There are a dozen years between the two photos above. The first is the English High School team of 1899, the year it re-entered the Argentine Football League, in reality the Buenos Aires football league, winning it, and the year before it changed its name to Alumni. The second photo is of the Alumni team in 1912, the season before it folded. It was a brief existence, not quite even a decade and a half, but one which was pivotal to not just football in Argentina but also South America.
The Buenos Aires English High School, now simply the English High School, which exists today in the Buenos Aires suburb of Belgrano, was founded in 1884 by Scots, Alexander and Margaret Watson Hutton. Watson Hutton
was himself a player, featuring in early friendly encounters in the capital and intent on his school practising football and not rugby. Nevertheless by the time of the formation in 1891 of the first Argentine Association Football League (AAFL), in reality confined only to the city, his boys were not ready. Still young and few in number they played but only friendlies at a junior level. And the reality is it was still the same when the AAFL was relaunched in 1893, although, in spite of being men against boys and Watson Hutton, President of the league, at times including himself in the XI, they stepped up.
In that first year of the second AAFL BA English High would finish second to bottom, fourth of five in a league won by a new team, Lomas, from the city's southern suburbs. The following year, although Watson Hutton remained league president, the team was said to dissolve, some of it players, including John Moore, moving to others, not least the newly joining Lobos from a town outwith Buenos Aires and rejoining St. Andrew's from the city's Presbyterian community. In fact the reality was that the BA English High School team was on hold not dissolved, Alex Watson Hutton, having just lost Margaret to cancer, with other priorities, not least their three young children.
However, the school, having dropped Buenos Aires from its title, would return the following year, 1895. It would fill the penultimate spot once more, this time fifth of six. And then it was gone again. Watson Hutton was reorganising the school. He would also step down as league President and over the next two years was recruiting, not players but pupils and staff, teachers and others. More players were in fact leaving. In 1896 sixteen year-old Jorge Brown was turning out outwith the league for Palermo Athletic from the suburb immediately to the north of central BA and in 1897 for Lanus as it joined the league, finishing a very creditable second.
One of the new teachers to arrive was Andrew Mack. Anglo-Irish and red-haired, a Cambridge graduate, he had clearly been a player in England and it seems on his arrival in Buenos Aires accepting or perhaps given the task of taking on the School's football. In 1898 the English High School Athletic Club was formed and a new and proper sports field acquired. In 1899, clearly regenerated with a number of young players coming through, not least a string of younger Browns, brothers of Jorge, grandchildren of Scottish immigrants, it joined the league's new Second Division. Mack was in the team. In fact he would captain it to 1902 and continue to play until 1911.
English High did not top the 1899 Second Division. Yet in 1900, having been runner-up by a single point, with the young players coming through, Walter Buchanan, goalkeeper John McKechnie, a son of Scots, several others, Jorge, Thomas and Carlos Brown, returning from school in Britain, and William and Herbert Jordan rejoining from Lanus and Lobos, the latter being excluded literally for being too far out of town, it was clearly thought to be strong enough to rejoin the league and promoted over Banfield. The confidence was not misplaced. The four-team league was won by five points without losing a game and it lost only in the semi-finals of the new competition that year, the Copa Competencia, to Rosario Athletic.
But there was then a slightly strange episode. An objection was raised by or at least channelled through the AAFL, effectively the Argentine Football Association, against the use of English High School as a team name. It is said to have been deemed advertising. The team was threatened with demotion to the newly-formed Third Division, to which EHS's response was simple. The team name was changed to Alumni Athletic Club still with Watson Hutton as club president and it carried on. Indeed, in footballing terms the name-change made no difference. Alumni topped the 1901 league and also won the Copa Competencia, defeating Montevideo's CURCC in the semi- and in the final avenging the previous year's Rosario Athletic defeat.
In fact so strong was Alumni with a steady flow of young, proficient players still feeding through from English High School's Youth section and its ability also to attract players from outwith that it would be champion again in 1902 and 1903 and also reach the Competencia final in both years, losing one, after two replays, and winning one, again to and over Rosario. Indeed the 1902 league was won without losing a game. That year too it provided five of the players that were included in the first official and in fact majority Diasporan Scots, national team, two Browns, Jorge and Ernesto, two Buchanans, Charles and Walter and the captain John Moore, after the previous year a John Anderson XI, with many of the same players, captained by Anderson himself and including Mack, had in Montevideo played a Uruguayan representative XI and won. Regarded by some as the first South American international it is officially unofficial. In fact the only blot, and a minor one at that, was was Rosario Athletic finally winning another Cup, an internal Argentine one, the Tie, overcoming Alumni after two previous failures and now two replays. Moreover, it was also the year of the Argentine footballing début for Alumni of a second Watson Hutton, Arnold, Arnoldo, Alex's sixteen year-old son by Margaret Budge, and, at the age of forty-nine, of Alex Watson Hutton's second marriage. It took place at the St. Andrew's Scotch Church and for his new wife he had gone no further than his early life in Scotland and his own school. She was Catherine Waters, the younger daughter of his ex-landlady in Edinburgh, both of whom he had brought to Buenos Aires as school matron and assistant matron, in the same reorganisation that seen Andrew Mack's arrival. That was having almost two decades earlier also brought Catherine's brother to help at the school. Indeed William Waters is said to have brought the first proper footballs seen in Argentina with him, had built up a sports equipment business and too would never go back, dying in Buenos Aires in 1906.
In 1903 the AAFL had been won by Alumni with just one loss, to Belgrano with the championship already assured. Yet in the 1904 season it was Belgrano that would take it. Alumni was runner-up. Nor would the team get beyond the quarter-finals of the Competencia. In spite of another Brown, Alfredo, being the league top-scorer the team was beginning to age. McKechnie retired. The club recruited. Laforia and Gottlieb Weiss came from Barracas, Patrick Browne from Flores. Nineteen year-old Charles Lett came in and, with him as top scorer and John Moore temporarily replacing Jorge Brown as captain, order in 1905 was restored. Alumni dropped only one point all season yet still was beaten in the Competencia by CURCC, as it was in the the new Cousenier Cup by Nacional once more from Uruguay. The only compensation was a win in the new domestic competition, the Copa de Honor, over local rival Quilmes.
There would, however, be no such failures the following year, perhaps the first of Alumni's best seasons. In 1906 all three cups were won as was the league with a single lost game. And it was done with a team that again had been reinforced both from outwith and within. Andrew Mack, Charles Buchanan at centre-half, and four Browns were included as were Letts, Browne, Weiss and Laforia but there was a familiar name in addition. At centre-forward was a returned Arnold Watson Hutton. He had been sent to Scotland to study medicine but returned aged just nineteen without completing, indeed hardly starting his course. In reality his talents lay elsewhere. Arnoldo was an all-round sportsman. On his return he would go straight into the national football as well as the Alumni teams. In 1910 as he matured he would be league top scorer, would also play cricket, tennis and water-polo for Argentina, marry a daughter of an ex-Argentine president and live out the rest of his life comfortably in the Argentine capital.
In meantime, however, in 1907 his team would once more win the league without a loss in it or in the Cups or in friendlies. By then there were six Browns in squad but temporarily no Mack. Perhaps it was simply age but he may also have been required at English High, where Alex Watson Hutton was carrying out his last move and reorganisation, personal and scholastic.He was now approaching his mid-fifties, time for a last push and see the school enlarged still further. He also had seen football in his adopted country expand from his school-boys and a few others. Now it included not just an increasing number of teams but a number of increasingly powerful, more often than not working-class, non-British teams, within and outwith the league, substantial crowds, money in the sport and encroaching professionalism and there is every indication that, if not already, he was becoming less than happy about the game's future.
For Alumni the record in the cups and friendlies in 1908 would be the same as the previous year, although in the league there would be slight stutter. They would be beaten by Estudiantes at home, twice by Belgrano away and in spite of Eliseo Brown scoring more goals than any other it would be Belgrano that would take the trophy. Then order would be restored in 1909. Everything would be won except a single league game, lost by a single goal to River Plate and two friendlies, both bad losses, 4- and 5-nil respectively. But then they were against visiting teams from Everton and Tottenham, which had both finished second in the English football league, the former in the First Division and the latter in the Second and promoted. And in 1910 in the league it was again much the same. However, there were perhaps the first signs of problems. The Cup and friendlies were all lost. And again in 1911 the Cup was lost, friendlies were shared, whilst the league was won with Ernest Letts, brother of Charles, now top scorer, but only after a play-off against Porteno.
By then Laforia had moved on and Browne and a couple of Browns had retired. But that does not fully explain what happened next. Alumni was simply gone. It registered for the 1912 season but played not a match. Two main reasons are given for the collapse. The first was a shortage of players because Alumni rarely admitted players from outwith the English High School. The second reason that it was losing money as it often donated its income to charity. Neither holds water. The club had in recent years not hesitated to bring in outside talent. In addition it had had a decade of giving money seemingly without a problem. Its Board did not see it as a business. It had no shareholders. It did not need to make a profit. The real reason was shamateurism and Alex Watson Hutton. Alumni was an amateur club. Others, non-British origin clubs, were pretending to be but were not. In itself that was not a problem. It was a pattern of football development that had occurred and was occurring elsewhere, not least in England thirty years and Scotland twenty earlier and in Uruguay,
John Harley at its core, at precisely the same time as Argentina. The fact is that Alex Watson Hutton did not like the development and when he, as a consequence of retirement from his school, also stepped down as Alumni club president its raison d'etre crumbled. The club was dissolved on 24th April 1913. All the members were invited to the assembly, but only seven attended.
It seemed simple but there was one last complication, confirmation, if you like. By 1912 Alex Watson Hutton had transferred his loyalty to the club close to his school and onto which his house backed, Belgrano, of which he had become president and which maintained the amateur ethos until in 1926 it too gave up Association football to concentrate on other sports, not least football's other iteration, the oval-ball one, rugby, at which it is still one of Argentina's top performers.