How many England footballers do you know of who are buried in the clan graveyard on the shores of Loch Duich? How many's portrait do you know hang on the walls of an iconic Highland Scottish building. My guess is none. But there is one and his footballing story is one not just of innovation but also Empire.
The iconic building is Eilean Donan Castle and it is something of a fraud, a benign and stunning fraud, but a fraud nevertheless. It lies a caber toss from Skye at the meeting of Loch Long, Loch Alsh and the said Loch Duich. Originally a Mackenzie stronghold it was razed in 1719 and remained a ruin for two hundred years. That is until John MacRae-Gilstrap hatched a plan to restore it. MacRae-Gilstrap was also something of a benign fraud. His name was actually simply John MacRae. Gilstrap was his wife's name, Isabella Gilstrap, whom he married in 1897. She was the daughter of George Gilstrap of Newark and niece and heiress to his brother, Sir William Gilstrap, also Newark-born, who had made his money from malting and died a year earlier, and it was his and therefore her money that paid not to restore, for the result was nothing like the original, but to rebuild the castle. Admittedly by then John MacRae owned the castle or at least his family had won claim, again using her money. He was after all a MacRae of Conchra on the shores of Loch Long and on whose lands Eilean Donan in some form or other has stood for eight hundred years. The MacRae were and are still its Constable.
You might by now be asking yourself, what has this to do this football? That's where the portrait comes in and therein lies the tale. The picture is of Stuart MacRae. He was born in India in 1855, both facts that are to be crucial in this story. He was the eldest of five children including three sons of a father born in Nairn and a mother on Lewis. He was by blood as Scots as Scots can be. Moreover, his father, Duncan, was the hereditary chieftain of the MacRae's of Conchra.
Duncan MacRae is buried in the clan cemetery on a mound at Clachan just a few miles from the castle. He lies beside his wife, Grace, and his son, Stuart. Incidentally MacRae in Gaelic means Son of Grace. John MacRae-Gilstrap is buried there too as is Isabella Gilstrap, father, mother, two sons and one daughter-in-law together.
How Duncan and the others were taken to Clachan is not recorded. However, on his death in London in 1927 Stuart's coffin was put on the train to Inverness, transferred onto the train to Kyle of Lochalsh and carried from there by his clansmen, as befits a man who was by then clan chieftain in his own right. And whether Stuart MacRae had the Gaelic, I don't know. His people still do and shinty too. He was certainly a member of the Royal Company of Archers. It is an elite, 450 year old Scottish institution, the sovereign's official bodyguard north of the border and is by invitation only. He was also, a little more hum-drumly, the first president and captain until his death of Newark Golf Club, the same Newark in Nottinghamshire that was the source of the Gilstraps, a living for the MacRaes and Stuart's connection to football. Newark was and still is a centre of brewing. The MacRae brothers made their livings from drink.
The iconic building is Eilean Donan Castle and it is something of a fraud, a benign and stunning fraud, but a fraud nevertheless. It lies a caber toss from Skye at the meeting of Loch Long, Loch Alsh and the said Loch Duich. Originally a Mackenzie stronghold it was razed in 1719 and remained a ruin for two hundred years. That is until John MacRae-Gilstrap hatched a plan to restore it. MacRae-Gilstrap was also something of a benign fraud. His name was actually simply John MacRae. Gilstrap was his wife's name, Isabella Gilstrap, whom he married in 1897. She was the daughter of George Gilstrap of Newark and niece and heiress to his brother, Sir William Gilstrap, also Newark-born, who had made his money from malting and died a year earlier, and it was his and therefore her money that paid not to restore, for the result was nothing like the original, but to rebuild the castle. Admittedly by then John MacRae owned the castle or at least his family had won claim, again using her money. He was after all a MacRae of Conchra on the shores of Loch Long and on whose lands Eilean Donan in some form or other has stood for eight hundred years. The MacRae were and are still its Constable.
You might by now be asking yourself, what has this to do this football? That's where the portrait comes in and therein lies the tale. The picture is of Stuart MacRae. He was born in India in 1855, both facts that are to be crucial in this story. He was the eldest of five children including three sons of a father born in Nairn and a mother on Lewis. He was by blood as Scots as Scots can be. Moreover, his father, Duncan, was the hereditary chieftain of the MacRae's of Conchra.
Duncan MacRae is buried in the clan cemetery on a mound at Clachan just a few miles from the castle. He lies beside his wife, Grace, and his son, Stuart. Incidentally MacRae in Gaelic means Son of Grace. John MacRae-Gilstrap is buried there too as is Isabella Gilstrap, father, mother, two sons and one daughter-in-law together.
How Duncan and the others were taken to Clachan is not recorded. However, on his death in London in 1927 Stuart's coffin was put on the train to Inverness, transferred onto the train to Kyle of Lochalsh and carried from there by his clansmen, as befits a man who was by then clan chieftain in his own right. And whether Stuart MacRae had the Gaelic, I don't know. His people still do and shinty too. He was certainly a member of the Royal Company of Archers. It is an elite, 450 year old Scottish institution, the sovereign's official bodyguard north of the border and is by invitation only. He was also, a little more hum-drumly, the first president and captain until his death of Newark Golf Club, the same Newark in Nottinghamshire that was the source of the Gilstraps, a living for the MacRaes and Stuart's connection to football. Newark was and still is a centre of brewing. The MacRae brothers made their livings from drink.
The young Stuart MacRae had between 1868 and 1873 been educated at Edinburgh Academy, where in his final year he was captain of rugby. However, by that time he had already been staying with a sister in Newark. She there had married a Thorpe and at eighteen Stuart followed her south more permanently to join maltsters, Thorpe and Sons, where he would work for over forty years. In terms of sport he also made a change, switching from rugby to football. For much of the next decade he would turn out for Newark Town, Notts County, today the oldest professional club in the World, then an amateur club for “gentlemen”, and for Corinthian, the invitation-only epitome of English, gentlemanly, amateur footballing prowess. For that was what Stuart MacRae was, a “gentleman” and "an amateur". He would be married in Hanover Sq., London and die at Portman Sq. He would have three children, an Anglo-Scottish mix of Kenneth Stuart, John Nigel and Emily Grace, and he would as an amateur win five footballing caps, the first in 1883 and the last thirteen months later. He would be selected for a sixth but have to cry off to be replaced by Jimmy Forrest, the man generally accepted to be not the first professional to play international football, that was Glasgow's
Reddie Lang, but the first actually to have been professional at the time of selection.
Thus Stuart Macrae has to be seen as a, perhaps the bridge between amateur and professional football but there was so much more. First of all he did not play for his country, at least not for Scotland. All his caps were for England. The reason was his birth. His father had been an army surgeon and served in India. Stuart, because he was born in Bengal was thus excluded from wearing the blue. The rule in Scotland at the time was that a player for the Scottish national team had to be born North of the Border and de facto resident there too. The rule in Britain and Ireland was that anyone born in the Empire was equally de facto English. It was a rule that would change but not for another four years. Secondly there was his position. Stuart MacRae was a half-back. In his first international games, against Wales in London and Ireland in Liverpool in 1883, both wins, he played in a 2-2-3-3 on the left in block-four defence. He did the same in the third game at Sheffield's Bramall Lane, a 2-3 loss against Scotland. His opposite number that day was John McPherson of Vale of Leven. Scotland's centre-forward, John Smith, scored a hat-trick. Yet MacRae must have played well. No-one got the blame, least of all him, and he was there again at same left-half the following year in Belfast and beating Ireland once more.
But next came Scotland and what a day it must have been. The crowd at tiny Cathkin Park in Glasgow, the second Hampden, was officially 10,000 but was estimated at double that. And from the Scottish point-of-view the crowd must have gone home happy. Scotland won by the only goal. Smith scored again after a mistake by an English full-back. However, for England there had quietly been a change but one of historic significance. The box-four defence had been replaced. England for the first time ever in international football played The Pyramid, 2-3-5, and the central half-back was MacRae. I wonder how he felt. A Highland-Scot was that day the World's first international centre-half but was also a clan-chieftain playing for the Auld Enemy.
Stuart MacRae did not play international football again. He was picked for the next game but withdrew because of injury. It was against Wales and marked two sea-changes. One was that it would be the first international where both teams adopted 2-3-5, and they would never go back. Jimmy Forrest took his spot and, when soon after MacRae broke a leg playing, Forrest had the berth permanently. The second, although MacRae's role was defensive, was that it would make possible the development over the next four years of the Scottish response, the next, major, tactical innovation, the attacking centre-half in
The Cross, this whilst the Anglo-Scot continued to play club games until at least 1890, at which point, aged thirty-five, he seems to have retired to the fairway and the putting-green.
And just as a subscript, in 1919 Thorpe and Co. was taken over by another maltster, none other than Gilstrap, Earp. By then Stuart MacRae was Thorpe's managing director. He joined the Gilstrap board and remained a director of the enlarged company until his death, his place in footballing history unacknowledged then and since. However, like Eilean Donan perhaps it too deserves restoration.