The "Killy" McPhersons & Watt
New paragraph
In the early morning of 5th March 1942 a Blenheim bomber was returning from convoy escort to its base at Carew Cheriton in Pembrokeshire but it never reached its destination. For a reason unknown to this day a mile or so short of the runway it crashed in open countryside and all three of its crew, all sergeants of the RAF Voluntary Reserve, were killed. The pilot was Norman Rolfe, the gunner/radio operator Harold Banks and the Observer one James Quar McPherson.
James Quar McPherson was twenty-four on his death. He had grown up in Jesmond in Northumberland and before being called up had been a footballer with Newcastle United. He never made the first team and who knows if he ever would have progressed beyond the seconds but even if he had, in contrast to both his father and his grandfather, on grounds of birth he would never have been allowed to play for Scotland in the way they might have had they shown the same on-field talent. However, whilst his loss did not mean the passing of his name with his younger brother's first son in the Scots tradition named after not just him but also his father and his grandfather it did mark an end so far of remarkable story of a Scots family from difficult beginnings taking our football, or more explicitly a major facet of our Scots football, to England, explicitly to Newcastle, to Holland, Norway and Germany, notably and critically for the club we know today, to Bayern Munich.
The story itself begins in 1862 and not as it happens in Killy, i.e. Kilmarnock, in Ayrshire but in Cupar in Fife. On 1st September that year a boy was born in still quaint Kirkgate in the town to twenty-five year-old Janet Quar. She too had been born in Cupar but had spent most of her childhood in central London, where her cabinet-maker father had moved with his three children but apparently not with his wife. In fact Janet's siblings would both marry and live out their lives in England' capital but for some reason in her late teens Janet returned home. She was there when at the age of 19 also at Kirkgate in 1857 she, a domestic servant, gave birth to her first child, a girl, Margaret. She was probably there or thereabouts when her mother died at that same address in 1865.
Margaret Quar, later given the surname White, incidentally or not the same as her grandmother's, was born illegitimate. James Quar was too. And both children seem promptly to have disappeared even if they and their mother may not have gone far. In 1871 Janet Quar was a housemaid on a farm in Balmerino, a village on the Firth of Tay still in Fife seven miles north of Cupar and at the age of thirty-nine in 1876 she married sixty-three year-old John Wann, who worked as a gardener also in Balmerino, where they continued to live at least until 1881.
Perhaps John Wann retired at seventy, so in 1883. He would die in 1890 not in Balmerino but Dairsie, or more precisely in the hamlet of Foodieash not two miles from Cupar where Janet Wann ran a grocers and was briefly joined by her father, also James, who would die again there in December the following year. In the meantime eighteen year-old James Quar Jnr was probably living in Cupar itself, a boarder with the Wilson family in Provost Wynd just round the corner from Kirkgate, calling himself James McPherson and importantly working as a printer.
Now why James Quar would be calling himself James McPherson is a mystery, for which I offer only one very tentative explanation. In the same year as Janet Quar had been born in Cupar a James McPherson had been born in Balmerino. Perhaps he had been the reason she had first been drawn to the place but it is equally clear that he did not stay long. There is no further mention after that. And that might have been it except that in 1880 a James McPherson is said to have won a half-mile race at the Hurlford Football Club in the village of the same name just outside Kilmarnock and in December 1888 a twenty-six year-old James McPherson married twenty-one year-old Marion Martin in Kilmarnock itself. She was from Riccarton. He lived in Gilmour Street in the town itself. She was steam loom weaver, the daughter of Robert Martin and Mary, nee Blackwood, and he a letter press printer, giving his father as James McPherson, deceased stair-railer and his mother as Janet Wann, previously McPherson, nee Quar.
And it was in Kilmarnock that the Quar McPhersons stayed for the whilst at least. Their first child a son, John, was born there the following year. He would die aged twenty-two. Then came more over the next dozen years and all born in the town; James Quar, Mary Blackwood, Janet Quar and Robert Wilson Martin. And it is also in Kilmarnock that two families, the Quar McPhersons one of them, and two footballing stories seem to have become erroneously conflagrated.
And so to the other family. On 29th December 1865 in Fenwick in Ayrshire a blacksmith called James McPherson married Christina Adam. She was a local girl. He was was born in Strathaven, possibly in Loudoun or perhaps in Galston, but somewhere in the Irvine Valley. It was about time they married. She had already given birth to a son, James Adam, the previous February in Fenwick but then she was only twenty-two and and he seemingly nineteen, perhaps twenty. They were to have four boys. John would be born in 1868, David in 1872 and Hugh in 1875, dying the following year. All the surviving sons would become well-known footballers. All would start at Kilmarnock. All would feature for Cowlairs. James, a left-half, would play in representative games for Glasgow, guest for both Rangers and Celtic and retire in 1894. John, a forward, better known as "Kitey" would be one of Rangers' greats of the 1890s appearing 175 times, would play in every position including in goal and retire in 1902. David, a wing-half, would also play briefly for Rangers and in 1892 once for Scotland. John would in 1888-89 receive 9 caps.
Now it said by some that James, John and David McPherson are half-brothers to James Quar McPherson. It seems unlikely. Firstly there is no evidence that Janet Quar ever went near Kilmarnock or James McPherson Snr near Cupar. Secondly even if he had she would have been at least twenty-four at conception and he sixteen, perhaps even fifteen. Thirdly, in 1876 the father of James, John and David was killed in an industrial accident at the Loudoun Tile Works and, although in 1881 they and their mother were still in Kilmarnock a decade later they, her included, had moved to Glasgow, specifically to Springburn, hence the Cowlairs connection for the siblings, Rangers for "Kitey" and later the Govan-birthplace of "Sailor" McPherson,
"Kitey" grandson, who in 1947 would emerged from junior football to be signed briefly for Rangers and then return to the junior game and junior international caps.
.
So the James Quar McPherson who died in that Pembrokeshire plane-crash in spite of stories and even reports in the Daily Record is unlikely to have been a degree of cousin to "Sailor" McPherson. Nor is there any known connection between "Kitey" and "Sailor" to a German international, as also claimed, although to James Quar there certainly is, as there is to much, much more.
That James Quar McPherson might have been a footballer is possible but unlikely. He was born at about the right time to catch the first wave of footballs explosion into the psyche of parts of Scotland but probably in the wrong place. Although the game reached Fife in the form of Dunfermline in 1874 it did not arrive in Cupar even at a Junior club level until 1880 so too late for him to have grown with it. That he was an athlete is undoubted and it is that ability, he was a successful sprinter from 100 to 1000 yards on the Scottish professional scene, and the knowledge of athletics that was in his new home town and beyond to prove not just transferable but remarkably so.
And for James Quar there is no doubt that Kilmarnock did become a home away from home. Not only did he marry there and begin to raise a family it was where in January 1892 his sister, a domestic servant like her mother, came to wed not a Ayrshire man but Peter Lawson, a book-binder, living in Dundee but also born in Cupar. And in 1889 James Quar, aged twenty-seven, had begun to train not in terms of football but physically Kilmarnock F.C and with apparent success. The club is said to have been founded in 1869 but first played football competitively and in the first Scottish Cup in 1873, losing in the first round to Renton and that was more or less the situation year-after-year for the next twenty-odd years. True there was some success in the Ayrshire Cup in the early mid-Eighties and it was repeated in 1890-91 before the club for two seasons joined the Football Alliance, the competition to the Scottish Football League, finishing second and then seventh of ten.
Then in 1895 Kilmarnock joined the Scottish League's Second Division in its third season, finishing joint third with Renton, third on its own the following season and reaching the semi-final of the Scottish Cup, losing to Dumbarton, then won the division the following year and was runner-up in the Cup to Rangers and won the division again in 1899. However, elsewhere there were other developments, specifically south of the border at Newcastle United F.C.
Only formed in 1892 Newcastle had finally joined the Second Division of the Football League in 1894 but more significantly the following year appointed a certain Francis George Watt as club secretary. Frank Watt was Edinburgh-born, in 1854 so in his early twenties when the contagion of football reached Auld Reekie. In fact he was Edinburgh through and through, starting, whilst working as a joiner, as a player with the Third Edinburgh Rifle Volunteers, the team that became St. Bernards and in 1874 the first Edinburgh team to join the SFA. He then played for Hearts on its formation in 1876, became a noted referee, even officiating at the 1888 Championship of the World between Renton and West Bromwich Albion, and was appointed Secretary of the Edinburgh FA.
Then he moved on. It was to Dundee, there to become Secretary of Dundee F.C. It was the third club with that name. Two had failed by 1880. The third emerged in 1893 from a merger of Dundee East End and Dundee Our Boys. And it was success in the job there with a team that had been joined the Scottish First Division and without sparkling remained there that Watt was persuaded south, not back to Edinburgh but across the border to also newly-officially-formed Newcastle United. It had joined the English Second Division in 1893-4, finishing 4th. Then in 1894-5 it had slipped to 10th before under Watt it was fifth twice until promotion to the top flight in 1888-9 to finish 13th of 18 and continue to climb. In 1899-00 Watt's Newcastle would finish 5th, 6th the following year and third the year after that, 1901-2. It would done on back of astute recruitment, notably of Scots. Up front first there was Renton's John Campbell and previously with Sunderland. Then in 1897 Jock Peddie was brought in from Third Lanark to lead the line for a hundred and twenty-five games and seventy-three goals. His replacement would be Alex Caie, acquired from Millwall but Nigg-born and then R.S. McColl, Queen's Park and Scotland centre-forward, amateur persuaded to turn professional, arrived. And meanwhile in defence with Watt's arrival in 1895 and staying for a decade had come Ayr's Andy Aitken at centre-half to be joined by Tommy Ghee, acquired from St. Mirren but Killy-born and having played for his home team in two stints and Leith's Andy Gardner, both notionally right-halves.
However, a left-half was not unearthed until 1902 and the arrival from Inverness of a young Peter McWilliam and in the meantime results had begun to slip. Having finished third in 1902 the following season Newcastle was fourteenth and Watt acted. A new trainer was brought in, again from north of the border, also from Kilmarnock and it was James Quar McPherson, who moved with his whole family to a new home on the banks not of the Irvine but the Tyne.
It was a change that in spite of the undoubted standard of the players already there and to come would prove to be the making on the club, essentially its establishment as the foremost team of the era. In 1903-4 Newcastle would be back up the table in 4th place. The following year it would be league champion and reached the FA Cup Final. In 1906 it would be 4th in the League and again lose in the Cup Final. In 1907 it would retake the League and in 1908 finish fourth and lose another Cup Final. Then in 1909 the League would be reclaimed and with a seven point margin and the team would lose in the Cup semi-final before in 1910 again dropping to fourth in the League but this time taking the FA Cup, but admittedly only after a replay. And in the meantime back in Scotland Kilmarnock from the heights of the turn of the century had struggled in both its league and the Scottish Cup after the promise of a decade earlier.
Now, there is no doubt that in the second decade of the 20th Century Newcastle United failed to replicate the successes of the first. In the four years before the Great War, although Newcastle again reached the FA Cup Final in 1911, only to lose again, there were losses in the first and fourth rounds and in the league finishes finishes in 8th, 3rd and finally fourteenth spot. In the first year of the war it was fifteenth. In part that may have been because of a need to rebuild an ageing team and the war years might have seen results. Of course, it never happened. Football only returned in 1919 and at the end of the 1919-20 season there was some bounce-back. Newcastle would finish eighth, then fifth and seventh.
And there had been changes elsewhere, not least amongst the Quar McPhersons. John, the eldest son, had died in 1912 at the age of just twenty-two. Two younger brothers remained and both were to follow in their father's footsteps. The elder was James Jnr, Jim. In 1919, aged twenty-eight, having been an amateur player for the club during the war, as English football returned he became an assistant to his father and, perhaps as a result, was also appointed trainer of the Norwegian team to take part in the 1920 Olympic Games at Antwerp. He was not alone. Jack Carr, full-back in Jim McPherson's greatest team, was trainer to the Danish team. Denmark was defeated in the first round. Norway beat the Great Britain team 3-1 at the same stage, only to be well beaten, 4-0, in the quarter finals by Czechoslovakia, a team notionally trained by Josef Fanta but actually by Dumbarton, Celtic and Scotland's Jake Madden that was to go on to the most controversial of finals, not lose but be disqualified.
And at that same time before a return to Tyneside Jim would also "coach" in Holland with Vitesse Arnhem, founder and chairman Willem Hesselink, before in 1924 travelling to Germany, to Bayern Munich for a brief but important spell training there, and where an earlier player, from 1902 to 1905, and coach had again been Hesselink. Bayern was at the time playing in the Bavarian League and it was McPherson's team that in 1926 won South German Championship for the first time and therefore compete again for the first time in the play-offs for the national German Championship to lose in the round of 16. It was a giant step for the club. It took it out of local football, since when it has never looked back.
Jim McPherson would remain trainer/coach of Bayern until 1927-28. In 1928 the club would again qualify for the national championship, reaching the semi-finals and losing to the eventual champions, Hamburger SV, at which point McPherson had moved on He returned to Holland, to Den Helder's HRC, newly promoted to the Dutch second division. He stayed two years and in the second of them the team would finish in runner-up spot.
In the meantime Jim's younger brother, Robert, had also followed the training route and also in Holland at HBS-Craeyenhout in The Hague. Having in the war years and till 1919 also played as a 16-18 year-old amateur half-back for Newcastle, in 1921-22 so aged 20 he turned out for a season for Carlisle before crossing the North Sea, coaching his Dutch team to the 1924 Silver Ball, defeating the Champions, Feyenoord, in the final and then the Dutch Championship itself the following year.
"Mac", as Robert McPherson was known, would remain with HBS until 1928. Perhaps then he returned to Newcastle. Certainly in 1932 he, having arrived in late 1931, was working as a trainer in the Dutch East Indies, so today's Indonesia, as football there was formalised. He led Batavia, present-day's Jakarta, to second place in the local championship in 1932 before in 1934 he was appointed coach on the other side of the World of Ipswich Town and with some effect. It was then still an amateur club, only turning professional on joining the Southern League in 1936 yet winning it in its first season and was third the next, just prior election to the football league and him moving on once more in body at least. His long-term replacement would be Dumbarton-born, Scott Duncan who started and finished with his home-town club and made 101 appearances for Rangers but in between before returning north spent five years as a player and 73 games on the right-wing under James McPherson Snr at St. James Park. And Duncan's direct replacement at Ipswich would eventually be Alf Ramsey.
"Mac" McPherson would then seem to have returned to Holland until the outbreak of WWII forced him back to Tyneside. In 1939 he is recorded as staying there with Jim and his family. Meantime, his brother effectively had in 1930 replaced their father as Newcastle's trainer under the management of Andy Cunningham, ex. Newcastle, Kilmarnock and Rangers player, Frank Watt had stepped back from team affairs in 1929 but would die still Club Secretary in 1932 to be replaced by his son, Moreover, James McPherson, having already retired in 1928 at the age of sixty-five, would be briefly and, as it turned out, temporarily replaced for two seasons by Assistant Trainer and former international player, Andy Combie, and also pass in Newcastle still, just ten months after Watt, to be buried in St. Andrews Cemetery. An era was over but not before James' Snr. would live to see his team, trained by his son in beating Herbert Chapman's Arsenal win the FA Cup only for a second time. A generation after one James Quar McPherson had finally won Newcastle the trophy for the first time a second would do precisely the same for only the second time.
And that is as true a version of the story of the footballing Killy McPhersons as I can establish. "Kitey"'s branch remained in Scotland. He himself became a director of Rangers and remained so from 1907 until his death, aged 58, in 1926. In the other Mac McPherson seems to have had no children. Jim McPherson had several, the James Quar McPherson who died on that Welsh hillside was one,; his eldest boy. But there is one more twist, that of the posited connection between them not just with German football, specifically Bayern, but also one of the earliest German internationals, whose name is the very un-Germanic Edwin Dutton.
Edwin Dutton was probably born in Silesia, then in Germany, now in Poland in 1890. His father came from Nottingham and would die in Berlin in 1914. Why the family went to Germany is unknown. Perhaps is was textiles, specifically lace, the manufacture of which Nottingham was a centre, perhaps coal-mining. However, he became involved in the introduction locally of cricket and football and in nearby Wroclaw, Breslau in German, then and eventually, after they had moved there, in the German capital too. And it was thus that his son, Edwin, went to school in Berlin and began to play on the right-wing for Britannia Berlin 92, a British-based team, and then BFC Preussen. With the latter aged 20 he reached the quarter-final of the German Championship and played one international for Germany, a 3-3 draw against Hungary in 1909.
It is then suggested that Dutton then returned to Britain and joined Newcastle United. It seems likely he was in the city at least in 1911-12, perhaps the previous year too. There exists a picture said to be of him from 1911-12 season in a Newcastle shirt. But he did not stay. There is no record of him in the first team squad at that time and via Holland in 1914 he was certainly back in Germany. Back in Berlin he rejoined Britannia Berlin 92, after discussion of his status, i.e. amateur of professional, was allowed from January 1913 to play in league and cup games, the following month represented Berlin against Paris, was working as a sports outfitter yet in November 1914 was arrested as British and interned in Ruhleben, where he found himself alongside a gamut of British ex-professional footballers working in Germany as coaches. Amongst them were John Cameron, Wattie Campbell, Fred Pentland, Steve Bloomer and others.
On release from Ruhleben Dutton returned to Britain. Specifically he returned to Newcastle where in January 1919 he married. And here is the crux. His bride was Mary Blackwood McPherson, elder daughter of James Quar Snr, sister of Jim and Mac. And it was there is Newcastle that they settled, perhaps working for the football club from 1919 to 1924, whilst he still worked away before, perhaps unsurprisingly, being there once more in 1939. He is said to have coached Stuttgart Kickers from 1924 to 1926 back in Germany, is known to have lived with Mary in Holland and when in 1927 he was appointed the first professional trainer to a southern, amateur, non-league club, it was none other than Ipswich Town, precisely where a decade later his brother-in-law would also find work.
And so we return to James Quar McPherson Jnr. After the 1932 FA Cup victory he would remain at St. James' Park for another five years. In 1933 Newcastle would finish 5th in the league but be knocked out of the Cup at the first occasion. And the same would happen the following year and there would be worse. The club suffered relegation and the manager paid the price. Andy Cunningham was replaced by Tom Mather with some but little change until 1936-7. The team seemed to regroup, finishing fourth but Jim McPherson left the club nevertheless. And the following season it showed. In 1938 having been fourth from top it finished fourth from bottom, recovered to ninth in 1939 but nevertheless Mather's time came with the War to an end, as did finally and sadly the McPherson footballing era that had seen the creation and perpetuation of perhaps the greatest "Scots" club team before 1967 and Celtic.
Jim McPherson would remain the city of Newcastle until his death in 1960. He would live to see the birth of his grandson, also named James Quar. Mac McPherson would die nine years later. In 1965 before the end of his life he was living at 42, Osborne Road in Jesmond, a house he shared with a Jane aka Janet Quar Fawcett, nee McPherson, elder sister, and two Duttons, oldest sister Mary Blackwood and her husband, none other than Anglo-German Edwin. However, Mac's death would not be in Newcastle. Allthough still in Northumberland it was to the north in Almouth. And nor would Edwin Dutton's be on Tyneside either. His and Mary's son would train in medicine, become a neuro-surgeon and settle in Cheshire, in Wilmslow. And it would be to there they would finally move, to house a mile or so from their son's and where in 1972 Edwin would pass away, followed the next year by Mary, she in a Manchester hospital.