(Grateful thanks need to be given to Connie Mendes of the Fall River Historical Society for all her help and especially her deep, local, social knowledge.)
This line is one with three points, but it is not a triangle. The two end ones are almost equidistant from the one in the centre. An apt metaphor, as should be come clear, might be that, whilst they are are not the centre-line of a football field, the centre-spot lay two hundred or so miles to the south-west, they form or rather formed a side-line on that same pitch. Indeed, if the footballing metaphor is extended, all three places, all towns not points per se, although perhaps now seen as something of a side-show, were almost as necessary for the game in America at least as the ball itself. Which is all a very convoluted way of saying whilst the three New England towns in question were vital to the early development of soccer in the USA, providing highly competitive teams to the three differing eras in which the game first flourished there, they were not instrumental in its arrival. That honour by an admittedly small margin remains
East Newark's.
Of the three towns the northernmost is the Rhode Island state capital, Providence and the southernmost the Massachusetts fishing and manufacturing port of New Bedford. The central one too is in Massachusetts but only just. It is the textile centre of Fall River, the early driving force of the game in all three and where, later on and reflecting new financial realities, matches where played just a step across the nearby state line into Rhode Island for the simple reason that there professional games were allowed on Sundays, whereas in Massachusetts they were not.
Yet, the question remains, given the point of this whole site, the Scots influence on early football, where all this takes us? In truth at first glance it is not very far. There was some Scots influence in soccer's first manifestation on the line yet overwhelming or even decisive it was not. Scots came to install textile machinery and to teach spinning technique in newly opening mills. A few stayed but most went back or onward and the development of football was left to others who remained, the English and the Irish. And in football's third manifestation, although there was more Scots impact or at least impact that was more obvious, as with other clubs that would make up the United States' then top league, the ASL, the American Soccer |League, it was in the form of imported talent that too came and went. So why, you might ask, bother with the line at all. The answer is twofold. It is firstly as a contrast to the fourth footballing hot-spot in the region, the non-linear one, the other in Rhode Island, Pawtucket. And secondly it has to do with the quiet but decisive impulse the line, specifically Providence, gave to America's second footballing era when the game across the water was at a particularly low and potentially fatal ebb.
However, to start at the beginning the line would have its first impact on American soccer in 1888. It would be Fall River in its first incarnations that would initially break the monopoly of the USA's then top footballing trophy by its first major club,
Clarks' ONT. A "British" team from the US's soccer town,
Kearny, New Jersey, it had been founded in 1883 by essentially three Scots and had taken the first three finals of the American Cup. That was before two teams from Fall River claimed the next five and two from Pawtucket the two after that. The sequence appears random but it is not without reason. In the case of Fall River it is as follows.
As the town in the three decades after the end of the American Civil War in 1865 but particularly from 1880 developed its cotton spinning based on power generated by the Fall River itself it needed two types of labour. Some of those with skills, the spinners, came from Glasgow, hence the minor Scots input, but many more were from the mill towns of Lancashire whilst the unskilled, the labourers, were a mixture of New Englanders, French-Canadians and Irish. The Lancastrians lived in one part of the town and from Blackburn and Preston, Darwen, Accrington and Burnley, where the game was already endemic, they brought football with them as an existing contagion. The Irish lived in another part of town and knew of football too, if vaguely, whilst the others lived in a third, with the Glaswegians amongst them as infected as the Lancastrians but the rest, at least to begin with, uninterested. Rivalries resulted off the football field and they were mirrored on it in the formation of localised teams, the mainly English Fall River East End in 1882, the more Irish North Ends in 1883, with its main coach, English-born Walter Beattie, who arrived about 1885, and Rovers and the Conanicuts in 1884. Fall River Olympics, the Globes from the south end of town and the Pan-Americans soon followed and in 1885 the Bristol County Football Association was created, Bristol being the county in which Fall River stands. Cups, various cups, the Walton, the Marsh and the Baxter, the Bristol County, began to played for. Indeed, such was the surge in the game that from small beginnings within little more than half a decade that American Cup not only was won but seemed to have a permanent, new home.
In seven years six times the American Cup would go to the Spindle City. Fall River Rovers, one of two teams from the town to have entered for the first time that year, the other being East End, would in 1888 take it at first attempt and retain it the following year. Fall River Olympics would win it in 1890 at its second attempt, East End in 1891 and 1892 and in 1894 Olympics once more, by which time players in the local leagues were already shamateur and had been for some time. Professional football, albeit disguised, had crossed the Atlantic. Meanwhile Providence, although its team the Athletics did take part in the competition from 1888, and New Bedford largely looked on. Their real emergence would only come after organised soccer, whilst American economic prosperity stuttered, ossified as the old century turned into the new. After a decade and a half the American Cup would not be played for officially between 1899 and 1905 and when it re-emerged was in the absence of previous rivals the fiefdom once again of New Jersey clubs. Fall River in the form of Rovers would not re-join the American Football Association until 1907, by which time it had not only two decades of competitive history but amongst its ranks a young player of immense ability, one who was entirely home-grown. His name was Tommy Swords.
Swords had been born in Fall River in 1885 to Irish-Americans with his mother born in Massachusetts and his father actually in Lancashire but of Irish parents. Tommy would die in Fall River too, aged sixty-seven in 1953, after football working for two-thirds of his life as a successful plumber. Yet half a century earlier in 1903 he was playing for a junior team in a town near Fall River before in 1904 joining the Rovers. There he would stay five seasons before moving in 1910 in a deal that was clearly shamateur, i.e. although officially amateur one that paid him to take the road almost three hundred miles south to Philadelphia, to one the city's Irish team, Hibernians, as it joined the newly-created Eastern Soccer League. There he would play alongside and against a number of players of a much higher standard not least Hector MacDonald, ex. Hearts, possibly veteran, ex-Scotland forward,
Tommy Hyslop
and
Bobby Morrison, all three of whom were in another team that was recruiting, Tacony.
Tommy Swords remained in Pennsylvania for two full seasons. In the first his team played in the Pennsylvania Soccer League, winning it and finishing as runner-up in the American Cup after a replay. In the second Tacony took the championship, at which point in 1913 came north once more. But it was not to Fall River, at least not immediately. He joined New Bedford F.C., then a town team also known as the Whalers, playing in the Southern New England Soccer League, only after a season making the move fully back home and returning to Fall River Rovers. There he was to stay for six more seasons, seeing out the rest of his career. And it was there too that he achieved his two greatest honours. In 1916, 1917 and 1918 the team played H. E. Lewis's and Bobby Morrison's
Bethlehem Steel, in the National Challenge, the Dewar Cup final, the alternative to the American Cup. The archetypal "works" team was pitched against the "town" team. The outcome for Fall River was a loss in the first encounter and a second defeat after a replay in the third but between the two a lifting of the cup. And in the summer of 1916 Swords had been selected as the captain of the first, official American National team on a tour. They went to Sweden.
Tommy Swords retired in 1920 at the age of thirty-five. He did so as soccer in America changed, not because of him but around him. Firstly, having been officially amateur, actually shamateur, it turned openly professional, secondly league football evolved and finally a third and a fourth type of team became involved, the first geographically-based, the second commercially. In 1921 the American Soccer League was formed. Initially it consisted of existing teams not just from New Jersey and New York but by including J & P Coats from
Pawtucket, Pennsylvania's Philadelphia Field Club and Fall River United, effectively the Rovers by another name, had extended its reach across the wider North-East of the country, a spread further increased the following season by the inclusion of Bethlehem Steel, again from Pennsylvania. Moreover, the year after not just did Fall River United become the Marksmen, named after Sam Marks, the first of new type of business-man club-owner, but the New York Giants also joined, the second, new type of involvement, the movable franchise. The team had previously been New Jersey's Paterson F.C.
Nor was that the end of it. In 1924 the ASL was expanded to twelve. More teams meant more games and in theory more money. And the new teams included not just the new New Bedford Whalers, formed by Fall River players, who had fallen out with Sam Marks, but also Providence, not a re-emergence but a football team of yet another and new type. It was one essentially based on a baseball club, in this case the Providence Clamdiggers and, although there was some input from the original Fall River F.C. the reality was that it played at the 'Diggers baseball ground and had owners, who were not football enthusiasts and were looking for little more than a winter revenue stream. And this involvement of baseball was taken a step further in 1927 with the creation of the New York Nationals. Confusingly it was the football arm of the New York Giants baseball club but could use the name because the unrelated Giants football team already existed.
And thus at least in terms of Fall River, New Bedford and Providence it stayed until 1931. That, with the league starting almost six months late in February, was until the wheels figuratively burst and fell off American soccer, one by one. The first loss was when Fall River Marksmen having won the league the previous year with the Whalers second was moved by Sam Marks to New York and became in terms of the league the Field Club and then the Yankees, whilst remaining in Cup terms with its original name. The second was when the Clamdiggers reverted to Fall River F.C., took over the Marksmen's ground and absorbed the Whalers. Providence, Fall River and New Bedford had just one team, not three. And even then it was a situation that lasted four months before a third puncture. Between the first and second halves of the 1931 season Fall River failed. The second half of the 1931 season started without the combined team yet New Bedford existed once more. It was Sam Mark's New York/Fall River operation that had floundered to penultimate spot in the first half now returned and twenty-one games later topping the table, even if the final play-off was lost.
So it was that as 1932 began New Bedford appeared to be both restored and a force. Indeed, when six games into a new season the first attempt at a league, one with seven teams, collapsed it, when a second attempt was made it was again at the forefront with now nine teams taking part. However, it managed just six matches before not just the league but it too was finally gone. In fact of the New England sides only a Fall River team and Pawtucket Rangers really remained standing at the end of the year, each having played nineteen games in what was the first half a third attempt that year at a league that could last. They were also said to be extant for the second half, the 1933 part of that same season, at least in theory, yet they played no games, at least no league games. In that second half only New York teams took part. However, when league games resumed in 1934 there was worse to come. Even two, it seems, had become just one. Pawtucket was still there but any representation from Fall River was gone. The original line and all its elements after half a century appeared one by one to have been completely erased at anything more than a local level. Football along it continued not in the stadia of a decade earlier but confined to the park and corner lot. That is but for a single, new, vital but emerging development outwith previous sources.
Just before and after the Great War a new wave of immigrants began to arrive in the textile towns of New England. They came from mainland Portugal, Madeira and the Azores and like British immigrants a generation earlier they brought with them their game of choice, "futebol". By the 1930s Lusitano-American football clubs were forming - Portuguese Sport Club, Lusitania Recreation - and playing alongside the older teams, were topping not just the local leagues but the regional ones as well and producing players of note. Born in Portsmouth just south of Fall River in 1908 and the new Tommy Swords was Billy Gonsalves. In a career that lasted until 1952, when he was in mid-forties, he played for many clubs. They included Fall River Marksman in its final throws and alongside the other locally-honed talent of French Canadian background, Bert Patenaude. He also featured for the USA six times including the 1930 and 1934 World Cups but interestingly never for the team from Fall River that emerged almost in the Marksmens' wake. It was Ponta Delgada. Based at the old Fall River Marksmen stadium it would win the National Amateur Cup six times between 1938 and 1953, top the National Soccer League of New England in 1948, the American Soccer League in 1953, win the National Challenge Cup in 1947 and be runners-up in 1946 and 1950. That same year two of it players would also be in the US team, captained by Scots-born Ed McIlvenny, that defeated England in the World Cup in Brazil.
Nevertheless Brazil and the Maracana proved to be something of a swan-song for Ponta Delgada. By the mid-1950 its star too was fading but still football, specifically Fall River football, was not. Having kept the torch glowing, so from the Azorean club's shadow a new Fall River F.C. would re-emerge for a final furry. It would feature strongly in the National Challenge Cup until 1963, then dip, replaced in 1970 by the Fall River Americans but rise once more briefly in the mid-1970 before club football simply was rendered obsolete. Like its old rivals, Providence, New Bedford, Pawtucket and
Kearny, Fall River has seen first soccer and then professional soccer in America, having abandoned the local, begin its slow if so far successful rise to be today something like the mass sport that it had been almost a century earlier, even if it is a slightly odd city-based, national behemoth of fickle franchise and faux-competition.