It was in December 1889 that the status of Huelva Recreation Club or Club Recreativo de Huelva was formalised. That date alone makes the club the doyen of Spanish football, the one that has been existence for longest, today playing in Spain's third tier. But, in fact, it had de facto existed for a couple of years even before that.
The meeting of formalisation was called by William Alexander Mackay. He had arrived in the port city on Andalusia's Atlantic coast in 1883. Huelva is sixty miles to the east of Seville, three-quarters of the way from there to the Portuguese border. But more importantly it was the shipping point for ores that were being mined in the mountain in the interior to the north by several mining companies but notably Rio Tinto. It had built a railway to connect its mine, and the small town of Rio Tinto that grew up around it, to the sea and in 1878 had appointed John Sutherland Mackay as the mining town's doctor. John Sutherland was William Alexander's elder brother, both sons of the manse and born in Lybster in Caithness.
Clearly John Sutherland was well-regarded. Soon after his arrival he was elected President of the Rio Tinto English Club, the growing but mainly Scottish expatriate social hub. And when with a similarly growing Rio Tinto Mining and other population in Huelva it was decided that a second company doctor was needed there the newly-qualified, like his brother from Edinburgh University, twenty-three year old William Alexander seemed the perfect choice.
In fact, although in 1885 William Alexander would open the Rio-Tinto Hospital in Huelva, he would not just administer to mine company employees only but all the British population, permanent and passing, and others and he would soon not do it alone. Firstly, again in 1885 he had returned to Scotland, to marry Catherine Robson in Edinburgh and she came to join him in Southern Spain. And he would also be joined by Robert Russell Ross, a second doctor, born in Canada of Scots parents, brought up in England in Surrey and also newly-qualified.
Mackay and Ross seemed to share an approach to health that recognised the importance of exercise, of sport. A year after his arrival Mackay was already organising a "Society for Ball-Games". By 1888 now the pair of them were organising more games. Initially it was with the participation of crews of incoming ships, with Spanish involvement, against what in Spanish already had the informal name, “Recreo de Huelva”. Then they were through the Seaman’s Institute, founded earlier in 1889 once more by Rio Tinto with Mackay on its board.
However, Mackay on the formalisation of "Recreo" as the club is known colloquially, was not elected President, although he was a Director. That first honour fell to Charles Adams, actually Adam, Charles Wilson Adam, who had arrived in the city in 1879. He was yet another Scot, a sports’ enthusiast from the footballing hotbed of
Paisley, by then a 42 year-old engineer and the manager of the local gas works. It was he, who firstly provided the land for the first ground and, secondly, insisted the sport, indeed the club, should be open to all the inhabitants of the port-city, British and Spanish, local or expatriate alike. After all they all bought his gas. He would seemingly remain in Huelva for the rest of his life, with his Greek-Scots-Italian second wife, his first, Flora McLean having died in 1875, have three daughters and two sons, Robert Wilson and John (Jack) McKay, and today be recognised for his contribution with a bust in the centre of the city. Moreover, the club's first Vice-President would also be a Scot, twenty-seven year old Gavin Spiers, also an engineer, born in Strathaven and Jack Adam as a teenager would play for the club from 1911 to 1916.
Rio Tinto would be Recreo's initial opponents but early the following year with Charles Adam replaced by E.W. Palin the famous letter was received from the British community in Seville in the guise of Seville Football Club. The letter challenged Huelva to game. It was played shortly afterwards in Seville and repeated home and away for at least the next two years. There then seems to have been a period of retrenchment, Huelva's only local opposition being Rio Tinto, Tharsis, another local mine and teams from Gibraltar. There its first club had been founded in 1892, its football association in 1895 and its Merchants Cup won for the first time the following year. That was until the new century when more teams would start to emerge in Seville and other towns in Andalusia. Malaga was formed in 1904, Sevilla in 1905, Jerez in 1907 and Real Betis in 1909.
Meanwhile, in Huelva in 1892 the sports club had new ground on land donated by the Rio Tinto company, William Alexander had in 1896 become Recreo's President and he been joined by a third, or is that fourth Scot. 1897 would see the arrival of John (Iain) MacDonald, Alexander Mackay’s brother-in-law, his elder sister’s husband, also a doctor. And he had other sporting enthusiasms, tennis and golf, which were then added to Recreo's roster. The town of Rio Tinto had already built its golf course in 1890.
In 1903 Mackay stepped down briefly as President as the club seemed to be opened up to more Spanish players. However, that same year he was back with William Morrison, of the Seaman’s Mission, as his deputy and the Club now known formally as Club Recreativo de Huelva. In 1906 the first Spaniard, Manuel Perez de Guzman, became vice-president with four of his sons playing for the club.
In fact William Alexander Mackay remained President of Receativo de Huelva until 1924. Even today to walk through Huelva is still to stroll through a life of medicine and sport. The train station, built in 1888 that would have seen the local teams boarding for away games, not least against Sevilla, is still there. The Casa Colon, then an hotel, where Mackay lived on his arrival is also still as handsome as it must have been then, as is the Barrio da Reina Victoria, again a mixture of Britain and Andalusia, built for the workers Mackay was there to administer to. The main square of the city, the Plaza de las Monjas, and the main street, the Avenida Martin Alonzo Pinchon, might still be recognisable. He himself had his practice first down near the docks and the station in Calle Alfonso XII, then in Calle Rico, in Calle Monasterio and finally in Calle La Fuente 18. In 1932 a nearby street, Calle Mackay and Macdonald, was even named after the two doctors and brothers-in-law.
But their influences extended beyond Huelva. Out on Punta Umbria a few miles to the south of the city the two Mackay brothers began the building of “health houses", again with their British and Andalusian style. Then there was nothing but native pines and the sea and it was there that Rio Tinto's workers came to aid their rest or recover with sun and sea-air. And there the houses are still in a part of what is now a largish town, a part that would better be called Los Escoceses but is known as Los Ingleses.
And all this was happening William Alexander, personally at least for a decade, did not have so seemingly smooth a life. He lost his first wife, Catherine, in 1898. She was just thirty-seven years old. With her he had four children and all died young of an untreatable, inherited disease. Two are buried in Huelva's cemetery. And he only remarried aged forty-eight in 1908, to Louisa Brown with whom he had four more children – two girls, Celia, Ursula, and Alastair and Ian.
On retirement aged sixty-five William Alexander Mackay chose, perhaps surprisingly, not to stay in Spain but returned to Scotland. He would live in a house at Heathmount in the countryside not in Caithness but just outside Tain in Easter Ross, where he died in 1927. And he would be buried in nearby Logie Easter cemetery by Invergordon. So as you ever drive up the A9 about half-way between Alness and Tain as you pass Logie Easter have a thought. The church is to the right of the road but here in the burial ground on a hill just to left is the grave of the man, who not by kicking a ball but through his love of sport in general and commitment to medicine and with a little help from the gas-man, Paisley's Charles Adam, and engineer, Strathaven's Gavin Spiers, gave birth to permanent football perhaps not in the whole of Spain, that is another story, but at least to the game in the country's south, in Andalusia.