There is no doubt that the contributions, the Scottish contributions to Argentine football of
Watson Hutton, Lamont, Douglas Moffat,
Anderson, the
Leslies
and others were immense. But they were confined almost entirely to Buenos Aires. Only Watson Hutton would in 1888 by playing in a Buenos Aires Select XI against one from
Rosario in Rosario have outreach, even if it were minimal. And as such the contributions should not obscure what was happening and would happen elsewhere in the country, in Mendoza, Cordoba and not least in Rosario itself, where its local football league would not be founded until 1905 but its first dedicated football club predates that of the country's capital by several years and in the meantime there was thriving "friendly" competition.
Two hundred miles to the north of Buenos Aires, Rosario, Argentina's second city, was, indeed is the major port on the Parana River, the doorway to the interior, served from 1863 by the British-built and owned Central Argentine Railway, reaching Cordoba in 1870 and after expansion from 1888 advancing deeper into the Pampas. Meanwhile in 1881 a young man named Colin Bain Calder was living in Dingwall, described as a coach painter, probably working for a carriage company in the town. He was twenty-one and from a local family. His father, Alexander, a carpenter, had died when he was young. The father’s grave can still be seen in St. Clement’s churchyard right in the centre of the town. Colin and his siblings were brought up in the then poorhouse, incidentally on land owned by the
Gladstones.
Football had reached the Northern Highlands at Golspie and Brora in the late 1870s, perhaps in the former with the Lindsay brothers returning from
Aston Villa and in the latter with miners brought from further south. By contrast Inverness did not see organised football until 1886, Elgin in 1884 and Dingwall in 1888 so any games, in which Bain Calder may have been involved, must have been largely ad hoc. Yet it seems Bain Calder had nevertheless been bitten by the football bug in Scotland and it was a contagion he carried with him to Argentina, where in 1889 he was in Rosario in charge of the Central Railway paint shop.
In Rosario there had been in existence a cricket club, founded in 1867, which gradually expanded its scope and in 1886, presumably taking advantage of the new railway connection to Buenos Aires, was to play the first inter-club rugby game in Argentina; against none other than Buenos Aires Football Club. However, it did not in the beginning play football, a sport that workers for the Central Railway would get together to practice. With permission from their employer they did it on land by the railway yard. They called themselves “Workshops” and used an old railway wagon as changing room, club-house and grandstand.
The lack of more organised football almost certainly then prompted those same workers to meet in October 1889 to discuss forming a sports club. A new name, the Central Argentine Railway Athletic Club, was suggested to replace Workshops. There was also intense discussion as to whether it should concentrate on football or include cricket. The decision was for football only. And the October meeting was followed by a further one on Christmas Eve that same year formally to found said club. A committee was elected. The secretary was Mr. Chamberlain, the vice-president was Thomas Hopper and the President, who had attended the October meeting and, perhaps as a Highlander, like the founders of Queen’s Park with little interest in cricket, spoken out strongly in favour of football-only, was paint-shop manager, Colin Bain Calder.
That Christmas meeting means that The Central Argentine Railway Athletic Club, "Workshops", or as it is known today, Rosario Central, is Argentina's oldest football-only club. Club Mercedes, in the town of the same name in Buenos Aires province and founded in 1875, makes a claim to be the country's oldest football club but the reality is that it started not as a sports- but as a social-club. Gimnasia y Esgrima, also in the capital, also makes claims. However, in the case of the former its name, in English Gymnastics and Fencing, indicate its origins with football not featuring until at least a decade after its formation in 1887. And Quilmes, in a BA southern suburb too has unfounded pretensions. Quilmes Rovers A.C. had been formed in 1887 in Quilmes, then largely British-populated town to the south of Buenos Aires, now a suburb of the capital. It played in the second Argentine league in 1893. That year it was the team of Alex Lamont and others. However, it would drop out once more at the end of 1895 and the present-day Quilmes then emerged from the town's cricket club, founded in 1897 by the Rev. Joseph Thomas Stevenson, the 30-year-old local Anglican priest, born in South Africa. It entered the league for the first time in 1900, perhaps something of a make-weight finishing last but guaranteeing continuity at a critical time.
One of the first tasks of the new Central Railway club was to find opposition against which to play. There were no other teams in town so Workshops” would have to start with be content with games against the crews of visiting ships. Yet it would not remain alone for long, although competition would not be today's rival, Newell Old Boys. Messi's first club would not be founded until 1903. The Rosario Cricket Club, had soon formed a team to play association- rather than rugby-football. And then there was St. Bartholomew's School.
The school had been first founded in 1868 to cater for Rosario's growing British, Anglican population. It closed in 1871 and reopened in 1874. 1880 saw the appointment of one Isaac Newell and his wife, Margaret, to teach the boys and girls respectively. He had arrived in the city in 1871 and found work as a telegraphist with the Central Railway. He had married in Rosario in 1876 and his son, Claude, Claudio was born a year later. Meanwhile, Isaac had re-trained and at the school all seemed to be going well.
However, in 1884, the vicar of St. Bartholomew's died, a new one arrived and Newell and he immediately fell out. Newell and his wife left soon after to start their own school and it was largely from ex-pupils of the new school and from Claude, by then in his late twenties, that two decades later the impulse to form Newell Old Boys came. In the meantime St. Bartholomew's School continued to grow. In 1886 it moved into new premises and 1888 a new teaching pairing arrived, George Robb and his wife, also Margaret. They had not come far. George Robb had been a teaching at Alexander Watson Hutton's
English High School in Buenos Aires. And he was another Scot with a passion for football and the idea, that he might got from Watson Hutton or even have introduced there himself, to have it and more generally, physical exercise as part of the curriculum.
That Robb was a player in incontrovertible. On 26th July 1888, having just arrived in Rosario, he was at left-back for a game played between an eleven from the city and one from Buenos Aires. The result was a 2-2 draw, Buenos Aires twice coming back. And in its team were also some soon to be distinguished names. At right-back was Woolley, F. Woolley, who would be the president of the first Argentine League, that is the first Buenos Aires, football league, and in front of him at left-half, was Hutton, Alex Watson Hutton, president of the second that continues to this day.
George Robb had been born in 1862 in Monymusk in Aberdeenshire. His father was a tailor and clothier born in Cruden, his mother in Alford. In 1871 they were living in Fettercairn in Kincardineshire and in 1881 in Aberdeen itself, George at eighteen already a school teacher. Five years later or so he was in Argentina, probably via Edinburgh. In August 1888 he married in the Anglican cathedral in Buenos Aires. His bride was Margaret Russell and she might have been part of the explanation for his, for their change of continents. She had been born and brought up in Edinburgh, although her parents had both been born in Fife. He was a Clerk of Works, who by 1881 was the capital's Master of Works. Margaret was herself a music governess. And there is almost a hint of elopement across the South Atlantic crossing. She was almost a decade older than her husband-to-be and they were from different backgrounds. Hers was clearly genteel. They had servants but they also took in students. His was not but there is the possibility that he boarded with the family, they fell for each other and wanting to do something about it had to go abroad.
George Robb was initially highly successful at Bartholomews. Its roll more or less doubled, in 1891 he took over complete its running and numbers continued to grow to the extent that by the end of the century it was able to field its own team that took on the local opposition, not least Colin Bain Calder's Central Argentine Railway Athletic Club (CARAC) and the team that emerged from the Cricket Club, Rosario Athletic. We even have the teams. Thomas Hopper and Miguel Green were playing for the railway club and Claude Newell for the cricketers.
Bain Calder would marry in Rosario in 1890. He would meet his wife there but she too had been born in Scotland, in Addiewell in West Lothian. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants to Scotland, who had moved on to Argentina in about 1878 and her maiden name was Green, Mary Green. She was Miguel Green's elder sister. Colin and Mary would have four children and descendants still live in Rosario. Bain Calder himself would remain president of the CARAC for eleven years from 1889 until 1900. He would be followed as president by another Scot, William Ball, a chemist, born in Dundee in 1859 but in Rosario at least since 1886. Miguel Green himself, having been a founding member and played in its first fixture aged just ten, would become club president in 1909. In the meantime the rule restricting its membership to its parent railway company employees only was lifted in 1903 at the suggestion of Green, with a name-change to Rosario Central, the name its still has.
In 1907 Colin Bain Calder would die. He was just forty-six. He would not see his club win the Rosario League. That would happen for the first time in 1908. Nor, of course, in more modern times see the development of the talents of Mario Kempes or know it would be Angel de Maria’s footballing alma mater. But he would see the formation of its great Rosario rival, Newell Old Boys, against which it still plays at Argentina’s highest level. Indeed Newell's foundation also in 1903 might well have been the reason from Rosario Central's change of status at the end of that same year. Isaac Newell would also live to see the formation of a club in his name. And he would see it take the Rosario league in 1905 and 1906 but like Bain Calder die in 1907. Yet neither would quite see Bartholomew's, Robb's School, fade from all but history.
George Robb after two decades in charge would in 1909 fall out with the school's authorities. He and his wife left to start their own school still in Rosario. It was unfortunate timing with the Great War just over the horizon and the effect it had on British numbers in South America. The new venture would ultimately fail and he at least would return to Scotland, to Edinburgh where he would work as an accountant and die in 1928. His children would re-emigrate from South to North America and his wife would also die there, in Vancouver in 1933. Meanwhile Rosario Athletic had ceased to play football altogether. The ostensible reason was because of a riot in 1917 in front of its ground at Plaza Jewell not involving its supporters but those of Rosario Central and Newell Old Boy's. Football for the ex-cricket club became infra dig. Its attention was turned to rugby as it still is today. A secondary one may well have been precisely what had also seen the end of George Robb in Argentina at least, the Great War. The ties between the schools and the sports club had been close with, before the conflict, many pupils of the former going on the feature in the latter's teams. However, from 1914 many of those same young men saw it as their patriotic duty o return to Europe to fight. And more than a few never returned.