In May 1894 in the then paper "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 some fifteen years later could have caused the change that had led it from internal competition in athletics and some variant of 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 a gap first in understanding and then the gap in knowldge.

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 type. 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; a Berlin English Football Club existed from at least 1891; Herta Berlin and BFC Germania both came into being in 1892. And in Dresden the change came, we suggest, from personnel, two specifically, and as follows.

 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 to be seamlessly succeeded at DEFC by another cleric, the first figure of note. His name was John Davis Bowden, who having arrived in the city on the upper Elbe in 1885, was a minister of the Church of Scotland, a Presbyterian, 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 Diasporans would have come the Scottish national passion specifically for and thus the switch in Dresden to the round- rather than the oval-ball.

But returning to football there would be from at least 1893 until 1898 as a player, indeed Dresdner Football Club captain, the fulcrum of the team and therefore the game, and then as a referee another name. It is J.W. Bell, which could be Scots or English in origin with a chance of North American but remains by far the harder of the pair to pin down despite knowing precisely where he lived in the city; within a a couple of hundred of yards of the DEFC ground. And that seemed to have been about it, leaving the possibility that football in eastern Germany at least had its critical boost perhaps entirely, possibly partially from what is by some called North Britain as distinct from England, south or north. However, thanks once more to the research of the inestimable Andy Mitchell we have some more at least snippets. He seems to have been a James (Jim) William Bell, still Scots or English, perhaps a teacher at the Technical High School as per |a British sources, alternatively a physician according to an American one, who in 1897, whilst resident in Dresden, would in London marry Helen Villard, then aged twenty-nine, an American from a distinguished family, with a German-born father and wealthy to boot. And they would still be officially living in Saxony in 1904 before her return potentially alone to England. She would die, still married, in London once more in 1917 to be buried in America.

Nor would that pivotal Scottish influence be confined to Saxony. A good part of the both football and football journalism's stories two hundred kilometres to the north in Berlin and even five hundred to the south in Vienna could be said also to have its beginning to the north of Hadrian's Wall, and as early as 1819.

That year forty-one year-old William Knowles from Old Machar, so Aberdeen, married twenty-year old Isabella Pitcairn. The wedding was in Dundee, her home-town. 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 a cousin, Elizabeth Smith and presumably also Scots in origin, and making a fortune trading in wool, grain and dried-goods. There too he would initially 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 more sons, both born still in Rotterdam, the elder, James, in 1863 and who went on to be an artist of note with no hint of sportsman, and Andrew in 1871.

But whilst Pitcairn Knowles wrote about and pictured sport he also played it - skating, ice-hockey, golf, field-hockey, cycling and, of course, football, and, quite possibly because of his Scots origins , specifically Association football. In 1893 in Berlin he was in the team of the city's English Football Club. He is then said, whilst in Austria to have had a part in the founding of its capital city's first football-club, First Vienna and to have been in its team. And on his return a year later to the German capital he became 'keeper and captain of the Anglo-American Club. He even by 1899 would create his own football-ground complete with stand on the Kurfuerstendamm.

Nor, in the face at times in his era of considerable German nationalism initially against football as a foreign sport and later as one practiced by non-Germans and even today some denial, was Pitcairn Knowles, as a British-Continental, a Germanic-Briton, alone in advancing the game to the point where it became embedded universally. Bloch was one. The Mannheimers aka Mannings were pioneers both in Germany and Gus Manning in the USA. London-born Alex Hyman was another. Moreover, all were full- or part-Jewish. Additionally there were John Pullar and Philip Dennys. In 1891 Berlin's English Football Club was captained by the latter. The following year he was playing for White Rovers in Paris. But he had been born in Australia of an English father and, like Pitcairn Knowles, a German mother. Then between 1892 and at least 1894 at the EFC again there was Herbert Pullar, born and raised in and around Perth with a Scots father and once more a German mother. It might even be that in Pitcairn Knowles' case recognition in Germany has not be been helped by, as a Diasporan Scot, he then in 1899 marrying in London and to a Scot; she was Margaret, interestingly a Gardner from Paisley and herself a a pioneer of women's hockey. And fairly soon they were moving on. Briefly they lived with their only child, a son, Gordon, in Jersey, in Paris and Brussels before settling on the English South Coast at Hastings, where business took a new turn with the opening of a Nature Therapy Hydro. And it would be there in 1956 that first Andrew would die, with Gordon in 1963 and Margaret in 1967.