John Carson is a man, of whom we have no known picture or photo, yet he was an important figure in the introduction of Association football to the English Midlands, specifically to Birmingham. But he was born in Helensburgh, in 1848, his father, a gardener, originally from Gatehouse of Fleet, his mother from closer-by in Kilpatrick. And even in 1871, aged twenty-two, he was still there, working as a Clerk to a Fruits Broker but had clearly been spending time in Glasgow. In June 1870 he had been in the Queen's Park team that had played Airdrie, winning 4-0 with him scoring one of the goals.

But by 1873 he was on his way South. He went to Birmingham, finding work there as a clerk to a Metal Merchant but also meeting up with John Campbell Orr, born in Glasgow but in the English city from Edinburgh. And together in October of that same year they founded Birmingham Clerks Association soon to be known as Calthorpe F.C. and widely accepted as the first Association team locally, which in itself tells us two things. The first is that even a decade after foundation in London of the Football Association the game had not yet spread from the South of England in any meaningful way. The second is that the amateur game, because Calthorpe was strictly that, and also then the shamateur one later in the decade and in the 1880s professionalisation in the form of Aston Villa would all be generated from Scotland. It is another demonstration of, due to repeated on-field success, just how quickly powerful the Scottish game became in the British one.

But Carson is said soon to have turned his attention from the round-ball to the oval-ball game, albeit with little obvious evidence. Perhaps more germane was that in 1877 he married, his wife Eliza Biggs, the couple settling in the south-western suburb of Harborne. In 1881 and now with two children they were living there on Bull St. However, and here is the twist, 1875 had seen the foundation of Small Heath Alliance F.C., from 1877 playing on Muntz St., its permanent home until 1905 when the club became Birmingham City and moved the three-quarters of a mile to St. Andrews. And by 1891 the Carson's had moved and were now staying 40, Golden Hillock, just five hundred years to the south of Muntz St. and in 1901 and 1911 would be on Dora St., the same distance but to the east. The conclusion that both addresses might have had something to do with the football club is hard to avoid. But what?

John Carson would have retired just before The Great War, the couple moving to Lyme Regis in Dorset. And it is there in 1931 that John would pass away in their home, Ardmore, on View Rd.. He was aged eighty-three, survived by Eliza for nine years. Her death at eighty-nine was in 1940 at the same address.