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

Scottish football historians will know that the youngest ever internationalist was John A Lambie, who made his debut against Ireland in 1887 aged 18 years and 63 days; however, he was first selected the previous year aged 17, although unable to play. It will surprise many to know that he was not the first 17-year-old to be selected for Scotland.
   I recently spent a few hours in the library of Glasgow Academy, going through the school registers. Although this is a rugby-playing school, the blurred distinctions between round and oval ball games in the early days of organised football resulted in several Academicals becoming prominent association football players and I have found at least four Scotland internationalists: Frederick Anderson (capped 1874), Alexander McGeoch (1876-77), William Turner (1885-86) and Woodville Gray (1886).
   Pictured above, Woodville Gray has a fascinating story. Born in 1866, he was the son of William Gray, the proprietor of Gray Dunn & Co, a well-known Glasgow biscuit manufacturer. Their factory at Kinning Park is still a prominent city landmark next to the M8 motorway, although derelict. The Grays were Quakers, and young Woodville was sent to the Bootham School in York, a Quaker establishment, from 1879-82. There he learned to play association football, so when he returned to Glasgow Academy for the final year of his education, 1882-83, he joined Pollokshields Athletic rather than play rugby for the school.
   He was fast and talented so, despite being just 16 and still at school, in April 1883 he was selected by the Scottish FA for the Glasgow select against Edinburgh. After leaving the Academy that summer, the honours continued and he played again for Glasgow v London (in London) in December 1883, then was named in the Scotland team to face Ireland in Belfast on 26 January 1884. He would have been 17 years and 230 days but 'was compelled to decline the honour' (Scottish Athletic Journal).
   Gray was named as a reserve for two more internationals (v Wales 1884 and Ireland 1885) before finally winning his solitary cap against England in March 1886, three months before his 20th birthday.
   Meanwhile, his club career was also interesting. Although he remained with Pollokshields Athletic until the end of the 1880s, he guested for Queen's Park from time to time, winning the Glasgow Merchants' Charity Cup in 1883 (age 16) and 1885. Even more notably, he was brought into the Queen's Park side for the 1885 FA Cup Final against Blackburn Rovers, as a replacement for the injured William Harrower - a perfectly acceptable substitution under the rules of the time.
   Woodville Gray married Gulielma Payne in 1891, had two sons and two daughters, and moved to Birkenhead where he worked as a printer. He died there in 1938. His elder son, Henry Woodville Gray, signed for Everton in 1919 as an amateur but never made the first team and had to give up the game a couple of years later after a bad injury.

More info on the Gray family can be found here: http://www.guise.me.uk/gray/index.htm 

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?

Update: an earlier carving of a football is in Wardsend Cemetery, Sheffield, in memory of a footballer called George Beaumont who was killed during a match on Christmas Day 1877. Click here to read his tragic story.