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.

The course of sports research is full of twists and turns, but one that really had me scratching my head was the case of two prominent Victorian footballers from Scotland with the same name.
   The record books show that Thomas McInnes was capped by Scotland in 1889 while with Cowlairs, and that he was prominent on both sides of the border through the 1890s. Trouble is, there was another Thomas McInnes playing at the same time, who was equally prominent, Scottish and a forward, and for a while they both played in the same city, Nottingham. The result is confusion, and many record books get them mixed up. It took hours of trawling through newspaper reports to sort them out, but I am confident that I have the definitive stories. (With thanks to Paul Joannou for his input.)

Thomas McInnes, the internationalist
Born Glasgow 22 March 1869 (not 1870 as widely stated); died Luton 17 January 1939.
   Started his career with Cowlairs in the late 1880s, and was capped for Scotland v Ireland on 9 March 1889, scoring the final goal in a 7-0 victory. Went to Notts County in December 1889 and despite being Scottish was selected for the Football League in their first match against the Scottish League on 11 April 1892. The following month he returned to Scotland and joined Rangers, playing in a few end-of-season Charity Cup ties and the opening four league matches of the new season.
   In September 1892 he was welcomed back at Notts County but first had to serve a month's FA suspension for having playing in Scotland (those were the rules at the time!). In summer 1893 he went north again for a season with Third Lanark, and then joined Everton for three seasons until 1897. He was at Luton Town from 1897-99, and wound up his career at Bristol Rovers and Bedford Queen's Engineers before retiring in 1901.
   Outside of football, McInnes worked in an iron foundry in Luton, and remained in the town until his death aged 69. He married Sophia Irvine and had two sons.
   The cuttings below show a drawing of McInnes in 1899 (Dundee Courier) and an obituary (The Scotsman).

Thomas McInnes, the FA Cup winner
Born Bowling, Dunbartonshire, 8 July 1873; died Dalmuir, Dunbartonshire, 1 December 1937. 
Full name: Thomas Fair Macaulay McInnes.
   McInnes went to Newcastle as a 16-year-old, primarily to find work as a rivetter. It was only once he got there that he signed up for Newcastle East End in December 1889, and played for them until the summer of 1891, also making occasional appearances for Newcastle West End. He spent the 1891-92 season in Glasgow with Clyde, then moved to Nottingham Forest in the summer of 1892. In his first season he was at City Ground while his namesake was playing across the river at the County Ground.
   He had eight fruitful years with Forest, winning the FA Cup in 1898, and nearly won a Scotland cap as he was twice selected for the Anglo-Scots in the international trials of 1897 and 1898. Then in 1900 he moved to Lincoln City, where he had three seasons. That should have been the end of his playing career, but he had a brief swansong on returning to Scotland, signing for Port Glasgow Athletic in January 1905, and scored on his debut in a Scottish Cup tie against Stranraer. He made just one league appearance the following month.
   McInnes married Ethel Pearson in Lincoln in 1903 and they had four children.

One of the great benefits of the digital age is the ability to find new material at the click of a mouse, often in places you would never have dreamed of looking. So, many thanks to the University of Toronto's Robarts Library for taking the trouble to digitise a 1912 book titled 'A history of the frozen meat trade' (click on link to open). 
   It's not exactly bedtime reading, but it does contain this photo and a short biography of a Scottish football pioneer, JJ Thomson, who not only played in the very first international of 1872 but also captained Queen's Park to victory in the 1874 Scottish Cup Final. His cap and medal are in the Scottish Football Museum.
   Like many early footballers, he came from obscure origins (born 1851 near Annan) and went on to become a highly successful businessman. He made his fortune in the meat trade, and by the time this book was published he was chairman and managing director of Eastmans Ltd. When he died in London in 1915, he left £46,000 in his will. [See also my previous blog post about him]

To mark this week's international between Scotland and USA at Hampden, I wrote up the fascinating tales of the two men who had played football for both countries, Barney Battles and Jack Marshall. It was published in the Scotsman (click here to link).
   While the story of Battles is relatively well known, finding out about Marshall was quite a challenge. He was generally assumed to have been born in Saltcoats in the late 1890s or even - according to one of his American clubs - in 1902. A detailed look at his playing career made those dates highly unlikely, as he started out with Saltcoats Victoria in 1911, but nobody in census returns seemed to match his profile. It was further complicated that his birth name was John, but he was generally called Jock or Jack in the press.
   Experience has taught me there are always clues out there, and the breakthrough came in a newspaper cutting that described his departure for the USA on the Cameronia in September 1924. I was able to check the ship manifest on ancestry, which listed him, his wife and three sons. The next stage was to find his marriage, which meant a trip to the ScotlandsPeople centre in Edinburgh, and by noting his parents on the marriage certificate I eventually found his birth: 24 April 1892 to John Marshall and Annie Cathcart at Braehead, Baillieston. The location was a surprise, but it transpired his father was a miner at the Braehead pit (no longer there, the site is just off the M8 motorway east of Glasgow), and it was clear from later census returns that the family moved to Saltcoats while John junior was a small boy.
   His football career could be tracked through the British Newspaper Archive and US soccer archives such as the excellent Bethlehem Steel site, but what happened to him once he hung up his boots? I found John Marshall in the US censuses in 1930 and 1940, living in Kearny, New Jersey, working as a labourer. That seemed to be the end of the line, as New Jersey deaths are not online, but by a stroke of luck I found a family tree - again on ancestry - that seemed to match. I got in touch with the owner of the tree, and she was able to provide not just a precise date of death, 10 October 1964, but also a photo of his gravestone in South Amboy, NJ, where he is buried with his wife. In return, I could provide details of his life.
   All in all, a satisfying conclusion to the search for a notable player, who was not just a captain of Scotland but also a highly respected star in his adopted USA.

John 'Jack' Marshall
Born Baillieston, Lanarkshire, 24 April 1892.
Died Morgan, New Jersey, 10 October 1964.

Playing career
Saltcoats Vics 1911-14 (inc a trial for Rangers res)
Shettleston Aug 1914 (three games only)
St Mirren 1914-19. Won Victory Cup 1919
Middlesbrough Nov 1919-23
Llanelly 1923-24
Brooklyn Wanderers 1924-25
Newark Skeeters 1925-27
Brooklyn Wanderers 1927-28
Bethlehem Steel Aug 1928- Aug 29
(On loan to Philadelphia Centennials for two games in Nov 1928)

Representative appearances
Feb 1913, junior international trial
3 January 1917, Home Scots 2 Anglo-Scots 1 at Hampden, War Fund match (scored one)
19 April 1919, Ireland 0 Scotland 0 at Windsor Park, Victory International

Seven caps for Scotland
12 Feb 1921, Scotland 2 Wales 1 at Pittodrie
26 Feb 1921, Ireland 0 Scotland 2 at Belfast
9 April 1921, Scotland 3 England 0 at Hampden (captain)
4 Feb 1922, Wales 2 Scotland 1 at Wrexham (captain)
4 March 1922, Scotland 2 Ireland 1 at Celtic Park
8 April 1922, England 0 Scotland 1 at Villa Park
16 Feb 1924, Wales 2 Scotland 0 at Cardiff

One cap for USA
6 November 1926, USA 6 Canada 2 at Brooklyn Ebbets Field (scored one)

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).

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.

It was a pleasure recently to meet 90-year-old Walter Fergusson, a retired company director living on the south side of Glasgow. He is, almost certainly, the only person alive who has met a footballer who played in the first international match between Scotland and England in 1872. 
   Walter recalls going to tea as a boy at the Cambuslang home of his great uncle, Willie Mackinnon, Scotland's first centre-forward, who also lived past his 90th birthday. Among his other claims to fame, he performed the first recorded overhead kick (above) and played for Rangers in their first game.

The story is in the Herald today at this link, but I also reproduce it below:

A pensioner in Glasgow has a unique connection to the world’s first football international. 90-year-old Walter Fergusson can remember, as a boy, being taken to tea at his great uncle’s house – his relative being Willie Mackinnon, Scotland’s centre forward in 1872.
   Walter is probably the last person alive who can say they met a player from the very first time Scotland’s football team took the field.
   His great uncle was a Scotland star throughout the 1870s, making eight consecutive appearances against England and one against Wales, scoring five times in the process. He won three Scottish Cup finals with Queen’s Park, and even made a guest appearance for Rangers in their first match.
   Mackinnon’s other claim to football fame is making the first recorded overhead kick, as described by a reporter at the 1872 international: Mackinnon, who is not tall, here made a very clever kick. The ball was on the bound higher than his head, when he leaped up and to the surprise of his opponent, who was waiting till the ball came over Mackinnon, kicked it well up the hill. The kick was much admired, and lustily applauded.
   He may have been a football legend, but surprisingly the talk in the Mackinnon household in Cambuslang was much more likely to be about music. Walter recalled: “The last time I met Willie Mackinnon was when I was 15 or 16, towards the end of my schooldays, I was taken to tea. My father’s mother was Willie’s sister and we were quite a close family.
   “Willie was an international class tenor. As a young man he auditioned for La Scala Opera in Milan and was invited over to join them. Nowadays the football is so good in Italy he probably would have gone, but then it meant leaving the family so he stayed at home. He also played the cello, and when I went to see him there was a cello propped up against the wall.”
   Mackinnon’s fame as a singer actually eclipsed his football talent, and towards the end of his life in 1938 was elected an honorary vice president of the Glasgow Choral Union – no mean accolade, as it also went that year to the famous composer Ralph Vaughn Williams. Mackinnon had joined the Choral Union as a boy alto even before his football career got underway, and became a tenor soloist in 1882. When he died in 1942, aged 90, his obituary in the Glasgow Herald was headed ‘Veteran Glasgow Musician’, highlighting his prominent role with numerous city musical groups.
   He was much in demand, and Walter added: “My father was in the choir at Pollokshields Church and once, when they put on a performance of the Messiah, Willie was invited to do the solo, which was fine. But then he carried on singing through the chorus and had to be reined in as he had such a powerful voice that nobody else could be heard.”
   Walter became a lifelong supporter of Queen’s Park thanks to his great uncle’s fame. “I first went to Hampden because of Willie Mackinnon,” he said, and his early memories of football recall a bygone age: “Although Queen’s Park were amateur, they could still compete at the top level before the war because they signed bankers and architects who had a career and couldn’t turn professional. Some of them were a bit eccentric: I remember Desmond White (later a director of Celtic) brought all his climbing gear to Hampden, then after the match went off to the hills to do some mountaineering.”
   He has a family anecdote about the pioneering days: “After the match on a Saturday, the Queen’s Park players would head to the nearest pub for their dinner and came out well stewed. Willie would stagger home to Cambuslang, but had to be in a fit state to walk all the way back to Glasgow Cathedral to sing in the choir on the Sunday morning.”
   Longevity runs in the family, and Walter has surpassed even his great uncle’s age. Now, 140 years after the first international, this means it is still possible to hear a first-hand account of one of Scotland’s earliest football pioneers.

For Scotland fans of a certain vintage, there are matches that stay fresh in the memory above all others. Forty years ago was one of those, the 2-1 victory over Czechoslovakia at Hampden Park which ensured Scotland would take part in the World Cup finals for the first time in a generation.
   That game on 26 September 1973 wasn't the first time I had seen Scotland play, but it is the first match I can remember them winning. It had such a huge impact on me, as an impressionable 15-year-old, that I kept the following day's newspaper. I still have it, and Allan Milligan's front page photo (above) of toothless Joe Jordan being congratulated by Tom Hutchison remains a classic image of unbridled Scottish celebration.
   More importantly, the win raised Scotland's football aspirations. It gave us confidence that we could compete on the world stage - this was the first of five consecutive qualifications - and also helped to shift the traditional attitude that beating England in the British Championship was the most important game of the year. 
   Our World Cup qualifying group seems ridiculous by modern standards. Just three nations, with the amateurs of Denmark making up the numbers, and group winner qualifying for West Germany. Scotland under Tommy Docherty breezed past the Danes home and away, while the Czechs could only, inexplicably, draw in Copenhagen before putting six past them in Prague. With two games remaining, that unlikely draw made our target simple: win at Hampden to reach the World Cup finals, regardless of what happened in Bratislava the following month.
   Simple? Hardly. 1973 had begun with a new manager, Willie Ormond, and an SFA centenary celebration game against our traditional rivals which turned into an embarrassing 5-0 rout; there would be another, albeit narrow, defeat at Wembley in May and by the autumn Ormond had lost five of his first six matches.
   In the media, there was scant optimism, and Ian Archer in the Glasgow Herald was particularly gloomy: 'There is no reason to believe that the Scotland of 1973 can succeed where the Scotlands of 1961, 1965 and 1969 have failed before them,' he wrote. 'Only the old adage that hope springs eternal will comfort the impassioned and the patriotic.'
   Nonetheless, the game was a sell-out, Hampden having been restricted to a crowd of 100,000. For the rest of us (particularly those like me with school to go to in the morning) there was the rare treat of a live broadcast on STV. It began ominously, a hard physical battle with no quarter given. I can still hear Arthur Montford intoning 'And that's disaster, absolute disaster for Scotland' as a nonsensical long shot from Nehoda evaded Ally Hunter's flap and crept in at the far post. It was 'a freak goal' according to the Scotsman. As half time approached, the hopes of the nation were revived as the big defender Jim Holton leapt above the Czech defence (and Denis Law) to head home a corner. All square at the break. 
   The second half was the stuff of legend. We saw a Scotland side which was disciplined, having to ensure there was no repeat of the opening goal while chasing a winner, and even the Scotsman's John Rafferty, not one for hyperbole, was 'thrilled to see this Scottish team play it with such composure'. In the 64th minute, Ormond replaced Kenny Dalglish with the robust figure of Joe Jordan, a game-changing move. Little more than ten minutes later, came the decisive moment: a Bremner shot hit the inside of the post and rolled agonisingly along the goal line and apparently to safety; but it came to Willie Morgan and his cross with the outside of the boot found the unmarked Jordan in front of goal, who found the net with ease. It was bedlam thereafter, a hysterical finale which lasted till the Norwegian referee blew for time. You can see the goals from the game on Youtube.
   Denis Law, who made his debut just after the 1958 World Cup and had suffered through those desperate failed campaigns of the 1960s, gushed: 'I don't think I have ever been happier in my life.'
   Below are the full front and back pages of the Scotsman, and while the paper is a bit yellowed with age, the memories remain fresh. In those days, football on the front page was something extraordinary, and that just about sums up what this meant.