Jimmy, Alec, the Buds and Podge
Now you can take coal to Newcastle either Geordie- or Ozzie-style. Both would be an equal waste of time for in the pit-villages around Newcastle in northern New South Wales, coal was as king as in Northumberland And football was no different. More than that the same was true in the collieries around Woolongong in the south of the state and also in the mining towns in the hinterland of Brisbane in Queensland and for a simple reason. Although rugby is a fine game if you happen to be at least 6ft 4ins and weigh 16 stones or more and Ozzie Rules is great for strapping lads too football is for the every-man, not least the real, wee men who had no choice but to spend half their lives burrowing underground. Whilst folk in Sydney breathed fresh-air and followed their code and Melbourne played its version of an ancient Celtic game so Australian pit-men, Newcastle pit-men amongst them, from the 1880s emerged grimy and blinking in the surface light at the end of the week to play soccer at weekends. Indeed, by 1890 there had been the creation of a team perhaps as important to the history of the game in Australia as southern New South Wales's Balgownie Rangers. It too is one that still plays, and semi-professionally, in the National Premier Leagues Northern New South Wales Division I, part of the second tier of the Australian game. It is to be found in Adamstown, a Newcastle suburb and its name is Rosebud, Bud for short.
There seem to be several suggestions as to why the name Rosebud was chosen, however none that is definitive. What, however, is known is that the suggestion for the club itself came in 1889 from the local vicar. He had watched a game between teams from the area, teams which had included several players from Adamstown, which at the time had no club of its own. One of those players was Peter Finlayson, the scorer of the winning goal for one of the teams in opposition, neighbouring Hamilton. And it was he who the vicar recruited to realise idea.
Peter Finlayson would become the new club's first secretary. But he was more important than that. Notably he had been born in Australia. He was the son of a Master Mariner, albeit from Scotland, from Inverness, but his football had been learned 10,000 miles from its home, clearly brought and implanted by others, to the best of whom there are obvious pointers. Although the Rosebuds is a sweet name it began quite aggressively to do the vicar's bidding. It started to recruit and it was the ex-pat Scottish talent that it especially went for. "Scotty" Millar came from Wallsend, another of the towns then just outwith Newcastle. "Jocky" Stevenson, like Finlayson, also came from Hamilton. And then there were the Jackson brothers, Alex, the then main interest, and Jimmy. Alex had been born in the Auld Country in 1868 in Bellshill, Jimmy seven years later in Cambuslang. In 1882, so Alex aged fourteen and already clearly playing, and Jimmy eight the family had sailed from Greenock, arriving almost three months later in Australia, it is said to Townsville in Queensland. However, they must soon have moved to Newcastle. Jimmy was barely thirteen when first turning out again for Hamilton Athletic. Alex was aged twenty or twenty-one when he joined Rosebud, presumably also from Hamilton. Jimmy would join him 1891, clearly absorbing Scots skills both learned at home and passed on from his elder sibling.
And so it might have remained, a Scots family on the other side of the World. Their father, a coal-mine engine-minder, so a pit-man born in Kirkintilloch, would die in Wallsend in 1905. That is but for a slightly strange story and perhaps a little serendipity. In 1893 for a season the club is said to have recruited a former England international,
James Princep. It is possible. As the youngest England player until Wayne Rooney, he would then only have been in his early thirties. But there is both a curiosity and problem. The problem is that biographies say he was in Egypt at the time. In fact such confusion is entirely compatible with the James Princep story. He was born in India, so at the time could only play for England. But he was essentially a Scot. He would die in 1895 at Nairn, as would his brother and his sister. His father's mother was Scots. His own mother was a MacLeod. His death is said to be from a chill caught playing golf and knowing the links at Nairn I am not surprised. He had been in the army in Egypt and when he left in 1890 is said to have stayed on but it is all a little vague and picking up a boat from the Suez Canal to Australia and a stay there for up to three years before a last, fateful Scottish putt would not be impossible. And then there is the curiosity. Once in Australia Princep is said to have come north to Newcastle, having already played for a season in 1892 at Canterbury, presumably the Sydney suburb and not New Zealand, and to have moved on to Brisbane in 1894. That would fit in well with a return to Scotland the following year. The question is how he paid for it all. It leaves the possibility that he was playing for money and in three seasons took to the field for the highest bidder. That would mean either that Australian football was already shamateur or that he introduced the concept. However, there is another possibility. James Frederick MacLeod Princep was both a gentleman and a doctor. There is every chance wherever he went he paid his way through his own means or medicine and his football remained strictly amateur.
Whatever the truth, Dr. Princep's time in Australia seems to have been a tour-de-force. Whilst with the Rosebuds he is said to have made quite an impression with his dribbling, ball-control and shooting. Crowds of 1,000 would pay to see him, and not just Buds supporters. He would also leave a legacy; the advice to train regularly and to develop players from a young age, which is precisely what the Rosebuds have done.
The 'Buds, even without Princep, would have a successful 1894 but they may have done it not only without him but also the Jacksons. By then Jimmy was nineteen and had perhaps been encouraged, possibility by Princep himself, to take his football further. Both Alex and Jimmy Jackson would return to Scotland, Jimmy said to have been already on his way in 1893, aged eighteen, Alex probably at much the same time. And there they would both seem to stay, at least for a while.
Alex would marry in Glasgow in Rutherglen in 1903, where three children would be born, including his son, Archie before in 1912 returning with his young family to Australia, settling in Sydney in Balmain, again a mining town. And it is there, of course, that young
Archie Jackson would grow up to represent New South Wales at age-group football and New South Wales and Australia at cricket, including an innings victory over England in London at The Oval in 1930, where he and Donald Bradman put on a decisive record-partnership of 243 for the fifth wicket. That was before back in Australia Archie's death from tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-four in 1933. Alex in contrast would die in 1960 at the age of ninety-two and is buried with his son, wife and daughter.
Meanwhile Jimmy had stayed. A full-back and sometime wing-half he is said to have played for Cambuslang before in 1896-7 joining Rangers. But there he played just a single game in a year before moving on to Newcastle United for two seasons. It was there that his first son, James, was born in 1899. His second son, Archie, followed in 1901 but in Plumstead on the outskirts of London. Whilst his wife, Marion, also Scots-born, was still in Newcastle, heavily pregnant with James, Jimmy had joined Arsenal, then Woolwich Arsenal. There he stayed for six seasons, helping to achieve the club's promotion to the First Division for the first time and captaining the team in its first season in the top-flight. In doing so he would be the first player to have learned his football in Australia and to have made the grade in the British game. Nor would it be his only legacy to it. Both his sons would have professional, footballing careers.
On leaving Arsenal in 1905 Jimmy remained in London for a further year before returning to Glasgow for two seasons aged thirty back at Rangers. Then he played in the lower leagues until 1915, his final club being Abercorn in Paisley, whilst the family was living in Gourock. It was there that young James and Archie learned their football. At eighteen James, also a full-back, was turning out for Queen's Park, turning professional after a year with Motherwell, then Aberdeen and Liverpool. There he would be captain and known as The Parson, for, whilst still playing, he would be ordained, becoming on retirement in 1933 a Presbyterian minister first on the Isle of Man and later in Liverpool. His brother, a centre-half, would also play for several clubs, in England notably Sunderland and Tranmere Rovers, but never with such distinction and retiring at much the same time as his brother. Archie would die in 1985 in Chester, James in 1977 in Dorset but strangely of Jimmy and Marion little more is known. She might have died in Paisley in 1939 but of her husband's resting place there are no clues, at least not yet. Perhaps he returned to Australia.
There the interim had seen football in Australia both stagnate and advance. Stagnation was because in the face of now two codes of rugby and Aussie-Rules the game had failed significantly to expand outside its existing strongholds. Yet at the same time Australian soccer had begun to internationalise. In 1922 three games were played against New Zealand, two losses, one drawn. "Podge" Maunder, another Newcastle, a Wallsend but a West Wallsend man, but with a father born in New Zealand and a grandfather on Guernsey, scored his country's first ever goal in an international.
Alex Gibb was captain for all three. In 1923 there were three more against the same opposition. Australia won one game. Maunder scored the winning goal. Gibb was again captain. 1924 has seen the debut of Judy Masters. That season there would be six matches all against not New Zealand but Canada. Maunder scored in the third and the fifth, whilst Masters, the coming star, scored in his first game and in the third and sixth.
After Canada there would in terms of A-internationals be a gap of almost a decade, until in 1933 when New Zealand would once more come a-calling. Three games would be played all won with some ease, fourteen goals scored, eight conceded, with a home side that had been completely rebuilt. Alex Gibb was team-coach. George Smith would score in all three but it would once again be yet another Newcastle-man, an Adamstown-man, who would net once and be the rising star. He was Alec Cameron. He is said to have been born in Northern England in 1907 but his name and that of his brother, James, are Scots enough for me. And the family was completely involved in football. His father would be the Rosebud President in 1923-4. His brother Secretary from 1925 to 1927. And later in life off the field he himself would also be President from 1949 to 1953 as well as the club’s delegate to the the game's controlling body, then a State Association director and a NSW selector.
On the field Alec had played for the 'Bud's first team at the age of fifteen. He was also in the club's team that won the State Championship in 1925 and 1930 and had played in B-internationals in 1928 and did again in 1933. However, it was 1936 and before injury curtailed his career at thirty that would be his finest hour. Previously his only criticism had been that he did not score enough, being a goal-maker more than a goal-marker. But he could turn it on with in 1930 five against New Zealand's Canterbury province and this time it would also be different. He would captain his country as this time once more in three games just two goals were conceded and twenty-one scored. George Smith again in the team would net nine times, a four and a five in consecutive games. Cameron himself scored in all three, five goals in all, a single and two braces, in addition to which and most importantly he clearly ran the mid-field, a withdrawn, right-sided inside forward in the mode developed by his namesake of a generation earlier,
John Cameron, and for a moment, that moment Australia's right-sided
Alex James.