and first Lions
If there is a ground I love to visit then it The Den, Millwall's New Den. Apart from having THE cafe by the front gates going there and being just takes me back to when a game was just "raz" without all the "mataz". It's my London equivalent of standing at the Gaol End at Victoria Park and listening to the craic in language that is half-English, and, given the ribaldry, thankfully half not.
And it is always said that Millwall is the Scots club in the English capital, its Aston Villa. Doesn't it play navy blue and white and have the lion on its badge? But all that is something of a red, indeed red and white herring. It didn't start with those colours and there was not an obvious Scot as a single figurehead. There was no
George Ramsay. In fact of the London clubs Arsenal and
David Danskin
are on the face of it a more immediate candidate. But then Millwall is not all that its seems in more ways than one.
Firstly, apart from having, indeed, encouraging the reputation that nobody likes them yet being a very friendly place to go for a game it is above all, if only just, a North London club masquerading as if its South London. You see it all began across the water on the Isle of Dogs on the bit of land that hangs like a goitre from London's East End and forces there Thames to bend around it. That's where the Millwall Docks are to this day, in an area that remains loyal to the club to this day and not to "West 'am nor nuffink" even though it is 100 years since, as Arsenal went from Woolwich to Highbury, for similarly financial reasons The Wall jumped the ferry to Bermondsey.
And, secondly, the Scots in the Millwall blood is if fact there if not for the reasons normally and in part erroneously supplied but because the Isle in addition of not just the docks in the second half of the 19th Century became the site of a number of important other businesses. Duckham's Oil started there. MacDougall's flour also with the clue of its origins obvious in the name. Although the current owner of the brand, Premier Foods, God save us, like to to put it all down to Joseph Rank of Rank Hovis McDougall the reality is that it had its beginnings with a new type of baking powder to replace yeast invented in 1864 and by the McDougall brothers. They were based in Manchester but their father was a Coldstream-born shoe salesman, cum schoolteacher cum chemist, who had come south. And in 1869 they had opened the Wheatsheaf Mill on the Outer Dock.
And then there was Morton's, general canners, therefore employer of tinsmiths, as well as jam- and pickle-makers. It was a business founded in 1849 in Aberdeen by John Thomas Morton, which in 1872 opened the first of several factories on the Island, becoming, apart from the docks themselves, the area's largest employer. Now it is unlikely that Morton himself would have given much encouragement to the football. He was a God-fearing man, who would probably seen his workers in church. But that does not mean Scots were not involved. At the beginning on foundation in 1885, emerging at the factory from a casual group of players that called itself "Iona" and wore blue and white, the Millwall Rovers team, playing in red and white stripes, had it is said as its first Secretary Jasper Sexton, the son of an Irish publican family on the Island, but only 17 years old at the time so unlikely to have been able to have had any official capacity. That may have lain with the Honorary Secretary, a William Henderson, who appears in the first team photo as a non-player
but one certainly with a Scots name and confirmed in some sources as both just that and a Morton's employee. And of the thirteen other players known from the period at least four, possible eight, were or were probably Scots. Moreover, so was its first Chairman.
Of the players probably most easily traced is early captain, Duncan Hean. He had been born in 1862 so was 22 or 23 years old in 1885. His birthplace was Dundee on Shepherds Loan, a road that is still there, cleared now but by the jutes mills, where his father, David, worked, having arrived with his wife and young family from Longforgan in Perthshire in about 1855. Duncan was the seventh of nine children, a tinsmith and working also in the canning factory, and he came south at some point after 1881, possibly in 1882, to settle. In 1891 he was married to a locally-born girl again of Irish parents and they had two boys, David after his father and his elder brother, also at the cannery, Richard after hers. Both would end up emigrating to States and Canada and both marrying and living the rest of their lives in Manitoba but not before their father had died in Poplar in 1892, aged just 30 and their mother remarried.
Then there was in that same first influx a J. Reekie, a Henry Gunn, a James Crawford, a Patrick Holohan, said also to have been born in Dundee of Irish parents and childhood friend of David Hean, an Alex Gordon, equally seemingly an Aberdonian who married Patrick Holohan's sister, Mary, and a George Syme, the last of whom had probably been born in Clackmannan, in Alloa in 1863, had been brought up in Leith and was an Engine Fitter to trade. And his story followed a very similar pattern to Hean's. He must have come south at much the same time, also married a local girl and died young but childless at about the same time and also in London, which makes the contrast with the life of club's first chairman, also young, just about twenty-six, all the more interesting.
He was one of the local doctors but not the only one. A second, Thomas Power, an Irishman, is listed amongst Millwall's first shareholders, as is a surgeon, John O'Brien, perhaps a Scot, more likely also Irish. He held ten, Power just four. In contrast the Chairman held thirty, as did a twenty-three year London-born old clerk, James Skeggs. In fact thirty-two individuals had invested in those same shares in double-figures. And William Henderson is there again with sixteen, listed as a mechanic and with origins now confirmed. He had arrived as a tinsmith from his native Edinburgh, born at 73, Broughton St., and was boarding in Poplar, aged twenty-five on the club's foundation. He would then marry his landlady's daughter, have ten London-born children and die in still in Poplar in 1911. And nor was he the only Scots voice amongst those willing to express their immigrant passion and on the Isle of Dogs invest in it. With twenty-two shares was twenty-year old, Glasgow-born Colin Gordon, an industrial chemist, who would go on to manage a local Wood Mill. With fifteen was the local draper, William Farish Beattie, twenty-five, from the hamlet of Middlebie in Dumfries-shire. All were of an age when they might have even been in Millwall's not but first ever teams. Theirs might be amongst the faces looking at us from the team photo above. Certainly two would again marry locally, Colin Gordon, marrying a girl from home, and all make new lives far from their roots.
But back to that first Chairman himself. He came from a family generation of doctors and he lived just by the main Morton's factory on what was then Glengall Road, also the site of the club's first pitch. And he too was Scots, indeed a Highlander, perhaps a fan, but not apparently a player. His name was William Murray Leslie, which in later life for reasons to be explained became William Murray-Leslie. He died in 1951 , both a doctor and a practising barrister, seemingly childless but married to the elder daughter of Lord Rotherham. However, he actually started life on a farm and on the Black Isle.
William Murray Leslie was the son of Alexander Leslie, a farmer at Knockbain by Munlochy, and Isabella Murray, hence Murray Leslie. But neither were local. Both had been born in Aberdeen-shire and he, Alexander, may not have been a farmer all his life. An elder daughter, from a first marriage, had been born in India, where her mother had died aged 20, as had a younger son. However, Murray Leslie himself was locally-born, as were four siblings, he in 1859, in 1871 was on Wester Suddie Farm, now known as Roskill, but by 1881, so aged 22, was a Medical Surgeon's assistant and in Bolton in Lancashire. It would have therefore made it difficult for him simultaneously also to have been an Irish football international, as claimed in some places, perhaps even by him, although there was a William Leslie who did feature once for Ireland in 1887, so after Murray Leslie had chaired The Wall. But he had done so as a twenty year-old and thus was about seven years too young and in any case had normally turned out not in Manchester area but for Belfast YMCA.
Now whether in Bolton Murray Leslie had had any connection with the Manchester McDougalls is hard to know but by 1891 he had moved south. It was the same year that his father would die and almost all the family, siblings and widowed mother come rapidly south too. He was by then thirty-two years old and living with his wife, Jane, two years younger than he, born seemingly in Singapore but formally resident in Edinburgh. Except that firstly she may have originally come from rural Perthshire and, secondly, not been his wife, because the banns were published for their marriage still in Poplar, so on the Isle of Dogs but not until 1896. And in the meantime Murray Leslie seems to be beginning to do well for himself. Whilst still living in Glengall Road he jointly with his brother and others owned property in the the City and was also practising in the West End, in Grosvenor St. and in Westminster. That is until 1900-1 when he seems completely to disappear until about 1905, with a hint that he may have been perhaps in North America, returning seemingly reinvented. He is soon living neither in the East or West End but in Chelsea. Moreover, in 1910 marries the Honorable Margaret Holland, so is either divorced, never went through with the Poplar banns, was widowed or was a bigamist. Furthermore, between 1911 and 1915 he and Margaret are said to have been living at Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, owned until 1913 by the infamous Aleister Crowley, one of his patients. And finally, having acquired a hyphen, Murray-Leslie dies, recorded as a member of the Bar, at clearly a good address in Haslemere in Surrey, apparently by then having left Millwall and football of any sort far behind but nevertheless with the perhaps long-disregarded role, indeed honour, of having been one of the first Lions and a more than intriguing one at that.