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As football in Scotland at the end of the 1880s and the early 1890s stuttered and stumbled over professionalism, i.e money, so outside Britain Scots football began to show its first signs of slow but decisive spread. In pivotal 1888 in India the Durand Cup, the World’s third oldest Cup competition, was played for the first time and won by the Royal Scots Fusiliers with the Highland Light Infantry as runners-up. Scottish regiments would take it for the next decade. And in Scotland itself 1888 was also the year the first Diasporan footballers since Andrew Watson and Malcolm Eadie Fraser were allowed to call.
But they, unlike Watson, did not play for Scotland but for Canada, thirteen of them, who had passed through two schools in Ontario, Galt Collegiate and Berlin High, where football was the game. They were managed by
David Forsyth, one of the thirteen, a Canadian-Scot, a teacher at Berlin High, and the man who has to be considered the Father of football in Canada. He was Scots-born or at least Scots-conceived. His parents, Archibald Forsyth and Ann Haggart, had been married in Meigle in Perthshire in 1852 the year of his birth before crossing the Atlantic. But otherwise the touring party were all Canadian-born, the descendants of English, German and Scots immigrants – Webster and Mustard, Kranz and Brubacher, Gordon, Gibson and Murray amongst others and two more figures pivotal to the early game in the Dominion, Watty Thomson and
Harry Pirie.
After games in Northern Ireland and before others in England the tourists played five games in Scotland – losses to Queen’s Park, Ayr and a Scotland Select Eleven, 4-0, a draw against Rangers and win over Hearts. However, the tour taking place was neither ground-breaking and certainly not the first indication of football in Canada. The first game in the country under Association football rules was said to have taken place in 1876 in Toronto, just a few short years after Scotland. That or the following year saw in Toronto once more the setting-up of the Dominion Football Association (DFA), the first outside Britain, just a year after the Welsh equivalent and three years before the Irish Football Association and significantly it would adopt not the games rules as per the FA in London but the Scottish FA. The reason is not difficult to fathom. One of founders, David Brown, born in Dalry, states that
"A number of Glasgow young men, who played the game there, found themselves congregated in the City of Toronto".
and
"A number of them being together one night it was resolved to attempt the introduction of association football. Rugby was then played with considerable vigour though not extensively, but the same feeling of dissatisfaction with it which led in England to the formation of the association prevailed here. This was supplemented here by the popular disfavour with which the Rugby game was regarded, on account of its roughness. These young men to whom I have referred were all members of the Carlton Cricket Club and they formed the Carlton Football Club, the first association club in Canada, and I believe on the continent."
Although the DFA would also be short-lived, replaced by the a more permanent football organisation, the Western FA, formed in 1880 still in Ontario; Western Ontario, hence the name. However, by then the SFA rules had already been sent for and adopted. Indeed the DFA's President was John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, the Governor General, and also a Patron of the SFA.
However, the 1888 tour to Scotland was not the first for Canadians outwith the country. That had taken place in late 1884 and early 1885, been organised by Forsyth once more, drawn from much the same pool of players as it would be three years later with one notable exception, Harry Pirie, and had been to the neighbour to the south, USA. Just one international game was played, in Kearny on the East Coast in East Newark on the Clark ONT field with William Clark one of the umpires. It remains the first, if one still regarded as unofficial, international game to be have been played outwith the British Isles with Canada scoring after 10 minutes in what was apparently a rough game of bad-feeling and fist-fights won 0-1. But it had been preceded by a couple in St. Louis. The first was against the local Thistle club, formed in 1883 by a,
"number of Scottish residents"
The second was against a combined Thislte and Hibernian team, which amply indicates the origins of its players, with soccer referred to as
"the noxious Scottish weed".
However, if the 1885 tour was the first time Canadians had been seen on the international football field, Canadian-born players had already graced that stage for the best part of a decade. The first had been Edward Parry. He had come into the World in Toronto in 1855 with his school-master father moving back to Britain that same year, became a schoolmaster himself and died at the age of seventy-six in Nottingham. Meanwhile in 1879 he had been one of the forwards for England against Wales. The second received his first cap just a year after Parry in 1880 also against Wales but for Scotland. His name is
Malcolm John Eadie Fraser, normally known simply as Eadie Fraser, a son of the manse born also in Ontario, in Goderich, but brought up in Glasgow. And on several fronts his much shorter life was an altogether sadder affair. By the time Canada set out on its second international tour Eadie Fraser was already dead.
The year of that second tour was 1886. A group of university students once more from Ontario and again organised by David Forsyth travelled to Newark for a second time and took on an American XI drawn locally. As a year earlier the US team was actually mainly made up of players from the United Kingdom, who had emigrated for work. Unlike a year earlier the Canadians, with Harry Pirie now in the team, would lose. But it was only by the odd goal in five and Forsyth's and their touring zeal was clearly not deterred as shown by the 1888 excursion across the pond. Indeed such would be the British tour's success a second one took place in 1891. Initially to be solely from the Western FA it became a squad drawn from both Canada, Watty Thomson amongst them, and the USA, playing games throughout the British Isles. True, in terms of results it was less successful than the previous one but the standard of teams faced was certainly higher. Victories only coming against obviously lesser teams. There were defeats to Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England Elevens. The Scottish score was 5:1., with the home team including notable players; Walter Arnott, Alex McMahon and John Bell; itself a measure of how seriously the opposition was being taken one that was also reflected elsewhere.
In the meantime back in Canada football was extending both its reach and organisation. The Central Football League was formed based on Toronto and the Eastern League to the east of the city. It led in 1901 to the foundation of the Ontario Association Football League, again with the involvement of David Forsyth, out of which and the school of the same name came the creation of the Galt Football Club. Known as the "Porridge Eating Invincibles", a more than obvious reference to it main national influence it would take the Ontario Cup in 1901 itself, 1902 and 1903.
A Canadian football team would next appear on the international stage in 1904. It would be at the third Olympic Games in St. Louis in Missouri. Football had not featured at the first Games in Athens in 1896. At the Paris Games in 1900 it had but with just three teams taking part. From France there had been a representative XI, clubs from Britain and Belgium. The gold medal had gone to Britain. And in 1904 there would be once again just three participants. None was from outwith North America. Europeans teams had decided it was simply too far to travel. Two of the three squads were local, from St. Louis itself, with the third, the eventual gold-medal winner, from Canada.
The Canadian team was Galt, Galt the heartland of Canadian football. The squad would again be mixed. Eleven were local but all but one Diasporan. Otto Christman had a German father and Canadian-born mother. Two had English parents, one each English and Irish plus Canadian, one wholly Canadian and five Scots. Two of the thirteen, Alexander Hall and Ernest Albert Linton, were even said to have been born in Scotland. In fact Ernest Linton was a sixth born in Canada of Scots parents, which leaves just one, Alex Hall, as the only Scot ever to have won an Olympic footballing medal. Nevertheless it also means seven of thirteen had carried or were first generation carriers not just of the football contagion but of its specifically Scottish variant.
It is clear the Porridge sobriquet was no exaggeration and, with success and passion for the game still so strong from the Auld Country, greater things might have been expected, not least at future Olympics. However there was a developing problem, the initial indication of which had been two decades earlier on the first Canadian visit to Kearny. In the year after Olympic victory, in 1905, a touring British team complained that opposition they met, although professing to be playing to Football Association rules, were actually using what euphemistically might be called "Canadian Rules". And there was truth in the complaint. Even by the then British standards Canadian players were literally going over the top and to bring them back, to bring the game back into line it needed the off-the-field efforts of a player, who would be injured in a "Canadian rules" game badly enough as a result to lose a leg. His name was Tom Robertson and he too was an immigrant Scot.