Sporting history continues to throw up surprises, the latest being the discovery of Louis Bruce, who in 1908 became Britain's first black competitor at the Olympic Games. His story was published today in The Guardian, and I was delighted to play my part in uncovering the details of his life, not least the fact that he was born in Scotland. 

Louis Bruce's identity had been lost to history in the past century. He was known as an early black tram driver but his first name was mistakenly recorded as Lewis. In Olympic records, his name was thought to be Lawrence. It was only the discovery of his original entry form to the 1908 Olympic Games that the truth started to emerge, and a team of sports historians set to work.
   He comes across as a remarkable character. He was born in Edinburgh in 1875, an illegitimate birth to a widowed mother from Plymouth, then brought up in Devon by his grandmother before heading to the capital for work. He was taken on by London United Tramways, passed his tram licence in 1900 and worked for the company for at least 20 years, based at Fulwell Depot, rising to the rank of Inspector.
   Being a tram driver was a tough job, standing on the open platform in all weathers, directing a large machine with a load of passengers on board. However, he was clearly good at it, being the personal driver for the managing director of the company, Sir James Clifton Robinson, who had a private tram at his house for going to and from work.
   He was not the only black driver at LUT as, in contrast to the racist attitudes of the time, Robinson was enlightened enough to be quoted as saying: 'I make no distinction in race, colour or creed; all I want is steady, reliable men of good character, no matter what they have been.' (Weekly Dispatch, 6 September 1903)
  Sadly, not everyone agreed with those sentiments. Another black driver with LUT was Alexander Frazer, born in Jamaica. In 1905 he had lost his job and was convicted (probably unfairly) of street gambling near his home in West London. At his trial, the presiding magistrate was reported as saying to him 'Why don't you get back to Jamaica and grow bananas?'.

Bruce was also a keen sportsman and took part in the annual tramway sports with success, winning events ranging from race walking to boxing. But it was as a wrestler that he earned his fame. He was a member of Hammersmith Amateur Wrestling Club, one of several who were selected for the GB team in 1908. He reached the second round of the heavyweight catch-as-catch-can (ie freestyle) wrestling contest.
   During WW1, being too old for military service, he left his tram duties to work as a hospital auxiliary for the British Red Cross. Then, after the war he continued as an Inspector before opening a newsagent shop. He died in Sutton aged 82 in 1958. 

There remains one significant mystery about Louis Bruce: the circumstances of his birth, including the identity of his father. 
   He has a complicated family background. His mother was Jane Elizabeth Mortimore (1842-1925) who married Henry Doney, a cab proprietor, in Plymouth in 1862. They had six daughters in quick succession before Henry died in 1870 aged just 33.
   In the 1871 census, the newly-widowed Mrs Doney had four daughters with her in Plymouth, while the other two were staying nearby with her mother and sisters. There is nothing to indicate Jane Doney had ever been outside Devon before, but four years later she was in Edinburgh, giving birth to an illegitimate son. What took her to leave her family and travel to Scotland is unknown, although she described herself on the birth certificate as a Lady's Nurse.
   The full name given to the boy was Louis Bruce McAvoy Mortimore or Doney. His father was not named but, assuming the mother was white, he must have been black. 
   The place of birth was Paradise Cottage in Morningside, which was then a growing suburb at the southern edge of Edinburgh. It was close to the entrance to the Royal Edinburgh Asylum but there is nothing to link Jane Doney with the institution - neither she nor any potential father is named on their staff lists.
   The assumption must be that Jane took up a job as a Nurse and, despite the need to leave her daughters behind, that job somehow took her to Scotland where she had the relationship that led to Louis being born. She spent at least several weeks in Edinburgh as the birth was not registered until February, but then appears to have returned to Plymouth as she remarried there in 1879; she had another son with her new husband, Richard Dingley Hobbs. Louis, meanwhile, was now using the surname of Bruce, and was brought up in the village of Plympton St Mary by his grandmother and aunts.
   The only clue to the identity of his father comes from Louis' marriage certificate, where he named him as William King Bruce, medical practitioner. So far, all attempts to identify this man have failed, so perhaps this was a false name, or someone who was only briefly in this country. There is also a mystery about the origin of Louis' other given name, McAvoy, as there is nobody of this name in his mother's family, so again one can only speculate. 
   While the search for the full story of Louis Bruce continues, his discovery as a pioneering black athlete is yet another example of sports history having to be rewritten. 

Louis Bruce, Olympic wrestler
Born 17 December 1875 in Edinburgh
Died 31 March 1958 in Sutton

As I write, Belgium are set to face Scotland at Hampden Park, fresh from an excellent World Cup campaign which saw them finish in third place. Yet perhaps their greatest honour came in 1920 when they won Olympic gold in the football tournament, and much of the credit went to their Scottish coach, Willie Maxwell.
   Maxwell is a key figure in the development of Belgian football, having gone to Brussels in 1909 after a fine career which included a cap for Scotland against England in 1898. Born in Arbroath, he started out in his home team where he represented Forfarshire aged 18. He played briefly for Hearts and Dundee before joining Stoke in 1895, where he was the club's top goalscorer in five of his six seasons there. Rated one of the top forwards of his era, Stoke turned down serious money for him but after he suffered a knee injury (thereby missing a second cap) he lost some of his speed. He had a season at Third Lanark in 1901-02 before returning to England with Sunderland, Millwall and finally Bristol City, where he won a Second Division championship medal in 1906.
   Like many prominent players of the era, he went to the continent to coach and took charge initially of Leopold FC in Brussels. Part of his remit was to teach the players how to shoot, and he also took them on a short tour to England. He was optimistic about the future for Belgian football, according to this article at the end of 1909:

   In 1911 he was asked to coach the Belgian national team, and was also training another club side, Daring FC. He threw himself into Belgian life, and even represented the country at cricket in 1913. He had always been a fine batsman and had played for Arbroath, Staffordshire and Bedminster during his football career.
   Although his Belgian appointment was curtailed by the First World War, he returned after the conflict and his greatest triumph came in 1920 at the Olympic Games, held in Antwerp. Belgium, as hosts, beat Spain and Netherlands to reach the final against Czechoslovakia. With Belgium leading 2-0 towards the end of the first half, English referee John Lewis sent off a Czech player and the rest of the team promptly walked off in protest. The Belgians were awarded the gold medal, and were essentially world champions (albeit this competition was for amateurs only).
   Maxwell remained as national team coach until 1928, after which he coached Malines (Mechelen) for a decade, and finally led Cercle Bruges to the second division title in 1937/38.
   He returned to Staffordshire and his wife's home town of Stone, where he is buried, although he died in Bristol.

William Sturrock Maxwell, born Arbroath 21 September 1875, died Bristol 14 July 1940. 

As the first Scots-born Olympic gold medallist, Sandy Hall has outstanding credentials to be a national sporting icon. Yet this prolific goalscorer from Peterhead remains unheralded in his native land - because his greatest achievement came with a Canadian team.
   The son of a whale fisherman, Alexander Noble Hall was brought up near Peterhead harbour but spurned the sea to earn his living by cutting granite. The hard physical work kept him fit and he played centre forward for his home town team, but there were few signs of the glory to come, an Aberdeenshire Cup final being a rare highlight.
   That would all change when the young man travelled to Canada in 1901 in search of adventure, picking up work on construction projects. After a couple of years his stonecutting took him to Galt, west of Toronto, a small nondescript town which just happened to have the top football team in Ontario. With the added ingredient of Hall's goals, the Galt eleven would achieve an extraordinary triumph: Olympic gold.
   The 1904 Olympiad in St Louis was the first where medals were awarded in association football, the winners recognised by the International Olympic Committee even though the competition was limited to just three teams from two countries. Galt defeated the University of Toronto for the right to represent Canada, then headed south to Missouri in exuberant fashion on the Grand Trunk Railway. They were backed by 50 supporters, including the town's mayor, who paid $10.70 each for the round trip on a special train decked in red and white.
   Hall, the only non-Canadian in the eleven, scored a hat-trick in the opening match on 16 November, as Galt thrashed Christian Brothers College 7-0; the following day they defeated St Rose Parish 4-0. Without conceding a goal against these two local sides, the Galt players were duly declared Olympic football champions and trooped off to the Department of Physical Culture to be presented with gold medals. One of those precious prizes, won by fellow forward Fred Steep, is now on show at the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame.

Until then, the only athlete with Scottish connections to have won an Olympic title was strongman Launceston Elliot in 1896, but he was born in India and brought up in England. Sandy Hall thus became Scotland's first home-grown Olympic winner, and to this day remains our only footballer (the Great Britain gold medal teams of 1908 and 1912 were all English).
   Yet when Hall returned home a year later, his Olympian status counted for little, and after a trial with Aberdeen reserves he picked up again for Peterhead in local amateur football. There the story might have ended but he was spotted by Edinburgh side St Bernard's, who liked his direct bustling style, and they offered him the chance to play professionally. He made a sensational start to his senior career at the age of 25, scoring a hat-trick against Dumbarton, and his goals in 1906/07 were a major factor in Saints winning the second division championship.
   This scoring prowess brought him to the notice of bigger clubs, and there was none bigger than Newcastle United, who had just clinched the English first division title. They paid £200 to take him to Tyneside in 1907, and again he made an immediate impression with ten goals in three end-of-season tour games in Germany; but when it came to the rigours of the Football League he made little headway and played just six times, scoring twice. United were happy to sell him to Dundee before the season was out.
   Again he made an early impact, netting a cup double against Aberdeen on his debut, but Hall was used only sparingly as cover for Dundee's established forward line, and had to be content with banging in the goals for the reserves. His chance to shine eventually came in the 1909-10 season with an extended run at centre forward, replacing first the ageing John 'Sailor' Hunter then George Langlands. Hall scored a hat-trick that saw off Motherwell in the Scottish Cup quarter-final; but after failing to find the net in the semi he was dropped for the final, cruelly missing out on Dundee's epic cup victory over Clyde. He played his part nonetheless, as a fixture backlog forced Dundee to play 12 games in April, and he turned out in several league matches to keep the stars fresh for the final. There was no medal for him, but Hall's role as understudy was acknowledged with a place in the cup-winning squad photo.
   No sooner had the season ended than he was off to Portsmouth, where he was offered work as a stonecutter, but he failed to settle with just three goals as his team finished bottom of the Southern League. He returned to Scotland with Motherwell, ironically signed by their new manager John Hunter, who had taken Hall's place in Dundee's cup final team, but failed to find the net even once.
   While playing success eluded him, Hall hit the headlines for a different reason in the summer of 1912 while visiting his mother in Peterhead. Hearing shouts that a boy was drowning, he ran down the harbour embankment, shed his clothes, and swam out against a strong current to save 5-year-old Alick McKenzie. Both the Carnegie Hero Fund and the Royal Humane Society recognised his bravery.

   Back to the football, he joined Dunfermline, who had just been elected to the second division and needed experience up front. Hall rewarded their confidence with a Fife Cup victory in his first match and scored 18 league goals in his debut season. Also working as groundsman, he was into his third campaign with the Pars when war intervened and he signed up as an artillery gunner, travelling to the front to bombard the Germans. In a letter home, published in the Dunfermline Journal, he complained about squalid conditions and weak beer: "You can get a dozen into you and still belong to a temperance lodge." It was a tough existence and within months he became so seriously ill that he was sent home, suffering from rheumatic fever.
   The war inadvertently revealed that his family life was quite a tangle. Hall and his partner Elizabeth Gibson had had three sons, but although each time they stated on the birth certificates that they were married, in fact they only tied the knot late in 1915, perhaps with the realisation that there would be dire financial consequences for her in the event of his death.
   As it happened, he survived unscathed and after demob in 1919 was still fit enough to embark on a football swansong at home in Peterhead, coaching and playing well into his forties. However, while he won another winner's medal in the Aberdeenshire Charity Cup, the episode ended in farce in 1923 when most of his team refused to play Aberdeen in a Scottish Cup tie. They were upset at the club's decision to sell ground rights, and Hall led out a hastily-assembled makeshift eleven who suffered a record-breaking 13-0 thrashing at Pittodrie. It may have been a factor in his decision that summer to emigrate to Toronto with his family, this time for good.
   As Sandy Hall faded into distant memory, his death in Canada in 1943 went almost unnoticed in Scotland, even in his native Aberdeenshire. Yet the first Scots-born Olympic gold medal winner retains a unique place in our sporting history, and deserves to be remembered as a local hero in the truest sense of the word.

Alexander Noble Hall
Born Aberdeen, 3 December 1880
Died Toronto, 25 September 1943

Football career
Peterhead 1898-1901
Buckie Thistle 1901
Toronto Scots 1902-03
Galt 1904
Westmount, Montreal 1905
Aberdeen A 1905
Peterhead 1905-06
St Bernard's 1906-07
Newcastle United 1907-08
Dundee 1908-10
Portsmouth 1910-11
Motherwell 1911-12
Dunfermline Athletic 1912-15
Peterhead 1920-23

Honours
Olympic gold medal 1904
Scottish Second Division Championship 1906-07
Lanarkshire Cup 1912
Fife Cup 1912, 1914
Aberdeenshire Charity Cup 1921
Carnegie Hero Fund award 1912
Royal Humane Society award 1912
Wartime service medals


Article copyright Andy Mitchell. With thanks to Les Jones, Colin Jose, Gordon Baird and the Andrew Carnegie Hero Fund Trust for their input.

A rare winner's medal from the only Olympic final ever held in Scotland is to be sold soon in Glasgow. McTear's Auctioneers will put the 1908 yachting medal under the hammer on 4 March.
   A couple of years ago I wrote about the 12-metre yacht race won by the Hera on 11 and 12 August 1908. Skippered by Thomas Glen-Coats MP with a crew of ten, it held off the challenge of the Mouchette to take gold - although only the skipper's medal was actually gold. The crew members each received a silver medal, and it is one of these that is being auctioned.
   Unfortunately, McTear's don't give any provenance for the medal so it is not possible to say which of the crew it originally belonged to. They estimate it will sell for around £3-5,000.

Update: hammer price was £3,400

Looking into the history of Scottish Olympic gold medal winners recently, I was sidetracked by the life of Launceston Elliot, who won gold at the very first Olympics in 1896 for the single-handed lift. Although the wrestler and strong man is generally regarded as Scottish because of his family background, and is in the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame, he never lived in Scotland.
   He was born in 1874 in the small Indian town of Kaladgi, now in Karnataka but at that time under the Bombay Presidency; his father was magistrate and collector there. The town is currently under threat of being submerged because of the Almatti Dam project, but that is another story.
   Elliot came to England as a teenager when his father retired, and travelled under his own steam to compete at Athens. His life is well told in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography (click for link).
   He ran a farm called Highfield at Mottingham in Kent, but when he (or rather his father) hit financial problems in 1903 he was forced to cash in on his strength and turned professional. He got involved in product endorsement, and his name appeared next to adverts for Cadbury's Cocoa: "I find nothing so refreshing and nourishing after a severe feat of strength".
   He also went on the stage, and this took him to Scotland, probably for the first time. He made an 'important appearance and first engagement' at Aberdeen in August 1903.
   He took his act as far as South America, but returned to Scotland in 1908. The 'magnificently developed and proportioned British Hercules' performed twice nightly at the Palace Theatres in Aberdeen and Dundee, part of a nationwide chain of music halls. What tickled me was the advert for his show on Saturday 8 February 1908, which was 'Under the Patronage of the Aberdeen Football Club'. Quite why the football club should have gone into the music hall business is not explained.
   He left Britain behind for good in 1923 and died in Melbourne seven years later - his grave was refurbished a couple of years ago. Whether he can really be hailed as a Scottish sporting hero is open to question, given his limited connection to the country, but by all accounts he was a proud Scot. 
He was certainly a fascinating character.