(With grateful thanks to Pastor Dan Morrison, the preserver of the memory.)
This story of Bethlehem begins not in Nazareth but Philadelphia. In fact this article might better be entitled "Building in Bethlehem and Philly", or rather "Building in Philly and Bethlehem" as, in Pennsylvanian, chronological terms at least, the city really came before the town, albeit that the real footballing roots of both are further back still and in again both cases probably three thousand miles and almost four decades away to and in Glasgow or thereabouts.
Football, soccer that is, came to Philadelphia early, in 1884 but just at a local level. The professional game arrived a decade later in 1894 but in the form of a number of baseball teams, including the city's Phillies, pretending to be able to play the larger ball game in a league that lasted just weeks. And that was it more or less for a further decade. Even though the period saw the formation of the city's Allied Association Football Clubs league and its Referees’ Association, the game reverted to being parochial as first economic depression hit hard from about 1894 and the Spanish-American War followed in 1898 with its ensuing disruptions. That is with the exception of the brewers' team, Philadelphia Manz, an early iteration of the Philadelphia Field Club by another name and heavily sponsored, winning the American Cup in 1897.
That was until March 1906 when Tommy Hyslop, as he was known in the footballing World, arrived in the USA and via a brief excursion to New Jersey found his way to Philadelphia to work ostensibly as a sometime mason, sometime carpet-weaver. Tommy, or as his passport probably said, Bryce Scouller, was an Ayrshire-man, born in Auchinleck in 1871. He would die in 1936 in Paisley, where he had grown up, and in the meantime before America beckoned it is said he had played, mainly as an inside-forward but also at centre-forward, for Elderslie, by Paisley, the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards (perhaps the reason for the pseudonym, a combination of his second name and his mother's maiden name), Millwall Athletic in London, Sunderland, Stoke, in two separate spells, Glasgow Rangers, also twice and winning the Scottish Cup on two occasions, Partick Thistle, Dundee Wanderers, Johnstone, by Paisley once more, and Abercorn in Paisley itself. Then on arrival in Pennsylvania at the age of thirty-five he turned out for Philadelphia Thistle, the city's Scots club, for a season before joining Tacony, a team from a booming Philadelphia suburb of the same name, not forgetting, of course, that in 1896-7 he had played twice for Scotland, in beating England on both occasions, once at home and once away.
Scouller aka Hyslop was clearly a bit of a maverick and a wanderer with something of a complicated back story. He appears to have been in either the British Navy and the Army or both and to have been married but with no wife, at least in America. However, he had been a very talented player and even in his mid-thirties still had something in those legs. He clearly stood out at Thistle and at Tacony with him in the side the local league was won. By then, however, how much carpet-weaving or stone-cutting he was doing must be open to doubt. With his last clubs in Scotland he had clearly been combining football and work outside. Both Johnstone and Abercorn were semi-professional, the latter in the Scottish league, the former outwith it, at least until 1912. Both teams would have been amateur but expenses would have been paid plus, no doubt, "boot money" from crowd receipts. It might even have been something of a similar arrangement that could have drawn him to America, to Thistle, but at Tacony there seems little doubt not just that there was financial inducement, illegal in an ostensibly amateur sport, but also the strong possibility of still more going on, this time legally.
Philadelphia was an expanding, industrialising city. Tacony was the home of the Disston factory. It was a very successful metal-bashing business making saws and other tools. The Disston family itself had taken, for those times, indeed for ours, a very enlightened approach to its workers providing them with good housing and social amenities, entertainment etc. Clearly it believed happy workers produced more and, given the company results over many years, who could argue. And there was as the 19th became the 20th Century also a new generation of Disstons coming into the business, not least Albert H., born in 1881 so by 1906 in his mid-twenties, who seems to have wished to continue to expand business and extend enlightenment.
Perhaps Albert saw football coming and it fitted his requirements. His workers would certainly have played it, indeed, by the mid 1910s Tacony as a club was already a decade and half old. Perhaps he was even a fan. He was certainly young enough to be sporting. Perhaps too he saw what was happening elsewhere with the works teams formed by Howard and Bullough in 1899 and Coats in 1900, both in
Pawtucket, Rhode Island, textile machine makers and cotton thread spinners respectively, the revival in 1906 of Clarks in Kearny in New Jersey, the other half of Clarks and Coats, and others and it set him thinking about football not just as sport for a few of his employees but as entertainment for the many of them.
Now in a trade like saw-making it would have been perfectly legitimate for the business owners to visit Europe for commercials reasons. Albert did so in 1907, 1908 and 1909. The question is coincidence. The visits coincide with the recruitment of Hyslop to Tacony, the obvious and growing Scottish influence at the club, even though it was not officially connected to the company, not least with captain, Hector Macdonald, ex. of Hearts, who had arrived in 1907, and the gradual appearance of a number of other players also from Scotland amongst them Bob Millar
and a certain
Bobby Morrison.
The Hector MacDonald story is relatively simple. He was born in 1880 in Edinburgh, the son of John, born in Clyne, that is Brora in Sutherland, where football began in The Highlands at about that time, and Fanny born in England. Part of large family he was still in Auld Reekie in 1881, 1891 and 1901, by then a plumber's apprentice, and from 1900 played a season with Lochgelly just across the water in Fife, two with Leith Athletic and three with Hearts. Yet it was as a plumber he arrived aged twenty-six in 1907 in Philadelphia, where he found employment at a sawmill, i.e. the Disston mill. That he came by invitation is probable, since by the following year immigrants from Britain had to have a job to come to. Earlier they were able simply to arrive on spec. That he stayed at least until 1920 is also clear, after which it all becomes more murky. He seems never to have married. He might have died in 1930s and in Florida.
With regard to Bob Millar, his tale is quite different. He is said to have arrived at Tacony at the age of just twenty-one in 1912, so probably "invited". He seems on the pitch to have been something of a head-strong young man, much in the Hyslop mould, moving from club to club and a hot-head, getting into on-field fights. But he was a also a very talented player, an inside-left, born in Paisley, coincidentally or not also the home town of Tommy Hyslop, and had already completed two seasons for his hometown club, St. Mirren in the Scottish First Division and perhaps a short stay with Arsenal in England. He would stay in Philadelphia for a single season before moving on to New York. It was a change that might be explained firstly by a return home in the meantime, which, if it was an attempt to restart his Scottish career, was unsuccessful and, secondly, having burned his bridges at Tacony, failing in Scotland and needing a job, that Brooklyn was what he could get at least temporarily. But he stayed for just a single season before moving back to Pennsylvania. There he joined Bethlehem Steel, where he is also reunited with Bobby Morrison, from where over the next decade and a half he moved on the several more clubs, entered football coaching and became the manager of the USA football team that reached the semi final in Uruguay of the first World Cup in 1930.
As for Bobby Morrison his arrival in America is perhaps a little more complicated. Certainly the immigration of the family is. Jean, the youngest daughter of father, Robert Snr, and his wife, Isabelle, arrived in 1907, aged just 16, and went to Philadelphia. Why is unclear. Brother James arrives in 1910 again to Philadelphia, whilst for the eldest daughter, Jessie, it was probably in 1913 and she once more heads to the City of Brotherly Love. Bobby and his youngest brother, Joseph, and their mother meanwhile have arrived there in 1909. The mystery is where was the father? Simply put, in 1901 they had been a family living together in Glasgow yet by 1913 almost that same whole family had shifted to Philly, the exception being their father and where he has gone is a mystery. All we know is that in 1909 Isabelle Morrison states she is still married, that by 1919 her husband is dead and she in 1920 declares herself a widow.
So why did Bobby Morrison come to the USA? It may have been to unite the family but then only Jean was there and she married that same year so had a new life. It may have been to look for work but he had work in Glasgow, as a machinist. However, it is far more likely he came to play football, specifically at the Tacony club, that it was done with approval, organisation, if not direct financial involvement from Albert Disston, and included the required guaranteed of a job. The two may even have met in Britain. Disston himself returned to the States from there in August 1909. Morrison then arrived in September. In October his was in the reinforced Tacony team that beat the previous season's league champions, all-conquering Philadelphia Hibernians and, since he had brought with him his mother and brother, who was still a child, he was clearly confident he had an "arrangement" that would allow him to look after them all, if not long- then at least medium-term. Moreover there is another possible facet to the scenario; that Bobby Morrison, footballer, and Tommy Hyslop not simply played alongside each other with Hyslop in the Tacony team until at least 1910, when together they won both the league and the American Cup, Morrison netting the winning penalty, but they knew each other already and Morrison had been recruited on Hyslop's specific recommendation. You see both the Hyslop and the Morrison families came originally from Sanquhar in Dumfries. There is even the possibility that Hyslop and Morrison were related. Bobby Morrison Jnr's great-grandmother and Tommy Hyslop's grandfather were both Sanquhar-born, she in 1796, he just four years later, which means it is feasible they were cousins or perhaps even brother and sister, the latter making Tommy Hyslop and Robert Morrison Snr, Bobby Morrison's father, second cousins.
Whatever the truth of the Hyslop-Morrison relationship from all the above it is clear that Bobby Morrison was a footballer, who was held in high regard and rapidly established a reputation in America. He is said to have been a Scottish "junior international", that is in today's terms a school-boy international. He would have been been fourteen or so at the time so it would have been about 1897. That such games took place is undoubted. The problem is that even the Scottish Football Association does not have records of them. He must too have been playing at a reasonably high level. The problem is that there is not an obvious trace of him. From 1900, so from the age of seventeen, until 1903-4 there is a Bobby Morrison registered with a variety of clubs close together in East Lanarkshire and at which he may have been learning his professional trade, but after that there is no obvious sign. It leaves two possibilities, that he had dropped down into junior football or that he was registered with a club in England but not getting a game. Both would indicate that a move to America might be attractive but both are once more unrecorded.
(In fact this question has now been clarified. See
Bobby Morrison.)
Bobby Morrison would remain at Tacony for four very successful seasons. That was until in 1913 when he moved on to become the first captain of what was to be the most successful football team in America over the next decade and a half. Indeed the move may have had organisational and naming repercussions at Tacony. It ceased to be the "town club", if one clearly supported by the factory, and became Henry Disston F.C. and then Disston A.A., a now fully integrated, that is openly subsidised, works team better able to pay to keep players, over which seems to hover a whiff of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. It was after all a subsidised works team, to which Bobby Morrison had moved. The team was
Bethlehem Steel. And for Morrison himself there were also repercussions. Tacony were clearly not happy. It "arranged" for Morrison to be banned by the American Football Association from participation in the American Cup for the following season, yet he would still have the final word and where it mattered most, on the field. Firstly his defection almost certainly left the Tacony team weaker, contributing to it losing the 1913 American Cup final by the odd goal in three and after two replays, in which goals against it had been scored in the 88th and 89th minutes respectively. And secondly, once reinstated and leading the Bethlehem team, he would finally win the American Cup the following year, beating none other than Tacony in the final.
Bobby Morrison would spend the rest of his life in Bethlehem, still an attractively Victorian town on one side of the river with the now defunct steelworks on the other, and there a similar process seems to have taken place to that at Disston. The owner, or at least the plant manager, had taken what had been an existing club increasingly under his wing until it too became a works team, but one like no other. Bethlehem F.C. had been founded in 1907. It was the amateur, town team then. At inside-right, probably from when he joined the company and certainly from 1909 until the 1913-14 season, was a Welshman, Horace Edgar, H.E., Lewis, twenty-five in 1907, thirty-two in 1914. He had been born in Pontardulais and as a working-class boy had arrived in America aged fourteen and done well. Although one of the lads on the football pitch, playing alongside Morrison in 1912-13 and 1913-14, he would rise in 1916 to become Vice-President of the Bethlehem Steel Corp., also founded in 1907 on the base of several other large associated companies and which on creation was the second largest steel company in the United States. The largest was U.S. Steel, formed from a buy-out of Carnegie Steel, with all its Scots connections.
And Lewis had a plan. It was firstly to bring more footballing talent to the team he cherished, one which in 1912-13 was already shamateur with Beith-born, ex-Morton Whitey Fleming known to be paid $15 (then £3) per game on top of his job at the plant and a team which between 1913 and 1915 was totally "retooled". And it was secondly a blueprint, which in 1915 on the absorption of Bethlehem F.C. into the newly-created works team, Bethlehem Steel F.C., became a master plan literally to forge on the field the USA's best club, now with a professional-size squad, and do exactly the same off it. The club would have built for it by the steel company America's first football ground with stadium seating, whilst over a decade and a half increasing numbers of clearly professional players from the UK, notably from Scotland, would be literally imported to fill the ranks of a top team, but one which played at times to incredibly small crowds, perhaps few more than a couple of hundred. In the end it proved to be a vanity project, which by the time Lewis left Bethlehem Steel was rendered unsustainable. However, it began well with Bobby Morrison not only a key player but one who would become both a close friend of Lewis himself, and also, it seems, a vital cog in the building process off the field. With Tacony Morrison had won the local league twice but had also twice been losing American Cup finalists. Under Albert Disston and with the Hyslop input it had done well. The plan at Bethlehem was clearly to do better and whilst it already had its Albert Disston in the shape of Horace Lewis himself the Hyslop equivalent had to be identified. That Lewis did in Morrison, not least because he clearly had had insight at Tacony and may even have almost "inherited" Hyslop's contacts as the older man's playing career, he was now over forty, finally came to an end.
In fact the Morrison-Lewis combination was almost immediately to have an effect, both on and off the field. On it in 1913, with Bethlehem F.C. having been runner-up the previous year but with Morrison now in charge the league, the Allied American League of Philadelphia, was won. It was won again in 1914 and 1915. In addition in 1914 still as Bethlehem F.C. the American Cup was entered for the first time, and also won. Moreover, in 1914-15 the Challenge Cup was entered for the first time and its
Dewar Cup won, whilst the semi-finals were reached in the American Cup. However it was not serendipitous success. It was being done through systematic change. Off the field Lewis himself had become part of the management team with Messrs. Graham, Lawson and Lyne, whilst on it there was a much-tweaked and now very Scottish team, which by 1915 it consisted of Fletcher, Campbell, Bobby Morrison himself, Murray, Ford, Duncan, Ferguson, Pepper, Clarke, Neil Clarke ex. of Celtic, Fleming, Toole and Bob Millar. However, more tellingly in getting there over three years eleven players came in for the first season under Morrison, with seven out including Lewis himself and ten more in for the second season, seven more out. And this was as in 1914 Robert Morrison, a "machinist" still, had travelled home to Scotland, returning to Philadelphia on 5th October just in time for the start of the season but no doubt at the behest of Lewis also having had the opportunity in the Auld country to renew old contacts, make new ones and begin the search for players not least to replace Morrison himself.
In 1915-16 now as Bethlehem Steel both the American and Challenge Cups were won, the latter with another Lewis, A.H., now listed as Head Coach, as he was until 1917, and in a new league the team was runner-up just as the Steel Field opened. In 1916 Morrison, now well into his thirties, was still captain at the beginning of the year but hardly played all season. The final end to his playing career came through injury in 1918, whilst in the meantime Bethlehem's success continued. It had taken the American Cup again in 1917 and 1918 and the Dewar Cup, once more in 1918 with a team on and off the field that was again on the change but strangely the same. Fletcher, Duncan, Ferguson, Murray, Fleming and Campbell were still there as was Pepper, now as captain, and Morrison, in a suit not kit, but they had been joined by Whitson, Kirkpatrick, Butler, Wilson, McKelvey, Ratican, Easton and Murphy. Almost all the new players were still Scots. Off the field too A.H. Lewis was gone. Billy Stark was the trainer and William Sheridan, who had been appointed in 1913 to oversee the company's general athletics programme, now the manager. Both too were Scots, from Glasgow, but had come to stay. Indeed Sheridan's son still lives in Bethlehem. Both were also fitness experts, trainers not football coaches, and both like the players had not appeared out of the ether. Which begs two questions. How had players and coaches been identified and recruited? And who decided on-field tactics?
In 1919 Bethlehem Steel won both the American and National Cups once more and then seemed to reach something of a plateau, even a crisis, not least because of finances. In 1920 it was the losing finalist in the American Cup and would not take part again until 1924. That same year it also backed out of a planned summer tour to Brazil, having the previous year successfully travelled to Sweden, Norway and Denmark. It also on the face of it did not join the American Soccer League when it was formed in 1921. In fact it did but in another form. The Philadelphia Field Club was resurrected and in search of better crowds the Bethlehem operation was effectively transferred the seventy miles to the City of Brotherly Love and renamed.
On the pitch the move was a complete success. With a basically unchanged team Bethlehem's alter ego won the inaugural league at a canter, scoring two goals to every one conceded. However, financially it proved no better than staying at home and that is precisely where it returned back under the Bethlehem name the next season and, having had to release players, at the end of the 1922-23 season, still finishing second. It was, however, done not without scandal. The wife of William Sheridan, who was still the manager, ran off with the top scorer for club and league that year, Daniel Niven, ten years her younger, married him although already married, fled to Scotland alone, leaving behind young Niven and accused of bigamy. Needless to say he left the club further breaking up what had been effectively the second squad that had been pieced together for it with H.E. Lewis's money and Bobby Morrison's know-how, at which point Morrison finally seems to have stepped back and the building of Bethlehem ceased. Although unable to play through age and injury yet having in 1919 applied for a US passport officially to play football for Bethlehem on its Scandinavian tour, doing the same again in 1920 for the aborted trip to Brazil and clearly having had another and important role in the dressing-room, in 1923 his name disappears from the squad roster. And with it, I suggest, went not just the club's first captain but its on-field and then off-field tactician for all of the previous decade and its identifier and procurer following "cousin Tommy's model" for those same ten years of its playing and perhaps also its training talent.