Chapter 3
A Beginning
In fact even 59% would not be the maximum Scots contribution to success in England’s League. On three more occasions, 1898, 1901 and significantly, given a subsequent event, 1927 it would be over half and in 1902 at 61% it even topped three fifths. However, whilst these occasions are in themselves markers in the story of the embedding of Scots football in English game or, as I personally would maintain and hope to show, its more or less complete takeover we have also to have a context, an understanding not so much of how it happened but why. And to do so we have to cut through the mythology that has been draped like a shroud over much of Scotland’s official footballing history to a match that is barely recorded but was crucial both at home and has since proved pivotal worldwide.
The exact date of the game in question, perhaps little more than a grand kick-about, remains, as far as I am aware, unknown. The location is, however. It is a small, triangular piece of ground beside a river, where there was once a village recreational area, the Park Neuk, where now there is a small housing estate and where to my mind there should be a tastefully small but obvious memorial. And it was there in 1872, in the late summer or early autumn so September or October, probably the former, and most likely on a Sunday afternoon, so the 15th, 22nd or 29th that a group of middle-class, South Glaswegians met with what we know to be mostly working-men, drawn from the village itself, from other nearby villages and from the nearest, large town. Furthermore we know they met on a shinty pitch for that was what there was with Camanach then the local working-man’s, autumn and winter game of choice.
The middle-class men were from the Queen’s Park Football Club, formed in 1867 to play to Association rules but in the meantime having had hardly a kick in anger, and they came on a mission, which might even have had something of an air of desperation. They were looking for opposition to play their code because, frankly, back in Glasgow they seemed to have found little or none and there was another sport, rugby, which equally frankly looked as if it might simply sweep them and it aside.
On 27th March 1871 an official international football fixture had taken place in Scotland for the first time. But, whilst it had been rugby, watched by a crowd of 4,000 and Scotland had won, the venue had been at the Academicals sports ground, but the one at Raeburn Place in Stockbridge so in Edinburgh and not Glasgow. Moreover, protocol insisted that the following year’s fixture would be in England so distant. It was actually played and lost on 5th February 1872 at the Kennington Oval in London. That was before it was due to return to Scotland a year and a month later on 3rd March 1873 and this time to Glasgow, with certainly a window of opportunity but more than that, what has now to be seen as one combined with a stroke of serendipity.
Now, whilst from 1870 a series of five, now somewhat ungraciously deemed unofficial, international England-Scotland association football matches had taken place with the last of them on 24th February 1872, they had been somewhat artificial, involving just Upper-class players and, bar one, in the Scotland teams only Anglo-Scots. Moreover the matches had all taken place in London, Scotland had not seen one of them and, although also with Kennington their venue, they had never attracted more than six hundred and fifty spectators. But between the fourth and fifth of them a crucial suggestion had been made and by the same instigator, the perhaps prophetically-named Charles Alcock, Honorary Secretary and Treasurer of the Football Association, the English Football Association. It was for a Cup competition, open to all clubs including essentially the only functioning one north of the border, Queen’s Park, where an invitation was duly received and accepted. However, problems there were still a-plenty. The Glasgow club was drawn in the first round in November 1871 against Donington School from Leicestershire and as chance would have it, at home. It is likely that the school could not afford the cost of travel to Glasgow so it was agreed that both could advance to the next round without playing, at which moment fortune struck once more. In the second round too the same two teams were again drawn to face each other once more with Queen’s Park at home, at which point the school unable to find the £2 per head for the journey to Glasgow definitively withdrew.
Thus Queen’s Park’s players found themselves in a third round of only five teams, of which it was the fifth. Two games were played. Neither involved the team from Glasgow. They were given a second bye. In the first of the games The Royal Engineers beat Hampstead Heathens. Then Wanderers, Alcock’s team, and Crystal Palace had drawn, so in order to have four teams, two games in the semi-finals both were allowed through just as they had been in the previous round.
Albeit that it was already somewhat farcical the semi-finals were then to be played at the same ground, the Kennington Oval once more, and Queen’s Park travelled down. Both games were drawn 0-0, Queen’s Park’s on Wednesday 5th March 1872 and in contrast to the rugby of two days earlier relatively good news. The Royal Engineers, based at Chatham, then defeated Crystal Palace in a replay on 9th March but Queen’s Park had found itself unable to finance the stay to allow the same against the Wanderers, the largely self-acclaimed, best team in the land. The match, the round was therefore forfeited and it was indeed the Wanderers, with Alcock as captain, which on 16th March went to win the final by a single goal.
However, whilst there was eventual disappointment the Queen’s Park saga had generated publicity, on the back of which and rising interest a sixth international was proposed, with agreement that it should take place on St. Andrew’s Day, 1872, so 30th November. Originally some of the players to have taken the field in the unofficial internationals and who were England-based, notably the Scottish peer, a certain Lord Arthur Kinnaird of the Wanderers, were due to play but withdrew. It left Queen’s Park bringing back ex-players the Smith brothers from London, where they were turning out for South Norwood, filling the other places with current players and club-captain, Robert Gardner, as Scotland’s first, official international skipper. It would prove fortuitous.
However, in the meantime we return to Park Neuk. The river at its foot is the Leven. The village is Alexandria, the neighbouring ones Renton and Bonhill. The large town nearby is Dumbarton. And the shinty-playing, young men worked locally in the dye-works and mills, hard work that required strength but still more so fitness and stamina. In fact they were qualities perfect for rugby and it was that game the Vale of Leven Athletic and Football Club intended to play on its formation on 24th August 1872. Indeed preparations on the other side of the village were begun of a ground, which would be known as Cameron’s Park after its owner, John Cameron.
In fact it may well have been the announcement in the local Press of the new club, which might have prompted a rapid response from Queen’s Park, hence the probable September date for what was set up as an exhibition game against locals with still more from across West Dunbartonshire joining and slotting in and out. And the net results were that firstly Vale of Leven decided to change codes, Renton formed its own football club within weeks and Dumbarton did the same in December.
The decision and the first formation were before the St. Andrew’s Day international. The second formation was just after it. The game itself would take place at the West of Scotland Cricket Ground in Partick, perhaps a deliberate choice to pay for a space that would only allow a constrained pitch, when a larger one had been available for free but would have been much more like the pitches the supposedly bigger and faster English would have been used to. Charles Alcock would be one of the umpires, Henry Smith, President of Queen’s Park the other, an umpire from each team on the pitch as was the convention then, with the referee, Queen’s Park Secretary and reserve, William Keay, on the sidelines. Between 2,500 and 4,000 looked on, the number uncertain because woman accompanying a gentlemen were not charged. The result was a 0-0 draw and to achieve it at the behest of Gardner Scotland had played a formation never seen before. England lined up as a then conventional 1-2-7. Scotland played a box-formation in defence, so 2-2-6.
That the match was a success is an understatement but perhaps it actually pales in long-term importance to those that were to take place from three weeks later and over the following three crucial months. On 21st December still in 1872 Vale of Leven travelled to Queen’s Park and, although losing 3-0, were far from disgraced, in spite of probably still stops to explain rules. And nor were they on following 11th January, when 0-0 was the score in the reverse fixture, or in losing the next game in February or again drawing for a second time at Cameron’s Park on 1st March with 1,500 said to be watching on, by which time three aspects of the game had unnoticed been changed and forever. The first was that Scottish football in the form of Queen’s Park had found regular opposition and there would be more to come. The second was that working-class football had found both its first practitioners and exponents. And the third was that Scots football would to Gardner’s defensive innovation of a month earlier begin to add through not the thinking but the practice of an ancient game of the people more innovations in attack and what we now call mid-field that would, firstly, mark our game out and, secondly, be the root-stock of the modern game. It is no coincidence that at its outset Vale of Leven, because it knew no other, would take the field in shinty formation and for the next few years play the new game with the same and then blended muscle-memory.
And matters off the pitch also then began to move at pace. On 3rd March, two days after the fourth Vale of Leven Queen’s Park encounter, the Scottish Rugby Union was formed and ten days later still the Scottish Football Association (SFA) followed, initially of eight clubs, six in Glasgow including, of course, Queen’s Park, plus Vale of Leven and Kilmarnock, and again crucially it followed Alcock’s example down south by the rapid creation the Scottish Cup. It kicked off on 18th October 1873 now with all the SFA members, a total of a dozen teams from Glasgow and in addition Renton and Dumbarton, sixteen clubs in all. It was precisely the same number, including Queen’s Park once more, that would compete in the English FA Cup that year. It kicked off a day later. Indeed, whilst the following season the numbers in Scotland and England were twenty-five, but now including a first from Edinburgh, and twenty-eight respectively, by the season after that, 1875-76, and as just one indication of just how football passion gripped north of the border the numbers were heavily reversed, twenty-eight still in England, all incidently bar one, Sheffield, from the South, but forty-nine in Scotland and, again unlike England, from across the social spectrum. Queen’s Park would still take the trophy in both years but there was now a military presence in 3rd Lanark, 23rd Renfrew and 3rd Edinburgh, increasingly distant town clubs like Kilbirnie, Mauchline and Ayr within an Ayrshire triangle to the south, nine clubs from Leven Vale and to Glasgow’s north, Lennox. The spread had begun.
Chapter Four