The two names together sound like a music-hall act. The pictures make them look like a combination of Flanagan and Allen and Flanders and Swann but both at opposite ends of England would touch and start great clubs and move on, one for work the other for belief. Both would be Scots, one a son of Ayr, the other a Fifer. Both must have been disappointed, one perhaps misidentified.
The son of Ayr was James Allan. In fact he was born in Ayr itself, in 1857, growing up in Tarbolton, the son of a shoe-maker. He is said to have been accepted by Glasgow University to study medicine, playing football in and around the city at Busby and Oxford, both founded in 1873, and East Kilbride, in 1877. But he soon left without graduating to become a teacher "down south", in fact in Sunderland. And there in 1979, so aged twenty-two, he founded the Sunderland and District Teachers' Association Football Club, which the following year became Sunderland Association Football Club and open to all.
Games began almost immediately with Allan, a forward, in the team. Five years later in 1884 the club played its first FA Cup tie with Allan still associated with the club and still in a team, which had several teachers and more than just a few Scots in it, as can be seen from what is said to have been the full 1884 line-up of players and management;
Kirtley, McMillan, Lumsden, Singleton, the captain, and Murdoch, Macdonald, J. Allan, Hall and Grayston, W.M. Allan, Leslie, Wade and Innes.
It even includes a second Allan, W.M, possibly James's elder brother, William, in what was its last amateur season. In 1885 it is said that it turned professional as professionalism was legitimised but not without caveats, one, that it was unlikely to have been the case entirely, at least not immediately and not officially, remaining for a period a mixture of professional, amateur and probably shamateur, and two, it was a form of professionalism that not exactly fully financially above board. In December 1887 a complaint was lodged by Middlesbrough after a Third Round FA Cup tie against it, a 2-2 away draw, which was followed by a home replay won 4-2 . It was said that in this second game Sunderland had paid some of it players illegally and it seems not just to have been true but there was worse still. Three players, Monaghan, Richardson and Hastings, had actually been "borrowed" for the match and from Scotland, from Dumfries, no doubt paid for their time and effort but presumably under the table, and Sunderland was as a result disqualified. Income would have been severely affected not least because the Teesdiders and not the Wearsiders then had a bye in the fourth round, beat Old Foresters in the fifth and only lost in the sixth to Crewe Alexandra but at home.
However, at this point the picture becomes mildly Machiavellian. It is said that Allan was unhappy about advancing professionalism but the situation may have been considerably more complicated. In May 1888 and therefore just six months after the Middlesbrough episode he was forced out as Treasurer of Sunderland AFC, which leaves two possibilities. He himself must either have been responsible for the illegal Middlesbrough payments, and therefore in spite of assertions to the contrary supportive of paying to play, or they had been done behind his back. Whatever the case there was clearly dissatisfaction at Sunderland AFC, and on both sides. There was clearly also political manoeuvring going on. Firstly, Allan would be replaced by a representative of a group of local business interests obviously unhappy with the Middlesbrough events, although from what point-of-view is not apparent. They might have disapproved but equally well could have been the instigators. Secondly, two months earlier in March Allan had also already been one of the founders of an alternative club, Sunderland Albion, financially supported by another group of local businessmen, to which seven Sunderland AFC players defected and of which in short order he became both Secretary and Treasurer. Moreover Sunderland Albion would play at Sunderland AFC's original ground close to Allan's school, a ground he had originally been involved in finding. And most importantly of all Dumfriesians, Monaghan and Richardson, were both in Sunderland Albion's first line-up along with other imported players, they must have needed still to be remunerated and that remuneration must have been authorised by the club treasurer, none other than Allan himself. It seems that, if Allan were anti-professional at Sunderland AFC, just weeks later by the time he was at Sunderland Albion he had had a Damascene conversion.
In view of events it is not surprising that the bad blood between the two Sunderland clubs continued. AFC refused to play Albion on the two first occasions there was a scheduled fixture. Nor would the rivalry between the two clubs diminish as both made preparations and applied to join the Football League, from its formation in 1888. It was a risky strategy with just one club from a town or city permitted. James Allan was confident of success but in the end it was Sunderland AFC, which in 1890 won the day. For Albion it spelt the beginning of the end, which finally came in 1893,. Even with the rule with regard to one-club-one-town now changed, as its major business backer folded, Allan's second club went with it leaving his first standing alone and with a squad that season, given Allan's nationality and contribution, that makes interesting, if ironic, reading. It was:
Tom Porteus Willie Dunlop Ted Doig Jack Auld Bob Smellie James Gillespie David Hannah James Hannah
John Scott Hugh Wilson John Harvey John M Campbell James Millar Bill Gibson Manager: Tom Watson
After football James Allan would continue as teacher and a headmaster in the Sunderland area. He had married in 1880 and would have six children. And it was still in Sunderland that he would die and be buried in 1911 at the comparatively young age of fifty-four by which date his club, at least his first club, had won the league title four times, in 1892, 1893, 1895 and 1902.
David Danskin, by contrast, was the Fifer, who learned his engineering trade in Kirkcaldy before moving south. There he arrived in 1885, taking a job at the Dial Square Workshop at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, strictly-speaking still in Kent but on the edge of an expanding London. At the factory he met Jack Humble and two former Nottingham Forest players, Fred Beardsley, a goalkeeper, and Morris Bates, a full-back, Forest having been formed in 1865 by a group of shinty players, but English ones, wanting to embrace the then new game. And it was the four of them, particularly Danskin and Humble, who were the driving forces behind the formation of an amateur works team that was originally given the name Dial Square F.C. Aged twenty-three Danskin captained the team in its first game, a 6-o win and continued to play for what soon became known as Royal Arsenal for two years more until injury brought his playing more or less to an end. By then the team had become one of the most successful amateur clubs in Southern England, but one with a working-class base. The professional teams of the north saw it as a team, from which to recruit. Humble realised to protect itself from predation the club had to turn professional, it did so in 1891, changing its name once more, this time to Woolwich Arsenal, and after struggling somewhat for two years in 1893 was accepted into the Football League, which until then had been a Northern and Midlands oligopoly.
In the meantime Danskin had in 1892 tried and failed to be elected to the Woolwich Arsenal committee, effectively its Board after which he refereed and became involved with a new, amateur club still associated with the factory, Royal Ordnance until 1896, when it ceased. He then remained in the area, opening his own bicycle factory, until in 1907 he moved to Warwick to work on the new fangled car for the Standard Motor Company. And there he remain, dying in Warwick aged 85 in 1948, buried in Coventry.
But it is to the other end of his life that we now turn. The David Danskin buried in Coventry had been born in Burntisland in 1863, the second of eight children. Danskin is a real Fifer surname. And the Christian name, David, also ran in the family. His father was David and his grandfather before him. Both had been born in nearby Markinch. His mother was from Beith and she and David's father had been married in Kirkcaldy, he working there in engineering as a lathe operator amongst other things. However, the family did not stay in Kirkcaldy long, barely a year, and, although they returned for four years between 1864 and 1868, by 1870 they were settled in a cottage by a loch outside rural Leslie, still in Fife just three miles from Markinch and on the other side of what is now Glenrothes. A cottage is still there.
The reason for the move was that David's father seems to have taken job at a water-man, that is at the Leslie waterworks, and it was there he more or less stayed. Both his wife and he would die there, she young in 1890 and he in 1910. Which leaves me with a problem, or rather two. Far from young David Danskin, football pioneer, growing up, as suggested by Arsenal's official history, in industrial Kirkcaldy it appears for a decade, for most of his young life indeed, he lived deep in the Fife country-side only going back to Kirkcaldy to take up an apprenticeship as an engine fitter. In 1881 aged 18 he was boarding as such on Kirkcaldy High St. Four years later he had moved on. Moreover, it also appears that there was a David Danskin, who did a la Arsenal, grow up in Kirkcaldy. It was his cousin, a year younger, whose father, David's uncle James, would eventually also move his family from the industrial, coastal town not to Leslie but back to hometown Markinch. Perhaps Arsenal have muddled the two?
However, be that as it may, in Kirkcaldy Arsenal's David Danskin no doubt played football. He was in his late teens and it was by then a centre of passion for the game. Raith Rovers was founded in 1883. He is said to have turned out for Kirkcaldy Wanderers, formed in 1881, coincidently of not the year of his return to the town, and alongside Jack McBean, who would later also play both for Royal Arsenal and Royal Ordnance. However, that too seems unlikely as McBean or McBain as he is recorded in Scotland, although also a Fifer and living in Kirkcaldy was almost five years younger than Danskin and therefore would have only been sixteen or seventeen when Danskin took the road south. In fact it is more likely that where Danskin had gone McBean because of Kirkcaldy connections, football or otherwise, followed. It would certainly explain why McBean continued to play after long after Danskin had stopped and also why when Danskin moved across to Royal Ordnance McBean and others went with him. Fifer blood runs thick.