In life almost fifty years separated Alex Bell and John Hewie. Bell was born in 1882 and Hewie in 1927. And it seems their paths followed two important parallela. Eight and half thousand miles lie between where both had begun their lives and where they played their club football, the former mainly in England, the latter entirely so, and their international appearances. You see they shared a birthplace, South Africa, and, if unequally, caps, twenty in all and for Scotland. Yet, their individual stories are as distinctive as diamond and gold.
Alex Bell was spotted playing for Ayr Parkhouse by a Scottish, former player, Will Davidson. Davidson had spent a single season in England in 1893-4 with Newton Heath, the Newton Heath that became Manchester United in 1902 in the year before Bell was signed by the club, incidentally as a centre-forward, and where after what was a tricky start he from 1904 became a fixture but at wing-half. Over a decade he would make over three hundred appearances and in 1912 he was selected for a single cap for Scotland, against Ireland in a 4-1 away win. In contrast John Davidson Hewie was to win nineteen Scottish caps between 1956 and 1960 at left-back. For two years, indeed, he was partnered by Eric Caldow, before Caldow was moved from right to left, from when on his international appearances became sporadic, finishing with a last one, a 2-3 loss at Hampden Park to Poland, which marked the end of Andy Beattie's Scotland manager-ship and in which Hewie missed a penalty. It was a somewhat sad end to an international career but not to club performances. Between 1949 and 1966 Hewie would make almost five hundred league appearances, all but a few for a single club.
Hewie had been nineteen when he had joined Charlton Athletic, having learned his football not in Britain but in Pretoria. Charlton would be his only British league club. He would leave The Valley just two years short of his fortieth birthday. And having returned to South Africa on retirement from playing he would die not there but back in England, in Lincolnshire. He had seemingly never lived in Scotland, his wife was English, however, with South Africa not achieving full independence from Britain until 1961 and under the 1887 IFB ruling he had the choice of playing either for the land of his and his mother's birth or that of his father, William, born in Yarrow by Selkirk in The Borders. Fortunately he chose the latter.
Alex Bell similarly had been twenty-one when he had made the move to Manchester. It was there too in 1934 he would die barely in his early fifties, having from 1925 until his death as a coach and trainer at Manchester City. But in the meantime after The Great War he had coached at Coventry, spent a season playing back in Scotland, the war years at Blackburn Rover and before that ten seasons across the city at the Back St. ground, the precursor of Old Trafford. With United, one third of their famous half-back trio with Roberts and Duckworth, winning two league titles and an F.A. Cup medal. In fact in the interim he only returned in 1903 briefly on signing to Ayr to marry, for it was there Mary, his wife-to-be, was staying, as was his own family and had been for some time. Although both he and his younger brother, Andrew, had both been born in South Africa, Alex in Cape Town, the births of three younger sisters and a brother had all been either in Glasgow or Ayr itself. It seems his father, also Alexander, a joiner, born in Drummore in Wigtownshire had spent perhaps half a dozen years in Cape Colony, probably marrying there, to an Ayrshire girl from Irvine, before returning home. Alex Jnr. was only South African by fate. He had come to Scotland aged no more than six, was in terms of football raised in the Scottish game and was in essence no different to contemporaries or near contemporaries like
Archie Goodall,
Willie Maley,
Jock Simpson,
Patsy Gallacher and others. Except, of course, for one fact. Unlike England or Ireland South Africa was "Empire" and, like John Hewie, Alex Bell too had the choice.