If there is one weakness of the otherwise inestimable website, Futbolteca, the on-line encyclopedia of Spanish football, it is think too Hispanic. It has had a tendency, as is the case elsewhere in the Latin world, not to understand the distinction between English and British and therefore Scottish. But in this case there is no such confusion. With regard to the introduction of football to Murcia, the section of Mediterranean coast between the provinces of Valencia and Almeria, one of the most important contributors is a Scot and he is recognised as just such. But more than that he is also the owner, albeit since his death notional, of the oldest football ground in Spain that is still in use as such. It is called Estadio El Rubial, is in the coastal town Aguilas, is the current home of  Aguilas FC, playing in Spain's fourth tier, and on its seaward side runs, Calle Juan Gray, John Gray St. And therein lies a tale. John Gray, John Watson Gray, gave the ground, on which the stadium stands, to the town on the one condition, one which is not exactly a long-shot as it has turned out given Spanish enthusiasms. It was that as long as one amongst the citizenry continued to play sport the land could not be sold. 

The direct cause of the Murcian arrival of the beautiful game was mining and the railway. Indirectly it was grass. As from the 1830s the paper-making industries of England and Scotland expanded they needed more Esparto grass. Algeria and the Mediterranean coast of Spain are ideal for its growing. All that was needed was transport and organisation and that is where shipping companies, agents and merchants began to arrive. The bulk seem to have been British and many of them Scots, home and Diasporan, particularly to Cartagena, fifty miles to the north of Aguilas but gradually transferring southwards. Amongst the names were  Noble, Hope, Johnston, Murray, McNaughton, Stirling , Malcolm, MacMurray, Macfarlane and MacLean.

Mining, on the other hand, would not become of interest until 1875. Similarly to what was already taking place in Rio Tinto in Andalusia , leading to the very first arrival of football to Spain, attention was turned to exploitation with new techniques of previously worked-out deposits in the coastal mountains. It was this development that brought the first John Gray, John Clark Gray, to the region and perhaps some confusion. He came to Cartagena as a "a mining and esparto agent" and there in 1877 teamed up with William Davidson Milvain to form Gray and Milvain Co. Ltd, a "shipping, brokerage and consignment of ships" enterprise. Milvain is said to have been born in Newcastle-on-Tyne and Gray specifically in Aberdeen in 1846, arriving and marrying in Cartagena by 1874 so in his late twenties. His son was born there that year. And there he seems to have remained, in time becoming British Vice-Consul.

And it was in that same year, 1874, that the third element of the story kicked off. Plans were announced for the building of a railway line between Aguilas and Lorca. Work began in 1875. Then more were made to extend to Murcia and furthermore for an elongation of the line to Granada. This as mining activity also began to take off. However, as is usually the case both the opening of the mines and the completion of the railway would take much longer than planned. The latter would see in 1885 the replacement of the original Spanish concessions by the British-owned Great Southern of Spain Railway Company. As a result there was greater stability and new impulse to the project. 1888 would see the arrival of Scottish engineer, Neil Cameron Kennedy, to ensure both. Meanwhile work on the harbour at Aguilas had also slowly progressed and as, from 1890, it and sections of line started to be joined up, it is said, the second John Gray, thirty year-old John Watson Gray, made his first appearance in the port-town.

It is also suggested Watson Gray came via Cartagena, that he had been born in 1862, so was about twenty-eight, and his birthplace was, like Clark Gray, Aberdeen. Indeed a boy was born in that year in that city the second son with a much older half-brother of Robert Gray, a shore-porter/van-driver, and suggestively Ann Clark. And he is there in 1871 a scholar, there again in 1881, now at 16, James St. down by the harbour, aged eighteen and a seaman but then disappears. In 1891 his presumably widowed mother is still at the same address with his elder brother James and his sons but of John there is nothing. It would seem he was already in Spain, recorded as an "habitual resident" of Aguilas in 1892 as an esparto agent and by 1893 playing ad hoc football with locals.

This was as in Aberdeen the game was taking off with not one but three main teams, having first arrived later than elsewhere in 1877. The original Aberdeen FC, formed in 1881, was already playing at Pittodrie, a mile from James St., Victoria United, formed in 1889, would play at Central Park and Orion, formed in 1885, at Cattofield. And, whilst the three teams would not combined to create the present Aberdeen FC until 1903, a teenage John Gray might have had a working knowledge of the game before his Spanish sojourn that would last the best part of forty years.

However, back to Spain. For all the esparto grass exporting and railway construction it was with the extension by 1894 of the inland line southwards through to Bazas, a mining area, that specifically the now fully-connected Aguilas began to boom, the Murcian equivalent of Huelva. From then ores could start be carried directly to the coast for export.  By 1899 that was directly to the port itself. By 1903 it was onto the El Hornillo loading pier. Meanwhile in terms of football in 1896 a young local man, Gines Garcia Abelan, had returned from Scotland, it is said from Aberdeen, where he had been learning English, bitten by the football bug. He introduced his friends to the sport and by the turn of the century there was with matches already taking place the impetus to form Sporting Club Aguileno with Gray as President, financier and trainer. It then went on a winning streak against opposition that is said have lasted seven years and twenty-six games.

Meanwhile in 1902 John Gray, known in the town as Juan, had with two other Scots, albeit Diasporan and brothers, formed Juan Gray & Compania, essentially a bank. They, the larger shareholders, were Arthur and Hugh, actually Frank. Borthwick, the monied sons of money. They gave their address as Edinburgh as Gray gave his not as Aguilas but Juniper Green. Hugh would die in 1950 worth well over a million pounds and after quite a life. How the three came together is unclear but in 1899 Juan Gray had bought a small island of Aguilas and in 1904 sold it to Hugh Borthwick, who would live there for the best part of a decade and a half , actually playing for the Aguileno team, and from there during the Great War went on to spy on foreign boats, some German, some not, leaving the port with ores; boats that were then attacked and sunk by the British. And after Aguilas he continued to work as a spy elsewhere.

Gray also continued to work, as well as banking as an esparto merchant with Alexander Malcolm and as a manufacturer.  Again in 1904 he bought an esparto factory, where the grass was made usable by boiling in sea-water. There he also organised football games near the factory for and passed on the laws of the game to his employees and when in 1907 Sporting Club Aguileno foundered he was instrumental in it being replaced by Aguilas Sporting Club. Gray, at almost fifty years old, was its trainer. He was also one of its three largest shareholders, the others being George Boag, the newly-arrived, Mancunian director of the railway, who became the club's first Honorary President, and fellow esparto merchant, Norman MacLean, Norman MacColl MacLean, born in Glasgow in 1860.

By then Gray had also married, to, as reported in Spain, Mary Eugenie Smith. And it was this marriage and her name that with some digging first proved the key to Juan Gray's real origins that were not Aberdonian and had nothing obviously to do with John Clark Gray. Mary Gray nee Smith was in fact Edinburgh-born Mary Euphemia Smith. That is the name on her marriage certificate with her residence as Juniper Green. The place of marriage is Colinton, on the edge of the Scottish capital and neighbouring Juniper Green itself. She is a twenty-nine year old spinster. The date is 1899 and the groom is not just John Gray but John Gray of Aguilas, Spain, a Banker, thirty-eight years-old so born in 1860/1. Moreover his parents are given as George Gray, a Wholesale Draper, and Catherine Watson, both deceased, with most importantly, and the turning of the key, one of the witnesses being an Eliza K. Gray. 

Eliza K. Gray, Eliza Kitty Gray, was born in 1862 in Whitefield, Cambuslang. In 1881 she is living in Edinburgh with her mother, Catherine, a widow and again in 1891, motherless. But on both occasions she is with her two elder siblings, a sister Ann, born in Kelso in about 1859 and a brother born in about 1861 in the same town and named John. In fact John was actually born on 30th December 1860 at 26, The Square, Kelso so would have been fifteen as the explosion of football in East Scotland began. Hearts had been formed in 1874. The building of his birth is still there, a townhouse above a shop, which might even then have been the reason for the family's presence. His father's business is given as Clothier, a shopkeeper selling cloth and/or clothes.

And from this point the early life of Juan Gray unpeeled itself. His mother and father had been married just in England, at Berwick-upon-Tweed. She was a young, twenty-eight year-old widow. Her first husband had been George also, George Munro, a Church of Scotland minister. But she was not English but born in Tranent by Haddington in East Lothian east of Edinburgh, the daughter of a Leather Merchant. And it was to Haddington she seems to have returned on bereavement, there meeting her second husband. Born in 1833 he was the son of "Land Steward" from the town. And it was at father-in-law's house that Catherine would be recorded in the 1861 census with his three month old Grandson, John.

But Catherine Watson would be doubly widowed. Her second George would die in 1863 at the age of just 30 and she would outlive him dying in 1882 but still relatively young at fifty-nine. Her son would be recorded as a bank clerk in 1881 and a clerk in 1891 and it must be assumed that it was as such he simply upped and went to Spain the following year, actually aged about thirty-one, at whose behest is unknown. He then returned in 1899, if not in between times, to marry and then settled involving himself in business, in the football and later in bringing the Boy Scouting movement to his adopted home in the sun. It seems he and his wife had no children but the pair were an integral part of the largish, British community in the town and of the town more generally. What testimonials there are are glowing. But then he is reported as again having upped and disappeared "without leaving a trace" back to Britain where he was thought to have died in the early 1930s. By 1925 he would have been in his sixty-fifth year and ready for retirement. But that third age far from being short was to be another thirty years. The Grays moved to England and seem to have settled finally in Hampshire, in Droxford inland of Southampton and Portsmouth. The death of Mary Euphemia Gray is recorded there in 1948 and of John himself, yet another un-lauded, Scots football pioneer on the Iberian Peninsula, in 1953 at a venerable ninety-two.               

Oh. And by the way Aguilas means Eagles.