There is a village in the foothills of the Pyrenees; a small, quiet village with a railway slipping through it on its way from the Mediterranean towards the snow-capped, high peaks that mark the French border. The lower part of the village on one side of the embanked tracks is in small rectangles. Its three “calles”, its streets, are lined with neat, terraced brick-built workers' houses that have something of a local look but also something else. The clue to the something else is in the street-names. The middle of the three is Escocia, Scotland. To the left is Paisley and to the right is Coats. The upper part of the village has the church, the graveyard and larger, newer houses and it middle part has old, large houses and buildings that have the air of other use, of administration but not office. And it is to this seemingly insignificant village that football first came not to Spain as a whole but to Catalonia.
The reason for football's arrival lies via two short tunnels in the railway embankment. Through them is the mill. Perhaps today, with all that has gone on in the province, or is it country, the Catalonian flag might be flying from its central tower. When I was there it was The Saltire and for a very good reason.
In 1894 Paisley-based cotton-thread manufacturer, J. P. Coats, now the multinational Coats p.l.c, just as it would in Pawtucket in the United States, Ipiranga in Brazil and later in Barcelona itself, had begun the construction of a mill in
Borgonya, the village in question, a short distant from the town of Torello. It is a place fed by the waters of the Pyrenees and about 50 miles north of the Catalan capital. To get production started Coats also sent out workers from the UK, almost all from Scotland, enough to have to build a dedicated residential district, hence the three streets with their wee, Hispano-Scots houses. And with the workers would be carried a passion for football they would deeply if unknowingly implant wherever they were sent. Borgonya was no exception.
When and where football was first played in the village no-one knows. It must have been almost immediately after the factory opened and was likely to have been a kick-about, perhaps at the end of Calle Coats on the open space that is now Placa del Pla de Can Salvans. 1895 would see the formation of a sports club, the ‘Associacion de Torello’ that exists to this day in the form of its 100-year-old golf course, with more formal Association football already being played. Fragments of those days remain – players’ names, predominantly Scottish names amongst them -
Cochran, team captain, Paton, English, Munro, Lyle, Gerard, Cooper, Al. Nichol, A. Tong and/or H. Tong, Rushton and King
– taking part in a match against a Barcelona Football Society eleven in 1895. It was an away-game, was lost 6:3 but with Cochran scoring a hat-trick.
The Barcelona Football Society had been founded in the autumn of 1893 based around the city's Methodist Church. It was the product of the British Community already having arranged matches around the church and the Sailing Club. At the latter was a group of 20 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 but possibly rugby or a hybrid, to be played on 27th December 1892.
Coats clearly found the Spanish thread market to its liking. In 1900 it acquired a second, existing factory in Sant Andreu, now a north- Barcelona suburb, and once a centre for textiles and dyeing. The factory 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 from Coats and already in place in Sant Andreu itself but the bulk employed by the Scottish lace makers, Johnston Shields & Co. of Newmilns in Ayrshire, the same company, whose employees had already 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 himself with an active interest in football, had opened a factory soon called “La Escocesa”, the ‘Scottish One’. It was in Poble Nou, now also a north-Barcelona suburb. It was run by Thomas “Tom” Shields, Jack Shields' younger brother, who had left Scotland for Spain at the end of October 1893, with his wife, daughter, about forty other Scots and clearly also with a personal interest in football. In the May of the same year, whilst still in Newmilns, aged thirty and perhaps a player he is known to have received a presentation from the local football club but for his off-field contributions.
And 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,
reflects just why.
Meanwhile, the city of Barcelona proper had seen the arrival of the Swiss Hans-Max Kamper, or Joan Gamper as he is known in Catalonia. Gamper had been a talented player in his home-country, the early hot-bed of football on Continental Europe. As a teenager he had captained FC Basel and been a co-founder in 1896 of FC Zurich before still in his early 20s he travelled and played in France until, en-route to Morocco, he passed through Barcelona and in October 1898 decided to stay.
He was soon involved in minor football in the suburb of Barcelona where he lived and with friends and the English community in April 1899 had a part in the founding of the Barcelona Lawn Tennis Club. Then in October he placed the advertisement in a local paper that attracted the interest of other, fellow footballers. Organised games resulted and settled teams rapidly became formalised clubs. Gamper's own new team was, of course Barcelona F.C., founded in November that same year. It is even said in one version of the story to have adopted the colours of Gamper's old team, FC Basel, and to have been open to all races and creeds. Indeed to begin with it might have been. However, almost immediately there was one notable exception, Scots.
There is an explanation. “Scottish” F.C.’s very first game would actually be against FC Barcelona. For Barcelona it would be its sixth, the initial 1:0 win having been in December 1899 over Colonia Ingles, the English Club of the port and the city's merchants 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 captain of the new entity, fellow Swiss, Walter Wild, president, 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 29 players, Catalans, Swiss including Gamper and Wild, Germans and British alike; John Parsons, the Wittys, Arthur and Ernest, D. Fitzmaurice, Stanley C. Harris, and even several possible Scots, Gordon F. Bastow, James Gillespie and A. J. Smart.
F.C. Escoces would play ten times in the 1899-1900 season and lose just twice. Once 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 that 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 a third team, a rival, Catala, in Barcelona’s second game. It is an accusation that was almost certainly true. The relationship between Catala and Escoces was clearly close. The two teams would play each other five times that season. However, the accusation was also petty. The addition of Escoces players to Catala had seemed to make little difference to the result. Barcelona had won 4:0. Moreover, it was possibly vindictive.
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. And it was from the Tolosa gym, a month before the formation of Barcelona, that FC Catala had emerged as the the “local”, Catalan-nationalist and overtly Catholic team.
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. Barcelona seems to have begun as a team of Protestants and foreigners, an impression only reinforced by it rapid amalgamation with the English Club with its equally Protestant roots.
So it was perhaps with Gamper still angered by his Tolosa rebuff, he sought through his new club a measure of redress, even revenge on Escoces and Scots using nationality as his weapon of choice, not once but twice. Following the objection Barcelona boycotted not just Escoces, the club, but also said 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. The combined effect was minimal on Barcelona F.C. itself but “FC Escoces”, following its last game against Hispania Athletic, was forced to dissolve after just 10 months.
However, although “FC Escoces” had disappeared its players had not. Its goalkeeper, John Hamilton, from Newmiln’s neighbouring village, Darvel, later 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 David Mauchan, were to appear in the Barcelona ranks in 1900-01 and for just one season. There they were later in the year joined by one of the Black brothers, moving on, perhaps tapped up from Hispania as the ever-ambitious Gamper sought to create his strongest team.
Davie Mauchan was probably born in Dumbarton and was not quite 20 when he played for Barcelona. He remained in the city until at least 1909, was later a referee and founder with his brother, Archibald, of yet another local club, C E Jupiter. George “Geordie” Girvan, born in Motherwell, raised in Galston, 20, perhaps 21, when he had arrived in Spain, returned to Scotland by 1904, his work in the city’s textile factories possibly done. But he also returned with a Spanish, a Catalan wife, although in the 1911 census she is shown as born in England. They had two children in Spain, James, who did not survive, and William. Back home Geordie became in time the secretary of the Scottish Lace and Textiles Union and provost of his home town of Newmilns, dying there in 1968, aged 90. Nor was Geordie the only one of the Escoces team to to marry in Barcelona. Willie Gold, Matthew Wallace, Peter Wishart all tied the knot as did Archibald Mauchan and a Gold, a Mauchan and a Hamilton were also born there. And of the bosses and their families Edward Steegmann was to die in Barcelona in his early sixties in about 1903, whilst the Shields remained. Janet Shields, Tom Shields daughter would marry in the city in 1908 or so.
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 John Pattullo, also known sometimes as George or Jorge.
Born in 1888 in Glasgow's Govan, John 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 forty-one goals in twenty 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 and international, Steve Archibald.
Yet it might never have happened. Just arrived in Barcelona for business – he was in the coal trade – the tall, skinny Pattullo was invited to play a game at the Contreria football ground in Badalona to the north of Barcelona for a British team against the University eleven. Football was not his game. He was, even with Barcelona, said to have missed fixtures to play his greatest love, tennis. As a footballer he had till then only played in goal and it was where he was put. By half-time his team was 5-1 down. Fed up he decided to come out of goal and play up front, scoring 5 goals with his team eventually winning 6-5. The University demanded a rematch, which ended 4-4 with Pattullo scoring all four for his side. For Gamper, who had apparently watched the games. that was enough. Pattullo was persuaded to join his team.
And then he was gone. Having helped his team to win its fourth Catalonian Championship, its third in a row, the Scot returned with his work to Britain. Only in March 1912 did he briefly reappear at the last minute to play the semi-final again against that year's champions, Espanyol, in the Pyrenees Cup. There was a rumour he was on his way. He was seen stepping off the train in Barcelona hours before the kick-off but the journey had been clearly worth it and he sorely missed. Barcelona won 3-2, with two goals from Pattullo and him also winning a penalty.
After the game Pattullo would return to Britain, definitively, even said to have repaid Barcelona for his hotel during his brief stay. Throughout he remained a staunch amateur, said even to have refused an offer from Espanyol, with shamateurism, although illegal, already clearly embedded. Without him Barcelona went on to win the Cup Final 5-3 in Toulouse in May and it is not clear if Pattullo ever played football again. At the outbreak of the Great War he enlisted in the Tyneside Scottish Brigade, rising to Captain, was awarded the Military Cross and also badly gassed. His health suffered, remaining poor and it was recommended that he move to Majorca, where he married; a marriage that did not last. In April 1928 he returned to Barcelona where he was asked to kick off a league match against Oviedo. In 1930 for a short while he even managed the Club Baleares in Palma before a return to Britain, perhaps hastened by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. In Britain his respiratory condition worsened. There is even talk of alcoholism before his death in London in September, 1953, in his early sixties and almost forgotten.
As for the first sites of Catalan football, the Borgonya mill was closed in 1955 after sixty years. Parts of it now are used for other purposes, parts are empty but much of it including the chimney still stand. And in the valley beyond the mill the river fed from the hills still flows and the canal that feeds off it further up-stream remains full. It once brought the river water that powered the whole factory. It still makes its way between the red-brick, factory buildings, having en route passed behind the late-Victorian-Edwardian pavilion that overlooks the sports field with nets stowed away but goalposts ready for the next game.
This whilst in Barcelona the two factories, Coats's and Johnston Shields's have had similar but different fates. Both are today dedicated to the arts, the Fabra y Coats buildings as a refurbished art exhibition centre and La Escosesa as a dilapidated but vibrant home of artist studios. Meanwhile the Coats company grew to become the Coats Viyella multinational, whereas Johnston Shields indeed the Shields themselves appear to have faded away. Jack Shields would die in 1917, seemingly childless and Thomas in 1925 with just the one, by-then married daughter.