This is a story of who and how, or rather whos and how. The whos are Bart McGhee, Bartholomew McGhee, the first Scot to score a World Cup goal, and Robert Millar, Robert Joseph Millar, another Scot, and the man to have taken McGhee to that moment. The how must be left to unfold as the tale is telt.
The moment in mind is 13th July 1930, about three twenty-three in the afternoon to be more precise, just four minutes after the netting of the first ever goal in the World Cup by the Frenchman, Lucien Laurent. The place was the Central Park Stadium in Montevideo in Uruguay. By then the two of them, Millar and McGhee, would have at least known of each other for the best part of a decade, if not more. Their paths would also have crossed on the field, as opponents and briefly as team-mates, in 1923 at the New York Field Club, with Millar then aged a veteran thirty-three and Bart twenty-four, and again in 1928 at the New York Nationals, There Millar was player/manager. Now their relationship is as player and manager.
Bob Millar might even have known Bart's father, James, for perhaps two decades and known of him for a decade more still. He would not have played against the father back in the old country, nor really seen James McGhee at either club or international level. Although McGhee Snr did play briefly at the end of his career for Abercorn in Paisley, Millar's home-town, it was when he was a baby. However, there are two buts. The first is that at Abercorn McGhee Snr. had played with Bob's elder brother, Harry. Fifteen years senior he also turned out as centre-forward for Abercorn in 1891-2 and for St. Mirren the following season before the best part of a decade down South, notably well over a hundred appearances for Bury. The elder McGhee might even have been known from the touchline. In 1908 he had been appointed manager of Hearts and, although he left the club under difficult circumstances in December 1909 by that time Millar, 5ft 11 ins, a whippet with a shock of blond hair, was already himself playing for St. Mirren. The Buddies and Hearts were both in the Scottish First Division and they had that season already played twice. The first was a home win in August 1909 for St. Mirren, 2-0. The second was also a St. Mirren win, this time away, 1-2, in the November.
It had been after the spat at Hearts that James McGhee had emigrated. In 1910 he had sailed to America and settled in Philadelphia. Bart McGhee followed two years later in 1912. Born in Edinburgh he came with his mother and his brother and aged thirteen, so already with a Scottish football education. Bob Millar also arrived just two years in 1912, possibly having spent a short time at Arsenal but definitely recruited by Tacony, the Disston work's team, also in
Philly. He would stay a season, move to New York for one more, and then spend much of the next five years in Philly itself or in its environs, mostly at
Bethlehem Steel.
Meantime Bart McGhee would be growing up and making a reputation on his own account as a footballer. At eighteen he joined New York Shipbuilding, which in spite of his name was based at Camden, New Jersey, that is just across the Delaware River from where the family stayed. In other words it was more or less a Philadelphia club. There he himself would stay for two years or so then crossed back over the Delaware to Wolfenden Shore, the works team of a yarn manufacturer in a Philly suburb for another two, one with his brother, Jimmy, alongside, and a further season at Philadelphia Hibernian. It meant he had spent the first five seasons of his playing career with home-town teams.
That sequence was interrupted in 1922 with the creation of what was essentially the New York Field Club franchise. Although based in New York City it had originally been the Paterson Football Club, founded in the New Jersey silk-weaving town of the same name, and to maintain itself at the new level after being runner-up at the end of the 1912-22 season it required the acquisition of players. Bart McGhee was recruited in 1922, Bob Millar in 1923, although he only played five games before moving to the New York Giants. At the Field Club Bart McGhee stayed two seasons, playing forty-eight game and from the left-wing netting twenty-three times. His team finished fourth and third respectively. He then returned to Philadelphia to Fleischers Yarn as it turned professional. Meanwhile Millar at his two clubs had made forty-seven appearances again over two years. However, by then it was 1925 and he was thirty-five and, although he had just won the first of his two international caps, both against Canada, he too moved on.
That first cap had been in a US team that as well a Millar included
Jimmy Douglas
and his cousin, Davey Brown,
Barney Battles
and the Stark brothers, Archie and Tom.
Yet it had lost 1-0 in Montreal in June. The second would be in November with Davey Brown and Archie Stark once more and back in New York and there would be a measure of recompense. The US won 6-1. Stark scored five, Brown the other. And between them in in the summer Millar and McGhee finally came together. In 1925 Bart McGhee had joined Indiana Flooring, in spite of its name in the Big Apple, when Fleischers Yarn had folded and Millar had joined at the same time but in a new role at least for him as player/coach. It is even possible that Millar stipulated that he wanted McGhee.
In 1927 Indiana Flooring was sold, ceasing to be a works' team. becoming part of a baseball franchise and renamed the slightly more appropriate New York Nationals. Both Millar and McGhee remained at least for the moment but that change of ownership was perhaps a turning-point. There was a problem on the horizon in the form of what would become known as the American Soccer Wars. In fact they were in part a reaction to pressure put on the American Football Association via the Scottish Football Association, the International Football Board and FIFA by Scottish clubs unable to receive transfer fees for the many Scottish players that had joined American teams over the previous five years because in 1919 the SFA had quit FIFA, whilst the USFA had remained a member. As a result the AFA found itself between a rock and a hard place, between FIFA and the American teams, particularly those of hard-nosed baseball businessmen. And in 1928 it just got worse. FIFA sent an order that the AFA should ensure all teams play in its National Challenge Cup. Three concurred but most of American Soccer League refused. The owner of the New York Nationals, with Millar having just led his team to the trophy in 1928 with McGhee in the team, even suggested that the ASL create its own cup. Millar reacted. In October 1928 he resigned and issued the following statement.
It may simply have been protecting himself. It may perhaps have been a Scot, used to what he interestingly called "organised football" and reacting to an owner, whose ethos he had grown to dislike. Whatever was the reason it proved to be the right move. The ASL clubs in the end stepped back as disorganisation began to affect their bottom lines and Bob Millar found his alternative position. He was appointed manager of the US national team, no doubt in the knowledge via the AFA and FIFA that there would in 1930 be the first World Cup, the professional version of Olympic football,and that if the the USA had a team and turned up it would play. At that moment it became Bob Millar's task to make precisely that happen, with Bart McGhee, who would continue more or less as the New York Nationals until 1931 except for a brief busman's holiday back in Philly at the Field Club in 1929, as an integral and ultimately crucial part of his plan. The US team would reach the semi-final of that first World Cup before being kicked off the park by a, shall we say, ruthless Argentina. Bob Millar would retire immediately on returning to US soil, in later life living in Kings in New York with his wife, Helen, and daughter, Mary, and working as a barman. He owned the Bob Millar Cafe, now the Mussels and More restaurant at 8001 5th Avenue, Brooklyn. And he would die in 1967 aged 76 on Staten Island. Bart McGhee would retire the following year in 1931 and return to Philadelphia. In 1930 he was married with two boys, a daughter followed, and living on South Reese St. in the centre of the city a short distance from where he had grown up. Like his father, a plasterer, when playing football, he was working in the building trade as a floor-layer, whilst clearly playing the game on the side. In 1940 he was recorded still as a labourer, in the year before his father's passing. And he himself would die aged 79 in 1979 still in Philadelphia, in the northern suburb of Norristown."I hereby advise you that I must refuse to continue as playing manager of the New York Nationals Football Club. I hereby tender my resignation, because to engage further in unsanctioned soccer football will materially endanger my status in organized soccer and will thereby affect my future livelihood as a professional soccer player. You have not lived up to the terms of my contract, which call for me to play and manage under the rules and regulations of the United States Football Association, and by forcing me to engage in outlaw soccer, you are breaking my means of gaining a living. I am compelled to seek a position in organised football."