Andrew Watson - a Scottish First
(With regard to this and so many other stories of Scottish football a huge debt of gratitude is due to Andy Mitchell. His work plus my own history was the inspiration for me to try to extend his approach beyond Scottish to Scots, and beyond Britain to Worldwide. I hope that I have been able to supplement the Watson story a little, to add other stories and perhaps awaken a few at least of Scotland's footballing Neanderthals.)
According to his gravestone Andrew Watson was born on 24th May 1856, not a year later as has been sometimes maintained. That the grave is in Richmond, Surrey seems also to put an end to the belief, held for some time, both that he emigrated to and died in Australia. He may have travelled there, to Bombay and elsewhere with his work in later life as a ship’s engineer but he died neither aboard or abroad but saw out his last days not far from his final resting place in the leafy gentility of Forest Road in the West London suburb of Kew.
Where Andrew Watson was born has always been much more certain. It was in Guyana, on the north-eastern coast of South America, of a Scottish father and a local mother. He was by birth both a West Indian and a South American. However, as a footballer, an association footballer, for that is how he is remembered, he was Scots.
Andrew Watson seems to be the only South American to have played for Scotland but more, much more than that he was the World’s first, recognised black footballer, the first black football international, so far the only black captain of Scotland and the first black football administrator. He may possibly also have been the very first black, professional player but for this accolade, at least, he has competition. In England, Arthur Wharton with a Ghanaian mother and coincidentally a half-West Indian and half-Scottish father, began his professional career at about the same time as Andrew Watson and may, in the mid-1880s, also, albeit briefly, have been paid to play. But by then Watson, as professionalism in football was just coming in, had played almost a decade at the top flight as an amateur, whilst elsewhere it would perhaps be another 20 years before black players would come to the fore in top-flight football. In Brazil in Rio de Janeiro in 1905 the Bangu team, founded by another ex-patriot Scot,
Thomas Donohoe, would feature Francisco Carregal, who from photographs may have been a blend of African, European and South America Indian heritage. Still in Brazil and a few years earlier in Campinas in Sao Paulo state there had been Miguel do Carmo, introduced to the game by
Tom Scott. In the city of Sao Paulo Arthur Friedenreich, the son of a German father and an African-Brazilian mother, would begin his playing career in 1909, quickly become a real star and be the first black Brazilian to represent his country, winning 23 caps and scoring 10 goals. Elsewhere football was still a white-man’s sport until after the First World War, when the next outstanding Black player was probably the Uruguayan, Jose Leandro Andrade.
Andrew Watson undoubtedly qualified for Scotland through his father, Peter Miller Watson, a lawyer born in Ross-shire but with Guyanese, plantation connections. Andrew Watson’s mother, named as Anna or Hannah Rose, is more of a mystery. She was Guyanese, of African ancestry and has widely been assumed, possibly quite wrongly, to have been a plantation slave. However, she might well have been a free woman, of mixed heritage and to have had roots not just in African but in much the same part of Scotland as Andrew Watson’s father.
Peter Miller Watson, one of five brothers, is recorded as being born at Kiltearn by Evanton, on 15th June 1805. He was not born, as sometimes said, on Orkney and his family were not Orcadians. Kiltearn is a lovely spot on the shores of the Cromarty Firth, the family home where his parents had been married, although their temporary home was at Crantit in Orkney, where the young Watson’s birth is registered. His father, James Watson, was Lord Dundas’s factor on the islands, although he was not a local and came from The Borders. His mother was Christian Robertson of Kiltearn, where her father was the minister. Theirs was a local, Ross-shire family, but one which already had an association with the West Indies and specifically both Demerara and Bernice in what is now Guyana. Her uncle, John, had been a merchant in Tobago. Her other uncle, Gilbert, had in 1770s first gone to Grenada and from there to Guyana. In her own generation her brother, also called Gilbert, had first gone to Trinidad, adjoining Tobago, and then also to Demerara. There he settled. By 1817 he had a plantation he called Kiltearn and children by a local woman. Another brother had died in Demerara at the age of 18. A third brother is also listed as a Demerara colonist before he was drowned off Ireland, possibly on the way to or from the colony.
Christian’s father, Harry, Andrew Watson’s great-grandfather, was born in 1748 in Kincardine, not the one between Angus and Aberdeenshire but in Easter Ross around Bonar Bridge. He was descended from the Robertsons of Kindeace by Invergordon and it is this that links Andrew Watson not only to the rich but also to the powerful of his time - but more of that shortly as the story unfolds.
In 1808 Peter Miller Watson’s father died on Orkney, aged just 31. His mother remarried three years later to Thomas Traill, a doctor from Orkney, who had set up practice in Liverpool and remained there for thirty years before returning to Scotland. And on marrying again Peter Miller Watson’s mother moved with her sons to Liverpool, a city, where she would have six more children with her second husband and which was from then on to be a recurring theme in the Watsons’ lives, father and son. Peter Miller Watson was to be brought up in the trading city. Andrew Watson would end his football career there and have a home in its suburbs for a quarter of a century.
In 1815 Harry Robertson died and was buried at Kiltearn. His widow went to live with her daughter, Christian Watson’s sister, who had at the age of 20 had married a Samuel Sandbach. The Sandbachs also lived in Liverpool. A man twice her age, Samuel’s family also had strong trading connections with Demerara, Guyana – sugar, molasses and, previously, slaves. The buying for transportation of slaves to the West Indies, Cape Colony in South Africa and Mauritius had been abolished in 1807 but not slavery itself. That would not formally occur until 1834 and slaves would not be freed until at least 1838. And in the meantime slaves could be bought and sold within colonies as before.
In the Liverpool of Peter Miller Watson’s youth amongst the merchant class, including a considerable number ex-patriot Scots, we find a web of commercial and personal inter-relations amongst the trading houses, reinforced by inter-marriage. Watson’s family was no exception. In 1790, George Robertson, who would die in 1799, and was Peter Miller Watson’s great-uncle, had entered into a merchant partnership in Glasgow called McInroy, Sandbach & Co., which was comprised firstly of Samuel Sandbach; the same Samuel Sandbach, who in 1802 married Miller Watson’s aunt, George’s niece; secondly Charles Stewart Parker, a Scot, who in 1797 had married a Margaret Rainy, and finallyJames McInroy himself. In 1804 a branch in Liverpool was opened. McInroy was to retire but other partners had joined. One was George Rainy, another Scot, brother of Margaret, and who had married Ann Robertson, another of Peter Miller Watson’s aunts. And Rainy was one of the major plantation owners in Guyana particularly in terms of slave numbers. And another such owner was yet another Liverpool Scot, one John Gladstone, perhaps better known as the father of the future, British prime-minister, William Ewart Gladstone.
In 1813, as the result of the settlement at the end of the war against Napoleon, Guyana, actually taken by the British in 1896, was formally ceded by the Dutch to Britain, The Netherlands having been a French puppet state. Political power in the colony changed hands but the Dutch did not disappear. Some felt the change in the prevailing wind and, adjusting their sails, adapted to the new political reality and commercial opportunities. In reaction to the same realities, retirements and deaths of original major shareholders and the introduction of new ones, McInroy, Sandbach & Co in Demerara became known there first as simply Sandbach & Co. and then absorbed the Dutch-Guyanese family, the Tinnes, and became known in 1831 as Sandbach, Tinne & Co. However, it remained still a business with a founding partner, who had been Peter Miller Watson’s great uncle, with, for a period, two partners that were his uncles and an expectation that Peter Miller Watson himself would in the goodness of time make his own contribution to it.
Unlike Peter Miller Watson the background to Anna or Hannah Rose is not so much a complicated web but on the face of it hidden beneath a mist of South American uncertainties. However, the mist may also have a Caledonian element. Rose is without doubt Hannah or Anna’s surname. That much is made very clear from the marriage certificates of both Andrew Watson and his sister, Annette. It is also a Scottish name that featured widely and to this day still features in Guyana.
In 1800, aged 17, Andrew Rose, born near Banff in 1783, with some training in surveying, had arrived in Demerara, where his father’s cousin, Thomas Cuming, who had first arrived in Guyana 40 years earlier, and Thomas’s cousin, Lachlan, had become prominent colonists. Lachlan Cuming remained in Guyana until his retirement in the mid-1820s. Thomas Cuming briefly returned to Scotland in 1798 to remarry but was back in Demerara in 1800, after the birth of another daughter, Hannah, and death of his young, second wife. It was this return that may have prompted Andrew Rose’s arrival in the colony. And once in Guyana Andrew Rose prospered, so much so that in 1805 he sent money for his younger sister, Anna, also to travel out, which she did that same year. The following year in 1806, whilst staying with the Cumings, she had married the top Dutch official in the colony, it still being formally Dutch. The official was none other than Philipp Tinne; of the same Tinnes that later would join with Samuel Sandbach et al in Liverpool business partnership.
In 1801 a Peter Rose, aged 16, so born about 1885 and, as clearly stated on his gravestone, “a native Scot” also arrived in Demerara. He would go on to be an important figure in the colony. To this day a major street in Georgetown bears his name. However, said Peter Rose is something of a mystery. There is no record of him having been born in Scotland. In the colony he is said to have worked for the merchants, Cavan Bros at some time. He would also work for and be manager of the Colonial Bank but there is nothing to link him obviously with Andrew Rose except the surname and that in 1810 Andrew sells a house in Cumingsburg, now Cummingsburg, a part of Georgetown named after his father’s cousins and built on one of their estates, with one of the contacts handling the sale being Peter.
There is, however, a possible, less obvious link. Andrew and Anne Rose’s father, William, was involved in Scotland in a long-running and slightly crazy legal dispute with the Earl of Fife, in which there was an intervention from what is described as the lawyer in the family, one Patrick Rose. He was not one of William’s sons but there is a Patrick Rose, born in 1761 and dying in Glasgow in 1847, mentioned as a colonist in Guyana. He was roughly a contemporary of William Rose, which suggests they might have been brothers or cousins. If Patrick himself had had children they might have been born in the 1780s. If he had a son he might have named him Peter, the English version of Patrick. If correct, it would make Andrew, Anna, then William and Mary, two more Rose siblings to come to the colony, and Peter Rose, all of about the same age, cousins to some degree. It would also explain why Peter Rose came to Guyana. His father had also some connection with the colony, the Cumings were there and Peter, with the same sense of opportunity, had simply followed cousin Andrew.
In Demerara in 1807 Anna Rose Tinne gave birth to a son, John Abraham Tinne, and also noted in a letter home that her brother, Andrew, now is his early twenties, had at more or less the same time lost a ‘mulatto’ daughter, Mary. In 1811 Andrew Rose is also on record as having applied to free a slave girl called Minkie, who had a daughter called Anna. It was not unusual for the mistresses of planters to be freed in such a way so the assumption is that Minkie was his common law wife. It may also have been that she was the mother of the late, little Mary and that her new daughter was also Andrew’s and been named after Andrew’s sister, given the name Anna, plus Andrew’s surname, Rose, rather than both Anna and Rose being Christian names. Also on record in 1815 is a “Mincky” Rose, a freed woman officially using the Rose surname, with her children, Ann(a) and now George, buying an amount of land in Cumings/Rose’s very own Cumingsburg. Six months later a “Minkey” Rose, a ‘free colored’ sells the same land. It would seem Andrew Rose’s petition in 1811 had been successful. Minckie Rose was wheeling and dealing on her own account, thus was definitely not a slave, was “free” as her children would therefore also have been.
Andrew Rose, briefly a person of some importance in the colony and its government, may already have been dead as early as 1822 or, if not, by 1832. However, there would have been time enough to have several more children with Minkie, of whom the eldest might have been Ann or Anna and could have been Anna Rose, mother of Andrew Watson. However, there is a problem. In 1830s she would have been in her 20s and by his birth already in her mid-40s and possibly a little old to be having children.
If nothing is heard of Andrew Rose after 1832. Peter Rose is, on the other hand, far better documented - and not just in Guyana, where his name appears not infrequently, not least in connection with the colony’s governing council, the Board of Policy, of which he was a member, at some stage alongside Peter Millar Watson. In that same year of 1832 in London Peter Rose is giving evidence to the Houses of Parliament on the slaves in the colony, their value and their treatment. In 1820 he had married, again in London, a Huntley Gordon, born 1801 then remained in Britain until 1825, serving as a Justice of the Peace in Aberdeen-shire, before returning to Georgetown. The couple are known to have had a daughter, Mary, but may have divorced. A Huntley Gordon Rose marries, or remarries, in 1839 to a Henry Bruce and dies in 1841.
And there are further complications. Additional Roses appear on and depart the scene. A Gordon Rose, born in England, arrives at some point before he marries in 1817 and, to confuse the picture further, in 1835 he dies in Cumingsburg, although he may not be related. There are Somerset Roses in Guyana also. Meanwhile, Anna Rose Tinne has died in 1827. Her and Andrew’s brother, William, also arrives in the colony at some time and dies there in 1841. Their sister, Mary, is also there, marrying a William Gordon, brother to Peter Rose’s erstwhile wife, Huntley Gordon, and to Alicia and Madgelina Gordon, all in Guyana and all from another Scottish family from Aberlour on Speyside. Their mother, like Andrew, Anne and William Rose’s, was also a Robinson. In Demerara, not for the first or last time and just as in Liverpool, related families seemed to be intermarrying. Peter Rose, however, does not seem to remarry. He dies a wealthy but not necessarily lonely man, in Guyana, in 1859 and is buried in the Bourda cemetery in Georgetown.
Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic in Liverpool in 1809 William Ewart Gladstone had been born. John Gladstone, his father, had in 1787 moved as a young man to the city from Leith, prospered as a corn and cotton merchant, had married in 1790 in Liverpool, lost his childless, first wife in 1798 and remarried in 1880. There is no evidence that he was involved directly with Sandbach, Tinne & Co. He had his own trading company, John Gladstone & Co. However, his second wife, William Gladstone’s mother, was Anne Mackenzie Robertson, daughter of Andrew Robertson of Dingwall and Kindeace. She not only shared a surname but was related via Kindeace, somewhat distantly in time but closely in miles, to Christian Robertson, Peter Miller Watson’s mother and Andrew Watson’s grandmother. And there were also more contemporary connection. Dr., later Prof., Thomas Traill was a Liberal and it was said to be Gladstone political influence that obtained in 1833 Traill’s appointment as Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at the university in Edinburgh, the Gladstone city of origin. It seems in Britain kinship and politics rather than overt business bound the Robertsons, and therefore the Watsons, the Traills and the Gladstones together but there was a further strand elsewhere, in Guyana, where business interests were mutual.
It is perhaps through Gladstone that the importance, particularly financially, of Guyanese connections for many families and individuals can best be understood. As a merchant John Gladstone made a fortune in corn from the USA and cotton from Brazil. With it he bought plantations, nine in all, in Jamaica and Demerara, the first of which was acquired in 1812. William Gladstone was brought up in a house his father built in Litherland, on the outskirts of Bootle in Liverpool, and called Seaforth House. The house is said to have been named in honour of Lord Seaforth, head of the Mackenzie clan with extensive lands and influence especially in Ross-shire. And remember William Gladstone’s mother was not just Robertson but also clan Mackenzie. Moreover and perhaps more importantly still Seaforth also had his fingers deep in the West Indian pie. He had been Governor of Barbados until 1806 from when, and until his death in 1815, he held high office in Demerara and Berbice, i.e. Guyana. Furthermore there he is listed as a colonist amongst the over 60 other Mackenzies and is said to have had descendants from children fathered out of wedlock. Put bluntly he had plantations there and influence, just as Gladstone bought his first plantations and Demerara was formally ceded to Britain by The Netherlands; a turn of events, from which Seaforth undoubtedly profited and John Gladstone with him.
John Gladstone died in 1851 at the age of 86, a man of great wealth, not least from Demerara. There is even a Gladstone listed as a Guyanese colonist; Eliza Catherine, born un-remarkably in Liverpool and married there too to a Thomas Nimmo, of Demerara but presumably from his name also Scots in origin. Indeed it was John Gladstones' wealth that was to passed to his children and, no doubt, would fund, somewhat dubiously, William Gladstone’s later political career. However, during his lifetime the elder Gladstone colonial possessions also clearly funded his son's early political ambitions but were not without their problems and their compensations.
In Guyana in 1823 a slave from a Gladstone plantation, who had taken the name Jack Gladstone, led a revolt. It started on a rumour that freedom was imminent perhaps based on the foundation in Britain that year of the Anti-Slavery Society. The revolt was forcibly suppressed. Freedom was on its way but not quite yet. Then in 1831 there was a similar slave revolt in Jamaica, which was something of a catalyst for the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act. However, still liberty was not instant. The slave owners continued to resist. They had lobbied Parliament, many of the members of which, like William Gladstone himself, had financial interests in plantations and therefore the practice of slavery. Peter Rose in 1832 had been a just such a lobbyist for the Guyanese slave owners. As a result all slave owners, many of whom were already powerful and wealthy, were granted a further 7 year to put into effect the changeover and a compensation fund of £20 million, which in today’s money equates to £1.5 billion, was set up.
In fact, pressure caused the freeing of slaves to be brought forward two years to 1st August 1838 but in the meantime through 1835 and 1836 compensation packages were worked out. John Gladstone had shares in 2,508 slaves. For them he received a cut of £108,000. It equates today to £8.1m. George Rainy, Peter Miller Watson’s uncle, had more slaves and did better still. He received shares from his several estates to the equivalent of £10m. Peter Rose received a share of £27,000 (£2m) for 500 slaves on 3 plantations he had with a fellow Scot, John Croal, the first mayor of Georgetown. The Tinne’s did well too. So did the Sandbachs and the Parkers. Even Peter Millar Watson himself received part of £1000, the equivalent of £75,000 today, in compensation for 16 slaves. He is said to have jointly owned a plantation, 20 or so miles from Georgetown, called Zeeburg with Alexander MacLaren given as born in Killin, Perthshire, who also owned another estate, La Bonne Intention, near the capital. McLaren married twice. His second wife was a black Guyanese and with her he had several children, one born in 1836 or 1837 and christened Peter Miller Watson McLaren and to which Peter Miller Watson would very likely have been godfather. It was the compensation that Alexander McLaren received for his slaves that would allow him later to return to Scotland, living at Lephenstrath, Southend, Argyll, obviously still a family friend, and where he would play a further small part in the story of the Watsons.
Other slave owners too were also compensated, some with smaller amounts for much smaller numbers of slaves, suggesting they were ‘domestic’ or working smallholdings rather than plantations. One such was a Minchy Rose, presumably the same ‘colored woman’ , Minckie or Mincky Rose, freed at the request of Andrew Rose 25 years earlier and buying and selling land in 1815. She received £76, which equates to almost £6,000. And also amongst the smaller beneficiaries was a George Rose, who elsewhere can be seen travelling from the colony and was perhaps Minky’s son, George, with an award of £230 (£20,000) for 7 slaves plus five women, who in their own names shared £290 (£26,000), also for 7 slaves. The five women were Ann, Kitty, Mary, Eliza and Hannah Rose; all also clearly free women, perhaps sharing because they were sisters, perhaps with Ann the eldest, possibly all daughters of Minkie, sisters of George, all aged from their mid-teens to their mid-twenties, and with the name Hannah Rose being, in terms of Peter Miller Watson, Annetta and Andrew Watson, now the most interesting.
Let us assume that Hannah Rose was one of the youngest of the six. She might therefore have been born between 1816 and 1822 and in 1835/36 aged 13 to 19, below the age of maturity, then 21, but old enough for money to be held in trust. In 1850, on the birth of Annetta, “little Anne”, and perhaps named after her eldest aunt or even Banff great-aunt, she would on the same basis have been 27 to 34 and in prime child-bearing age. In 1856, on the birth of Andrew, perhaps equally named after his Banff grandfather, she would have been 34 to 40 years old and still very capable of having children.
A Christina (Kitty), Ann and Mary Rose were all to marry in 1834, 1837 and 1838 respectively, in Demerara and in London. Eliza and Hannah, it appears, did not, perhaps because they were still too young. It is about this time too that an unmarried Peter Miller Watson is first known to have been for certain in Guyana aged in his late twenties and early thirties, a suitable age for a lawyer to have learned his trade. There is the evidence of his god-child in 1836. In 1838 his name appears for the first time in papers and announcements from the colony. He was also, at least not initially, the only Watson there. Uncle Gilbert still had the Kiltearn estate on the Berbice coast, where names of locations in Easter Ross are everywhere. In Guyana the Kiltearn estate lay between “Tarlogie” and “Goldspie”. In Scotland Goldspie is Golspie and Tarlogie is just 15 miles distant by the Glenmorangie Distillery by Tain. His two older brothers, Harry and Andrew, were also running plantations in Demerara. Andrew’s was named William. That was at least until their untimely deaths, Harry in 1836 and Andrew, drowned at sea off the Guyanese coast, a year later. It seemed Peter Miller Watson had not only his own plantation, Zeeburg, and another to run but also the affairs of his two late brothers to deal with just at the time when the slave labour on his and all other plantations was coming to an end. The situation was further complicated by the death in 1839 of his Uncle Gilbert but not before in 1838 Peter Miller Watson had written a letter to Sandbach, Tinne & Co. in Liverpool now regarded as giving the definitive analysis of how plantations could post-slavery be still run at a profit. Indeed it may have been his task, as a lawyer, in Guyana for himself, for family members, for a number of other parties, including Sandbach, Tinne, partners in which, Henry and William Sandbach and John Abraham and Philip Tinne, had slaves and also received compensation, and even for the Gladstones, to make as un-disruptive to income as possible the ending of slavery and the development of an alternative strategy.
That strategy was the introduction of indentured labour, a system that John Gladstone was to push to its very limits. To keep his plantations running he began the importation, with patently false promises on working conditions, of the first of 200,000 indentured workers from the Indian sub-continent. They were slaves by another name, forever financially unable to return to the Indian sub-continent the descendants of whom to this day form 40% of Guyana's current population.
Christian Robertson, Andrew Watson’s paternal grandmother, Peter Miller’s mother, died in 1842. Perhaps then Miller Watson returned to Britain but he was soon back as the next mention of him in Guyana is at the end of 1847 and the beginning of 1848, again in his capacity as a lawyer. It is known that the Zeeburg Plantation was sold in 1849 and Alexander McLaren returned to Scotland. The first of Peter Miller Watson’s children, his daughter, Annette or Annetta, was born in late 1849 or 1850 so he must have been there, at least for the conception. In 1852 Miller Watson is known to be in the colony still or once more but after that there is, except for the conception of Andrew in mid-1855, nothing of him until 1858 and not in the colony. In November of that year Miller Watson was recorded as already buying a property near Guildford at about the time his children were said to have come to Britain, Annette aged 8 or 9 and Andrew just 2. It would have been the house he is known to have owned at Weylea.
Peter Rose died in 1859. There seems to be no evidence that money was left in his will to an Annette or Andrew Watson, as potentially his grandchildren, and further reinforcing the idea that their Rose grandfather was Andrew. If correct Andrew and Annetta’s father was from Evanton and on their mother’s side, their grandfather was from Banff. In 1861, at the time of the census, Peter Miller Watson himself seems not to have been in Britain. His brother, William Robertson Watson, is, incidentally shown on the census as a visitor to Miller Watson’s ex-partner, Alexander McLaren (McLaurin) and his daughter, Mary, at Southend in Argyll. Miller Watson’s absence suggests that he might have been in Demerara, yet his children are known to have been in Staffordshire. They were staying, accompanied by 19 year-old Eliza McLagan, also born in Guyana, at Colwich House, by Stafford, under the roof of Elizabeth Buchanan. Both the Buchanan and McLagan families had both Scottish and Guyanese connections.
Peter M’Lagan senior had been born at Moulin in Perthshire in 1776. He had died in the year before the census in Edinburgh in 1860. In 1841 he had already been living in Edinburgh with his son, Peter McLagan junior, aged 18, and his daughter, Janet, aged 25. In 1842 M’Lagan had bought two Scottish estates, Pumpherston and Calderbank in Mid-Lothian, presumably with the £21,500 (£1.65m) he had received in 1836 in compensation for a share in the slaves on two Guyanese estates, Coffee Grove and Caledonia. They had been registered in his name, as yet another partner in Sandbach and Co. until his retirement from the company in 1821, and in Samuel Sandbach’s name by none other than Peter Miller Watson’s uncle, George Rainy.
In 1851, Peter McLagan Jnr, now 28 years old, born in Demerara had been farming 400 acres at the same Pumpherston, Mid-Calder in Midlothian and an Emma Mcligin, aged 9, also born in Demerara, was at a school in Preston run by Elizabeth Buchanan. In 1861 she was back staying with her old school mistress, but now at Colwich, presumably also chaperoning the Watson children, whilst 38 year old Peter McLagan was still at Mid-Calder and clearly a man of some substance. He was to become a Gladstonian Liberal MP for Linlithgow in 1865 and remain so until 1893, presumably on the inheritance he had received from his father. It had once again been generated through Sandbach & Co. , where the links between the Sandbachs, Tinnes, Parkers, other Demerara families and the Traills were continually forged and strengthened though the 1820s , the 1830s and beyond. Elizabeth Sandbach, Peter Miller Watson’s cousin, had married Charles, the eldest Parker son. His half-sister, Anne Traill, also married the younger Parker son, George, who retired from the company in 1838. Margaret Sandbach, Elizabeth’s sister and again Peter Miller Watson’s cousin, remained married in Liverpool to John Abraham Tinne, the son of Anna Rose and Philipp Tinne. However, it was to be John Abraham Tinne first marriage. In 1857 at the age of 64 and by then a widower he remarries in Aberdeen an Elizabeth Robinson, with the Rose and Gordon connection and a further familial link. Even a generation later still a Katherine Margaret Sandbach married a James Capellen Tinne in Liverpool further reinforcing the loops of kinship. And influence continued too. As well as Peter McLagan, Charles Parker, the son of Charles Parker and Anne Sandbach and Peter Miller Watson’s cousin’s son, born in Liverpool in 1829 also became an MP. He died 1910 but in a long career was both secretary and brother-in-law to Viscount Cardwell, who had held the office, amongst others, of Secretary for the Colonies; Guyana included.
Peter Miller Watson was not to die until 1869 but it seems neither he nor his son were at home in Guildford at the time. Peter Miller Watson died in London whilst earlier, in August 1866, Andrew Watson had been admitted at the age of 10 to the Heath Grammar School in Halifax. Prior to that it is said he spent a short time also in Halifax at the Crossley Orphanage, which had been opened in 1864 for father-less boys. It is possible that his stay at Crossley may in 1866 just have been a temporary measure. However, his entry to Heath Grammar, perhaps after prep-school nearer home, may again have owed much to Demerara connections. The first master of Heath Grammar was the Rev. Thomas Cox. He had married an Elizabeth Buchanan, whose father was said to be John Buchanan. Elizabeth Buchanan, school-teacher of Preston and Colwich, was said to be the widow of Robert Buchanan. Both Buchanans were said to have been Scots and in Demerara there was no shortage of that name, including Robert and John.
On his death in London on 22nd April 1869, aged 64, Peter Miller Watson left £35,000; the equivalent today of £2.5m. The will included an annuity to his brother, William, with the bulk of the legacy shared, presumably in trust because of their ages, between his children – Andrew, aged almost 13, and Annette, 19. Each was therefore left more or less £1m, making them comfortable but not rich. However, there was another bequest. A sum of £250, a small sum now worth about £18,000, was to go to... a Hannah Rose of Georgetown, Guyana. It seems the children’s mother was still alive and had not been forgotten.
At the 1871
census Andrew Watson, aged 14, is a scholar, still boarding with the Rev. Cox at the Heath Grammar School, Halifax before he moves later that same year to Kings College School, Wimbledon, the independent school that has since spawned Mumford and Son. It was at Kings that he is said to have honed not his music but his athletic, notably as a high-jumper, and perhaps "football" skills, although rugby or association is unclear. Annetta Watson, aged 21, was at the time of the same census living in Scotland in Innerleithen by Peebles with her uncle, William Robertson Watson. Still giving her address as Innerleithen on 30th September 1873 Annetta Watson married John Hunter Stephenson, a man 15 years older than she, with the marriage officially registered in Kensington, London, early in 1874. He was to leave her just weeks later in May 1874, and she divorced him in London in 1875, claiming adultery and that he had deliberately infected her with venereal disease. If he did, he lived a remarkably long time with it, seemingly dying at the age of 66 in 1900 and out-living her by 11 years.
And it must have been in 1874 that Andrew Watson, by then aged seventeen or eighteen, moved to Scotland, just two years after the game in reality arrived and just as it began to explode in popularity in the country. The
first Scottish Cup Final
was played that year. He is shown that year as a player with Maxwell FC on Glasgow's South Side but how much he really knew of the game at the beginning is of doubt. He is said to have picked up the ball and run with it on occasions. But it is know too that in the autumn of 1875 he matriculated at Glasgow University to study Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Civil Engineering, leaving after a year, during that time probably still playing for Maxwell in Pollockshields, before the following year joining the Govan team, Parkgrove FC, where he was to contribute not just on the pitch, as the team entered the Scottish Cup for the first time in 1876, losing in the first round to Lancefield, but also became match secretary.
It was in 1876 that William Robertson Watson died in Edinburgh, perhaps outlived only by the youngest of the brothers, John, who was a lawyer in London. And in 1877 Andrew Watson, now presumably twenty-one and with the independence his inheritance would have provided, set up in business as Watson, Miller & Baird, wholesale warehouse-men at 35 Mitchell Street, right in the centre of Glasgow with partners, William Govan Miller and George Osborne Baird. Moreover, in November of the same year and again having reach the age of maturity he married at the St Ninian’s Episcopal Church on Pollockshaws Road in Govan. The Watsons were Episcopalian. He was described as Andrew Watson, an apprentice mechanical engineer, age 21, of 97, Shields Road, a short distance from the church. He describes himself as the son of Peter Miller Watson and Anna, not Hannah, Watson, maiden surname Rose, with the implicit suggestion that his father and mother, if not married, had some sort of at least semi-formal arrangement.
He married Jessie (Janet) Nimmo Armour, aged just 17 of 100, Watt Street, in Govan, just a few hundred yards from Shields Road. Witnesses were Jessie’s older sister and William Govan Miller, Andrew’s business partner. On 13th August 1878 still in Glasgow Rupert Andrew Watson, a son, was born. A daughter, Agnes Maude Watson, followed, born on 12th February 1880 at Rutland Terrace, again in Govan. A month later still Andrew Watson represented the city in matches against Sheffield and London, the first obvious recognition of his footballing prowess. A month later still he had left Parkgrove, it having lost in 1877-78 in the quarter-finals to the eventual Cup winners, Vale of Leven, the following year in the third round to eventual runners-up, Rangers, and in 1879 in the fifth round so having improved immensely. He did so on 24th April to make his debut for Queens Park, even playing in the Glasgow Charity Cup on 12th May, winning 2:1 against Rangers and was described in the Scottish Football Association Annual that year thus:
“Watson, Andrew: One of the very best backs we have; since joining Queens Park has made rapid strides to the front as a player; has great speed and tackles splendidly; powerful and sure kick; well worthy of a place in any representative team.”
In the 1881 census the Watson family is recorded at 15, Afton Crescent, on the other side of Queen's Park. Andrew, aged 24, is described as a dry goods warehouse-man. Jessie is aged 20, Rupert, 2, and also in the house is Jane Maxwell, Jessie’s sister in law. Agnes was at her grandparents. Andrew’s sister, Annetta, has also moved to Glasgow. She is recorded as music teacher, living at 64, Grant Street.
It was also in 1881, on 12th March, Andrew played at full-back for the first time for Scotland, captaining the team, as just the 8th to have the honour, against England in London at The Oval and winning 6:1, the largest ever margin of victory over the Auld Enemy. Smith scored a hat-trick, Ker a brace. Two days later he, as captain once more, and the team also defeated Wales, 5:1. Ker again scored a brace. A month later with Queens Park he won the Scottish Cup Final and then the Glasgow Charity Cup, once more against Rangers.
The end of the 1881-82 season, when Queens Park again won the cup, defeating Dumbarton 4:1 in April, also saw Andrew Watson’s final cap, again against England but not as captain, that was his club captain, Charles Campbell, and again a win. This time it was 5:1, Ker once more with a brace. For Andrew Watson it was his three internationals that saw him named almost half a century later in 1926 as the best left back Scotland had till then ever had by someone, who had seen him play, as well as all his successors with his final international perhaps formative in football’s future development. It was that defeat to a Scotland team featuring seven Queen’s Park players which led in England to Nicholas Lane Jackson, a prominent member of the FA, creating the famous Corinthian team. This direct reaction to the success of Queen’s Park and the Scotland national team is quoted in the book Corinthians and Cricketers,
“It would not be wrong to claim for Queen's Park the building of Scottish football almost single-handed.... It has wielded a profound influence in fashioning the technique of the game, and its development of scientific passing and cohesion between the half-backs and the forwards as a counter to the traditional dribbling and individuality...During those barren years England's teams consisted of amateur players from many different clubs...who had to combine their individuality without any pre-match knowledge of each other's play...Not surprisingly, England failed to beat an enemy nurtured on scientific combination.”
Then at the beginning of the 1882-83 season Watson played one Scottish Cup tie and moved south to London. The move was curious, probably made possible again by his inheritance but, initially, for no obvious reason. In fact he would be found a position, quite probably through the influence of new, English, footballing colleagues as a sinecure, at The Admiralty. The finger points at the Bambridge brothers, Charles and Arthur, both of whom would play for England. Indeed Charles Bambridge had been in the 1882 team that had been put the sword by Scotland. Thus in terms of that football Watson was now turning out for Swifts, a team formed in 1868 and based not in London, certainly not near Edmonton just a mile or so from Tottenham Hotspur and where he would live, but in Slough. The Bambridges played for the same team. In the 1882-3 season Swifts were knocked out of the FA Cup by Old Etonians in the 4th round at the Oval. In the game he is said to have become the first black player to feature in the English FA Cup and that in moving south had made him ineligible for Scotland. At the time the rule appears to have been only Scottish players resident in Scotland were selected.
In December 1882 Watson then played for a London team called the Pilgrims and the following spring was asked, a not inconsiderable honour, to turn out for none other than the Corinthian club as founded by Nicholas Lane Jackson ; this in the first year of professionalism in football in England and therefore world-wide. And, whilst in March 1883 Watson went on the Corinthian Easter Tour before, in April, once more travelling north to Scotland to represent Edinburgh University, it also has to be noted that Arthur Bambridge was a Corinthian too.
And the following season would begin in much the same fashion. With Swifts he defeated Clapham Rovers in the 3rd round of the FA Cup, Old Foresters in the 4th, only losing to Notts County in the quarter finals after a reply. Then in the October he was playing friendlies for Pilgrims and touring with Brentwood FC from Essex in November. It seemed he might have been settling permanently in London, which may have explained why on 1st October he had resigned from Watson, Miller & Baird, his business in Glasgow, selling his shares to his partners.
However, although the 1883-84 would begin in London it would not end there. As the year ended Jessie Watson, at the age of just 23, died in Edmonton. Andrew Watson found himself a widower, with two children, aged 5 and 3 and his response was to move back to Scotland, presumably to seek support from Jessie’s parents and his sister. And there in Glasgow and playing football once more he turned out for Queen’s Park in their Scottish Cup semi-final victory over Hibernian and picked up a winners’ medal, when Vale of Leven refused to play the final and Queen’s Park were simply awarded the trophy. He also played three games in the Glasgow Charity Cup, where Queen’s Park won the final 8:0 against Third Lanark but did not feature, when his club also reached the FA Cup Final, losing 2:1 to Blackburn Rovers. It was the first of successive years, in which Queen’s Park were to play in both the English and Scottish FA Cup finals. It had played in both competitions from 1881-2 and would do so until 1886-7. Presumably Watson was cup-tied.
Still in Glasgow Andrew Watson took the field in October 1884 for Queen’s Park for the season's opening match, against Dumbarton, to be played at the second of the three Hampden Parks stadiums that have existed. The first, and the one that Andrew Watson had first known, is now under the railway line that runs past the Queens Park Recreation ground. The new one was built 150 yards away in what is now Cathkin Park, which in turn is 300 yards from the present stadium. However, Watson was commuting. Once more for Swifts in England he turned out in the third round of the FA Cup, with a win after two replays against Old Westminsters, before in January being knocked out 0:1 at home in the 4th round by the other Nottingham team, Forest. Meanwhile Watson had again toured in December with Corinthian in Lancashire; a tour, which included an 8:1 win over Cup-holders, Blackburn Rovers, and a game against the Liverpool team, Bootle, at its Hawthorne Road ground. Bootle F.C. had been formed in 1880. It had early success, winning the Liverpool Senior Cup in 1883 and was one of two top teams in the city. The other was Everton.
If Watson on the Corinthians tour had come to the attention of Bootle there was no immediate move by him, or them. He returned to Glasgow in 1885, this time as Queen’s Park had already been knocked out of the Scottish Cup 2-3 at home to Battlefield in the 3rd Round, yet would in March reach the English FA Cup Final, losing once more to Blackburn Rovers, this time 3:1, but with him not present, again Cup-tied, and would win the Glasgow Charity Cup, on this occasion 1:0 against Dumbarton, with him once more in the team. And it was in Glasgow that he seems to have remained for the next year, with no more caps but again success. He featured now aged twenty-nine for Queen’s Park in all its Scottish Cup ties right up to and including the final. It was played on 13th February 1886, was won against re-emerging
Renton, 3:1, and would be the last game he played for the club. He is then said by a Dundee newspaper to have sailed for California.
Why he seems to have travelled to America is unknown. It was, on the face of it, a slightly strange destination. Nor was the sojourn to be long, a month and half. He had returned to Britain by April 1886, when he turned out for London Caledonians, presumably in the English capital. Then in June he followed it with an exhibition match in Dundee but from when there is no mention of any other fixtures. For almost a year he appears also to have done little, at least in football terms. The whole episode begs the question of whether he went to California at all or if there had been a misunderstanding, a mishearing by the newspaper. In fact might he have travelled not to California but to Guyana, to Demerara? A Hannah Rose, who had been her mid- or late 30s in 1856, would in 1886 have been in her mid- or late sixties. Perhaps Andrew Watson’s mother had died in Georgetown and her son, who she had perhaps not seen for almost thirty years simply went home to attend to her and his and his sister’s affairs.
Andrew Watson’s almost year off was, however, to be not entirely one of idleness. In February 1887 once more in Scotland he married for a second time, to Eliza Kate Tyler. Born in Fareham or Southsea in Hampshire in 1861, she was the 25 year old daughter of an East India merchant. Andrew Watson described himself as aged 30, the son of Peter Miller Watson and this time, Hannah Watson, maiden name Rose, and gave his address as 15, Florence Place in Govan. Kate’s address is given, probably coincidentally, as Rose Cottage in Shettleston, just to the north of Glasgow. She was staying there with her father and sister but it is not clear if this was a temporary or permanent address. Witnesses to the marriage were John F. Brown and Annetta Stephenson, Andrew Watson’s sister, who appeared to be using her married name in spite of divorce three years earlier. Yet once remarried Andrew Watson did not remain in Glasgow for long. In May 1887 at the age of thirty-one he played his first game for his new club, none other than Bootle FC, in a city with for him a myriad network of kinship and influence through blood and marriage that might even have extended to sport. Whether Eliza Kate at first went with him to Liverpool is not known. Even in the 1891 census she and the children are shown only as visitors.
In the summer of 1887 football in Liverpool was to see a flurry of activity, much it from North of the Border. As well as Watson, Bootle also thought they had signed fellow Scots, Bob Izatt and John Weir from Third Lanark with Weir, twenty-two, born between the Maxwell and Queen's Park in Glasgow and having won a Scotland cap against Ireland month earlier. Everton, across the city at Anfield, in the meantime had signed James Cassidy and Alex Dick from Kilmarnock Athletic, Abercorn's John Goudie, John Murray from Motherwell and Rob Watson from Glasgow Thistle. A Cup game was said to have been scheduled for Bootle against Workington. Everton were to play Bolton Wanderers. Izatt and Weir were due to travel with Bootle but actually travelled to Bolton and with Everton, apparently poached away at the last minute. For Bootle the result was a win. For Everton the result was a victory as well but also an FA enquiry into the eligibility of several of their players. One wonders which?
In 1887-88 Andrew Watson played for Bootle the whole season and almost every game, quickly forming a formidable partnership at left back with fellow Scot, Tam Veith, from Dumbarton and on the right. In the FA Cup they first beat Higher Walton, then in December the Midlands club, Great Bridge Unity, before going out in the 5th round to Old Carthusians, 2:0 at a Kennington Oval he knew well. In that team, made up of former pupils of Charterhouse School in Surrey and including several England internationals, football and cricket, was one C.A. Smith, who as Sir Charles Aubrey Smith went on to become a noted stage and, eventually, film actor.
Like today, in the 1880s local Derbies were at time almost of more interest than national competitions. In Bolton there were Wanderers and Halliwell, in Blackburn Olympic and Rovers and Liverpool, Everton and .... Bootle. In December 1887 they met, in the aftermath of the summer goings-on, in the Liverpool Cup at the Everton ground in Anfield against the background of talk of the formation of a national football league, with one club per town. Both Bootle and Everton had made their interest known with the winner of the cup clash more likely to be Merseyside’s representative.
Such was the interest elsewhere in and generated by the fixture that the Bolton-based Football Field periodical after the match published a special report, describing it thus:
“The manners of a Marquis and the morals of a Methodist was hardly the combination you expected to find at Anfield today when the blue and white standard of Everton FC floated gaily over a wild conglomeration of wildly excited partisanship such as is seldom witnessed in this or any other country. The merry clicking of the turnstiles started around 1o’clock. The Bootle enthusiasts are easily distinguishable, and they occupy a fair proportion of the overcrowded enclosure, the printed cards bearing the legend “Play up Bootle” conspicuously displayed in their hats. Just before 2:25 the Bootle players arrived on the ground, and from the far corner, a hearty roar of cheering greeted them. They present a strong thickset appearance, of uniform height, solid and weighty. Five minutes later the quartered jerseys of Everton are visible emerging from the other end, and there is a spontaneous round of applause.There was a crowd of around 12,000 people present to see the sides line up.......”
We even know the teams:
Everton: Joliffe, Dobson, Dick, Higgins, Gibson, Weir, Cassidy, Farmer, Goudie, Murray Watson and Fleming.Bootle: Jackson, Tam Veith, Andrew Watson, A. Allsop, Jonny Holt, Woods, Wilding, Morris, Lewis, Anderson and Hastings.
Andrew Watson was there alongside Tam Veith. There were at least 10 Scots on the field and possibly as many as 13.
The report continued:
“The game that followed was reported to be a disgrace and the least spoken about it the better. Old wounds were re-opened as the sides “fought in out” on the pitch leaving several players injured. Everton, eventually, won the game 2-0. The local press was quite guarded with their comments but our friend from Lancashire was critical and had this to say…“I have spoken to many of those, who were present at the match and have been met on all hands with expressions of sorrow, of anger, of disgust at the sport, to which we were treated. As a result of the match, there were three players seriously hurt. Weir of Everton had his shoulder put out, Hastings, of Bootle, received a most cruel and painful hurt, whilst Morris, of the same club, got an ugly kick on the head. Dick emerged from the contest as he might from a brawl, with a black eye, and many other players will not readily forget the heavy charged and cruel kicks.””
The game was clearly brutal but the result was not to stand. The results of the FA enquiry were soon published. Everton were found guilty of “persuading players to join them by financial inducement”, in other words, tapping-up, banned from the FA Cup for the next season and from taking any further part in the Liverpool Cup. Bootle was then awarded the tie.
Andrew Watson was to be injured against Bolton Wanderers in the final non-Cup game of the season. It was to be his last game for Bootle. He was on the side-lines for the Liverpool Cup Final against Stanley, which Bootle won 3:0. However, he, now a father for the third time after the birth of a son, Henry, in March, was in the team photograph as the end of the game, standing in a suit and bowler next to his colleagues in their strips.
Whether Andrew Watson retired at the end of the 1887-88 season is unclear. However, he did not play for Bootle again. Nor is it clear that he was a professional at the club. A loss of amateur status would have made playing elsewhere, even in Liverpool, difficult so even though playing with obvious professionals he might have chosen not go there. And in any case it seemed not to matter. For him it may simply have been time, with his decision to cease playing influenced not only by injury but also Bootle’s failure to get the city’s coveted place in the Football League that started in 1888. Instead Everton was chosen amongst the twelve founder members. The Bootle centre-half, Jonny Holt, reacted immediately. He decided that his future lay with the rivals across the city, he was joined there by further reinforcements and the rest is history.
It seems that Scotland’s first in so many ways having turned his back on football, remained based in Liverpool and went to sea having obtained his ticket as a marine engineer. March 1889 saw the passing of his sister, aged just 40, still using the name Stephenson, with her doctor her executor and the cause cirrhosis of the liver. Her death took place at 15 Florence Place, Stanley St, Glasgow; the same address as Andrew had given for his second marriage. He had clearly been staying with her at the time. In January 1891 a daughter, Phyllis Kate, was born to him and Eliza in Liverpool. The 1891 census found Eliza, Henry and the 3 month old Phyllis staying, listed as visitors, in Liverpool with a mother and daughter Blackley, but Andrew was not there. It is presumed he was at sea. However, that Watson was working at all is a little curious. He had a little over 20 years earlier received a fairly large sum of money in his father’s will, which should have kept him in reasonable comfort for the rest of his life. True he had two families, one which he seems on his second marriage largely to have abandoned in Scotland. His son and daughter by Jessie Armour remained with their grandparents at 75, Houston St., Glasgow, just a short distance from where Jessie and her parents had lived at the time of her and Andrew’s marriage. His son, christened Rupert Andrew, was sometime between 1911 and 1914/15 to emigrate to Australia, marry his step-cousin, pointedly put on the marriage registration that both his parents were deceased, when his father was not, and give his own first name not as Rupert but Andrew.
However, even when the second Watson family were settled in Liverpool they did not live in great style. Perhaps they were simply frugal. Their two addresses shown on the censuses of 1901 and 1911 are both still there and are small houses in terraced streets. In 1911 Andrew Watson is described as a sea-going engineer born in Georgetown, who at 54 was already retired, perhaps because he could. Eliza is 47. Both the children are at home still, Henry a draughtsman and Phyllis, perhaps continuing the musical talent of her Aunt Annette, the music teacher, described as a violinist and artiste. Yet sometime after 1911 the Liverpool Watsons moved to London. They settled in the south-west of the capital. Andrew Watson died, aged 64, of pneumonia on 8th March 1921 at 88 Forest Road, Kew, Surrey, close to the River Thames in a good sized house in a leafy street. He was buried three days later in nearby Richmond Cemetery. His wife outlived him by 28 years. She died in 1949, aged 85, at 6, Wilton Court, Richmond, an address she shared with her daughter, and was also buried in Richmond Cemetery but in a separate grave to Andrew; one she shares with her unmarried daughter, who died just 8 years later. Henry Watson would also seemingly remain unmarried and died in 1975 across the river in Hounslow but with no known place of burial and little else in terms of information beyond his Service Record in the Great War and his mother's death. With regard to the former joined as a Private, was demobbed in 1920 as a Corporal and had from 1st May 1915 served in a Scottish regiment, indeed in the same one as my own grandfather, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. And when his mother died he, listed now as Civil Engineer, was the executor of the small £437 legacy, today valued at about £15,000.
Similarly of the Glasgow Watsons nothing was known of their later lives and deaths. Rupert, listed as Andrew Watson, aged 22 and curiously like his father a marine engineer was known in 1901 to be still in Glasgow living on Houston Street in Kinning Park with his 72-year-old grandmother, Agnes Armour, his sister and a boarder. And he is still there in 1911 in the same employment. But in 1912 grandma Agnes died, Rupert moves to the to the side of World, marries, with his wife dying in 1973 in Parramatta near Sydney, Australia and again apparently no children. But of Rupert death there is perhaps new information. A Rupert Andrew Watson, born about 1878, died intestate on 12th June 1948, so aged sixty-nine or seventy, listed as a "waterside worker" not in either the U.K. or Australia but New Plymouth, Taranaki on New Zealand's North Island and is buried locally in the Henui cemetery. However, are such no traces of a marriage or death for wee Agnes. At the age of about thirty-two she seems simply to disappear.
And that would seem to be that except there are a number of questions about Andrew Watson that frankly remain for the moment unanswered. The first is financial. It is clear that from the age of twenty-one he was a "gentleman" in his own right with a substantial legacy from his father of between £1-2m in today's money. It no doubt, as reported, meant that as player/secretary his reported subsidising of Parkgrove F.C., his club at the time, is possible if not proven. It is equally possible that he may also have used that same wealth, as reported as player/secretary, albeit perhaps briefly, of Queen's Park for the same purposes. Contrary perhaps to appearances that club was not wealthy. He was founded by tradesmen, particularly drapers, and its players were middle-class but by no means rich, with perhaps two exceptions in the period, Watson and Andrew Hair Holm. The latter would die in 1934, leave an estate of the equivalent of £15 million earned from a whisky business with White Horse as a main brand he had built up over a life-time, was also Andrew Watson's first full-back partner at the Mount Florida club, Watson able to play on both left and right, and would gain three Scotland caps between March 1882 and March 1883, captaining twice and replacing Andrew Watson at left back. And Andrew Holm had an elder brother, J.W. , the same age as Watson, who also played for Queen's Park and might have been his full-back partner when both played a noted part in the defeat in March 1883 of Church by the club Watson had moved on to, both physically and internationally. It was the elite, English club Corinthian F.C., which in spite of being set up in 1882 to reverse, it is said by some, the almost decade of defeats by Scotland of England by the fusion of wealthy, English public school talent seems to have tried to do so by adopting the Scottish 2-2-6 formation, regularly appropriating Scots for its teams. and ultimately failing.
Evidence of the former is that already on the first Corinthian tour of Northern England in 1884 and an additional fixture against Notts County as well as Andrew Watson there had also been Dr. John Smith, Kirkcaldy physician, ex. of Mauchline, Edinburgh University as well as Queen's Park and Scotland once more, J.W. Holm again and Stuart MacCrae, wealthy maltster and the World's first international centre-half, Newark, Notts resident but the son of a Highland clan chieftain and able only to play for England not his real country because his equally Scottish mother had been in India at the time of his birth. And of the latter in the end it seems apparent that professionalism and league football that really made the difference. In 1884 three Corinthians were included in the England team, and also three probable shamateurs. England lost. In 1885 it was two and two. England achieved a home draw. Then in 1886 the team included a remarkable nine Corinthians and one professional but still the result was a draw, albeit away, whilst in 1887 the ratio was seven to four and England would lose at home. Only in 1888 would there finally be a one-off win, and an away one too, but Corinthians to professionals was parity, 5:5, and of the latter was a Scot anyway,
John Goodall. In fact it was only from 1891 that England began to win regularly and by then only one on the field, the goalkeeper, admittedly Corinthian, was amateur and not playing league football.
And then there is the possibility that Andrew Watson may not only have subsidised his clubs but even Scotland. Could it have been that the famous tour in 1881 with a team that looks on paper somewhat rag-tag but nevertheless resulted in the Scotland's greatest victory over England, 1-6 at the Kensington Oval, followed by a 1-5 victory two day's later against Wales at Wrexham may have been part paid by him with the captaincy in both matches his reward?
However, there was to be little bathing in 1881 glory. For Watson there was to be one more international cap, for the 1882 5-1 home victory over England, before he is said to have moved south to London. The reason may simply have been because he could. Whether or not he had used some of his fortune to help his former clubs he still was wealthy to fulfil the Corinthian criteria. He also presumably did not lose money when he sold his share in his Glasgow business and settle with his wife and young family in Edmonton in North London. And he certainly seemed to have regarded it as permanent. He played as Andrew Watson, even against clubs regarded as professional by the SFA. and therefore infra-dig. However, his openness was in contrast to that of the afore-mentioned Dr. Smith. In order not to be identified and therefore banned in the 1884 game against Notts County he had played as J.S. Miller. Moreover it was not a one-off. In other games he featured again as Miller but J.C.
Yet as we know the stay in London did not last, not once but twice. Nor did the involvement with the Corinthian club. And the reasons can only be two-fold, given that we know he continued to play football at the top flight. The first is that his life took another course and to an extent that can be seen with, after the death of his first wife in very late 1883, his second marriage in 1867. The second is that his financial situation deteriorated to the point that he no longer fully passed the Corinthian criteria and was thus excluded. It is perfectly possible. It would have meant that over a a decade he would have been spending the modern equivalent of between £150-200,000 per annum, so substantial but far from unimaginable. It would certainly explain why he is known to have made the decision to move to Liverpool to sign for Bootle, if not necessarily as a professional then a well-expensed amateur. It would also explain his decision to begin to train as a ship's engineer.
However, as much as the new life as a Liverpudlian might explain the second change of direction it casts no light on the first. It followed the death within the year of his original move to London of his first wife, upon which he chose to return to Glasgow. It meant that once more turning out for Queen's Park. Yet he never again played for Scotland in a period when there were a number of changes of full-back pairings in the national team. And this is where history may become a little ugly.
On 8th January 1886 a young man died shortly after his arrival in Sydney, Australia. His name was
Malcolm Eadie Fraser. The cause of his death was tuberculosis and he had been sent to the Antipodes to try to cure him of the effects of the illness he had picked up in West Africa, where in 1884 for work he had gone for work. Eadie Fraser was on his death just twenty-five years old. He was also a noted athlete. In February of 1884 he had turned out for the last time Queen's Park, defeating Hibernian in the Scottish Cup. It meant that he was not available to turn out for Scotland the following month. He had not featured against Ireland a month earlier. Yet he had won five caps and scored four times for the national team. His last appearance had been against England a year earlier and had scored the winning goal four minutes from time.
Yet Eadie Fraser may not actually have been allowed to turn out for Scotland anyway. Although he was a son of the manse his father had been sent for a few years to minister in Canada and that was where young Malcolm was born and whilst in 1882 that may not have been a problem by 1884 it might have been. The reason was simple. At some point in that period the criterion for representing Scotland was changed from residence to birth and residence. Eadie Fraser complied with the original rule but not with the second.
And there was, of course, a second player, who would also have fallen foul of the same change. In fact he and Eadie Fraser had for a couple of seasons been together at Queen's Park and in 1882 played in the same Scotland team in the 5-1 defeat of England. And that player was Andrew Watson. Indeed the question has to be asked whether the rule change had been made deliberately to exclude both Watson and Eadie Fraser or, since Watson went first, specifically Watson with Eadie Fraser collateral damage. Whatever the case, for both the result was same. Both left Scotland to, given the qualities of both, Scottish football's undoubted loss.