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 

I recently wrote the story of Robert Main Christie, the Dunblane man whose amazing list of sporting achievements included playing for Scotland against England aged 18, scoring a goal in an FA Cup final, winning the Scottish Cup, curling for Scotland, and founding the local golf club. You can read the article, published in the Scotsman, here.
   It was a timely coincidence that Andy Murray, a major contemporary sporting talent from the town, was showered with awards this week, including freedom of Stirling and an honorary degree. 
   By contrast, Christie's life was all but forgotten and only in death is he commemorated, having been gassed in the final year of the first World War. He was such an interesting man that many details had to be left out of the article, not least that as I write this I can see the schoolhouse where Christie's father was the dominie, next door to the family home where he was brought up. Contemporary accounts describe how Christie and his friends founded a football team in about 1877 aged just 12 or 13, and in time Dunblane FC grew to be a power in Perthshire, winning the county cup eleven times; the story of the team could well be my next big project.
   He was also very active in curling, a regular player in the local rink and also a vocal critic of the Royal Caledonian Curling Club at their annual meetings. And an enthusiastic golfer, and angler, and billiards player.
   His death was as horrible as it was tragic. Aged 52, he could probably have stayed at home with his wife and five kids, but spent most of the war in khaki: in France, Greece and back to France. In May 1918, while commanding the 101st Labour Company, he and his troops came under a bombardment of German shells at the little village of Foncquevillers. The high explosives did plenty of damage, but unknown to the men who survived was that other shells contained mustard gas, silent and odourless but utterly deadly: a few hours after exposure the first symptoms began to show, and soon the skin and lungs were covered with burns and ulcers for which there was no treatment, no respite apart from death. Christie died after four days of agony, but I came across others who suffered for weeks, even months, before dying. Some of the memorials to him in Dunblane are pictured below: on the main war memorial, in the cathedral and in the masonic lodge.
   He was one of over 100 local residents to be killed in the conflict, and they are all commemorated in a fascinating new book by local historian Ed Campbell: Dunblane War Memorial: Remembering Dunblane's Fallen (£12.99, on sale from local shops or Reveille Press).

The course of sports research is full of twists and turns, but one that really had me scratching my head was the case of two prominent Victorian footballers from Scotland with the same name.
   The record books show that Thomas McInnes was capped by Scotland in 1889 while with Cowlairs, and that he was prominent on both sides of the border through the 1890s. Trouble is, there was another Thomas McInnes playing at the same time, who was equally prominent, Scottish and a forward, and for a while they both played in the same city, Nottingham. The result is confusion, and many record books get them mixed up. It took hours of trawling through newspaper reports to sort them out, but I am confident that I have the definitive stories. (With thanks to Paul Joannou for his input.)

Thomas McInnes, the internationalist
Born Glasgow 22 March 1869 (not 1870 as widely stated); died Luton 17 January 1939.
   Started his career with Cowlairs in the late 1880s, and was capped for Scotland v Ireland on 9 March 1889, scoring the final goal in a 7-0 victory. Went to Notts County in December 1889 and despite being Scottish was selected for the Football League in their first match against the Scottish League on 11 April 1892. The following month he returned to Scotland and joined Rangers, playing in a few end-of-season Charity Cup ties and the opening four league matches of the new season.
   In September 1892 he was welcomed back at Notts County but first had to serve a month's FA suspension for having playing in Scotland (those were the rules at the time!). In summer 1893 he went north again for a season with Third Lanark, and then joined Everton for three seasons until 1897. He was at Luton Town from 1897-99, and wound up his career at Bristol Rovers and Bedford Queen's Engineers before retiring in 1901.
   Outside of football, McInnes worked in an iron foundry in Luton, and remained in the town until his death aged 69. He married Sophia Irvine and had two sons.
   The cuttings below show a drawing of McInnes in 1899 (Dundee Courier) and an obituary (The Scotsman).

Thomas McInnes, the FA Cup winner
Born Bowling, Dunbartonshire, 8 July 1873; died Dalmuir, Dunbartonshire, 1 December 1937. 
Full name: Thomas Fair Macaulay McInnes.
   McInnes went to Newcastle as a 16-year-old, primarily to find work as a rivetter. It was only once he got there that he signed up for Newcastle East End in December 1889, and played for them until the summer of 1891, also making occasional appearances for Newcastle West End. He spent the 1891-92 season in Glasgow with Clyde, then moved to Nottingham Forest in the summer of 1892. In his first season he was at City Ground while his namesake was playing across the river at the County Ground.
   He had eight fruitful years with Forest, winning the FA Cup in 1898, and nearly won a Scotland cap as he was twice selected for the Anglo-Scots in the international trials of 1897 and 1898. Then in 1900 he moved to Lincoln City, where he had three seasons. That should have been the end of his playing career, but he had a brief swansong on returning to Scotland, signing for Port Glasgow Athletic in January 1905, and scored on his debut in a Scottish Cup tie against Stranraer. He made just one league appearance the following month.
   McInnes married Ethel Pearson in Lincoln in 1903 and they had four children.

One of the great benefits of the digital age is the ability to find new material at the click of a mouse, often in places you would never have dreamed of looking. So, many thanks to the University of Toronto's Robarts Library for taking the trouble to digitise a 1912 book titled 'A history of the frozen meat trade' (click on link to open). 
   It's not exactly bedtime reading, but it does contain this photo and a short biography of a Scottish football pioneer, JJ Thomson, who not only played in the very first international of 1872 but also captained Queen's Park to victory in the 1874 Scottish Cup Final. His cap and medal are in the Scottish Football Museum.
   Like many early footballers, he came from obscure origins (born 1851 near Annan) and went on to become a highly successful businessman. He made his fortune in the meat trade, and by the time this book was published he was chairman and managing director of Eastmans Ltd. When he died in London in 1915, he left £46,000 in his will. [See also my previous blog post about him]

To mark this week's international between Scotland and USA at Hampden, I wrote up the fascinating tales of the two men who had played football for both countries, Barney Battles and Jack Marshall. It was published in the Scotsman (click here to link).
   While the story of Battles is relatively well known, finding out about Marshall was quite a challenge. He was generally assumed to have been born in Saltcoats in the late 1890s or even - according to one of his American clubs - in 1902. A detailed look at his playing career made those dates highly unlikely, as he started out with Saltcoats Victoria in 1911, but nobody in census returns seemed to match his profile. It was further complicated that his birth name was John, but he was generally called Jock or Jack in the press.
   Experience has taught me there are always clues out there, and the breakthrough came in a newspaper cutting that described his departure for the USA on the Cameronia in September 1924. I was able to check the ship manifest on ancestry, which listed him, his wife and three sons. The next stage was to find his marriage, which meant a trip to the ScotlandsPeople centre in Edinburgh, and by noting his parents on the marriage certificate I eventually found his birth: 24 April 1892 to John Marshall and Annie Cathcart at Braehead, Baillieston. The location was a surprise, but it transpired his father was a miner at the Braehead pit (no longer there, the site is just off the M8 motorway east of Glasgow), and it was clear from later census returns that the family moved to Saltcoats while John junior was a small boy.
   His football career could be tracked through the British Newspaper Archive and US soccer archives such as the excellent Bethlehem Steel site, but what happened to him once he hung up his boots? I found John Marshall in the US censuses in 1930 and 1940, living in Kearny, New Jersey, working as a labourer. That seemed to be the end of the line, as New Jersey deaths are not online, but by a stroke of luck I found a family tree - again on ancestry - that seemed to match. I got in touch with the owner of the tree, and she was able to provide not just a precise date of death, 10 October 1964, but also a photo of his gravestone in South Amboy, NJ, where he is buried with his wife. In return, I could provide details of his life.
   All in all, a satisfying conclusion to the search for a notable player, who was not just a captain of Scotland but also a highly respected star in his adopted USA.

John 'Jack' Marshall
Born Baillieston, Lanarkshire, 24 April 1892.
Died Morgan, New Jersey, 10 October 1964.

Playing career
Saltcoats Vics 1911-14 (inc a trial for Rangers res)
Shettleston Aug 1914 (three games only)
St Mirren 1914-19. Won Victory Cup 1919
Middlesbrough Nov 1919-23
Llanelly 1923-24
Brooklyn Wanderers 1924-25
Newark Skeeters 1925-27
Brooklyn Wanderers 1927-28
Bethlehem Steel Aug 1928- Aug 29
(On loan to Philadelphia Centennials for two games in Nov 1928)

Representative appearances
Feb 1913, junior international trial
3 January 1917, Home Scots 2 Anglo-Scots 1 at Hampden, War Fund match (scored one)
19 April 1919, Ireland 0 Scotland 0 at Windsor Park, Victory International

Seven caps for Scotland
12 Feb 1921, Scotland 2 Wales 1 at Pittodrie
26 Feb 1921, Ireland 0 Scotland 2 at Belfast
9 April 1921, Scotland 3 England 0 at Hampden (captain)
4 Feb 1922, Wales 2 Scotland 1 at Wrexham (captain)
4 March 1922, Scotland 2 Ireland 1 at Celtic Park
8 April 1922, England 0 Scotland 1 at Villa Park
16 Feb 1924, Wales 2 Scotland 0 at Cardiff

One cap for USA
6 November 1926, USA 6 Canada 2 at Brooklyn Ebbets Field (scored one)

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.

For Scotland fans of a certain vintage, there are matches that stay fresh in the memory above all others. Forty years ago was one of those, the 2-1 victory over Czechoslovakia at Hampden Park which ensured Scotland would take part in the World Cup finals for the first time in a generation.
   That game on 26 September 1973 wasn't the first time I had seen Scotland play, but it is the first match I can remember them winning. It had such a huge impact on me, as an impressionable 15-year-old, that I kept the following day's newspaper. I still have it, and Allan Milligan's front page photo (above) of toothless Joe Jordan being congratulated by Tom Hutchison remains a classic image of unbridled Scottish celebration.
   More importantly, the win raised Scotland's football aspirations. It gave us confidence that we could compete on the world stage - this was the first of five consecutive qualifications - and also helped to shift the traditional attitude that beating England in the British Championship was the most important game of the year. 
   Our World Cup qualifying group seems ridiculous by modern standards. Just three nations, with the amateurs of Denmark making up the numbers, and group winner qualifying for West Germany. Scotland under Tommy Docherty breezed past the Danes home and away, while the Czechs could only, inexplicably, draw in Copenhagen before putting six past them in Prague. With two games remaining, that unlikely draw made our target simple: win at Hampden to reach the World Cup finals, regardless of what happened in Bratislava the following month.
   Simple? Hardly. 1973 had begun with a new manager, Willie Ormond, and an SFA centenary celebration game against our traditional rivals which turned into an embarrassing 5-0 rout; there would be another, albeit narrow, defeat at Wembley in May and by the autumn Ormond had lost five of his first six matches.
   In the media, there was scant optimism, and Ian Archer in the Glasgow Herald was particularly gloomy: 'There is no reason to believe that the Scotland of 1973 can succeed where the Scotlands of 1961, 1965 and 1969 have failed before them,' he wrote. 'Only the old adage that hope springs eternal will comfort the impassioned and the patriotic.'
   Nonetheless, the game was a sell-out, Hampden having been restricted to a crowd of 100,000. For the rest of us (particularly those like me with school to go to in the morning) there was the rare treat of a live broadcast on STV. It began ominously, a hard physical battle with no quarter given. I can still hear Arthur Montford intoning 'And that's disaster, absolute disaster for Scotland' as a nonsensical long shot from Nehoda evaded Ally Hunter's flap and crept in at the far post. It was 'a freak goal' according to the Scotsman. As half time approached, the hopes of the nation were revived as the big defender Jim Holton leapt above the Czech defence (and Denis Law) to head home a corner. All square at the break. 
   The second half was the stuff of legend. We saw a Scotland side which was disciplined, having to ensure there was no repeat of the opening goal while chasing a winner, and even the Scotsman's John Rafferty, not one for hyperbole, was 'thrilled to see this Scottish team play it with such composure'. In the 64th minute, Ormond replaced Kenny Dalglish with the robust figure of Joe Jordan, a game-changing move. Little more than ten minutes later, came the decisive moment: a Bremner shot hit the inside of the post and rolled agonisingly along the goal line and apparently to safety; but it came to Willie Morgan and his cross with the outside of the boot found the unmarked Jordan in front of goal, who found the net with ease. It was bedlam thereafter, a hysterical finale which lasted till the Norwegian referee blew for time. You can see the goals from the game on Youtube.
   Denis Law, who made his debut just after the 1958 World Cup and had suffered through those desperate failed campaigns of the 1960s, gushed: 'I don't think I have ever been happier in my life.'
   Below are the full front and back pages of the Scotsman, and while the paper is a bit yellowed with age, the memories remain fresh. In those days, football on the front page was something extraordinary, and that just about sums up what this meant.