A few years ago Martin Cloake, writer and historian of Tottenham Hotspur F.C., wrote a series on “the men who made Spurs.....about some of the key figures that made the club what it is”. In that list he included not just Peter
McWilliam
but also John “Jock” Cameron, understanding the crucial role each had played in the creation of his club, and the footballing continuity they represent. However, he firstly did not understand, beyond the fact that they were both Scots, the origins that link the two. Why should he? His viewpoint is that of a Londoner, not a Highlander. Nor was he aware of how important McWilliam to be in the history of Dutch Total Football, both would be in the story of another of North London’s clubs, Spurs’ deadly rivals, Arsenal, and therefore with Spurs of London football in general and the parts McWilliam would play in the sport in India and obliquely both he and Cameron in the Spanish game.
Not that John Cameron was born in the Highlands. He came into the World in 1872 in Ayr, seven years McWilliam’s senior. However, his father, and, at the loss of his Ayrshire mother two years later, the first of the two great family losses he would endure, his step-mother were both born and brought up in Balnuilt in Strathconan in rural Ross-shire, thirty miles from Inverness, twenty from Dingwall. It is a village that no longer exists. It was first cleared and now lies under the waters of the Loch Meig reservoir.
Cameron was another Scots boy with an education, a working-class boy with a brain as well as footballing feet, with footballing ideas; a product of Ayr Grammar. A quick and intelligent forward with good technical skills, able to dribble or to hold the ball well, and a fine eye for a pass, he arrived at Spurs in 1898 at the age of twenty-six. He had come via Queen’s Park as an amateur in the Glasgow club’s limbo years outside the Scottish league, and then from late 1895 for two and a bit seasons in the English Football League, at Everton, first as an amateur, as such in 1896 winning his only Scotland cap, against Ireland, just a 3-3 draw in Belfast, alongside fellow débutant, R.S. McColl, returning north to feature in the losing team to Celtic in the 1896 Glasgow Charity Cup and then finally turning professional.
It was also at a time when owners of league clubs in England were seeking, shall we say, to “maximise their returns”. As one of the measure they unilaterally applied a wage-cap to players’ pay. Players responded, Cameron amongst them. He, with a number of other high-earners with most to lose, not least his team-mate at Everton and fellow, Scottish international, John Bell, was instrumental in forming the first players’ representative organisation, the Association Footballers Union, the AFU; Colin Veitch would a decade later be a prime mover in the second, the PFA, the one that would last. Cameron became the AFU’s first Secretary, Bell its President and both were promptly placed on the transfer list by their club.
However, although the AFU was effectively broken up by pressure from the League clubs, they had failed to take into account one important factor. The League was mainly a Northern English phenomenon. Arsenal had in 1893 become the first Southern club to be accepted and would remain in the Second Division until 1904. It had been followed by Bristol City only in 1900. Meanwhile other Southern clubs played the Southern League, where crowds were growing, money was being invested and most importantly there was no cap on players’ income. That alone would be enough to attract not a few top players, including Scots internationalists
John Tait Robertson
and
R.C. Hamilton.
Thus it was that in 1898 at the age of 26 John Cameron was scooped up as a player with thirteen others by a Spurs, moving from Tottenham Marshes for a season at Northumberland Park. A year later the club’s secretary moved on and Cameron, after scoring 35 goals in the season, became not the first Scottish secretary at an English Football League club; that had been
Thomas Mitchell
at Blackburn from 1884 to 1896 and then for a year as Arsenal’s first professional manager, followed closely by George Ramsay at
Aston Villa; but not just the first Scottish player/secretary, i.e. player/manager, but the first ever player/manager at what are today's senior, English clubs. It would be the start of a remarkable period. By 1906 the trio of Cameron, Mitchell and Ramsay had become eight, with Scots managers also at Manchester City, Middlesbrough, Bradford, Chelsea, Derby and Bury. By 1910 it was eleven, matched through the 1920s and peeking at a dozen in 1927.
With Spurs moving to White Hart Lane at the end of the 1898-99-season Cameron immediately set about rebuilding the team. Thirteen players left in the 1899 closed season. Fourteen came in, two from Everton, amongst them the future Irish international, Jack Kirwan, and four from Scotland joining three others, including Cameron, in the first team.
Cameron, as a constant member of the team for the first four years, was over six seasons to make 238 appearances for Tottenham. He introduced an attacking style of play, establishing “the personality of the club”, a personality that persists. He would lead it to the Southern League Championship in 1900, twice to be runners-up and never lower than 6th. However, his greatest triumph, one very unlikely ever to be repeated, was in 1901, when the club became the only one ever from outside the Football League to win the FA Cup. In 1884 and 1885 it might have been Queen’s Park only to fall at the last hurdle. In 1901 it was a team led by an ex-Queen’s Park player, defeating Sheffield United after a replay. In doing so Cameron played six Scots and employed an innovative formation. During the game he dispensed with the standard, Scottish 2:2:3:3 with its attacking centre-half but retaining wide full-backs, adopted 2:3:1:4. Defending in more depth with a defensive centre-half, note, not yet a centre-back, and Cameron himself at inside-forward in mid-field, Spurs attacked on the break, coming from behind to win 3:1. Cameron scored the equaliser and made the second goal.
In 1907 Cameron left Tottenham. Why is not clear. It is possibly because the club' directors were directing resources prior to joining the Football League at the ground and not players. Two years earlier at thirty-three his playing days had come to an end. For those two years one of those filling his position of inside-forward had been a certain
Herbert Chapman, who was watching, clearly learning and would soon be putting into practice. Cameron himself concentrated on managing but had also been working as a football journalist and pundit and it was to writing that he turned after Tottenham. In 1908 he published “The White Hart’s History of the Spurs Entry to the Football League” as Spurs did just that and “Association Football and How to Play It. In 1911 he was living with his wife and daughter just outside Southend and recorded still as a journalist but a year later he had been tempted back into the game but in Germany. He had been recruited as a coach by Dresden SC, one of Germany’s very first football clubs but quite possibly not from Britain but Holland. Tijs Tummer's, a fount of knowledge of British involvement in early Dutch football, says that on 1st August 1911 Joh Cameron became trainer of Haarlem, in fact the club's first trainer although it had already been in existence for two decades. And with his input the club went on to win the Dutch Cup Final, beating Vitesse 2-0. However it was not before Cameron had joined, for part or all, the Ajax party that that May toured Hungary and Austria, where they played Wiener Sport Club, which had lost just the previous week to none other than an also on-tour Spurs. Nor was that the only coincidence. Ajax's trainer was Jack Kirwan, who had not only played 154 games alongside Cameron for Tottenham himself between 1899 and 1905 but they had both been in the London club's forward line in both the 1901 FA Cup Final and its triumphant replay.
Also from Tijs Tummer it is clear that Cameron remained in Haarlem for the summer of 1912. He is recorded as playing cricket there at the time. But by the autumn of that year his attention was turning to Deventer in the centre of the Netherlands. In October De Zaluwen, an elite club there published a book, "How to Raise the Level of Dutch Football", in which Cameron is quoted and in March 1913 he moved to train another Deventer team, UD, but not quite soon enough. In the East Zone of the Cup that year it lost in the play-off that would have taken it to the final against the champion of the West Zone.
So it may have been that John Cameron went directly later in 1913 from Holland to Germany and it was whilst still at Dresden that the Great War broke out, he, along with many Britons, including several ex. footballers, internationals amongst them, including Fred Pentland, was rounded up and they were interned for the duration of the war at the Ruhleben camp in the Berlin suburbs. It would be Pentland who in the camp would listen to Cameron, learn and a decade later implement at Athletic Bilbao and Atletico Madrid. So successful was he with it that by the 1930s all of Spanish football had followed suit, as it still does today.
In Ruhleben once more Cameron’s organisational abilities also came to the fore. He became for the duration of the conflict Secretary of the camp’s football association and captain of its Rest of the World team in its games against the camp’s English players. Sadly, however, in 1915 Cameron’s wife died, in Ayr and it was there he returned on release in 1918. For two years he became manager of Ayr United but soon returned to journalism. He may even have had a breakdown, exacerbated by his war experience. He certainly never managed again, never seemed to have direct involvement with football, making a living from his pen and is said to have died in Glasgow aged 63 in 1935. In fact he did die that year but in Edinburgh, in Easter Road close to the Hibernian ground, and recorded not as a footballer, nor a journalist, nor an author but as what he had been forty years earlier, a humble clerk. He deserves more than that not least for the fascinating insight his “Association Football...and How To Play It’ gives into how a successful, English football club then played the Scottish game and how that style had changed even within the time he had been playing.
He writes,
“In the last decade the forward line was purely individualistic, and there were certainly many giants of the game. Combination play was, generally speaking, unknown, and every forward was quite on his own. The forward line is now a combined one, and in one way it is more effective than the old style. It is hardly possible to get a combination of both, but it can be done, and if a team are fortunate to do so they would certainly come out on top at the end of the season. It is a recognised fact that the forward play of to-day is rather too mechanical, and we miss the individual efforts that we used to appreciate so very much in the days gone past,”
He clearly recognises the influence of
Gilbert Smith
and that the game had changed between the time of his first involvement in the early 1990s and 1907, but implies the best of the old and the new can be combined, presumably in the way he had at Spurs, without being “mechanical”.
Then he goes on to analyse a side positions by position.
“Naturally, the centre forward is the connecting link in the rank. He should be tall, a fine dribbler, and more often an individualist than any of his comrades. He should also be able to keep his wings well together and distribute the play to the best advantage, and most of all to be a fine shot,”
He seems not to favour the short, Scottish centre-forward. Perhaps he has
R.C. Hamilton
in mind and,
“The inside forwards (his position) should do what is called “the donkey work”, to fetch and carry, and to help the half-backs when they are in a dilemma. Theirs is the most thankless job of the lot and a great deal done by them is often unappreciated.”
His team has a “mid-field” and inside forwards , who are the link between that mid-field and the forwards. This was what he had done as player, was to be his outstanding, innovative contribution to football thinking and what Herbert Chapman was to duplicate time and again at Northampton first, then Huddersfield and finally with Alex James at Arsenal.
Then he moves on incisively to wing-play.
“Coming to the outside man, he should be able to shoot accurately from any angle. Often a great failing of his is running towards the corner flag instead of making a beeline for the goal.....I do not believe in an outside forward coming to the assistance of the defence, save under exceptional circumstances...... Centring the ball is a great feature, and the best position from which to do so is about thirty yards out, landing the ball close upon the twelve yard line. If he puts it further than that the goalkeeper is in a position to catch it and the save the position........The art of being able to place corner kicks effectively is a thing of the past. Perhaps this is due to the restrictions against charging the goalkeeper (introduced 15 years earlier) unless he is actual contact with the ball........It may seem strange, but the best way for the outside right to kick is with his left foot. The same applies to the outside left; he should kick with his right foot. The reason here is surely obvious, because kicks with your left foot from the right wing cause a slight swerve on the ball.”
In John Cameron’s mind there is no question of wingers tracking back. They are also not there to hug the by-lines but attack the goal full-on. This is what would form the basis of the Ajax style in Holland from the 1920s. He regrets the decline of the art of the corner, is precise about when a centre should played, and where it should land, and advocates the “modern” practice of left-footers playing on the right and vice-versa.
With regard to the half-backs he says,
“There is no doubt that the half-back line is the back-bone of the team, and probably the centre half catches the eye more than any other member of the eleven.......as he is command of both the attack and the defence....I prefer a fast man for this position.....his head work ought to be excellent.....the distribution of play is practically left to him. It is debatable point regarding the halves whether they should direct their main efforts against the inside or outside forward. To my mind, there ought to be an understanding between the back and the half, but in theory the half-back should tackle the inside forward and leave the outside man to the back. The best of critics disagree on this point.....”
His analysis of the centre-half pinpoints precisely what a good one had to be – skilled with head and feet, clearly by 1908 not just a tool of the attack but with an additional but not dual role as a defender. He prefers a player with pace, an
Alex Raisbeck. Herbert Chapman would be more ambivalent, looking for precision. He was also Scottish in his recommendation of full-backs marking wingers and not inside-forwards.
As for the full-back he is years ahead of his time. He looks for speed and technique, dismissing simple ruggedness, encouraging attack.
“One associates the full back with long and lusty kicking but he must possess many more qualifications. He must be speedy, a fine tackler, and, above all, a good header of the ball. He must be strong in defence, but again, when his side is having most of the play he should be able to put in many a good shot......he should be able to kick as well with one foot as the other.....to the uninitiated it seems that when the ball come to the back he should return it vigorously, and nothing more. This is far from correct. Many of our best backs have been moderate kickers, but when they did kick they did so with discretion and judgement, placing the ball to the full (perhaps half-) back if he was free or to the outside right or left, as the run of play might be.”
It describes a style of football that is both different to that of today and with resonances. It was played under the 3-man off-side rule and is not the rugged, perhaps over-rugged defence and the out-and-out wing-play of the 1940s, 50s and 60s but something altogether more subtle; a style that even by the 1930s England certainly and Britain as a whole would seem almost to have turned its back on but, particularly by Scots or those influenced by Scots, was carried elsewhere, not least to Spain and Uruguay, and there allowed to develop with considerable success in a way that seemingly became impossible at home. It would be a style, of which there, in Scotland, would be a final blossoming before in a scene increasingly monopolised by The Old Firm, Celtic and especially Rangers, before ossification would, outwith Rangers with its Struth philosophy, set in and persist.