thread and through-ball
Paisley, the town, would not have existed without cloth or specifically without thread, silk and then cotton. And a certain cloth is what it is still remembered for long after textile manufacture has moved elsewhere. Picture Paisley, think Paisley pattern. World football as we know it would also not have existed without thread, more precisely cotton thread. To my knowledge it has led directly not just to the export of the game but its implantation in two of the World's most important footballing nations, Spain and Brazil, and in a third, the USA, that is perhaps finally coming to its footballing senses. Moreover there are other countries too, Russia, Portugal and Italy for example, where it has also played a considerable part. And those exports, those transfers, those plantations have not been by seeds simply blown on the wind but in the minds and more importantly ultimately via the boots, usually with Scots mud on them, worn more often than not by Paisley men.
Yet to appreciate the Paisley pattern you have to recognise firstly history, its origins are oriental, then imagination, the adoption and adaption of the design itself, technique, the spinning of thread and its weaving, and lastly organisation, the ability for sixty years and more for the town to replicate and supply into the market. And as with Paisley textiles, so Paisley football; a game imported from elsewhere in Scotland but adopted and adapted; technique on the field and again for three score years at least organisation both on and off it. The process began with a man not actually born in Paisley but one who was married there, or at least in Johnstone, whose parents came from there or thereabouts and for all we know is buried there. He died young, not even forty, but no grave has been found. He was the first tactician,
Robert Gardner; the man, who has for the century and a half since defined the way, from the back to the front, a football team is built. We know he was born in Glasgow. We know he died in South Queensferry. We know of a childhood and youth spent in and around Glasgow. We know of an end of a life building the first Forth Bridge, the one that still carries the railway at times with me on it north from Edinburgh, and we know that for six years, perhaps a decade he was the most important man in Scottish, which at the time meant, World football, the man who moulded a distinctive footballing style and a series of teams, most with him in goal, that learned to sweep all before them.
So what did Robert Gardner do? Apart from being integral, on and off the field, to the the early years of two of the major early clubs, one of which, Queen's Park, still exists, he was Scotland's first captain. He then, once deprived of the captaincy for reasons of early football politics, was also clearly the brains that within just a couple of years opened the Scottish national team not just to the Glaswegian middle classes but to working-class talent. As the son of working-class Paisley people perhaps he did not ignore his roots as others might have. And in doing so he firstly created a game specifically in Scotland that was accessible not just to working-class players but, in the end just as importantly for the finances of the game's future, to working-class spectators in increasing lucrative numbers. He created, quite probably unintentionally, a business model that would soon be adopted elsewhere, not least in the equally working-class, burgeoning towns of northern England, England's Paisley equivalents. Moreover, secondly, he by his tactical acumen not just built a base, from which the Scottish game could grow, but allowed the grafting-on of
insights into how the game might be played that were uniquely Scottish, and all this whilst personally defining and refining the early art of goalkeeping. It seems basic now but he did it first, he narrowed angles. And then he was President of the Scottish Football Association, which he had helped found, as the Scottish team basically swept aside all-comers, that is England first, and having been, if not instrumental, then certainly involved both off and on the field in its first international ventures, Wales too. True he wasn't in goal on the day of the first Scotland-Wales game in 1876 but he was there, as referee.
But back to textiles. Coats and Clarks, or is it Clarks and Coats, emerged from families of weavers and loom-makers to become not just Scotland's or Britain's but the World's most successful of the cotton-thread spinners. The waters of Paisley's river, the White Cart, had provided the initial power that the two dynasties harnessed. The mills they built on its banks in time attracted labour from all parts of the British Isles, local people, other Lowlanders, Highlanders, Irish, even English and all equally in time were swept up by a remarkable passion specifically in Scotland for football, a passion, which as Clarks and Coats started operations abroad was carried across the waters.
It was a transfer on a business and even a personal level that began with Clarks. In 1806, it is said, at the height of the Napoleonic War silk and therefore silk thread was in short supply. Peter Clark, a manufacturer of silk weavers' looms and silk twine, no doubt seeing his business fall away, found a way of spinning cotton as a replacement. And, as twines, as threads do, it caught on. In 1817 a Paisley production mill was opened. In the 1840s salesmen were sent to North America and there too demand proved beyond expectation. As a consequence it was decided to build a mill in the USA. The site chosen was Newark in New Jersey, it was opened in 1865 and a number of Scots, thirty in all, were sent out to teach local labour how to work the machines. However, as they were mostly girls and football hadn't reached Scotland, nothing happened, at least as far as "soccer" is concerned.
However, the Clarks' move abroad was not pure chance. The domestic sewing machine had been invented a decade earlier and was selling like "hot cakes". Nor was it unreciprocated. In 1867 the Singer Company decided to produce in Britain and chose Glasgow to do it, quite possibly because its general manager at the time was a certain George MacKenzie. And thread and sewing was clearly a symbiotic relationship. Singer prospered in Britain. Clarks prospered still more in America. Its original mill became too small and it was decided to build a new facility just across Newark's River Passaic on the edge of a town called
Kearny. The new mill was moved into in 1875. Again more Scots were brought out, women and now men, and a new generation of the Clarks themselves. And it was precisely as football was begin to grip Scotland at all levels.
From that date in the mid-1870s there is little doubt that football was played at the Kearny mill and the others that followed on the same site. By November 1883, when a meeting was finally held to discuss, indeed to formalise the formation of a club, 150 attended. Although cricket and baseball were also to be played it represented thirteen football teams' worth even with some on the bench. The first president was company boss Campbell Clark. The first vice-president was William Clark Jnr. The name chosen for the club was Clark O.N.T., Our New Thread, the first commercial sponsorship carried by a team, and a third Clark, Robert, was on the left-wing and captain when the first game was played in February 1884.
Clarks ONT clearly provided a spark for working-class football in a region, to which immigration was high. In October 1884 the American Cup was first played for, won by Clarks as it would be the following year too. And in the meantime Coats too had begun to stir. Unlike Peter Clark James Coats was a weaver. He opened a first mill in Paisley in 1802. In 1826 he came late to thread, opening a mill to make it in nearby Ferguslie and the family came later still to international operations, but when they did, in Russia, what is now Poland, Latvia Germany, Austria, Hungary and more importantly elsewhere, it was widespread and in footballing terms inestimable. In 1893 Coats' mill in
Borgonya in Catalonia in Spain began operating. In 1903 it bought a share in an existing mill in Sant Andreu in Barcelona. In 1905 the Companhia de Linha Coats and Clark was founded in Porto in Portugal, production starting in 1908, and in Lucca in Italy so was Cucirini Cantoni Coats, with the Lucca Football Club founded that same year. In 1907 a mill was opened in Ipiranga, a suburb of Sao Paulo in Brazil and by then Coats had also bought out the Conant Mill, opened in 1868, in Pawtucket in Rhode Island in the USA. In fact in 1900 it had been instrumental in the formation, taking a leaf out of the Clarks' book with which it had merged in 1896, of J & P Coats, the company team, that was to play at the highest level of US soccer until 1929, be bought out and change its name to Pawtucket Rangers and play on until the collapse of the game in America in the mid-1930s.
Perhaps it was the presence of Clarks and Coats that drew abroad the next important Paisley contributor to World football. More likely it was just a need to get away. Born in 1890 at nineteen
Robert Millar was already playing first-team football as an inside-forward for the town team, St. Mirren. But he had during his playing career, something of a temper, a tendency until he matured to fall out with teams and team-mates, plus he had well developed idea of his own ability, which was undoubtedly considerable. In truth he possibly never gave himself the chance to show it fully in Scotland because at the age of twenty he was already in America and playing for sponsored works team, Tacony/Disston, in Pennsylvania. In fact he was to play for a number of teams both before and during The Great War, always doing well in terms of goal-scoring but also always moving on, probably and understandably following the best shilling. And he was able to because, although he got himself in some scrapes on the field, he was probably the most consistent marksman in the various leagues that existed. Indeed, it was only with the emergence of the other great, imported, Scottish goal-scorer,
Archie Stark, that he was surpassed. But by then it appeared understandable. It was the early 1920s. Having just scored ten times in twenty-one matches and for J & P Coats in Pawtucket he was already in his early thirties and supposedly passing, if not past, his prime.
In fact it would turn out that the middle 1920s were for Millar a remarkably productive period. Even perhaps dropping down in level slightly he not only scored forty goals in ninety-nine games between 1923 and 1927 but gained his two international caps, for the USA against Canada, one loss, one win in 1925. By then he was not only playing but coaching, this as the US Football Association not only became involved in spats with FIFA, with the Scottish FA in the background, but with some of the American clubs. Called the US Soccer Wars it would within just a few years result for the American professional game in complete collapse. For Millar it would be an perhaps unexpected opportunity. In 1928 he was appointed coach of the United States national football team. He would take it to the first
World Cup in Uruguay in 1930, there reach the semi-finals and where the first goal for the United States would be hit by Bart McGhee, the last by
Jim Brown, both Scots, as what was a half-Scots team was ultimately kicked off the park.
Also at the Uruguayan World Cup was Brazil. Managed by Píndaro de Carvalho it had finished behind Yugoslavia in the first round and been knocked out. De Carvalho had spent his entire playing career in Rio de Janeiro but he had been born in Sao Paolo and it was there almost two decades earlier that the last of the Paisleyites had made his mark. And what a mark it was.
Archie McLean had been born in the town in 1886. He worked for Coats. He installed, maintained and repaired its machinery but also was a semi-professional footballer with Ayr, Galston and finally Johnstone. In 1907 in the close season he had been sent by the company to Sao Paulo just as it opened its Ipiranga subsidiary. He also played several games for Germania in the Sao Paulo Championship before returning home. And in 1912 he was back in September, when he was meant to have returned for the new season as Johnstone joined the Scottish Second Division, turning out in two of the last games of the season in Brazil for the British Sao Paulo Athletic Club. (SPAC)
In fact SPAC would cease to play football at all at the end of that 1912 season but McLean, having not returned home, would in 1913 join the Americano club, where at the end of season he first played alongside the young Fred Hopkins. It was a partnership that continued in 1914 but now with an entirely new team, whose inspiration was obvious to all. Its name was Scottish Wanderers and with it the two of them, McLean and Hopkins, were noticed for a short-passing style of wing-play. It became known as A Tabelinha, "the rhythm". It was in essence the Scottish, the Paisley, short-passing game. McLean himself was given the sobriquet "O Veadinho", the Little Deer or Gazelle, and with McLean and Hopkins also successfully drafted into the Sao Paulo State team against Rio and their style proving perfect for Brazilian conditions of heat and hard pitches it was gradually adopted elsewhere. In fact it became the basis for the specific style of forward play that would eventually emerge fifty years after it was first glimpsed not in Rio but at the Velodromo in Brazil's then second city and since then dazzle the footballing world.