If there is a man, whose fortune can have changed more and more disastrously than Eadie Fraser's then I am tempted to say I would like to meet him. But the reality is that I would not want to and in any case could not. Misfortune killed him and very young.
Malcolm John Eadie Fraser was born in 1860. At nineteen he was player for Queen's Park, at half-back and forward, at twenty for Scotland, a country for which he would feature on five occasions. The first would be against Wales in 1880 three weeks after his twentieth birthday as one of the central pairing in attack. Then there was a gap. Quite why is unclear. The next would not be until 1882 in a 5-1 victory over England. He then scored a brace in the following game once more against Wales, the winning goal in the subsequent match again against England but away in 1883, and finally the middle one in a 3-0 home defeat of the Principality. Put simply he scored four goals for Scotland and never lost a game.
Yet at the age of twenty-three Eadie Fraser was out of the Scotland team, with two possible explanations. That he was not committed to football cannot be in doubt. In 1882-3 he was not only a Queen's Park player but was also prepared to put in administrative effort as club secretary. Nor was he not held in high regard. The club's history written in 1920 says of him.
"Scotland never had a better forward than Eadie Fraser, known to everybody as the "Graceful Eadie". His movements were perfect. His popularity was extraordinary. On the field and off it he was a thorough gentleman, and never descended to those tricks which tend to bring the game into disrepute."
So it seems at least on the face of it given what happened next that the reason must have been financial. In 1884 just before his twenty-fourth birthday he boarded a ship to West Africa to take up a job there. However, the climate there appears not to have suited him at all. He became ill a year later he was on his way. But it was ultimately not to be back to Scotland. Andy Mitchell's wonderful work established that he took a boat bound for Australia. The whole episode suggests haste, a desire to get him away from Africa as quickly as possible. He was the only passenger and it is said that several of the boats officers were friends, having played football with him back in Glasgow.
He reached Sydney very late in 1885 but the passage had clearly not been a cure. Within days he was admitted to hospital in Sydney and friends in Australia were clearly summoned. David Walker of the local YMCA, who had also played football with him in Scotland, had been instrumental in getting him into the Prince Alfred. Another friend, the Rev. A. Miller, was sent for but did not reach him before on on 8th January 1885 he died.
Eadie Fraser was buried at Sydney's Rookwood cemetery. A committee was formed of people who knew and knew of him, Scots almost to a man, to raise a memorial and that might have been it. However, there were perhaps elements to the Eadie Fraser story, either of which might help to explain his departure at such a young age beyond simple income.
Malcolm Eadie Fraser was a son of the Manse. His father was the Rev. John Fraser. He had been born in Cromdale by Grantown-on-Spey. He was a Highlander, who came from the same area as several of Queen's Park founders and who had married Edinburgh-born Sarah Lawrie. They would have nine children, of which Eadie Fraser was the middle one. But John and Sarah had married in London, that is London, Ontario in Canada. They were living there in 1851 and again in 1861, he the minister of the Presbyterian Church in Goderich in Ontario, six of their children were Canadian-born including Malcolm. He was two when the family returned to Scotland and his father became minister in Cumberland St. in Glasgow's Gorbals, although the family lived in Cathcart. The Cathcart address would explain the affinity with Queen's Park. Hampden is literally up the hill.
However,
in itself none of the above might be important had not the Scottish Football Association changed its eligibility rules for Scotland players. The change took place sometime in late 1882 or early 1883, although there is no mention of it in SFA minutes of the time. Prior to it residence had, if only de facto, been the sole requirement for possible inclusion in the Scotland team. After it the requirement became both birth north of the border and residence. The change seemed initially to catch one player, Andrew Watson, born in Demerara in what today is Guyana. He played three times, twice in 1881 and once in 1882, three wins including the largest ever against England and away, captaining that game, and then was gone. As a Black player, the first ever Black international player, educated in England and probably not with a Scots accent it was relatively easy to assume he was not Scottish-born, although his father, his paternal grandparents and maternal grandfather were. However, it clearly took a little longer to realise the same applied to Malcolm Eadie Fraser. He had first represented Scotland in 1880, played alongside Andrew Watson in 1882 and continued until the last game of the 1883 international season in March. And it was not as if he he were clearly still available. He played for Queen's Park for another season yet was never again picked for the national team. Whereas in 1882 he was Scots. By the second half of 1883, although he had been in Scotland from the age of no more than two, he had become Canadian and un-pickable.
The change of status, from one day to another becoming a foreigner, may on its own have been enough to have caused Eadie Fraser to look abroad. However, there might have been another factor. In 1881 he was recorded, like all the four brothers still at home, working as a warehouseman. It was not the greatest of jobs. But home was no longer Cathcart, it was Cumberland St., where his father's church was to found. Moreover, his mother was dead and his father had in 1876 remarried, to the widowed, Agnes Crawford. Perhaps its had been time to leave home and not just for him? In 1891, although two of his sisters were still in the family house, all the boys were gone.