The object of this web-site is in large part through accurate research and from a Scots perspective to pass a spot-light across the whole of the history of the game of football, that is to say not just the obvious stars. They should, of course, not be ignored but have been and continue to be essentially takers, their reputations enhanced, sometimes inaccurately, by football authorities, the SFA and FIFA amongst them. But the intention has also been from the beginning to illuminate seemingly lesser lights, a few professional, many amateur, a few in between, who created and played for what were largely but not exclusively Scots clubs outwith Scotland and in doing so took their equally Scots passion for the game to every corner of the World.
In the USA New Jersey’s
Clark ONT was the Scots team, at least initially, in football's first wave there; a team that would in 1885 take the first American Cup and the two subsequent ones. In its second wave it was
Kearny Scots, once more from New Jersey, with more Cup victories. And in the third, as the game across the Atlantic reached its first high-point, it was Pennsylvania’s
Bethlehem Steel. And when in 1913 Bethlehem Football Club became Bethlehem Steel or at least soon afterwards there was a Morrison in the team. He was captain in the 1914-15 season, the next season and again briefly the season after that and would be followed into the team, once more briefly, by his younger brother.
So what, you might ask. Both Morrisons were journeymen, talented but not enough to have been players either on the World or even the Scottish stage, who in America would find their levels. True both seemed to deserve moments of recognition but they were not so much for their contributions in terms of ability but more for who almost a century later they would enthuse and what that enthusiasm would generate. We owe much of the history of Scots team Bethlehem Steel F.C. to another Morrison, a Presbyterian minister who still lives in Pennsylvania just an hour or so's drive from Bethlehem and still keeps the faith, both religiously and historically. And the reason? The footballers names were Robert and Joseph, the pastor's is Daniel and Bobby and Jo were Dan's great uncles.
However, first impressions can be misleading. The more that was revealed about particularly Bobby Morrison the more it became apparent that he was a player not just of some repute in Scotland before arrival in America but there he became an integral part not just in the formation of Bethlehem Steel but the success US soccer enjoyed for fifteen years before being hit by footballing politics and economic depression. So who were the Morrison brothers? Both were born in Glasgow, seventeen years apart, Bobby in 1883 and Jo in 1900. So was their mother, Isabella Grieve. However, their father, also Robert, was not. He was a Dumfries-shire man, born in Sanquhar in 1851, the son of yet another Robert. He had moved to the city late, aged 30, from St. Quivox in Ayrshire, where the family was by then living, and it was in Glasgow he had married the following year. Isabella was a half a dozen or so years younger than he. Bobby was their second child, Jo the last of seven, of whom five survived childhood. And they lived in Bridgeton, within sight of Parkhead.
Robert Jnr. would cross the Atlantic in September 1909, with Joseph and their mother. Others in the family seem to have made the move between 1906 and 1913, but without their father, who was alive in 1909 and dead by 1920. And they all settled in the Philadelphia area. As to their footballing pedigree Robert is reported to have played for Scotland's Schools in 1910. The report is clearly false. By that time he was already in America, was also twenty-six with a footballing education, a Scottish footballing education at half-back already long in place. What he did have was a junior cap and had immediately before leaving been turning out for the prominent junior side, Kirkintilloch Rob Roy, a club still playing, now in the Scottish Junior Football Association West Premiership. In fact he was captain, probably arriving from Kilsyth Emmett, another junior side but no longer in existence, having played for a number of smaller senior clubs, but including the Airdrieonians 2nd team, Airdrie at the time from 1906-7 having finished 3rd, 4th and 5th in the Scottish First Division. Furthermore his departure for the USA had even noted in the Scottish local press, as was that he was about to turn out for Disston, the amateur, perhaps shamateur, works team of the saw manufacturer of the same name in the Philadelphia suburb of Tacony and with which he would reach the semi-final of the American Cup in 1911 and lose in the final in 1913.
Bobby Morrison would remain with Disston/Tacony until the end of the 1912-13 season, then make the fifty mile move to Bethlehem. He was by then already thirty, perhaps beyond his prime. Yet his new team would take league titles that year and the next, the American Cup in 1914, the Challenge Cup in 1915 and both in 1916. It seems then, even though he began still as captain, he would drop out of the first team but not leave the club in spite of what is said to have been a serious injury in 1918. It was that same year he became naturalised. In fact in July 1920 he, aged thirty-six, was recorded as a machinist in the steel industry living in Bethlehem with his mother and two brothers, Jo and James, Dan's grandfather, but still clearly a member of the Steel club applying for a passport to travel with it on tour to Brazil. From the application we even have a description, 5ft 5 1/2 ins tall, with brown, straight hair, square jaw, high fore-head and a ruddy complexion.
Robert would marry in 1921, his football career over at the age of thirty-eight. His wife would be Scots-born Kate Doherty. Their only child, a daughter, would be born in 1923. By then his brother, Joseph, in his early 20s with his footballing education entirely in America, would play a few games for Bethlehem and then move on to the Fleischers' Yarn works team back in Philadelphia for the 1924-25 season. That is before, having taken the American Cup in 1923, it was wound up. He then became a clerk, married, also had a daughter and would die in 1949 still in Bethlehem. His, Robert's and James’s mother would herself die in 1951 and be buried in Philadelphia and Robert would pass away in 1952, aged sixty-nine, once more in Bethlehem never to see the modern resurgence in American soccer but be an integral part of its foundations. He would in 1951, the year before his death, be one of the first to be inducted into American Soccer’s Hall of Fame, a Diasporan Scot, whose contribution to the Beautiful Game might be remembered across the Atlantic but here has been largely and wrongly ignored. That is until now.