John Shields
Barcelona
John Hamilton
The Swiss Hans-Max Kamper, or Joan Gamper as he is known in Catalonia, had been a talented player in his home-country, the early hot-bed of football on Continental Europe. Still a teenager he had captained FC Basel and been a co-founder in 1896 of FC Zurich before still in his early twenties travelling and playing in France before, en-route to Morocco, he passed through Barcelona and in October 1898 decided to stay. It was Kamper, already involved in minor football in the suburb of Barcelona where he lived, who with friends and the English community in April had a part in the founding of the Barcelona Lawn Tennis Club, now the Real Club de Tenis de Barcelona that exists to this day, and in October 1899 had placed the advertisement in a local paper that attracted the interest of other, fellow footballers. The new club that resulted is said in one version of the story to have adopted the colours of FC Basel and to have been open to all. Indeed it was, with apparently one initial or rather rapidly introduced exception – Scotsmen.
However, football even in the Catalonia capital never mind Catalonia itself, did not start with FC Barcelona, Gamper's club. There were, of course, J. P Coats’s Scots weavers of Borgonya and there is evidence in Barcelona of the British community organising matches around the Sailing Club and the Methodist Church. At the latter was a group of twenty or so men and boys that played some form of football, whilst the former had placed a newspaper advertisement, for a match, assumed to be soccer, on 27th December 1892. The autumn of 1893 then saw the creation of the Barcelona Football Society, again associated with the city’s Methodist Church, and the game the following year with the visitors from Borgonya.
For Coats business in Spain clearly proved attractive. In 1900 they acquired a second, existing factory in Sant Andreu, now a north- Barcelona suburb, and once a centre for textiles and dyeing. It is still there, preserved as an arts-centre. However, in 1899, the local team, FC Sant Andreu, had already been founded by Scottish textile workers, some perhaps already in place from Coats and Paisley in Sant Andreu itself but the bulk and the impetus employed by the Scottish lace makers, Johnston Shields & Co. of Newmilns, between Darvel and Galston in Ayrshire's Irvine valley, the same company, whose employees had also been instrumental in the introduction of football to Sweden.
In 1893 Johnston, Shields’s Captain John “Jack” Shields and fellow owner, Edward Steegmann, an engineer from Nottingham, where he had been a player-member of Notts County, so clearly with a direct interest in football, had opened a factory soon called “La Escocesa”, the ‘Scottish One’ in Pobre Nou, now also a north-Barcelona suburb. It was run by Jack Shield's younger brother, Thomas “Tom” Shields. He had left Scotland for Spain at the end of October 1893, with his wife, daughter, about forty other Scots and also clearly with a personal interest in football. In the May of the same year, whilst still in Newmilns, he is known to have received a presentation from the local football club, which played in the Ayrshire League from 1891 to 1894, for his off-field contributions.
By 1900, the season after its formation, FC Sant Andreu had already become unofficially known as “FC Escoces”, Scottish F.C. Its team, including,
John Hamilton, Young, W. Barringer, J. Fallon, Wallace, J. Denniston, J. Dykes, McLachlan, Wishart, A. and Joseph Black, George Girvan and Willie Gold, possible ‘Gould’
reflects just why.
Certainly Hamilton, Black, Girvan, Young, Wallace, a John White, Wishart, a James Dykes and Gold are all names local to Newmilns and the valley and at the time with connections to the lace industry. And there are Blacks and Mclachlans in Paisley. Indeed the last of the Newmilns connections has perhaps a curious twist. In 1881 a William Gold, born in 1875, is recorded as living in Galston. He has a brother, David, two years older, the same name as that of the Scottish-born player, who had arrived aged 18 in America in 1891, later coached in Pennsylvania and would be manager of the United States team at the 1934 World Cup, with a J. Gold also already having played for New York in the first American Cup in 1884. Perhaps football and America and now Spain ran in the Galston Golds come Goulds.
Scottish F.C.’s very first game would be against FC Barcelona. For Barcelona it would be its sixth, the initial 1:0 win having been in December 1899 against Colonia Ingles, the English Club by another name. It would be the first and last time Colonia Ingles would play. A week later it and Barcelona would merge with Gamper as captain, fellow Swiss, Walter Wild, president and English Club’s John Parsons, vice-president and William Parsons, vice-captain. As for the Escoces game, Barcelona won 2-0 and Joan Gamper scored both goals in a season that saw the team draw on twenty-nine players, Catalans, Swiss including Gamper and Wild, Germans and British alike; John Parsons, the Wittys, Arthur and Ernest, D. Fitzmaurice, Stanley C. Harris, and again possibly several Scots, Gordon F. Bastow, James Gillespie and A. J. Smart.
Here there is a strange, little story about Gamper that has both religious and nationalist overtones. He had earlier, before the 1899-90 season, been prevented from joining the Tolosa “gym”, or exercise club, because he was a Protestant and the gym already had Catholic members, amongst them both Catalans and some Scots, presumably Escoces Scots. Instead Gamper joined another gym, the Sole, from which the prototype Barcelona F.C. was quickly to emerge. In contrast to the Barcelona club of today, with its clear Catalan identity, it was then anything but. Whilst from the Tolosa gym, a month before the formation of Barcelona, had emerged FC Catala, the “local”, Catalan-nationalist and overtly Catholic team, Barcelona seems to have been one of Protestants and foreigners, an impression only reinforced by it rapid amalgamation with the English Club with its equally Protestant roots.
F.C. Escoces played ten times in the 1899-1900 season and lost just twice. One loss was to Barcelona, the other in a mixed British squad, Team Ingles, against the crew of the visiting Royal Navy ship, HMS Calliope. However, after the tenth game of the season F.C. Barcelona raised a retrospective objection to Escoces on the grounds that it had allowed some of its players to turn out for rival Catala in Barcelona’s fourth game. It is an accusation that was almost certainly true. The relationship between Catala and Escoces was clearly close to judge from the Tolosa gym and the two teams would play each other five times that season. Indeed, the Catala team that day is said to have included six Scots but then the Barca team included eight players from the city's English community. Moreover the game was clearly bad-tempered. Gold now of Catala and the Barca Englishman, Harris, are said to have ended up in a rammy. Fists flew. Both were sent off by the referee that day, Glasgow-born William Mauchan, who had arrived in Catalonia via Nottingham and one of whose sons, probably the eldest, Peter, also Scots-born had been in the Escoces forward-line in its and Barca's previous fixture.
Yet, given blame on both sides the accusation was pretty petty and possibly vindictive. The addition of Escoces players to Catala had seemed to make little difference to the result. Barcelona had won 4:0 but, with Gamper then said to have been replaced as Barca captain and possibly still angered by his Tolosa rebuff, he, seeking through the club a measure of redress, even revenge, might have used nationality as his weapon of choice, not once but twice. Following the on-field fight and the off-field objection Barcelona took its own action. It boycotted not just Escoces, the club, but also said for a season it would not play any games against teams that fielded a “Scottish” player, thus de facto barring the whole Scottish nation. More than that, they refused to field any “Scottish” player themselves with the combined effect that “FC Escoces” was, following its last game against Hispania Athletic, forced to dissolve after just 10 months.
However, although “FC Escoces” had disappeared its players did not. Its goalkeeper, John Hamilton, from Newmiln’s neighbouring village, Darvel, who in 1902 would be the first president of the Barcelona Referees’ Association, played with fellow-Escoces team-mates, Willie Gold, Gustavo Green and briefly A. Black, for at least a season for Hispania. It had been formed by a break-away group of Spanish Catala players, who disagreed with its extreme nationalism, and in 1901 went on to win the Copa Macaya, named in honour of a founding Hispania player and run by none other than Thomas Shields.
Additionally, with the boycott soon lifted, three more ‘Scottish’ players, the defenders, George “Geordie” Girvan, who nevertheless scored in the 1901 Cup Final, and a Mauchan, probably again Peter, perhaps next son Archie or even both, were to appear in the Barcelona ranks in 1900-01 and remain for four seasons. There they were later in the year joined by A. Black, moving on from Hispania as the ever-ambitious Gamper sought to create his strongest team.
But there is a problem. Some Barcelona sources give the Mauchan in the side from 1901-1905 as David and from Dumbarton. There is even a Davie Mauchan born in "The Rock" who as a newly-qualified mechanical engineer, who would have been not quite 20 when he might first played for the Blaugranas and might even have had footballing pedigree. His eldest brother, Andrew, had in 1897 been right-back in the Dumbarton team that had reached the 1897 Scottish Cup Final, only to be defeated 5-1 by Rangers. Moreover, the same Davie Mauchan is said also to have become a referee and in 1909 with a brother or bothers to have formed CE Jupiter, a team, which exists to this day in Sant Marti, the suburb next to Pobre Nou. On the face of it there is in both suggestions a certain plausibility but there is probably a much simpler explanation. William Mauchan had a total of five sons. Peter and Archie had had been born in Scotland, John in Nottingham in 1890 with the two youngest in Spain in 1895 and 1897. Youngest of all was William Jnr and two years older was David. It seems far more likely that Jupiter was founded, as suggested elsewhere, by the three youngest boys and history has conflagrated both the Williams, Snr and Jnr and David with Peter.
Whilst the Barcelona Mauchan-dynasty remains a little confused and therefore complicate, fortunately with other of the Scots pioneers there is greater clarity. George “Geordie” Girvan, perhaps 21 when he had arrived in Spain and born in Dalziel by Motherwell but of Ayrshire parents from Loudoun just up the Irvine river from Newmilns and Darvel , returned to Scotland by 1904, his work in the city’s textile factories possibly done, but perhaps with a Spanish wife, Susannah Maria Zillah, became in time the secretary of the Scottish Lace and Textiles Union and provost of of Newmilns, his adopted town, dying there in 1968, aged 90.
Barcelona was to field no Scots in 1902-03 or 1903-4. It was not until 1904-5 that John Hamilton joined from a now dissolved Hispania, but as a defender, whilst one of the forwards was Joseph, the second of the Black brothers. With them in the team Barcelona was in 1905 to take its first Catalonian championship but again their stays were to be brief; just one season. It would not be until 1908 that William White joined and played in attack and not until two years later that arguably Barcelona’s greatest Scot arrived. His name is George Pattullo, also known sometimes as Jorge or even John.
Born in 1888 in Govan in Glasgow, George Simpson Pattullo made his debut for FC Barcelona on 24th September 1910 against Espanyol, netting in a 1:1 draw. In the season he would score 41 goals in 20 matches, a goals-per-match ratio better than Lionel Messi’s. He has been described as the club's "most influential British import of all-time”, which means, if true, he was more important than Welshman, Mark Hughes, Gary Lineker, then an English international, and the fellow Scot, Steve Archibald. It is some claim but not without reason.