It is reported that what were described as “ball-games” were played in Manaus, deep in Brazilian Amazonia as early as 1900. The city, its wealth founded on wild rubber, already had by then a largish British presence of engineers, bankers and merchants. Between 1902 and 1905 they were joined by others constructing the city’s port Monday to Friday and playing ad hoc football at the weekends on a nearby river-beach.
However, the organised game is said first to have made its appearance in May 1906, with the foundation of Racing Club Amazonense by the Brazilian, Jose Conduru Pacheco and nine others. He had first caught the football contagion on a visit downstream to Belem, the port where the Amazon reaches the sea and the sport, introduced by sailors and merchants from Europe, had been quickly taken up by locals. The following year a second club, Sport Foot-ball Manaos, briefly came into being, playing Racing before folding, whilst the Manaos Sport Club, founded the previous year by the British Community and again using the alternative spelling of the city’s name, also formed a team that once more took on Racing Club.
1909 then saw the foundation of Brazil Football Club and four matches between it and Racing, now with its own ground. It also saw games against visiting British ships and a tour from Belem by Sporting Club de Para. Meanwhile 1908 had probably seen the formation of the all-British Manaos Athletic Club, from which a football team emerged in 1910, playing in a round of local friendly games, in which it was beaten by Brazil Football Club but was victorious in three contests against Racing Club. In 1912 Manaos Athletic played six known games, four friendlies and twice in the Tourneio d’Ouro, the Golden Tournament. 1913 saw the foundation of Nacional Futebol Clube and it was to prove a formidable rival to Manaos Athletic, with its squad now known to include Fenton, Anderson, Burnett and Gorvin. The following year, 1914, Manaos Athletic played Rio Negro, a new team and one that exists to this day, winning 8:0. That same year the first Amazonian Championship was contested by five teams and the prize was The Gordon Cup. It was won by Manaos Athletic with a forward line of Bolivar Purcell, an England-educated, Anglo-Brazilian involved in football not just in Manaus but also in Belem and Fortaleza, Cunningham, Gorvin once more, and Burns.
The trophy, the Gordon Cup itself, still exists. Originally donated by William Gordon, a man then 39 years old but still bitten by the passion for the game, it was on show in Manaus as the World Cup came to the city in 2014. Usually described as an “English Merchant”, William Gordon, William Stewart Gordon, was nothing of the sort. He was Scots, born in 1870 in Elgin, his mother a local girl, his father, Thomas Gordon, born in Ross-shire, in Fodderty, between Strathpeffer and Dingwall, through which the river seems to flow with football especially of the South American variety. It was the birthplace of folk, whose children,
Andy McCombie,
Colin Bain Calder, would take the game not just to the jungles of Brazil but south to England and to Argentina.
In Elgin in 1871 Gordon senior was a clerk. A decade later the family does not seem to have been in Britain but by 1891 they were living in London in Camden, Thomas the secretary/accountant of an oil- and coal-company and 20-year-old William himself a merchant’s clerk.
How William first arrived in Brazil is unclear. However, throughout the period from 1910, now almost forty, he can be seen travelling to and from Britain to Brazil, to Belem in Para and Manaus. He may have returned home following the death that year in Elgin of his mother, and continued to visit his father, who would die at the same Elgin address in 1932. Certainly in 1923 he is recorded sailing from Belem to Liverpool, first-class, a merchant, aged 52, giving his home address as Burnside, Hatch End in Middlesex. However, by then Manaos Athletic had folded and the Cup that bore his name was no longer played for. The club had repeated its Amazon Championship win once more in 1914 but then was probably impacted as in so many other places in South America by the First World War as its young men returned to fight. It withdrew from the competition in 1916 and finally closed its doors for good in 1922.
Where William Stewart Gordon died is also a mystery. It does not seem to have been in Britain but there is a strange, alternative possibility. In a graveyard in Lafayette in Mississippi in the United States there is a stone that exactly bears his name, with a date of death in 1937 and a birthday just one day different to that recorded for the boy from Elgin – a coincidence perhaps or even a simple slip of the chisel. Who knows!