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.

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.

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.

A regular challenge in researching the early footballers is that published information can be wrong: a name might be spelled wrongly in an old book, and that is how it remains for ever more, without being subject to further scrutiny. One such example which I stumbled across recently was that of MJ Eadie Fraser, who won five caps for Scotland between 1880 and 1883, scoring four goals in the process. At Queen's Park (pictured above) he won two Scottish Cup medals and was club secretary in 1882/83. According to the Queen's Park history (1920): Scotland never had a better forward than Eadie Fraser, known to everybody as the  "Graceful Eadie". His movements were perfect. His popularity was extraordinary. On the field and off it he was a thorough gentleman, and never descended to those tricks which tend to bring the game into disrepute. 
    He is generally named as Malcolm James Eadie Fraser, but a bit of digging found that the J actually stood for John. A bit more digging turned up the fact that he was born in Canada and died in Australia, quite an unusual journey for a Scottish footballer.  Here, for the first time, is a summary of his life:
    Malcolm John Eadie Fraser was born in Goderich, Ontario, on 4 March 1860, the third and youngest son of Rev John Fraser and Sarah Ann Lawrie, who also had three daughters. His father, a native of Grantown-on-Spey, trained for the ministry in Canada with the Presbyterian Church, and the boy was probably named after Dr John Eadie, professor of biblical literature, who was a leading Presbyterian. The family returned to Scotland in 1862 when his father was admitted as a probationer by the church, and in time was appointed as the first minister of the new Cumberland Street UP church in Glasgow's Gorbals.
    Young Eadie became a good footballer and was just the right kind of player for the pre-eminent club in Scotland, Queen's Park, talented and gentlemanly. However, at the peak of his powers, just before his 24th birthday he left Scotland to take up a job in West Africa (I have yet to ascertain what and where). The following year, in 1885, he became ill and to escape the climate became the sole passenger on the cargo ship Ardmore travelling to Australia. Within days of docking at Sydney, however, Eadie Fraser died in the city's Prince Alfred Hospital on 8 January 1886.
    He was buried in the vast Rookwood Cemetery, but the story does not quite end there. Later in 1886, some Australian friends launched a memorial fund [link] to erect a suitable headstone to a great footballer. Unfortunately, it seems not enough money was raised, as in May 1887 a meeting of the Southern British Football Association reported "The Chairman, Rev A Miller,  referred to the proposal to erect a headstone at the grave of Eadie Fraser, the Queen’s Park club to defray the cost of the railing. No action was, however, taken in the matter."
    A final quirk to the story is that one of Eadie Fraser's Scotland team-mates in 1880 was Andrew Watson, famously the first black international player. It has been reported (but I have not found confirmation) that Watson also died in Sydney in 1902. Could it be that Watson and Fraser are both buried in the same cemetery - reunited on the other side of the world?