In May 1894 in the then magazine "Spiel und Sport" (Game and Sport) it was stated that a player, Hermann Obst, from the Berlin club Thor- und Fussballclub Victoria 89 should,

"In the return game to be proud to have beaten .............., Germany's first Association football club."

Victoria 89 had won 2-0 having six month earlier in the first game, admittedly away, against the club in question lost 5-0. That club was Dresden F.C., otherwise know as Dresden English F.C. or English Dresden F.C. and it was its first defeat in the first eight Association games it had ever played, beginning on 1st January 1891.

But the Dresden English Football Club, "English" being a shortening of English-speaking, because it included other Britons and also North Americans, had been founded in 1874 so what, fifteen years later had caused the change that had led it from internal competition in athletics and football specifically in 1891 to the Association game? Certainly no-one in Germany had been able to answer the question but we from outwith can perhaps fill the gap both in knowledge and understanding.

But first a little background. Football seems to have reached Germany, then only just a unified country, in the 1870s and by two routes, German education and British immigration. But it appears to have been almost entirely the oval-ball variant. On the other hand the round-ball game seems to arrived a generation later, via the Swiss schools with Walther Bensemann and through growth and change in British or Euro-British communities in various cities, notably Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. Bensemann had brought the game to Karlsruhe in 1889. FV Karlsruhe was founded in 1891. In Hamburg SC Germania had been founded in 1887 but with an inflow of British took up football in 1891 only for its practice to be interrupted by a cholera outbreak the following year. Berlin had seen the formation of BFC Victoria in 1889 but seemingly no external games for perhaps another three years. Herta Berlin and BFC Germania both came into being in 1892. And in Dresden the change came, we suggest, from personnel.

 On creation in 1874 the President, as it turned out an almost Life- President, of the Dresden English Football Club (DEFC) was the city's Anglican vicar, John Gilderdale, born in 1828 a Yorkshireman but brought up in Southern England, an Oxford graduate with no exposure to the "beautiful game". However, Gilderdale was to die still in Dresden aged sixty-two in May 1891 and was to be succeeded at DEFC by another cleric. His name was John Davis Bowden, he had arrived in the city on the upper Elbe in 1885, was a minister of the Church of Scotland in charge of a newly-built kirk with a capacity of two hundred. That alone tells us that of an English-speaking population estimated as a little over two thousand a substantial proportion were now Scots or descended from Scots. And with those Scots would have come a national passion specifically for the round-ball.

In 1819 forty-one year-old William Knowles married twenty-year old Isabella Pitcairn. The wedding was in Dundee, her home-town. He was from Old Machar, so Aberdeen. However, Isabella would not see thirty. Her death would be in 1827 back in the Granite City but not before she had produced two sons and two daughters. The younger boy, in the old Scottish, named William Pitcairn Knowles, had been born in 1820 in Skene in Aberdeenshire but would pass away seventy-four years later in Wiesbaden in Germany, having in his early twenties moved to Rotterdam in The Netherlands, there, in 1844, marrying Elizabeth Smith and making a fortune trading in wool, grain and dried-goods. There too he would have two sons, one again called William Pitcairn Knowles, and a daughter, Isabella, but Elizabeth would also die young and William senior would in 1862 remarry, to the Polish/German-Jewish Doris Kluge from Berlin and they would have two sons, both born still in Rotterdam, James, in 1863 and who went on to be an artist of note, and Andrew in 1871.

Thus John Livingstone would grow up in Santiago. Indeed he would die there too, in 1955, having trained as an architect but working finally as a journalist, with football administration on the side. He would be one of Chile's first three delegates ever to FIFA, travelling to Europe in 1928, perhaps even to Scotland, to attend its 1928 Congress in Amsterdam. He would also marry in Santiago, in 1918, and have two children, two boys, the second of whom, Sergio,  El Sapo, The Toad because of his crouching stance, would from a start in the club-game in 1938, at twenty-one in 1941 become his country's goalkeeper, perhaps its greatest ever, captaining the national team at the 1950 World Cup including against England, retiring first internationally in 1954 and then from club football at almost forty in 1959.

1907 hockey in Paris