The Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club (CURCC), captained by a certain, Govan-born John McGregor, played its first football match in 1892, a 3-2 victory over William Leslie Poole's English High School. It might well have been literally men against boys. Otherwise its record would be in reality less than successful, at least to begin with. It was, shall we say, a slow burner. It, with John Macgregor still captain, would not beat
Albion, the era's initially dominant team, admittedly of only four, until 1895. It was that year too it also elected its first non-British football captain, the first of many at a football club that exists in Uruguay's top flight to this day, its most famous club now known as
Penarol.
Meanwhile, that same year, 1895, Albion changed its rules. With its restricted membership limited to Uruguayan-born Britons only, it, founded as Football Association in 1891 with William Maclean as its first president, was now still winning regularly, certainly against CURCC but perhaps struggling to field a team. It was time for a change, i.e. for the first time to allow in British-born immigrants and even, say it quietly, foreigners.
William Leslie Poole was precisely one such British immigrant. The Anglo-Scot, who had arrived in Montevideo a decade earlier aged 19 and introduced football at English High, the school at which he was a teacher. There he had taught his pupils, now Albion players, the game but had been limited to appearing only for the Montevideo Cricket Club team. Now finally he could play for the team he had made possible and its performances, not necessarily just because of him, improved. In 1896 it crossed the River Plate to Buenos Aires there beating both the Retiro and Belgrano Athletic Clubs. At home too it went on a run almost of the proportion of Queen's Park on football's arrival in Scotland in 1872 with 18 victories, one draw and just one defeat, 1:0 to passing Royal Naval vessel, which it revenged with a 6:0 return match. And in 1897 it lost just twice, again to a Royal Navy team and once to CURCC.
I tell this story firstly because it is symptomatic of so much early football in South America, restricted initially to particular ethnic and social groups that to survive had or was even forced to open its doors. Secondly, it points to recognition of that same imperative much earlier in Uruguay than elsewhere, particularly Argentina and above all Chile, where it would not take place, if it did at all with unreconstructed British-origin clubs more often than not simply folding, for between one and two decades more.
However, back in Uruguay, specifically in its capital, Montevideo, the club rivalry that had developed in the first half of the 1890s between CURCC, Albion, Montevideo Cricket with the addition of the Montevideo Rowing Club prompted the formation of others – notably the German Deutscher Fussball Klub in 1896, and two teams of disaffected Albion members, the Uruguay Athletic Club in 1898 with a mainly British team, and another of the country's present top clubs, the Club National de Football, Nacional, in 1899, with no Britons and playing its first game in 1900. And it would be the Deutscher Fussball Klub, Uruguay Athletic Club, CURCC and Albion that also in 1900 would form the first Uruguayan league, the Uruguayan Association Football League, now the Uruguayan Football Association, with for the first season and still a degree of British prejudice. Club Nacional would be excluded because it allowed too many crillos, non-British, native-born Uruguayans, to join.
The league would be a success. CURCC, now with the powerful Cambuslang-born James Buchanan in the squad, would take the title. It would also provide the league's first president, Peter (Pedro) Charter, who in turn provided impetus for the first international. It took place in 1901 and was won by Argentina, 3:2, in 1901 just as William Poole himself took over the UAFL presidency.
The UAFL would again be won by CURCC in 1901. In fact, it would take three of the first five championships played and in the years from its formation it had become tradition that the president of the Central Uruguayan Railway, the company, would also be the president of its football club. The Anglo-Scot, Frank Henderson, had been the first, for the eight founding years. The club's Youth Academy today bears his name. However, in 1906 the new company president, also an Anglo-Scot, Charles Bayne, refused to take on the role of footballing figurehead. Why is unclear but he appears to have been a difficult man under orders from the company's owners in London, one of whom was Frank Henderson's brother, to improve profitability. It was a moment of some crisis for the club. It stuttered, having won the league in 1905 and not winning it again until 1907 ahead of now five other clubs.
International games continued but noticeably with no involvement of British players, apart from the sponsorship from 1905 of Lipton Cup by Scots-born, Thomas Lipton. However, it was a situation that was to change radically in 1909. A "Robert" Buck of Montevideo Wanderers played three times for Uruguay in 1909 and 1910. He would also take the field once for Argentina in 1912, one of two early, dual internationals. However, Buck is problem. Elsewhere he is named as Robert Sidney Buck but there is no trace of him in either country. Yet there is in both of Sidney Richard Buck, an insurance agent. He was born in about 1885, can be seen travelling from Montevideo, a resident of Uruguay, to London in 1921 and again in 1937 from Buenos Aires, now a resident of Argentina. And he was English, born in London.
But whoever Buck was in addition in 1909 he was joined for Uruguay by the man, a Scot, who would be a pivotal figure at CURCC/Penarol and for Uruguay. His name was “El Yoni”, Johnny Harley, whose contribution not just to his adopted country’s game but also the style, in which his countrymen played and continue to play it, cannot be underestimated. Born in Glasgow, in
Cathcart
to be precise, in 1886, he had a tough start to life. He lost his mother young. At four he was a patient in Glasgow's Deaf and Dumb Institution. Yet Harley completed his education at Cathcart Public School, there know as Jock, and moved on until, as a newly qualified railway-engineer, aged 20, in 1906 he found work on trying his luck abroad on the tracks, initially in and around Bahia Blanca in Argentina to the south of the country's capital. Then he briefly went home before returning in 1907 but this time to Buenos Aires itself. There, whilst working again for Bahía Blanca and North Western Railway and the Buenos Aires Western Railway, he played for the latter's team Ferro Carril Oeste, which exists to this day, before in 1908 being spotted in a friendly by CURCC, the opposition. The club was clearly looking for new talent. It would not take the Uruguayan title in that year. Harley was head-hunted, He was made a job offer and in 1909 crossed the River Plate and never looked back.
Newly-installed in Montevideo John Harley first played for CURCC and then until 1920 with CURCC’s alter ego and successor,
Penarol. He captained the club team for ten seasons and on retiring in 1920 went on to manage it. As a small but tough and stylish Scots centre-back, making his début for Uruguay in his first year there and acting as player/manager, he would represent his adopted country seventeen times, captaining it twice and later also managing it. However, perhaps his greatest legacy was his introduction, the passing-on of the Scottish, short-passing game to Uruguay, known there as "corto a pe", short-to-foot, not just at club level, in the same way and at the same time as fellow Scot,
Archie McLean, was doing in Sao Paulo in Brazil, but also directly to the country’s national team in a way Mclean did not.
As a club CURCC/Penarol was to be quick to adopt the new style but success was not immediate. In 1909, it was only runner-up, with Montevideo Wanderers taking the title for a second time. In 1910, in the league consisting of nine teams, it was again runner-up, this time beaten by River Plate. Only in 1911 did to take the title again, and once more in 1918. In the meantime it would be runner-up five-times and third once. Then on his retirement but retaining his style it would win further Uruguayan Football Association trophies, in 1921, 1926, 1928 and 1929 and, as there was a split in the country's football for three years, be second in 1923 and champion in 1924 of the Uruguayan Football Federation competition. This was the same period as the Uruguayan national team would, playing the Harley way, also for the first time enjoy major success in both South America and Europe. It would take the Olympic gold in Paris in 1924, Amsterdam in 1928 and as recognition be awarded the first World Cup in 1930, which as host nation it would also win.
Harley’s own international career had begun soon after his arrival in Penarol, in the Newton Cup, the second of three matches in 1909 against an Argentinian team that included three of the
Brown brothers. He played with Buck, in a 2:2 draw and both were also retained for that year’s final game, a loss again against Argentina, and the first in May 1910, a win, with Chile the opponents in the first South American Championship. However, Harley did not feature against Argentina in June in the second game of the Championship. It was perhaps fortunate or even a measure of what he brought to the team. Uruguay was soundly beaten, 4:1. He only returned in November 1910 for the last two games of the year, a draw and then a remarkable 2:6 away win, where his goalkeeper was Leonard Crossley, a 25-year old Englishman, who also played for CURCC.
Crossley seems to have first come to Montevideo as a 20 year old in 1905, and was to have an important influence on Uruguayan, if not South American, goalkeeping. Immensely brave, he was carried hurt from the field many times. It was even rumoured that he had been killed in a game but he played for ten years until 1916, embracing the 1912 rule-change, then became an honorary member of Penarol, served on various committees, was club treasurer in 1935-36, was one of the founders of the College of Referees and died in 1958, and like John Harley, in Montevideo.
In 1911 Harley would play four of five international games, a win, a draw and two losses; now the only Briton in the team. However he would not play in any of five more in 1912. It was not until October 1913 that he would return, after Uruguay had failed to win for seven games. They won and they won the next game too with him still in the side; and the one after that in 1914. It was only in September 1914 that the run came to an end, narrowly, to a late goal in Buenos Aires. A second defeat would follow in the first game of 1915, again narrowly with in the team both Harley and for the first time, the Black player, Isabelino Gradin, who Harley had been instrumental in bringing through. This was to be Harley's second great contribution to the game. Nor was it a one-off but something that he was credited with on a number of occasions and with several players, just as was the case with fellow Scot
Tommy Donohoe’s Bangu in Brazil, i.e. the encouragement and selection of players according to ability no matter what their race. Bangu would resign from leagues in Rio de Janeiro on at least two occasions because of bans on its Black players. Their contribution to racial equality would be at club level. The Uruguay team would ride out the racism openly expressed at the 1916 South American Cup, win it and takes Black players to the 1924 and 1928 Olympics. Theirs would be internationally. But in Scotland in the era, in which Donohoe and Harley had learned their football it was not without precedent. In 1882
Andrew Watson
had become the first Black football international, in its Golden Era had captained his national team, Scotland and was, of course, South American-born, in Demerara in today's Guyana.
Neither Gradin nor Harley would appear in Uruguay's next international. It too was lost. Harley was brought back. Uruguay won but the Scot was now in his 30th year. He did not travel in 1916 to Buenos Aires to the South American Championship, today's Copa America, won by his adopted country. Gradin did and with Juan Delgado, the player who would eventually take over Harley's role in the Penarol team, was the subject from Chile of racial questioning. Uruguay was accused of playing Africans. However, Harley was to have one last international, if not very successful, hurrah. Firstly, in Montevideo with the Brazilians on their way home from the Championships they met a Uruguayan eleven, including the Scot, in a game that the home side lost by a single goal. He would then play three games more, captain in two but lose them all before finally stepping down.
John Harley was to remain in Uruguay for the rest of his life, working for the railway company for 37 years and playing at club level until 1920. In 1951, nine years before his death in Montevideo in 1960 and burial in the city’s British Cemetery, he was honoured with a club match at the national stadium, the Estadio Centenario, at which the crowd was 40,000. However, a decade after El Yoni’s retirement, thirty years before his benefit game and forty years before his death 100,000 was the crowd, with him amongst them, in the same stadium in Montevideo. The match was, of course, the first World Cup Final, Uruguay against Argentina, the country, in which he had settled, had married and was raising a family against the one that had been his first South American port-of-call. It must have been quite a moment as the home country, his adopted country took the trophy with a style of football that owed much to, in fact could not have been without the innovations of a wandering Scot, who had found himself a home from home.