David Forsyth -
the Father of Canadian Soccer
Football is a team-game. And the team is not just players. It is the officials on the field and the administrators, the organisers at least the benign ones, those who run the sport in the interests of current and future players and not as a means of ego- or bank account inflation. David Forsyth was both a player and a remarkable organiser, all the more remarkable as, although he on the face of it had all the right credentials, there was no obvious way in which he seems likely to have caught the football bug.
David Forsyth was said to have been born in 1852. Where is more difficult to ascertain. His death certificate and various censuses say it was Scotland, although there is no sign of registration here. It was however certainly somewhere between Perthshire and Ontario. In 1861, long before football had even come to Scotland, he was living in the latter, south of Toronto, the eldest son of Archibald Forsyth and Ann Haggart, married in Meigle west of Perth south of Alyth and in the suggested year of his birth.
He was one of four children, two boys and two girls with the other three Canadian-born. In 1871 they were all living in Waterloo South, a short distance to the west of Toronto, David at school. But a decade later he was living in the neighbouring town of Berlin, now called Kitchener, and was a teacher with an evident passion for the round-ball game both on and off the field, one clearly gained not in Scotland but the New World. The previous year had seen the formation of the Western Football Association, that is the football association of Western Ontario. The Honorary President was J.B. Hughes of Waterloo, where David Forsyth had spent his childhood. Forsyth himself was Secretary-Treasurer, would remain so until 1905 and be again from 1921 until 1923 after having been President from 1914 until 1919. And Berlin High School, where football was the game, was represented too, as was a certain Galt Collegiate. Moreover he was still active as a player and would continue so for some time, this in spite of marriage in 1882 and two children, a daughter and a son born in 1888 and 1891 respectively.
It was also in that 1888 Canada's third and by far its most ambitious foreign international venture took place. Its thirteen participants were almost all drawn from ex-students of Galt and Berlin. The exception, playing, organising and managing, was a teacher at Berlin High by then in his mid-thirties, none other than Forsyth himself, marked out in yet another way. Apart from him the others were all Canadian-born, the descendants of English, German and Scots immigrants – Webster and Mustard, Kranz and Brubacher,
Thomson,
Pirie and Murray, Gordon and Gibson amongst others. And they were travelling to both Ireland and Britain with an impressive itinerary. It began in Northern Ireland and after initial games there and before others in England included five in Scotland – losses to Queen’s Park, Ayr and a Scotland Select Eleven, a draw against Rangers and win over Hearts. If the strongest teams were not always put up against them they were nevertheless treated with the respect due a country with a formal footballing history only a little less than Scotland's. The first game played in Scotland under Association football rules had been in 1872. In Canada it was said to have taken place in 1876 in Toronto. The following year, in Toronto once more, saw the setting-up of the Dominion Football Association, the first outside Britain, again four years after Scotland, just a year after the Welsh equivalent and notably three years before the formation of the Irish Football Association. It would be short-lived but just four years later and still five months before Ireland the Western FA proved far more durable and internationally progressive.
In 1885 again with impulse and organisation from David Forsyth and with him in the team a Canadian XI had travelled to the United States, to
Kearny in New Jersey, to the ground of newly created
Clark ONT, where it took on and beat 0-1 an American XI drawn from local teams. Tom Gibson scored the goal from half-back.
Watty Thomson was at inside-forward The trip, again with Forsyth organising, would be repeated the following year, Forsyth now at inside-right and
Harry Pirie at half-back. This time the Canadians would lose by the odd goal in five. Then came 1888 followed in 1891 by a second tour to Britain. Initially to be solely from the Western FA it became a squad drawn from Canada and the USA, playing games throughout the British Isles, including defeats by Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England Elevens. The Scottish score was 5:1. The Scots team included notable players, Walter Arnott, Alex McMahon and John Bell amongst them, whilst although Forsyth and Pirie were not there Watty Thomson was.
In the meantime football in Canada was spreading both numerically and geographically. In 1896 the Manitoba Football Association was formed in Brandon. By the turn of the century Central Football League had been formed based on Toronto itself and the Eastern League to the east of the city. They with the Western League, in turn and once more with the involvement of David Forsyth, led in 1901 to the foundation of the Ontario Association Football League, out of which would emerge the Galt Football Club, based in the same town as Galt Collegiate. Known as the "Porridge Eating Invincibles", a more than obvious reference to their main national influence, the club would take the league's trophy, the Ontario Cup, in 1901 itself and again 1902 and 1903.
A Canadian "national" football team next appeared in 1904. It was 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 did. Just three teams had taken part, clubs representing Britain and Belgium and a representative XI from France. The gold medal went to Britain. And in 1904 there were once again just three teams participating, none from outwith North America. It had been decided by other teams, with countries in both Europe and South America already playing international fixtures, that it was simply too far to travel, which left two of the three participating squads from St. Louis itself and only the third from abroad, from Canada and it took the gold medal.
The Canadian team was Galt, the Galt Football Club, Galt for thirty years in the heartland of Canadian football and again it was mixed. Two of the thirteen,
Alexander Hall and Ernest Albert Linton, were said to have been from Scotland, ten locally. In fact only Hall was actually born in the Auld Country, in Aberdeen, and he remains the only Scot ever to have won an Olympic footballign gold medal. 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 six, including Linton, Scots. It meant the seven of thirteen had carried or were first generation carriers not just of the football contagion but a special variant. The Porridge sobriquet was no exaggeration and, with passion for the game still so strong from the Old Country, greater things might have been expected from victory in St. Louis in the same way as thirty years earlier Queen's Park's participation in the first FA Cup and the first international had begun in Glasgow and its surrounds.
However there was a developing problem. In the year after Olympic victory, in 1905, the year Forsyth stepped away temporarily from football administration, a touring British team, the famous amateurs, The Pilgrims, complained that Canadian teams were not playing to Football Association rules. There was truth in the complaint. Even by the then British standards Canadian players were literally going over the top and to bring it back into line it needed the efforts of another immigrant Scot injured, probably in 1906 or 1907, in a "Canadian rules" game badly enough to lose a leg. His name was
Tom Robertson. It was he who in 1908 in opposition to the existing Toronto League founded the Toronto and District FA to play only to British rules, becoming its Secretary. And it was his insistence that prevailed. The tolerance of "Canadian Rules" was ended. Furthermore in 1910 he then stepped up into the gap left by Forsyth first becoming Secretary-Treasurer of the Ontario Football Association and then in 1912 the first Secretary of the Dominion of Canada FA, one of the prime movers in its formation and its joining of FIFA six months later. He was to stepped down shortly afterwards but 1914 would see the return of Forsyth and a continued presence in the game that would take him through retirement in 1923 both from football and as Berlin High's headmaster at the age of seventy. He died still in Ontario in 1936 at the age of eighty-two.