And there was after Bobby Atherton a second player, one who would never play for his native country and never, indeed, realise his potential even as a League player because of the Great War. Like Leigh Rouse he would be decorated for his valour and die of his wounds in the mud of The Somme in 1916.
His name was Richard McFadden. From 1911 to 1915 for four seasons and 137 appearances he was top scorer with Clapton Orient in the English Second Division. At twenty-five he was in his prime. There was talk of interest from First Division Middlesbrough and a transfer back to the North-East, near where he had grown up in Blyth and played a single season in 1910-11 as a twenty-one year old for the local team. He had even played in at least one international trail game. He is said to have taken the field for The South against an England XI in late 1913, scoring his team's only goal in a 3:1 defeat, and again for The North in January 1914 again in defeat, but narrowly, 4:3 and once more scoring. He was clearly highly thought of by the English football establishment.
However, it went no further. At the outbreak of the Great War forty or so members of the Orient staff volunteered to fight. McFadden joined the Duke of Cambridge's Own Regiment, rising to Company Sergeant Major, was wounded and recovered. However, only a few weeks later at just twenty-seven he became one of the 120 or so Scottish professional footballers, 40% of a total of more than 300 British players, internationalists and journeymen alike, the bullet or torpedo making no distinction, known to have died in the hostilities. It remains instead a question of what might have been but with a twist. Had Richard McFadden survived, had he moved to Middlesbrough, international opportunity might have come a-calling. But it could not have been for England because in spite of his Northumberland childhood, Richard McFadden, a boy-wanderer, a potential successor of
Alex Donaldson, was a Scot, born in 1889 in Cambuslang.