140th anniversary this week - is that there are some carefully preserved original artefacts from the match, as well as the illustrations which appeared in the Graphic. 

•    The ticket (above) is held by the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow. They could be bought in advance of the game from Queen's Park committee members, and despite the high price, sales were so buoyant that there were fears the ground would not cope with the anticipated large crowd. The Glasgow Herald suggested admission should be by ticket only, but then published an anxious response on the day of the game from an intending spectator: 'I do not know the committee of management, nor anyone who has tickets to dispose of, and it would be too had if I had my journey to Partick for nothing.' In the event, the crowd behaved impeccably 'and never once trenched upon the field of play'.
  
•    The shirt (below left) worn by England forward Arnold Kirke Smith, in his only international, was kept by his family until 1998, when it sold at Christie's for £21,000 and is now on display in the National Football Museum - the first of eleven 'milestones in the game' that visitors see. Picture courtesy of Umbro football's photostream.
  
•    Caps were not awarded specifically for this match, but Scotland's JJ Thomson made sure the honour of playing against England in 1872-3-4 was recorded on his cap (below right) when it was presented a couple of years later. It is now held at the Scottish Football Museum.

Who knows if there are any other souvenirs of the match still to be discovered?