When in Turin on 11th April 1909 the first round of The Thomas Lipton Trophy kicked off we know the four participants, including the English, eventual winners, the Durham team, West Auckland. The competition is even cited, incorrectly, as the forerunner of the World Cup. It was between clubs and not countries and therefore should be seen as the precursor of the European Cup and today's Champions' League. And when it was replayed two years later in 1911 and again won by The West we even know the officials, amongst whom was the Italian-Scots, Willi Nolli, bringer of football from Edinburgh to Darlington.

But what is largely ignored is that Glaswegian multi-millionaire grocer, Thomas Lipton, already in 1905 provider to Argentina and Uruguay of the Copa Lipton, on becoming in 1909 a Knight Commander of the Grand Order of the Crown of Italy, had that same year simultaneously created not one but two Italian club football competitions, both in his name, one the Trophy, the other the Lipton Challenge Cup. It was to be played, perhaps for balance, by teams not from the North of Italy but the South and was the result, whilst cruising the Mediterranean on his yacht, Erin, of two visits Lipton had made to Palermo. The first had been in 1902, the second in 1907. And on both occasions he would have met the Whitakers, originally from Yorkshire but by then having made a fortune, in parallel to the sherry families of Spain and the port ones of Portugal, by exporting Marsala wine to Britain and firmly integrated into Sicilian society. Moreover, the younger Whitakers had a couple of years prior to Lipton's first contact been instrumental in the introduction of football to their adopted town. What is today's Palermo Football Club, note still in English, had been founded in 1900, as the Anglo-Palermitan Athletic and Foot-Ball Club, from an initiative a couple of years earlier still by Joseph Whitaker, born in 1843 so by then in his fifties, thought to be the club's first president.

In fact one of the Anglo-Palermitan's first game was said to have been against the crew of Lipton's Erin, the yacht winning 0-1 , a result, such was the improvement, reversed to 7-0 in 1907. And it was probably that second visit, which prompted two seasons later the instigation of the Lipton Challenge Cup, to be played by teams from Rome, the South of Italy and Sicily and the first game of which took place on 25th April 1909 just two weeks after the northern Trophy.

However, Thomas Lipton's Challenge Cup was not an innovation. It was a replacement, a replication and expansion of an encounter that had taken place on Sicily specifically between Palermo FBC, in other words, Anglo-Palermitan, and the equivalent from the city of Messina. The latter had been formed in 1900 also, with the rivalry played annually from 1905 to 1908, with reward for the winner, twice Messina, twice Palermo, the Whitaker Challenge Cup, donated by not Joseph but his brother, Joshua, six years younger.

Thus, the Whitaker Challenge Cup might be considered not just the inspiration for the Lipton Challenge Cup but also the Lipton Trophy, the first Italian derby, remembering the first derbies elsewhere would be in 1907 in Turin, in 1908 in Milan and others later still, and even the precursor of the Coppa Italia. It would not be played for until 1922.

On his return to Britain Halley would back in London carve out a substantial career as both a practicing architect and a writer on the subject. That is before in 1914 being commissioned in The Royal Engineers and sent to France, where at Arras he was wounded in 1917, was promoted to Major in 1918 but that same year in October and on the Belgian border killed by a sniper, whilst out surveying. He is buried in Belgium at Mouscron.