Today marks the centenary of the birth of the legendary Bill Shankly in the Ayrshire mining village of Glenbuck. This little community, now virtually wiped from the map, had an extraordinary record of producing top class footballers and long before the Shankly family came to prominence there were a number of others who grew up in Glenbuck and would go on to play for Scotland.
   The very first of these was the mercurial Alexander 'Sandy' Brown, whose great claim to fame was scoring in every round of the FA Cup in 1900-01 as Tottenham Hotspur won the trophy for the first time. He is in the middle of the front row in the above photo, and there is also online footage of the final, one of the earliest films of a football game. Sandy scored twice in the first match, a 2-2 draw with Sheffield United, and the third goal in the replay which Spurs won 3-1.
   The following year he was selected for Scotland against England, and he duly marked his debut with a goal, but it would never appear in the record books. Early in the second half, part of the terracing at Ibrox collapsed, killing 25 people, and although the game was played to a finish it was immediately declared void. When the match was replayed the following month, Sandy was not in the team.
   He had to wait a further two years for his one 'official' Scotland cap. By then playing with Middlesbrough, he failed to impress against England as Scotland lost 1-0 at Celtic Park, and he was never troubled by the selectors again.
   Sandy Brown started out with Glenbuck Athletic and his football talent rescued him from a life in the coal mines. He turned professional with St Bernard's in Edinburgh early in 1896, just after his 18th birthday, and was an immediate success, scoring 8 goals in 15 league matches. That summer he was snapped up by Preston North End, where he played for three seasons, scoring regularly. But he could not settle, and his career was a progression of moves from club to club: Portsmouth in 1899, Spurs in 1900 for a year, back to Portsmouth, Middlesbrough in 1903 for two seasons, then Luton Town for three years. He set up in Luton as landlord of a pub, the Dewdrop Inn, but well-publicised marital difficulties forced him to give it up.
   I recently did some research into his background (helped by contributors to the scottishleague.net message board). It had long been thought Sandy was born in 1879, but a careful analysis of birth records in Glenbuck showed that his date of birth was in fact 21 December 1877 and his mother Margaret White was not married. However, six months later she married the father, William Brown - and the following year they had another son, Tommy, who would later also become a professional footballer with Leicester Fosse and Portsmouth. Sandy ultimately emigrated to New Zealand, and died there in the town of Granity on 6 March 1944.
   The village football team is generally known as Glenbuck Cherrypickers, but their original name was Glenbuck Athletic, founded around 1877 by three men including William Brown - possibly Sandy's father. The 'Cherrypicker' name was adopted around the turn of the 19th century and the picture below shows the team just after they won the Ayrshire Junior League in 1897. There are two players in the photo called Brown (without initials), and one of them is Sandy's younger brother Tommy before he moved south.
   The Browns were among the earliest of the long conveyor belt of talent from Glenbuck who became professional footballers, an extraordinary record for such an obscure village. Bill Shankly and his brothers are the most famous, but other Scotland internationals include goalkeeper Willie Muir of Dundee (capped in 1907) and John Crosbie of Ayr United and Birmingham (capped 1920-22). 

The launch of a new magazine, the Aberdeen Football Historian, is the latest bit of sports heritage to come out of the Granite City. Together with a recent book and a couple of websites, it demonstrates a real commitment to celebrating the glorious (and less than glorious) past of the club.
   The magazine, put together by local aficionados including club historian Kevin Stirling, is a fascinating read of 24 pages in full colour, with a cover price of just £3. The first issue, almost inevitably, starts by marking the 30th anniversary of Gothenburg but also has some original features such as the club's first mascot and the strong Aberdeen connections to Scotland's first international team.
   There is a dedicated website, which adds to the existing AFC Heritage website, and combined they are a great resource.
   For serious historians wanting to know what happened in Aberdeen before the present club was formed in 1903, I can strongly recommend Fraser Clyne's book The Aberdeen Men Can't Play Football (above right), which is an early history of football in Aberdeen from 1881 to 1903. Published last year at £12.99, it is a tour de force of original research, telling the story together with detailed statistics and many previously unseen photos. He gets to the bottom of the famous Bon Accord team that lost 36-0 to Arbroath, and turns up fascinating anecdotes such as the launch of a matchday programme by Orion FC in 1895 and various visits to the city by Scotland XIs and top English sides like Sunderland and Liverpool. Somewhat belately, it's my Scottish sport history book of 2012.

It's a crucial part of our sporting legacy, but hardly anyone knows where it is. On 9 July 1867 a group of men met at 3 Eglinton Terrace on the south side of Glasgow 'for the purpose of forming a Football Club'.
   Scotland's first association football club duly came into being, named Queen's Park after the nearby recreation ground where they played. The club became an institution that almost single-handedly introduced the association game to the city, organised the first international match in 1872 and provoked the formation of the Scottish FA the following year.
   The story of the club is well known, but what about the location of this historic meeting? It is a puzzle that is hard to answer satisfactorily as Eglinton Terrace no longer exists: it disappeared as an address in 1891 when its parent street, Victoria Road, was absorbed into the city of Glasgow and renumbered as one long thoroughfare.
   The site is now occupied by four-storey tenements, which Historic Scotland considers to be sufficiently important in architectural terms to be worth listing Grade B. They date the tenements to the 1880s, but the buildings are somewhat older as Victoria Road was first laid out in the late 1850s, linking the city with the open spaces to the south, including the new Queen's Park.
   Eglinton Terrace started to be built in 1864, a terrace of tenements on the west side of Victoria Road, running south from Allison Street to Prince Edward Street. Press adverts indicate the original properties were self-contained flats, with shops at street level.
   The first notice appeared in the Glasgow Herald in March 1864: 'To Let, at Eglinton Terrace, houses of 3 and 4 rooms and kitchen, bathrooms &c, with garden plots if required.' This was bigger than many people required, and some of the residents took in lodgers; Mrs Cook of 3 Eglinton Terrace advertised 'Two young men may have share parlour and bed room'. A few of the tenants at Number 3 can be identified from Glasgow street directories, including a bookseller and an accountant, although none of them appear to be founders of Queen's Park FC.
   One of the earliest residents, listed in the valuation rolls from 1865, was a wine and spirit dealer called James Cook at No 1. His pub was on the corner with Allison Street, and it has been suggested that it had a meeting room at No 3. Certainly, there are reports of later meetings taking place in James Whyte's, as the pub was later called before being transformed into the art deco Victoria Bar at the turn of the century. It seems unlikely that a pub would extend two doors along, but James Cook and his wife Jane, referred to above, owned a flat at Number 3 so potentially they had the space to host a meeting in their home over the pub.
   So why did the Queen's Park founders chose to meet in this particular property? A potential clue comes from an advert in the Glasgow Herald on 8 July 1867, just one day before the meeting: 'To Let at 3 Eglinton Terrace, Victoria Road, Parlour and Bed Room. Plunge and shower bath in house.' Would that vacant parlour have had enough room for 20 people to gather?
   While the definitive answer to that question will probably never be known, the precise location of 3 Eglinton Terrace can be pinpointed to what is now the tenement entrance at 404 Victoria Road, between the Victoria Bar which occupies 400-402 and Optical Express at 406-408. A close examination of the Glasgow street directories shows clearly the evolution of Eglinton Terrace and its residents up to the 1890s.
   This unremarkable suburban tenement is the location for the foundation of Scotland’s first association football club, and is therefore of great significance for our sporting heritage.
   At present, however, there is nothing to mark the spot. Commemorative plaque, anyone?

A little town in Aberdeenshire can stake a claim as the true birthplace of Scottish football, after my discovery that three of the founders of Queen’s Park went to school there.
   Brothers Robert and James Smith, and club secretary William Klingner - among the men who met on 9 July 1867 ‘for the purpose of forming a Football Club’ - were all educated at Fordyce Academy before coming to Glasgow in the 1860s.
   Long since closed but once known as the ‘Eton of the North’, Fordyce Academy enjoyed immense prestige in the Victorian era and there was fierce competition for places.
   Klingner recorded that first meeting of the Queen’s Park FC in beautiful script (above), but unfortunately for researchers it is not possible to consult his original, which was lost in a fire at Hampden Park early on Boxing Day 1945.  We only have this picture of the minute because it was reproduced in Richard Robinson’s History of Queen’s Park, published in 1920, and widely accepted as the definitive version of how the club was formed, and who its founders were.
   In the course of my research for my book First Elevens, on the first football internationals, I became aware of a few anomalies in Robinson’s text, which had not really been questioned or re-examined. Dublin-born Robinson was described as the club historian, but he was in fact more of a cycling aficionado in his youth and one of the founders of the Scottish Cycling Union. His day job was managing the post office telegraph office in Glasgow, with a sideline as a sports journalist: he launched the Scottish Athletic Journal while football editor of the Glasgow News. Newly retired at the time of the Queen’s Park jubilee, he was in a good position to write the club’s history.
   Much of his background research was done in 1916 and 1917, but the book had to wait until after the war. There was, however, copious newspaper coverage of the club’s jubilee and two books of press cuttings are held in the Scottish Football Museum.
   The story begins with a group of young men from the north of Scotland, who in the mid-1860s exercised together every Saturday on a patch of ground in Strathbungo. One of them was James C Grant who, when interviewed in 1916 for the Athletic News, identified the initial group as comprising himself, Robert and James Smith, Donald Edmiston, Lewis Black, and a couple of others. Grant described how they practised traditional Highland sports like hammer throwing, putting the weight, jumping, wrestling and tossing the caber, but when building work made the ground too confined, they decamped to Queen’s Park Recreation Ground in Langside.
   Again, they found their space being encroached, but this time it was by about forty youths from the local YMCA who were kicking a ball about. The men from the north joined in for their first game of football, and enjoyed it so much that they went into town to buy their own ball. The fact that footballs could then be bought – there was a range at the Royal Polytechnic Warehouse – indicates the game was becoming popular.
   They added football to their list of activities, and it soon became their primary sport as more and more people joined in; so many, in fact, that in the summer of 1867 they decided to form a proper club. Hence the meeting at 3 Eglinton Terrace, part of Victoria Road in Crosshill, which was attended by about 20 young men, of whom 13 were elected onto a committee.
   From among them, four office bearers were appointed to lead the club, and research shows that there is an astonishingly close link to these founders, whose origins are in north of Scotland communities just a few miles apart.
   The exception was Mungo Ritchie, chosen as president, who at the age of 30 was likely considered a senior figure by the players. Born on a farm at Madderty in Perthshire, his father died when he was just six weeks old so it is little surprise that he came to Glasgow to seek his fortune. By 1867 he was established as a draper – a clothes retailer.
   The north of Scotland connection starts with Lewis Black, first captain, born in 1841 at Cullen on the Moray coast and brought up in Grantown-on-Spey. He would succeed Ritchie as club president the following year and was also a draper.
   The beautiful script of the minute was written by 19-year-old William Klingner, a merchant’s clerk, who was elected secretary. (Robinson mis-spelled his name as Klinger, and it is only recently that the discrepancy was spotted.) Klingner came from Portsoy, on the Banffshire coast, the son of an émigré from Dresden who was village doctor.
   And the fourth office bearer, the treasurer, is minuted as ‘Smith senior’. Robinson identified him as Robert Smith, but James was the elder Smith brother by four years. Robert, then aged 19, was actually ‘Smith junior’, among the ordinary committee members.
   The Smiths were the sons of the Earl of Fife’s head gardener at Innes House in Morayshire, and were prominent figures in early Scottish football despite moving to London at the end of the decade: both were capped for Scotland against England in the first international of 1872. James died relatively young, but Robert headed across the Atlantic and carved out a fine career as a newspaper proprietor and politician in Wyoming, USA.
   The extraordinary link between them is that it is just five miles from Lewis Black’s birthplace in Cullen to William Klingner’s home in Portsoy, and right in the middle is Fordyce, where the Smith brothers and Klingner were educated.
   Supported by bursaries and legacies, Fordyce Academy took pupils as boarders as well as day boys, who had to pass highly competitive entrance exams to be accepted. There is no evidence that the boys played football there in the 1850s, but clearly it gave them a taste for outdoor exercise that they continued into adulthood.
   While Glasgow can claim to be the birthplace of Scottish football, the roots of the founding fathers can be traced to the other end of the country. Fordyce Academy may have closed in 1964, but its legacy remains.

There has been a notable movement in the last few years to rediscover the last resting places of famous Scottish footballers, and I have to applaud, in particular, the efforts of supporters at Celtic and Rangers in researching and recognising the pioneers of those clubs.
   This week the excellent Celtic Graves Society is co-ordinating a 125th anniversary celebration of the club's first match in 1888 by arranging for flowers to be placed on the graves of the eleven players in that match. Easier said than done: while eight of the players can be found within a few miles of Glasgow, the other three are in Brooklyn, Pennsylvania and Prague. Read about it at the Celtic Graves website or follow @celticgraves on twitter for updates and photos.
   Meanwhile on the other side of Glasgow, the fine work of the Gallant Pioneers website continues to promote the early history of Rangers. They have a regular Founders Trail to visit key places, and make the point - which applies to so many clubs: 'We were told often enough that people just weren't interested in the history of the Club but time and again the supporters have proved them wrong.'
   And just to prove how much interest there is, Gary Ralston's book on the Gallant Pioneers has just been republished in paperback by the author and is now selling briskly on Amazon.
   Regular visitors to this blog will know I've long had a similar interest in early Scotland internationalists, particularly those who played in the first match in 1872. Pictured above are two gravestones, for Joe Taylor (left) in Glasgow, and JJ Thomson in London. I've now located ten out of the eleven players, although not all have a headstone.
   The team captain, Robert Gardner, continues to elude me. He died in 1887 away from home, in South Queensferry, while working on the Forth Bridge project, and there is no record of a local burial. Chances are, therefore, that he was taken back to Glasgow but I have scoured the available burial records (on barely legible microfilm in the Mitchell Library) without success.  It's a challenge, certainly, but when I do find him I will be making sure he is properly commemorated.

Out of interest, here are the final resting places of the other ten, starting with those in Scotland:
James Smith (1876): Urquhart Old Cemetery, Elgin.
Joseph Taylor (1888): Cathcart Cemetery, Glasgow.
David Wotherspoon (1906): Southern Necropolis, Glasgow.
Alexander Rhind (1923): Tomnahurich Cemetery, Inverness.
William Muir Mackinnon (1942): Westburn Cemetery, Cambuslang.

Elsewhere:
Robert Leckie (1886): Olifants Bosch, South Africa.
James Biggar Weir (1889): Warrina, South Australia.
Robert Smith (1914): Graceland Cemetery, Chicago.
James John Thomson (1915): East Finchley Cemetery, London.
William Ker (1925): Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington DC.

The full stories of why they were in those far-flung places can, of course, be read in my book First Elevens: the birth of international football

My article remembering Dr Jimmy Paterson, of Rangers and Arsenal, is published in The Scotsman today [click on link], a fascinating tale of a fine football career interrupted by the First World War.
   What it doesn't reveal is the extraordinary coincidence that led me to write it, one which I am sure will resonate with all sports historians. It just happened that my parents, who live in Edinburgh, mentioned that their next door neighbour's father had played football. So I duly went next door and spoke to Jimmy Paterson's daughter Mhairi, now in her eighties, who brought out a file of cuttings and photos. 
   I was also able to find newsreel footage of Paterson playing (and scoring) for Arsenal in 1926 on the British Pathé website [click on link]. She had never seen film of her father playing football before.
   There was nothing for it but to write his story - especially when it became clear that no-one had done so before!

The full text of my Scotsman article on Jimmy Paterson, with his career statistics, can be downloaded here as a pdf or read it below.

THE GOOD DOCTOR OF RANGERS AND ARSENAL
 
By Andy Mitchell
 
'Are you not playing for the wrong side?' There are some things a Scottish footballer can never be prepared for, and one of them is playing for England.  Such was the fate of Dr Jimmy Paterson, who was born in London where his father, a Presbyterian minister, was preaching.
   In all other respects the talented winger was a Scot through and through, and one hundred years ago this month, Paterson won the first of his Scottish League titles with Rangers. He repeated the exploit after being decorated for bravery in the Great War, and would surely have won Scotland caps were it not for the accident of his birth.
   In fact, international recognition came instead in the white shirt of England: as his career seemed to be heading to a close, he had returned to the city of his birth and signed for Arsenal as an amateur. He did so well that he was selected to represent the English League against their Scottish counterparts.
   He was greeted by his former team mates with affection as well as a ribbing that he was not really English.  And, as if disoriented by wearing an England shirt, when Paterson was presented with a bunch of flowers by a young girl just before kick-off, he still had them in his hand as the referee's whistle blew. Too polite to throw them on the ground, he ran up and down the wing clutching them for several minutes until he found someone he could hand them to. It was a measure of the man, who had none of the failings proverbially attributed to the offspring of clergymen.
   Brought up in Glasgow, he was sports champion of Bellahouston Academy, and his performances in the team that won the Glasgow Secondary Schools League attracted the interest of Queen's Park. Soon rising to their reserve team, the Strollers, he then caught the eye of Rangers manager William Wilton and the youngster signed at Ibrox in September 1910. Although he made his debut that month because of an injury to the veteran Alec Smith, Rangers were content to let him develop in the reserves, as he embarked on his medical studies at Glasgow University.
   Paterson broke into the Rangers first team in November 1912, two months after his father's death, replacing Billy Hogg at outside right. He made an immediate impact and was widely heralded in the press, notably in a lyrical tribute from the legendary Walter Arnott. Rangers duly won the league by four points and Paterson made his first trip abroad on the club's tour of Denmark. The following season he switched to the left wing, where he developed a prolific partnership with Tommy Cairns that lasted until his graduation as a doctor in 1916.
   In the depth of war, there was a severe shortage of doctors, and he was immediately appointed Medical Officer to the 14th Battalion the London Regiment, the London Scottish. With the rank of Major, for the next two years he had a torrid time on the front line, where 'Doctor Pat' earned enormous respect from his fellow soldiers. One of them wrote in the Regimental Gazette: 'We loved him for the trouble he took. We loved that kindly word of encouragement that did us more good than all the 'number nines' ever issued ex-stores. If that little medico works as hard in the football field as he worked that night, heaven help the opposition!'
   There was formal recognition, too, and he was awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry in 1917: 'Under an intense hostile bombardment he hastened to the spot, dressed the wounded and cleared them from the road, personally seeing to their removal to the aid post. He then returned and cleared the dead from the road, setting a fine example of coolness and disregard of danger.'
   When hostilities ceased, after three years away from football, he made a surprise return to Glasgow. A journalist later recalled: 'One day in September 1919, I learned from Jimmy's younger brother Bobby that Jimmy had been posted to a Glasgow hospital. He added that, if I turned up at Ibrox Park the following evening, I might see Jimmy playing against Raith Rovers or, on the other hand, I might not. Jimmy had just arrived in Glasgow, untrained, and carrying too much weight, and was scared stiff at the idea of being thrown into action so soon. His homecoming had not been made public but, quickly recognised by the Ibrox clientele when he ran on to the field, he was given a reception that nearly took the lid off the south stand. Despite his extra 'tonnage' he was at his brilliant best that evening, including a bonny goal that earned him another deafening ovation.'
   Paterson's wing partnership with Cairns was restored and Rangers romped to the 1919-20 league title. However, he had a medical career to think of, and as early as December 1919 there was press speculation that Paterson intended retiring at the end of the season to join his brother-in-law, John Scott, in a London medical practice. Several city clubs were reported to be chasing his signature, among them Spurs and Chelsea, but the decision was effectively made for him as Scott was Arsenal’s club doctor. Before he left Glasgow, the Rangers brake club supporters showed their appreciation by presenting him with a solid silver coffee and tea service, valued at 100 guineas (equivalent to about £3,000 today).
   In the autumn of 1920 he signed as an amateur for Arsenal but continued to be rewarded by the club, although the form of reward was, well, different: he was presented with 'gifts' such as a baby grand piano from Harrods, a diamond-studded tie-pin, and a fine Venetian vase.
   Following a series of outstanding performances on the wing, in March 1921 he was selected for the Football League against the Scottish League, coincidentally played at his new home ground of Highbury. Before the match he came into the Scottish dressing room to shake hands with all the players, and was photographed with three of the Scots, but the sentiment ended there and his cross led to the game's only goal, headed in by Charles Buchan late in the second half.
   He clocked up over 70 appearances for Arsenal in four years although, as an amateur, he had to balance his football with work as a doctor. On one occasion he missed the team's train to Liverpool but Arsenal arranged for a later train to make an unscheduled stop at Edge Hill, where a car was waiting to whisk him to Anfield, arriving just in time for kick-off.
   Paterson retired from football in 1924 but had a curious swansong two years later. Arsenal had an injury crisis in February 1926 and signed Joe Hulme from Blackburn, but he was cup-tied so manager Herbert Chapman turned to Paterson for a surprise recall in the FA Cup. He showed he had lost none of his magic by scoring against Aston Villa, and newsreel film of that goal can be seen online.
   Not long afterwards he left London for good and moved to a country practice at Bramley in Surrey, staying there until he retired to Ayrshire in the 1950s. His daughter Mhairi, who now lives in Edinburgh and recently saw that newsreel footage of her father for the first time, recalls him watching wistfully as soldiers prepared for D-Day: although he said nothing about his own wartime experiences, he knew what horrors lay ahead for them.
   Dr Paterson died of a heart attack in 1959, aged just 68. Despite being considered one of the outstanding talents of his day he was never given the recognition he deserved with a Scotland cap, through no fault of his own. But in true amateur spirit he had no regrets and, despite playing for two of Britain’s most glamorous teams, recalled in an interview shortly before his death: 'My happiest football days were at Good Old Bella'.

My story on Andrew Watson is published in the Scotsman newspaper today, revealing for the first time what became of the pioneering black Scottish football player.
   For many years it had been thought he died in Australia in 1902, but there has never been any documentary evidence to back that up. I decided to start from scratch, examining his life step by step, but the biggest and most obvious clue was that he showed up in a search in the 1911 census. The fact that he had a wife and two children - not the same wife and children he had 20 years earlier - just made the research more challenging and interesting. I found his first wife had died age 22, leaving their son and daughter to be brought up in Glasgow with their grandparents. Watson married again, had two more children, and lived in Liverpool and finally London, where he died in 1921.
   A fascinating element of his story is that he was the product of a Scottish planter and a Guyanan woman. His father, Peter Miller Watson, was a former slave owner who was compensated by the British Government for the freedom of his slaves in the 1830s; so when he left £35,000 in his will to Andrew Watson and his sister Annetta, giving them financial security for life, much of their fortune derived from the misery of slavery. Little is known about his mother, whose name is given as Anna Rose on his first marriage certificate and Hannah Rose on his second; but as one of his father's wealthy business associates was called Peter Rose, possibly she was linked to his household.
   I have yet to visit Watson's grave, but will do so next time I am in London. Meanwhile, if anyone else would like to go to Richmond Cemetery and take a photo or leave a bunch of flowers, it is in Section 4, grave plot No 6321.