Almost two hundred years ago, the world’s first football club was established in Scotland by a young lawyer and his friends in Edinburgh.
   The Foot-Ball Club remained active from 1824 until 1841, with around 300 recorded members. As the world’s first known organisation dedicated to football it is a crucially important episode in the development of football, yet its full story has never been told.
   Now, I am working with John Hutchinson on a detailed history of the club, together with a biography of its founder, John Hope (pictured above). It is not just a story about football’s early days, it also looks at the players and their impact on Scottish society.
   Hope is not given enough credit by historians for his contribution to the early development of football, where the focus is often on the founding of the Football Association in 1863, on the public schools, on Sheffield and so on. For example Sheffield FC, founded in 1857, have actually incorporated into their crest a claim to be ‘the world’s first football club’. It simply isn’t true. They might be the oldest surviving club, but the first? No way.
   For a definition of what constitutes a sports club, this is what Hope himself had to say in a letter:

The football club resumed in October; the fun first-rate.  I played for three hours on Saturday.  Had business not kept me from the field this winter, I would have been in splendid wind.  As it was. I am pretty swift, and am still a good hand at rolling down my opponents. Mr Esplin is very keen, and the life of the club.  He brings out the men.  He plays first rate.  He gives a splendid ground kick - so sure.  We mutually respect each other, but we are daily approaching to a keener contest.  He has had more practice that I, and carries six years less than I do.  He is short, and there is no upsetting him; but I hope to roll him next Saturday.  The club gave occasion to some very spirited caricatures by my brother Jamie, I being, of course, the principal butt.  We got new caps, very neat, improved by Esplin, like jockey caps.’

There, in one quote from the 1830s, are embodied all the essentials of a sporting club: the playing, the physical contact, the organisation, the team uniform, the rivalry, the respect for fellow members, the hope that it will all be better next week, the futile attempts to regain lost youth, the regret for not training enough and the laughter and camaraderie of a group of healthy and energetic young men united for one specific athletic purpose.

The next event for which we have hard evidence dates from 1851, when the students of Edinburgh University challenged the 93rd Highlanders, garrisoned in Edinburgh Castle, to a match. The losers were to present the winners with a silver medal. Won by the soldiers, that medal is preserved in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders collection at Stirling Castle, and is of enormous sporting significance – the world’s oldest football prize.
   The link to John Hope? The silversmith who designed the medal, James Mackay, had a son James who was schoolmate of John Hope and a member of the Foot-Ball Club – so he was no doubt able to advise on the correct manner of play for the image.
   John Hope wasn’t done yet. In 1854 he opened a playground in Stockbridge, where he encouraged boys as well as girls to play football. He laid down the rules of play – which bear similarities not just to his 1833 rules, but also to the future codes for association football. There was no hacking, no handling, and goals were scored between the posts.
   Then, when association football finally came to Edinburgh in the 1870s, John Hope founded one of the city’s first clubs for the soldiers in his volunteer regiment, the 3rd ERV. He actually kicked off their first match, and was presented with the trophy when they won their first cup.
   When Hope died in 1893, he left most of his fortune to the Hope Trust, which preserved his papers, over 200 boxes of them, in our national archives, now called the National Records of Scotland. The football records were discovered by the historian Dr Neil Tranter, of Stirling University, who first wrote about the club in the 1990s, and we are now researching it in greater detail, a far reaching project which will culminate in a full scale book later this year.
   Meanwhile, we have recently published an article in the academic journal Soccer & Society. It is a subscriber publication which can be accessed at this link, but for those who do not have a subscription please get in touch via the contact form on the home page.
   A report on our findings has also been published in Scotland on Sunday, and can be read via this link.

This is a book I would love to have written – imagine finding that one of your ancestors was a famous footballer, one of the greatest of his age, yet now almost forgotten. What a great opportunity to bring him back to life!
   That was the challenge facing Clive Nicholson, who is Fred Spiksley’s great great nephew. He has devoted much of the last 20 years to researching Spiksley’s biography, and has dug deep into conventional and less likely sources to uncover every aspect of his life story. A huge amount of work left no stone unturned and the resulting book is substantial and fascinating, extending to 390 pages packed with detail and accompanied by numerous photos, several of which are new to me. Another factor that makes this book different is that instead of launching into the publishing world himself, Clive brought on board professional writers and designers.
   Fred Spiksley (1870-1948) was an England international left winger whose most famous period came at Sheffield Wednesday, but whose career encompassed a wide range of clubs.
   Having written a biography of Arthur Kinnaird, I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to bring Victorian characters to life, and the authors do manage it very well for Spiksley, demonstrating an understandable fondness for his skills and forgiveness for his flaws. It turns out that Spiksley was not just a fine footballer of international class, who went on to an adventurous coaching career in several countries, he was also a compulsive gambler, a womaniser and possessed of a unpredictable temper.
   There are anecdotes galore as the authors provide an insight into the precarious world of football in the early professional era: the brutal tackles, the appalling conditions for players and spectators, the financial pressures and the shady characters.
   One of the reasons the book is interesting to a Scottish audience is the authors' claim that Fred Spiksley scored a hat trick for England against Scotland in 1893, which would have been the first. All the contemporary reports attributed the final goal to John Reynolds, but later on a number of observers, including Spiksley, claimed it for himself. The case for attributing the goal to Spiksley is not particularly well detailed in the book itself, but is outlined in great detail on their dedicated website, spiksley.com.
   Having read it through carefully, some of the background research is impressive but I have to say I am not convinced, although the arguments have been accepted by others, including the influential englandfootballonline site. It was only many years later that people started to claim that Spiksley had scored a third. The main justification for the 'error' is that the journalists' view of the match was obscured, but I find it hard to believe that the reporters from Sheffield, who knew Spiksley well, did not recognise him as the scorer, or did not quickly correct such an obvious error for a local readership. Especially if, as the authors say, 'Fred was bombarded by a horde of Scottish reporters once he left the sanctuary of the pavilion'. Did they not ask him?
   There is also the assertion that Spiksley was presented with a gold chain by the FA to mark his achievement. Again, there is no contemporary report of a presentation, nor an FA Council minute or note of expenditure in the accounts, and the chain is now lost.
   Ultimately, it is impossible to prove either way, but there are many similar instances in football history of stories arising years after the event which have no foundation in the truth. In fact, the authors inadvertently perpetuate another of these, writing that Jack Lyall, Sheffield Wednesday’s  goalkeeper, was 'picked to play for England only for it to be established that he had been born in Scotland' (page 262). Not true. There is no contemporary evidence to support this, and as far as I can gather this apocryphal story first emerged in Lyall's obituaries.
   Another criticism is that the book would have benefitted greatly from a rigorous editor. I know the authors had a difficult time getting the book into print as their deal with a publisher collapsed, but there are numerous formatting errors and text repetitions (eg several times it was a 'miracle that no one was killed' in a crowded stadium). The text also sometimes veers off at a tangent, as their enthusiasm for detail gets in the way of a good tale. For example, the fact that an England player had a telephone in 1893 is interesting but a potted history of the development of the telephone industry is superfluous; and a bizarre paragraph about Britain's waning colonial ambitions in the middle of a review of the 1896/97 season (page 197) is utterly irrelevant.
   Those quibbles apart, the book succeeds in bringing Fred Spiksley to life - notoriously difficult to achieve in football biographies - and deserves the wide audience it appears to be finding. It has benefitted from an innovative marketing campaign, using the whole toolbox of social media, personal appearances and interviews, publicity stunts and pestering journalists, which all conspired to boost sales, and it is now into a reprint; which teaches a lesson to other sports historians (like myself) who should really be better at publicity.
 
Flying Over an Olive Grove has a cover price of £19.99 hardback, and can be ordered post free from spiksley.com