(Once again huge thanks to Andy Mitchell. As I dig, he, through his blog, Scottish Sport History, fills in in front, behind and to the side of me. The truth about Victor Gibson is his brilliant research alone.)
This is a story briefly of a Scot, who was not allowed to be, a Diasporan, an Englishman, who said he was a Scot probably for PR purposes, a Scot, who even FIFA call an Englishman and how professional football finally came to France. But I'll start it in Ireland.
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With the first stage of the division of the Emerald Isle football had by 1928 also begun to separate and two leagues, both professional or rather semi-professional, had emerged, one in the Six Counties and the other, the League of Ireland, mainly around Dublin. The latter was briefly to attract players mainly from the English Midlands but also from Scotland. With the problems in American soccer coming to a head
Alex Massie, between
Bethlehem Steel and Hearts and Scotland, briefly played for Dolphin in 1930. Alex Hair of Partick Thistle via Preston North End scored twenty-nine goals in twenty-two matches for Shelbourne in 1930-31. That is until the focus of interest, that is income, for itinerant players, Hair amongst them, was in 1932 to shift not to the USA, where the game was by then almost total collapse nor back to Britain but to France.
Top-flight football on the other side of the English Channel had from the end of First World War been “shamateur”, that is until in 1932 it officially turned professional and in a way that was both unique and well-funded. If teams were not works-, i.e. company-backed, they were often supported by the local municipality or department and with the money they provided were able to recruit not just in France but also throughout Europe and even in South America. Between 1932 and 1939 five hundred and forty foreign footballers are said to have played in France, more than a 100 annually, with 50 or so coming and going per year, each club with an average of seven. Some became naturalised but most did not. Some, indeed, even went on the play for France.
Hector Cazenave, born in Uruguay, of French parents had started his career at
John Harley’s
Penarol before moving back to his familial "homeland", winning eight French caps including playing at the 1938 World Cup. Miguel Ángel Lauri, also said to have had French parents, although it was never proven, was Argentine-born. He arrived in France in 1937, played once for his new home that same year but, when he was called up into the French army in 1939, returned once more to South America, but not Argentina. He went to Uruguay, also to play for Penarol. However, the most influential foreign-born French player of all was Auguste Jordan. He was one of 100 or so Austrians, who arrived to play for French clubs between 1932 and 1939, recruited through agents in Vienna, who also operated out of Paris and Prague. Born in Linz Jordan had first played for Racing Club Paris in 1933, perhaps attracted by the manager for the 1932-33 season, one he would have known from the country of his birth,
Jimmy Hogan. Jordan would remain in France for the rest of his playing career, from 1938 play sixteen times for his adopted country and with his fellow Austrians and other Middle-European’s bring with them the pre-Great War, Scottish footballing styles not just of Hogan but also
Madden, Dick and others.
Yet, there would be far more direct and far earlier "Scots" influence on the French game.
John Goodall had spent two seasons from 1910 at Roubaix in the far north of the country, as player-manager. He was the Scot, who was not allowed to be. On the pitch from a highly successful international forward with 14 caps between 1888 and 1898 and 12 goals to his name he had Scots parents, spent most of his childhood and all his youth in Kilmarnock but had no choice but to play England because, his father having been a soldier, he was born in barracks in London. And as Goodall left so not just one but three arrived. One was Victor Gibson, said to have born in 1882, where is unclear, and to have been a player, a centre-half, a journeyman Scottish centre-half with Morton and Falkirk before moving in 1911 to Spain, to Espanyol in Barcelona for a season and then in 1912 aged thirty crossing the border to join Sete. And he was to remain in Occitanie in France's south-eastern corner for twelve years as the club's player-trainer, taking them to two local titles before the Great War and, after football was restored following the hostilities and its inevitable disruptions, to the 1924 French Cup Final. Sete would be beaten that day. The cup-winners would be Olympique de Marseille and in that winning dugout, again as trainer was another figure of interest, a certain Peter Farmer.
However, 1924 was neither the first time a Marseille team or a Scot had been involved in winning a French footballing trophy. In 1908-09 another of the Marseille clubs, Helvetique, had taken the French Championship. It would also be runner-up the following year and champion again in 1910-11 and once more in 1912-13. It was a club founded in 1904 with obvious Swiss origins and still had number of players from that country but certainly by 1913 at least one Diasporan. In goal and captain that season was one James McQueen. An itinerant teacher first and footballer second in 1907 and 1908 he had been in Italy, in Turin, playing for Juventus and then Torino. Then in 1919 he became a teacher Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England, where he stayed for twenty-nine years until his retirement, dying still in High Wycombe in 1965 aged 82. In the meantime he had served in the Royal Artillery in the Great War including a posting back in Italy in 1917 and presumably from about 1908 had been in the south of France. Certainly the Marseilles team in 1909 is already recorded as including an "Englishman".
However, James McQueen was not really an Englishman, although he was born in Bishopsgate in London in 1882. In fact he was the third son, the third of four children of Richard McQueen, a Scot and a serving City of London policeman, born in Leith, probably a soldier in 1861 and by 1877 married in London. At James's birth all seemed to be going well but things seem then to fall apart very quickly. In 1886 Richard McQueen was dead. By 1891 his wife, Catherine, was in a mental hospital in Kent, where she remained at least for the next decade, which left the children effectively orphaned and very much to their fates. James's eldest brother, also Richard, was sent to the Police Orphanage, went through the workhouse and was later recorded as a tramp. His younger sister would be adopted by Robert Falconer, another Scottish-born policeman serving in London, before marrying still in the city, whilst the two middle boys were given slightly longer straws. Both would be taken in by the London Caledonian Society Orphanage. William would serve in Royal Scottish Fusiliers in the Great War and then worked as a steward on Atlantic liners. James would also travel but in a different way, with it unclear if teaching or kicking a ball about was the driver.
So to Peter Farmer. Despite what was reported in France at the time and is still by FIFA he was not English. He was in fact born firstly, like so many footballers, in the Leven Vale, in Renton, and secondly, like a number of other Renton footballers, of Irish parents. The year was 1886. However, he would not play for Renton but with the family moving to Bonhill he would for three years turn out for Vale of Leven, in Alexandria just across the river, presumably in the seasons between 1906 and 1910 when the club noticeably revived. It re-entered the Second Division, reaching at its best third spot, at which point Farmer was noticed and is said to have joined Celtic, the recently appointed chairman of which and staying in post until 1914 was
James Kelly, of course also Renton-born and from an Irish family.
In fact Farmer never progressed beyond Celtic's reserves. Indeed he may well have suffered an injury that curtailed his football on the field seemingly still in his mid-twenties turning to physiotherapy and coaching, it is said firstly in Germany and Austria presumably before the Great War, and, before Marseille in 1923, in Switzerland. He would then go on to coach Torino, and still in Italy possibly Biella, from 1924 to 1926 before again returning to Scotland and Parkhead. Celtic has him on their books from then right through to 1938 and it is quite possible having replaced Eddie McGarvie, that he was the club's main trainer until 1930, when Will Quinn came back for a second stint. He had previously trained the team from 1911 until 1923. Certainly Farmer is reported as a member of Celtic's staff having trained the Scottish national team that in 1929 beat Northern Ireland 3:1 in Glasgow.
However, in the interim France had again called and twice over. The initial call came from Paris, from the Red Star club in the suburb of St. Ouen. It is a club that still exists, based in the Paris suburb of St Ouen and playing in Ligue 2, France's second tier.And with them at the beginning May 1928 he would take a second French Cup, this time against CA Paris, Cercle Athletique, at Stade Colombe watched by 30,000. The second, no doubt helped by the cup victory, was Farmer's appointment to train the French Olympic team for the 1928 Olympic games in Amsterdam. And it is from Amsterdam that we have the only description of Farmer's character and approach. Peter Nicolas, one of his French players, one who was taking part in his third Olympics and also played under him at Red Star, gave us this brief description of his character and approach.
"He was a fine fellow but he never gave us a word of advice, just saying 'OK' each time we won. On the other hand, he knew how to keep the team's spirits up and that was ample compensation."
However, how much time Farmer was given to prepare the French squad is questionable. The Games kicked off just three weeks after the Cup victory and France was knocked out in the first round, beaten by Italy 4:3. To make matters worse, although Italy would go on to take the bronze medal, losing narrowly in the semi-final to the eventual gold medallists, Uruguay, the French had been two up in seventeen minutes, a brace from Juste Bouzes of Red Star. Ironically too the goals that had turned the France-Italy match around were scored by players Farmer already knew. Two minutes after Bouzes's second, Torino's Rosetti pulled one back and in the second half Italy opened up a two goal gap through Levratto, Banchero and Baloncieri. In 1925 Baloncieri had joined Torino from his home-town club, Alessandria. There he had made one hundred and twenty appearances, scored an excellent seventy-four goals and clearly impressed the man then in charge on the pitch at the club that would buy him, none other than Farmer himself. In fact Farmer may well also have known Rosetti and Banchero. Both had joined Torino in 1926 just as Farmer left but could well have already been identified as targets, whilst he was still there.
It seems likely that Peter Farmer remained in Scotland in the early 1930s. However the call of France was clearly still strong. In 1933 a year after the game there became openly professional and was still in something of a state of flux, he returned for a year, perhaps a little more, again to Paris but this time at Racing Club in the French First Division, followed possibly by a short stay at Cherbourg outwith the top league. He had been preceded at Racing by
Jimmy Hogan, both coaching Jordan, and from Cherbourg returned briefly not to Scotland but to English football at Southern League Tunbridge Wells Rangers.
Neither stay was in reality particularly successful in terms of results and Celtic, once Jimmy McMenemy had become trainer in 1934, again seems to have become his main focus for perhaps four more seasons, that is until just before the Second war he became a coach to the Romanian FA, probably until the War itself, after which his career did not seem to resume. When peace returned Farmer was almost sixty. Alec Dowdalls by then had replaced McMenemy and would remain in place until 1956. By the Farmer was seventy and seem to have settled not in Scotland but London. He would die there in Hammersmith in 1964 at the age of eighty.
Meanwhile, there was Victor Gibson. After Sete and defeat by Farmer in the 1924 Cup Final he would become player-coach at Montpellier for a season. before in 1925 becoming simply manager and now at Marseilles, taking them to French Cup victories in 1926 and 1927. It meant with the Farmer victories in 1924 and 1928, the two of them would take four out of five titles. It was at this moment when there seemed to be the possibility of French football following America in looking firstly to Scotland for its inspiration. There would even be moment when like America football across the Channel was like its American cousin vilified, being labelled The French Menace. Secondly it seemed Gibson might be at the forefront, seemingly leading by example. Although Farmer returned home Gibson would move on to Sochaux, Peugeot’s well-funded works team. There from 1929 he would remain for five seasons. In 1930 the club would institute the Sochaux Cup and in 1932 he would see the team into the professional era as a founder member and powerhouse, like Bethlehem Steel across the pond in American soccer, of the new National League.
However, there would be problems, firstly not so much with Victor Gibson's contribution but with the man himself. There were always doubts about Gibson's origins not least because he could not be found anywhere in Scotland, either as a player or even a person. There was also never any indication that he played or coached Scots-style or that he employed in his teams Scots players, who would know the Scots footballing system. This was in spite of Scottish football producing players that, on grounds of quality, were in demand in England and America and the Scottish national team as the 1920s became the 1930s being, if the not best then with Austria and Uruguay, one of the three best in the World.
In the end the reason was simple as Andy Mitchell's research has uncovered. Victor Gibson was not Scottish. He was not even Diasporan. He had not been a professional footballer, at least not in United Kingdom In fact he was not even Victor and he was English only by birth. His name was Arthur Henry Gibson. He was born in Woolwich now in South-East London, then in Kent in 1888. His father was William, born on Jersey, so theoretically Arthur Henry might have played for France, and his mother, Fanny, was Irish. He had in 1911 as part of a team from neighbouring Plumstead, an amateur team, travelled to Barcelona on a tour, from which he and two others did not return. Instead they remained to play for Espanyol. The reasons are not certain, although there must have been a financial inducement in a city where shamateur football was already well embedded and it looks, having married the year before and the couple losing a child, he must have considered he had little to go back to at least not immediately. Barcelona for whatever reason seemed a far better option.
In fact Arthur Gibson did return to Britain eventually, to England, to London once his time in football was run. Having left Sochaux in 1934 with the club avoiding relegation by a single place, Sete topping the table, also taking the French Cup, and Marseille finishing third, his next and final stop was at Sporting Club La Bastidienne in Bordeaux and then probably home soon enough. In 1938, whilst living in Ruislip and working as sports club groundsman he successfully sued for divorce. The reason given was that she was living with someone else but then he was too, a French lady called Juliette, with whom he had a daughter and lived until his death still in Ruislip in 1958, aged sixty nine.
Which leaves The French Menace, also called The Nimes Affair. It was the claim that French football was poised to take large numbers of Britain's best player. As such it was little more than a figment of British journalists' imaginations. Whatever the difficulties they were exaggerated, not just to sell copy but also to try to exonerate English clubs, which were simply behaving badly. The problem lay firmly on the English side of the Channel not the other.
It began with the reported attempt by FC Nimes, another founder member of the new National League, in 1932 to recruit from Chelsea two Scottish internationals, Tommy Law and none other than Hughie Gallacher of
Wembley Wizards fame. And they would not have been alone. In 1930 William Aitken, a winger, previously of Queen’s Park, Rangers, Newcastle and Preston North End, and famous for his trick of bouncing the ball on his head as he ran along the touch-line had joined AS Cannes, admittedly from Bideford Town. Billy Aitken had come from Juventus, where he had been player/manager; the same Peterhead-born Billy Aitken, who with that same club had faced
Jake Madden in the Mitropa Cup and, with Slavia Prague, had been expelled from the competition in 1930. He stayed for four years with Cannes taking the Cup in 1932 as a player and finishing as runner-up in the second year of the new French league in 1933 with him now player-manager. Then from 1934 to 1936 he was managing Reims and from 1936 until the beginning of the Second World War now well into his forties was player-manager at Antibes. And other Scots also playing at the time would include Owen McCahill, who had been on St. Mirren’s books, Alex Sherry, a comparatively young defender, born in 1908, who, having played from 1929 to 1932 again at Preston North End, spent the 1932-33 season with Olympique Marseille, Jock McGowan at Lille and Denis O’Hare and Johnny Paton, who having played the 1931-32 season in Ireland moved the following season to France. However, Law and Gallacher were of an altogether different magnitude.
It was also complicated, perhaps even inspired by a second event. In 1928 Arsenal had asked that all international matches be played mid-week so as not to disrupt too much preparations for weekend fixtures. The request was knocked back but the clubs did not leave it there. By 1931 enough support amongst them had been gathered for a far more radical proposal, indeed decision. It was that no players at English clubs should be released for any internationals. It was something that was soon sorted at with regard to English players but for the Home Nations it would take a year, in which time in Scotland's case selection was restricted to only players at Scottish clubs.
Ironically the situation hardly touched Arsenal. It had Diasporan players but only one Scot, Alex James, as a first team regular. Chelsea, on the other hand, had half a dozen. The club, under the management of Scot, David Calderhead, had over the preceding few years brought in a number of high-profile Scottish players. Gallacher and Law were two of them but so were Cheyne, Wilson and
Alex Jackson. Jackson, Gallacher and Cheyne alone had cost £25,000. And there is no doubt that all could have become discontent because it was effectively a wage-cut. All players at league clubs were subject to the maximum wage. The best were paid it. Imposed unilaterally by the Football League itself it stood at £8 per week, but for international players that had been topped up by payments to play for your country. Now they were gone with no scope for compensation from the only source available, the clubs, impossible.
Now no doubt players attempted to negotiate around the problem individually. Indeed Gallacher and Law, the supposed initial targets, may even have originally exaggerated the approach from Nimes to give themselves a better negotiating position with regard to such compensation. In football brinkmanship is not new. However, it also provoked a situation, in the middle of which Jackson found himself by default. Alex Jackson was by no means as pure as driven snow. His return in 1925 from America had been duplicitous. He had left telling
Bethlehem Steel that he was just going home for a month and would be back for the start of the next season; this as Aberdeen was simultaneously announcing his permanent return to Scotland. His boat docked on a Monday. He turned out for Aberdeen on the Thursday. Bethlehem Steel rightly wrote to the SFA and was given the brush-off with, of course, no recourse via FIFA. Scotland was not a member. And no doubt Jackson also tried unsuccessfully to get Chelsea to break its wage cap to compensate for his loss of international money. In addition, having first come to prominence playing in the United States, he had been clearly prepared to wander, in America, Scotland and England, and, and as result, was aware of how clubs and leagues elsewhere both functioned, treated their players and paid. He had also with Gallacher and Law been one of the Wembley Wizards and, at 27 still with perhaps some of his best footballing years ahead. On that basis alone, not unlike his American experience as a player a decade earlier, France might have seemed an interesting option. There it was said a top player, with Jackson arguably the World's greatest player and at or near the height of his powers, might expect a signing-on fee of several thousand pounds and be paid as much as £22 per week, almost three times his Chelsea money. However, he must also have known his British value. There was even talk that
Herbert Chapman, who had originally brought him from Aberdeen to Huddersfield and was now building Arsenal to his design, was wanting to bring him to Highbury, no doubt on terms that would have been as attractive as they could.
But now Jackson was not just negotiating for himself. He was team captain and expected to represent all his teammates but at least could do so from a relatively strong position. On the one hand, although his 1930 arrival at Chelsea had not been totally smooth, hampered by injuries somewhat in two seasons he played some seventy-eight games, even from the wing scoring at almost his normal rate of one every other game and was apparently held in high regard by the fans and the directors alike. On the other hand during that 1931-32 season because on the field it was not going as well as had been expected, the club was in mid-table, there might have some developing unhappiness in the Boardroom not helped by Nimes. To Chelsea and all other clubs it might have looked like a repetition of the Scottish situation vis-a-vis the USA just four years earlier, only now, following the FA's definitive withdrawal in 1928 from FIFA, it also applied to English clubs. With France a staunch FIFA member, no transfer fees would be payable for any move across the Channel. From a move to Nimes, anywhere else in France or, indeed to any other FIFA country, the club could now get nothing.
In the end Nimes' interest in Law and Gallacher came to nothing. However, the affair did not fade to nothing and it had also had its effect. Alex Jackson clearly lost the confidence of the Chelsea hierarchy to the extent that it turned against him and within weeks he was effectively sacked. It was said Jackson had broken club rules in, as captain, arranging for his team to take an extra drink in his room the night before a match. The accusation was entirely true but the club’s reaction seems to have been totally out of proportion to the point of being a pure pretext. Jackson was suspended, transfer-listed and told he would never play for the club again, being made both a scapegoat and an example. He was almost out of contract. It would not be renewed but Chelsea retained his registration. It meant he could not sign for another Football League club without Stamford Bridge’s permission and it was withheld.
Alex Jackson then found himself with no choice but to look for work with non-league clubs, which he found at first in England, for £15 and then £10 per week at Ashton National and Margate respectively. And here the hand and the interest of Herbert Chapman may be seen twice. Firstly, his second club had been Ashton North End in the 1896-7 season with it dissolved in 1899. Ashton National was its natural replacement. Secondly, in 1930 Chapman had sought to take over Margate and make it Arsenal's nursery club. It was almost a duplicate of what Peter McWilliam had done with fellow North Kent League team, Northfleet, except it was knocked back by the FA; a takeover was not allowed but cooperation a la Spurs was and it was precisely what McWilliam concluded still with Margate when in 1934 on Chapman's death he became Arsenal's chief-scout.
Meanwhile, after reconciliation by Jackson with Chelsea was attempted and failed, he looked abroad, to France, from 1933 but not with Nimes. For a season he joined Nice, where Scot, Charlie Bell, born in Dumfries, a journeyman centre-forward as a League player, was manager having coached in Portugal and Italy and at Marseille, and then he spent two years with Le Touquet on its foundation, retiring at just 31 in 1936. However, Nimes had not gone away. Three further player, also Scots, had also by then made similar moves.
One was a something of a journeyman but a league professional nevertheless. An inside-left born in Denny Peter McDougall would come to France from three seasons having been a reserve at Southampton, so not Chelsea, and would spend 1932-33 helping Sete to fourth place. Then returning to England he would spend four years, again mainly as a reserve at Arsenal under first Herbert Chapman and on his death Peter McWilliam, before a season at Everton and two at Bury, as the war began. The other two were internationalists, if contrasting ones, and Nimes would not be denied. Both would go there from 1932 for two years.
Andy Wilson was a player at the end of his career. Already he was in his thirties, he had been a centre-forward mainly with Middlesborough starting just before the Great War. He had also been part of the All-Scots team to tour Canada and America in 1921, had played for Scotland between 1920 and 1923, twelve caps just and thirteen international goals, then turned out for eight years and 238 games for Chelsea. That was before being replaced there by Gallacher and loaned to Queens Park Rangers. At 40, he would end his playing days in France, returning to manage Walsall. Alex Cheyne in contrast was 25, two year younger than Jackson, a forward also, recruited from Aberdeen with five Scottish caps in a season and now also trapped by the international ban. He would after France briefly return to Chelsea, which presumably still held his registration, and after reaching some degree of understanding was able to continue his career with Colchester United into his early thirties and the outbreak of war
However, none of the Scottish players, “prestige” or journeyman nor after 1928 any Scots coach seems to have brought their French clubs any particular success. None figured in the top three in the French League, whilst they were there or after, not even when Phil McCloy, with two Scottish caps in 1924-25 was briefly player-manager at Rennes. In the seven years from 1932 both Sete and Sochaux would twice take the title, with Marseille, Lille and RCF Paris also prominent. Cup success was also distinctly absent, although both Racing Club and Marseille were again prominent.
Nor would the teams in France, after an initial flirtation, draw their main tactical and stylistic inspiration from the British game – far from it. Whilst wages, except in exceptional cases, normally paid by French clubs would attract only semi-professional or journeyman players from the UK, from elsewhere it was different. After the first season it was realised that a far better general class of player could be attracted for the same money from elsewhere, from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, even from South America, far more talented players not permitted by specific regulation to ply their trade in Britain or, indeed, in the then next best alternative, Italy. And they came with their styles; the styles of Madden, of Sindelar, of
Harley, of, as Willy Meisl reported, Scottish football from before the First World War and Scots football in all it derivations and adaptations. They reinforced styles already in place from the previous decade. As well as Austria’s Jordan in Paris, Uruguay's Conrad Ross and others in the 1930s, Hungary's Gustav Sebes played in the 1920s for Olympique Billancourt and Marton Bukovi at Alba in the same decade with their Hogan-esque influences. It was their approach and not the contemporary British style, their philosophies and not Herbert Chapman's,
Bill Struth's Rangers' or even Scottish New-Style that were planted in what has become not just one of World’s great footballing nations but be something of a cauldron of innovation.
Both Sebes and Bukovi returned home. There Bukovi played club football with Ferencvarosi, eleven times for the national side and then between 1933 and 1935 again in France at Sete. Sebes would play at MTK Hungaria until 1945 and once for Hungary. Both would then enter management. Bukovi from 1947 back in Budapest and once more at MTK would be the coach of first Palotas and then Hidegkuti, his Hamilton and Sindelar, and develop 3:3:4, the M:M. Sebes would in 1949 become Hungarian manager and with a variant of Bukovi's M:M come 4.2.4 as played by his Magic Magyars, in defeating at home both England, at Wembley for the first time, in 1953 and Scotland in 1954, change the course of footballing history forever.