It is Brazil where the idea for this website was born. Specifically it was at the top end of Rua Paissandu in Rio de Janeiro standing, facing the Guanabara Palace, at the side of a road that cuts across the land where football in the country was quite probably first played. Let me explain.
Almost a century ago my grandparents took the
drift south from the place of their Scottish births, not to England or even Australia but as fate would have it to South America. They arrived in Minas Gerais, eventually settling in Rio and never came back. They are buried in Brazil as are two of their children, my uncle and one of my aunts. Now as far as I know my grandfather did not play football, at least not in Brazil. He and my grandmother were both bowlers, champion bowlers at that, but the Brazilian teams of my childhood caught my imagination as did the story of how football arrived in the land of my father's childhood. It was said it did so in the feet and mind of a young, half-Scot, half-Brazilian, a little like I imagined myself. In fact I am not half-Brazilian and nor was the arrival story fully true but it took me forty years to get to that truth. And, as I did so, over the years other stories began to emerge with one theme, of predominantly Scots involvement in the introduction of the game not just to many parts of Brazil from Sao Paulo to Amazonas but also all its neighbours and beyond.
Senior football arrived in Brazil in 1894. It had been played at a school-boy level by pupils in Jesuit Colleges before that date, not least at the one in Novo Friburgo, right behind the house where my own family was later to live. A hefty kick and the ball might have landed in the river, which the house overlooked. Where it first arrived, however, is more open to question. It was thought it had been carried by Charles Miller, my half-Scot, half-Brazilian, when from schooling in Southampton he returned to Sao Paulo with a suitcase of sports equipment, including a football. However, it now seems most likely that just two months earlier it had actually arrived in the luggage of Eliza, the wife of Thomas Donohoe, and not Sao Paulo at all, to the town of Bangu just outside Rio de Janeiro. But there is a third and most recent possibility. Thomas Scott, a railway engineer, who arrived at that same time in the interior of Sao Paulo State , was not just instrumental in the formation of the first clubs in Campinas and Jundiai, both cities in the interior, but also had sons, who on moving in Sao Paulo city continued to play in its top-flight for another thirty years. And Donohoe and Scott were also Scots. Read on.....
Styles