The arrival of Scott McTominay and Billy Gilmour at SSC Napoli has added to the list of distinguished Scottish footballers in Italy. But they are not the first Scots stars in Naples, as my new research has found that the very first football captain in the city was born in Glasgow.
   His name was Peter Jackson, and he was elected captain of Naples Foot Ball Club at their inaugural meeting in the spring of 1906. He was a key player as organised football made its first steps in Naples but only remained with the club for a couple of years. His identity has remained hidden until now.
​   Naples FBC is a direct ancestor of SSC Napoli, which came into being in 1926 but its exact date of founding is uncertain. Around 1904/05 a group of Italian, British and Swiss residents with links to cricket and rowing came together to play football, and in February 1906 they established a standalone club.
   Peter Jackson was a popular choice as captain at that meeting. An influential player who led by example, when he left Naples at the end of 1907 for work reasons, his departure was perceived as a 'heartfelt loss' according to Stampa Sportiva, which said he had 'trained his team with such diligence since the formation of the NFBC'.
   Somewhat misleadingly, the same article called him a champion player of 'the First Union of Newcastle', which has baffled historians as there is no such club. So, who was Peter Jackson? 

It took a lot of research to track him down, as although there is a link to Newcastle it was not immediately obvious. I found that Jackson had come to Naples to work at the Stabilimento Armstrong armaments factory at Pozzuoli, a couple of miles west of the city. This was a subsidiary of WG Armstrong & Co, based at Elswick in Newcastle, where it had a massive plant for naval munitions and shipbuilding.
   Jackson had actually learned his football at school in Harrogate, where he attended Western College along with his elder brother Thomas. They both played for the school, then progressed to the Harrogate Corinthians amateur team. Peter was good enough to be picked for the town select in 1903.
   The reason he ended up in Naples is that he followed his father into the steel-making industry. His father James, from Glasgow, was a metals expert whose career had taken him as far as Russia. While there, he married his Scottish wife Janet in St Petersburg, and when they came back to the UK their second son Peter Ainslie Jackson was born in Govan, the shipbuilding heart of Glasgow, in the summer of 1883.
   The family did not remain in Scotland for long as James Jackson then took up a post as foreman steel smelter in Newcastle, moved to Harrogate and came back to Newcastle in the mid 1900s. Peter appears to have been taken on by WG Armstrong but was sent to the Pozzuoli factory to serve his apprenticeship. He was clearly a useful employee, as his name appears in the Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute in 1907, for contributing to a research project.
   He was not the only Pozzuoli apprentice to play for Naples, as the name of George Pratt appears in some early reports.
   However, their time in Italy concluded at the end of 1907 when Jackson and Pratt were recalled to Newcastle, probably because there was an Italian management buyout of the Pozzuoli plant.

I can find no evidence of Peter Jackson playing football once he returned to Newcastle, but he was perhaps focussed on his rising career as a steel engineer. He was clearly prosperous as in 1913 he was reported to have a motor car - a rare luxury in those days - and he remained in Newcastle for the next decade. After getting married in 1917 he took up a job in Manchester, first with Armstrong Whitworth at Openshaw, then at the Trafford Park steelworks, where he was manager of the melting shop.
   He was still in post when he died in 1939, aged just 55. As he had no children, and his siblings did not marry, there were no descendants to carry on the family name. 

At a time when two modern-day Scots are making such an impact in Naples, it is worth remembering that the football-mad city opened its arms to another Scotsman over a hundred years ago.

Peter Ainslie Jackson
Born 28 June 1883 at 23 Burndyke Street, Govan, Glasgow.
Died 8 May 1939 at Mellor, Cheshire.

​Naples football pioneers

In the course of researching this article, I identified some other early Naples players:

William Henry Potts (1883-1959) was an important player for Naples through their first decade, one of the founders of the club and its captain after Peter Jackson left in 1907. After winning the Lipton Challenge Cup for the second time in 1911 he joined US Internazionale Napoli. Originally from South Shields, he came to Naples as a young man and remained there until the Second World War, apparently as a local agent for the White Star Line. He spent his final years on Merseyside, dying in Southport.

Harry Saltmarshe (1870-1929) was not only a player but also club treasurer in 1907. He moved to Naples around the turn of the century and worked for Dent Allcroft & Co, luxury glove makers. Originally from London, he married in Naples and spent the rest of his life there.

George Archibald Pratt (1888-1971) played alongside Jackson in the first games between Naples and Rome in 1907. An engineer, after returning to England he became a well-known tennis player in Cheshire, and even played once at Wimbledon against Bill Tilden.

Harold Frederick Greaves (1881-1962) appears in an early team line-up. Originally from Derbyshire, he was a shipping clerk in Liverpool before heading to Italy, and married in Naples in 1907.

​George Edgar Little (1884-1961) played for Naples in 1906 and settled in the city for most of the rest of his life, although was forced to return to his home town of Liverpool during World War 2. He was a director of a pharmaceutical firm, Bell Sons & Co Ltd, and died in Naples.

I have more detailed information about these players which I will gladly share if you contact me using the form on the home page.
​

I would like to thank Felice Ba, football historian in Naples, for his assistance in researching this article.

Click on these links to the site Calcio Antico for further information on the early years of Naples Foot Ball Club:
La fondazione del Naples
Pionieri del Naples

Only two male Scottish footballers have ever played in a title-winning side in Italy. It happened way back in 1905, when Jack Diment and James Squair starred for the Juventus team that won the club's first 'Scudetto'.
   Despite that remarkable achievement the pair remain almost unknown, even though precious few Scotsmen have featured at the top level in Italy over the years. The most notable names are Denis Law, Graeme Souness and Joe Jordan, while currently Liam Henderson and Aaron Hickey are starring in Serie A, but none of these fine players ever won a title.
   While it has to be acknowledged that Diment and Squair were amateurs and hardly of the same standard, they have a fascinating story and their lives followed remarkably similar paths through work, football and even in marriage, before tragedy intervened.
   Of the same age and background, they met in Newcastle as they embarked on a career in shipping, and while many records state that they joined Juventus from Newcastle United, the truth is that they were never on the club's books and their names do not appear in any contemporary British football records.
   However, they must have played football at some level in England before they were sent to Turin in the autumn of 1904. Aged 19 and 20, they joined the staff of Walter F Becker, an influential steamship owner with interests in several Italian ports, whose company Navigazione Alta Italia ran the Creole Line. He also had a passion for football, having founded a club in Messina (Sicily) in 1901.  
   Shortly after their arrival, the two young men were pitched straight into the Juventus team. They made their debuts on 13 November 1904 in a 1-0 defeat to Genoa, a contest for the Palla Dapples – the silver ball donated by Henri Dapples for a series of challenge matches which saw the winner retain the elegant trophy. 

They soon became an integral part of the team. Diment at right half was known as 'Il Mulo' – the mule – for his tenacity and no-nonsense approach, while fair-haired Squair at inside left was quick and creative, pitching in with the occasional goal.
   Early in 1905 their influence was an important factor as Juventus lifted the Campionato Prima Categoria title, the predecessor to Serie A. By modern standards, it was not a lengthy campaign, with Juventus first winning the right to represent Piedmont by beating city rivals Torinese.
   That qualified them for a mini league where they faced the champions of Lombardy and Liguria, US Milanese and Genoa respectively. The three teams played each other, home and away, over six weeks and Juventus had no difficulty defeating Milanese twice, with Squair scoring one of the goals, while both games against Genoa ended in draws.
​   That left them with six points before the final match of the series when, to general amazement, Genoa failed to beat Milanese. This meant that Juventus, a point clear, were declared champions of Italy for the first time (and they would not win it again until 1926). 

Amidst the celebrations the triumphant Juventus team posed for the cover photo of La Stampa Sportiva, with Diment and Squair taking pride of place. But while the two 'foreigners' were widely referred to as English, both were from Scottish families and many of their descendants still live in Scotland.
   James Macgregor Squair was born in Edinburgh in 1884 and spent his early years there but sadly his mother died when he was only three. When he was about eight he moved briefly to London, where his father remarried, then to Newcastle, where he went to school. He started working as a shipbroker's clerk in the city but there is no record of his sporting activities in the local press apart from an appearance for a minor cricket club.
   John Bowman Diment, known as 'Jack', was born in Plymouth in 1885 but that was only because his father, a Sergeant in the Gordon Highlanders, was posted briefly to Devonport Barracks. Jack was only on the south coast of England for the first six months of his life and when the family returned to Scotland he was brought up in the village of Durris, west of Aberdeen. When his father left the army they moved to Newcastle where Jack found a job with a shipping agency. He, too, was not mentioned in local sports reports.
   After their title success, Diment and Squair continued to feature regularly for Juventus for three eventful seasons. The side came close to retaining the title in 1906 but when a play-off against Milan ended in a draw, Juventus refused to replay the match in protest at the venue being in their opponents' city, and Milan were awarded the title.
   During the 1906-07 season Juventus recruited another British player, goalkeeper James McQueen, also with Scottish roots but born and brought up in London.
   However this was a time of discord within the Juventus ranks and when a breakaway club was formed in the city, called Torino, several players moved across. Almost their first act was to knock Juventus out of the 1907 Campionato, in the very first Turin derby, which prompted more players to leave.

Among them were the Juventus foreigners, with McQueen first to leave and he was followed in the summer by Diment and Squair. They all played for Torino in 1907-08, concluding the season with an international tournament, but after that the team started to break up and they went their separate ways.
   McQueen, who was a language teacher, headed for a new job in the south of France where he played for Olympique de Marseille and eventually won the French title in 1913 with Stade Helvetique.
   Squair, meanwhile, went to Naples having been appointed as local manager for Peirce Brothers, an off-shoot of Becker's shipping agency. This marked the end of his football career, even though there was a club in Naples, as he had other things on his mind: he was in love with Mabel Stroud, daughter of an English lace manufacturer who was based in Turin.
   Mabel followed Squair to Naples and they were married at the British Consulate in March 1909. In November they had a daughter called Emily but tragically he died just five days later, probably from illness although his death certificate does not state the cause. He was only 25.
   Meanwhile, Diment remained in Turin and was in a relationship with Mabel's sister Olga. He spent another season with Torino, playing his last matches for them in March 1909 when the team won the Palla Dapples on two consecutive weeks.
   His work then took him to Milan and within a week of moving, he joined Milan Cricket and Football Club (which became AC Milan) and played regularly with them for a year. In December, in the newly-expanded Prima Categoria, he showed he had lost none of his combative spirit when he punched an Andrea Doria player in retaliation for an off-the-ball kick, provoking a crowd invasion and an abandonment.

By then, Olga had returned to England for the birth of their daughter Ruby, and that probably prompted Jack to leave Italy in the summer of 1910 to come home. This seems to have been the end of his football career as he married Olga and they returned to Newcastle.
   During the First World War, Diment joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a driver and spent five years in uniform, serving in Salonika until he was invalided home in 1916. As a personal note, I was fascinated to find that he travelled back on the hospital ship Britannic, on which my own grandmother Sheila Macbeth was serving as a nurse; the ship was sunk by a mine in the Aegean Sea on its very next voyage but she survived to tell the tale.
   After he recovered, Jack was posted to France, but surprisingly when the conflict was over he volunteered to remain in the army for an extra year in Germany. This was perhaps an indication that his marriage to Olga was on the rocks, as he later divorced her.
   The lure of Italy was still strong as he returned to the country, remarried to Kate Clarke in 1932, and their son Donald was born in Turin. After the second world war, Jack and Kate settled near Hull, where he died in 1978 at the grand old age of 93.
   Not many Scottish footballers have found success abroad, so let's celebrate Jack Diment and James Squair, whose exploits with Juventus, Torino and Milan are little known, and whose Italian title win in 1905 remains a unique achievement.
 

John Bowman Diment
Born 1 June 1885 in Devonport, Plymouth
Died 12 October 1978 in Castle Hill Hospital, by Hull, Yorkshire
Juventus 1904-07
Torino 1907-09
Milan 1909-10
 
James Macgregor Squair
Born 28 September 1884 in Edinburgh
Died 30 November 1909 in Fuorigrotta, Naples
Juventus 1904-07
Torino 1907-08


​NB in the opening sentence I specified 'male footballers' because at least a dozen Scottish women have played professionally in Italy, with several of them winning league titles including Rose Reilly, Edna Neillis, June Hunter and Maria Blagojevic.