- Uruguay's Scots Team
In 1924 Uruguay was to take the Olympic football gold medal. Great Britain had won three of the previous five. Canada was the victor in 1904, when Britain did not enter but the writing was on the wall. In Antwerp in 1920 Britain had been knocked out by Norway in the first round and home-town Belgium had taken it, if controversially. There had been complaints from Britain about “professionalism” as teams made special, long-term preparations under paid coaches for the tournament and Czechoslovakia, coached by ex-Scottish professional and international,
Jake Madden, who had at least had made his permanent home in Prague, walked off in the final, furious at the perceived bias of the referee, who was English.
Nor would the 1924 win be a fluke. Uruguay would repeat the feat in 1928 and then go on to win the first ever playing of the World Cup. Admittedly on all three occasions again no teams from Britain were present but a winning team can only face what there is and it was not as if there was not British, or more specifically, Scottish involvement and influence. The United States reached the semi-final of that first World Cup with five Scots and a Liverpudlian in its eleven. Uruguay owed its successful style to another Scot. The man who is seen as the Father of the game in the country, its introducer almost half a century earlier, had been the English-born son of a Scottish doctor. And in the meantime football in Montevideo had., if nothing else, followed its own unusual path.
The Father of the Uruguayan Game was
William Leslie Poole. He was born in Kent in 1866. His mother was from there but his father was born in Edinburgh, from a long line of medical men from Aberdeen and Angus. Leslie Poole arrived in Uruguay in 1885 to teach at the Montevideo English High School and was said to have been a Cambridge graduate. A simple calculation of his age on arrival says he was not. He was no more than nineteen. He, as did his two brothers, matriculated at the University, mainly because their father was not just a doctor but had also become an Episcopalian minister at a church at Girton. It is now within the university-town but was then a village just outwith Cambridge but close enough to give all three boys the right to attend. Only one would graduate. Another would not but join the Army. William Leslie would not graduate either but quickly leave for Uruguay and never return, at least not permanently. Why is unclear.
The Montevideo English High School had been founded in 1874 by an earlier immigrant, William Castle Ayre. He was also instrumental in forming its Junior Sports and Athletics Club and it would be to this that Leslie Poole on arrival would specifically introduce football. He had carte-blanche; Ayre died shortly just before or after Poole's arrival. And it would from that same club six years later in June 1891 that a first Uruguayan football club would emerge. Initially it was simply called Football Association but would just months later become
Albion F.C..
Albion remains Uruguay's oldest club. It also remains amateur and now plays in the third tier. Its founders are described as British, except that although it first captain of football was J.S. Stewart, with Scottish origins and its first president was William John MacLean, again of Scottish origin with probable Caithness connections and until recent times a continuing association in name at least with Montevideo's and other South American ports through the company MacLean & Stapledon, Shipping Agents, the first vice-president was the very un-British sounding Enrique Lichtenberger. However, whilst his father was a Brazilian merchant but with roots in Alsace, he had an Irish mother. In fact Albion F.C. might be said to have had its very origins in Montevideo's merchant and port elite, much of which was de facto British.
However, as Albion took shape, with initially a policy of only including players of British heritage but born in Uruguay, on the other side of the city geographically, commercially and to an extent socially there were also the first indications of developments. The railways had arrived in Uruguay in the 1870s. In 1876 the Central Uruguay Railway company (CUR) had been registered in London. Building was begun from Montevideo into the hinterland and operations started in 1878. The building and operations were British-controlled. Then in 1890 an extension of lines was completed the decision was taken to buy a parcel of land seven miles outwith Montevideo and there in the village of Penarol, named after a village in Piedmont in Italy, build a headquarters and workshop. Indeed the following year, 1891, with the arrival of British staff, many of them Scots engineers and labourers as was the case in railways worldwide. it was both literally piped in, with a march or a jig is unknown, and would in September see the foundation of the Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club (CURCC).
From the railway cricket club it took no more than a few months for football to emerge. In May 1892 just in time for the Uruguayan winter season John Woosey, a founder member of Albion but probably again squeezed by the no foreigners rule and also an employee of CUR was instrumental in its introduction. Just three weeks later the first match was played. It was against Albion, which led to Woosey and another Albion founder in the CURCC team, Herbert Sagehorn, being formally expelled from their original club. A rivalry was created that was not simply between port and railway but had just been personalised.
In 1892 CURCC played a total of eight games, against Albion, Montevideo Cricket Club and Montevideo Rowing Club. There was also at least one game against the English High School, a 2:0 win. In 1893 it was eight more games. In one against Albion the opposition included Stewart, Lichtenberger and Maclean, whilst CURCC played Woosey, the Irish Burns brothers and had as captain, thirty-two year-old John McGregor. Both Stewart and McGregor had probably arrived in 1891. Stewart was a Clerk, from his name a Scot, who, more than likely on a standard four-year contract had returned briefly to Britain in 1895 and possibly again left Uruguay in 1899, perhaps for Brazil. McGregor, however, would go nowhere. He had been born in 1860 and would die in 1945. His place of death was Montevideo. He is buried in the British Cemetery there but was certainly also a Scot; place of birth was Govan, indeed Partick, in Glasgow.
John McGregor is typical of the Scot that was so important in the early development of not just Uruguayan but much of South American football in general. As a type he reappears as the pioneer of organisation and style in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, even Mexico but, because of the lack of distinction between British and English, never mind Scottish, is assumed to be elitist. Nothing could be further from the truth. John McGregor's father was a riveter in the shipyards, hard and dangerous work. His mother, Ann Kerr, looked after him and his brother, Robert. Their Glasgow upbringing could not have been easy. It is not unsurprising that, after starting probably as a blacksmith but taking courses in "applied mechanics, steam engines, gas engines, applied mathematics, magnetism and electricity and theoretical and practical metallurgy" (My thanks to Alvaro Cabrera for this insight), he looked for a better life elsewhere. He found it on his arrival in 1891 in Uruguay, where he married a local girl, Manuela Rasilla, and raised two sons, two Scottish sons, Alex and Ronald, and a daughter, Maria Elisa. Furthermore the lack of distinction also applies to little understanding of the British class-system on the one hand and on the other the differing attitudes of working-class men within Britain to football. The British, especially English, middle-class had their cricket and rugby was preferred to football. The English working-class, especially the Northern English working-class had cricket and football in more or less equal measure but the Scottish working-class and to an extent its middle-class too had just football, which for it, for then was more than a game. It was a passion. John McGregor was no different. He was one of 12 or so Scottish members of the original one hundred and eighteen club founders, that included foreigners and locals. He was also part of a smaller number for whom football was the game that mattered. He would play for and captain its team until 1896, a period throughout which and beyond the club president would be clearly both supportive and again interesting from the Scot point-of-view. His name was Frank Henderson.
Henderson had arrived in Penarol probably in 1890 and definitely from Chile. The family had been living there for at least two years. His daughter, Dorothy, had been born in Valparaiso in 1888 and his son, Kenneth, there in 1889. And Henderson was not strictly a railway man. He was an accountant. He was also another Diasporan Scot and representative of the family's general interest in railways in Britain and elsewhere in South America and in that Uruguayan railway in particular. He had been born in London. His family is said to have come from Langholm in The Borders. His grandfather was born in Edinburgh. Frank was the fourth of four sons and the sixth of eight children of George Henderson, whose first son was also George and his second, Alexander. Alexander was also an accountant, then a stockbroker and would become a highly successful businessman. Amongst his business activities be would a major shareholder in the Manchester Ship Canal and in port developments and telephone and electrical systems worldwide. He would also finance a number of railway in the United Kingdom and internationally, be chairman of the London and North Eastern Railway from 1899 until 1922, a Member of Parliament from 1898 to 1906 and once more from 1913 to 1916, was created a baronet in 1902 and a peer in 1916. He was on his death a very rich man, from whose wealth two major investment funds were created, one being the Henderson Group, now Janus Henderson. CUR was one of those investments, Frank Henderson was sent to Uruguay to expand and look after it financially and their younger brother, Brodie, an engineer, would look after it and similar investments in Argentina from a technical point-of-view.
Frank Henderson would remain in Uruguay for the best part of a decade. He would then move on but still have roots across the River Plate. His son, Kenneth would remain in Uruguay for the rest of his life. He would die in Montevideo in 1973 having twice married and raised two families. And in both countries, Uruguay and Argentina, both Frank and Kenneth Henderson would see football expand and consolidate. In Uruguay John McGregor would be its first star and as he waned, he was replaced by another. The newcomer was James Buchanan, by which time Uruguayan football was also changing. Having been dominated in terms of wins in its early days by Montevideo Cricket Club both the MVCC and Montevideo Rowing clubs ceased to play competitive football in 1895. In part it was a response to political upheavals in the country in 1894 but the former did move to rugby, at which it still excels today. Moreover CURCC played only 6 games that year, with not just McGregor in the team but now also John Stewart, presumably Albion's J.S. Stewart, and just three in 1895. At that point football might even have died, however 1895 also saw Albion, at the suggestion of Lichtenberger, change its rules to allow in foreigners, William Leslie Poole, now aged twenty-nine, amongst them. The change may not have been just altruistic. The flow of players from the school had been slowing but now there was a tempting pool of British-born players without a team and wanting to play. It made sense to change the rules to accommodate them.
The result was a rejuvenated both a Albion club, in 1896 it played nineteen matches and lost just one, against a team from a visiting Royal Naval ship, and reinvigoration of the game on general. That same year CURCC played fourteen matches, also winning and losing against visiting ships' crews but losing all four against Albion and, whilst there were stirrings elsewhere, the same pattern would be repeated in 1897 with twelve games. The stirrings were that 1896 had seen the formation of Deutscher, the German-immigrant team. There were now three teams. Albion also decided on the creation of a new ground, in the mainly British suburb of Montevideo, Punta Carretas. Three plans were put forward, by Willy Maclean, John Stewart, back from the UK or was it CURCC, and Enrique Lichtenberger, the last being adopted. A new Albion team was also emerging, now with not just both Lichtenberger and Leslie Poole, Poole as Captain of Football, but joined by another, unrelated Poole, C.B., and the Sardeson brothers, Juan and Jorge Enrique. They too were members of the elite, sons of a John Sardeson, an English accountant with the Banco Londres, Buenos Aires and Rio de la Plata, and his Uruguayan wife and, aged eighteen and sixteen respectively, had just returned from studying accountancy in London.
CURCC would play Deutscher for the first time in May 1898 and a second new team, American, in June. It would be the first of a number of new formations. The Sandeson brothers, with other Albion players, would at the end of the season be instrumental in the formation of a second team in Punta Carretas, a break-away from Albion, Uruguay Athletic. River Plate, or Platense, the port-workers team, had been formed the same year and Nacional and Liberdad the following. In 1899 CURCC would play Deutscher once more, one of nineteen games including six against Albion and a visit from Lobos from Argentina. By then James Buchanan was very much its established star player.
In 1894 John McGregor had stepped down as club Captain of Football, replaced by local man, Eduardo Acebedo. The reason was quite probably that he would not play at all in 1895, probably on home-leave in the Uruguayan winter months, the British summer, after four years away. In 1896, however, he was back at the age of thirty-six playing his last season with both he and Buchanan in the same team. James Buchanan was a big, powerful tank of a man. And he probably had a Scottish, footballing back-story, possibly an Argentine one as well, and was about to have, if unknowingly, a significant part to play in Uruguay's footballing future and on two counts.
He is described as a machinist, would play for CURCC until 1900 and reappear in Buenos Aires four years later playing for another railway company team founded that same year, Ferrocarril Oeste. He may also have been the James Buchanan to have been a part of the St. Andrew's team to have won the first Argentine Football League in 1891. Certainly on photographic evidence there is some similarity. Moreover, he is also said before arriving in Uruguay, and therefore perhaps Argentina, to have played in Scotland for Cambuslang, even to have played in a Scottish Cup Final. He may even have been recruited to CURCC specifically because of his footballing pedigree, or is it pedigrees.
In 1888 Cambuslang had played in three finals in Scotland. In the first in January in the Glasgow Cup the team had beaten Rangers 3:1. Then the Glasgow Merchants Charity Shield had been lost to the great Renton side of that season, 4-0 in May, as meanwhile had the Scottish Cup Final, 6-1 in February to Renton once more. In that game a John and a James Buchanan formed the right-wing pairing outside James Plenderleith. Plenderleith then moved to England, to play professionally for Liverpool with football in Scotland still amateur, at least notionally. James Buchanan, it seems, had to take a different road.
As it happens there was a James Buchanan, who had grown up in Cambuslang and was at an age to play football in 1888. In 1881 he was nineteen moreover with a brother, John, five years younger. In early 1888 they would have been about twenty-six and twenty-one respectively, the former perhaps becoming a little too old to turn professional in England and the younger, John, with no need. He was a pupil-teacher with the prospect of a profession outside the game and money under the table from it. Furthermore, he is more than likely to have been the same Cambuslang John Buchanan, who had played for Scotland gain at right-wing against Ireland in 1889, a 7-0 victory at Ibrox, when Willie Groves had scored a hat-trick and Frank Watt an opening brace.
James Buchanan would make his first CURCC appearance in 1896 and his last in 1900. The Cambuslang James Buchanan had played his last game in Scotland in the 1893-4 season. If they were same man it gave him a more than adequate two years to make his way to South America. It even might have given him time to taken a tour of duty to Argentina in the interim. Meanwhile in 1895 CURCC had not beaten or even drawn with Albion since 1892. In 1896 the run would continue. The first two meetings that year would be lost, and the last two, but between there would be a draw. Then 1897 would begin with two more draws. There would then be a third and a fourth, whilst two more would be lost but two won. In 1898 three would be lost, two drawn and two more won. Results were improving and in 1899 CURCC would finally win more of the Albion encounters than would be lost. It would be a turning-point and, prompted by Buchanan, not just on the field but also, as would be proven, off it.
It would also be in 1899 Frank Henderson, who during his tenure had been supportive of the game, stepped down as the director of CUR and President of CURCC. But he did not retire. At the age of fifty-one he simply moved across the River Plate to Argentina. His last child, Ines, was born there that same year. And it was from there that he would a decade later return to live in London, in a house called Langholm in Wimbledon Park. In the meantime he would be not just his brother's man in Uruguay but for the whole of his South American interests. He, his wife, Agnes, and his daughter would travel back and forth to Britain frequently. He would be joined at times in Argentina by his engineer brother, Haldane. He would visit Montevideo, where his son would continue to work for CUR under a series of successors from Frank Henderson's immediate one, Frank Hudson, who had a similar attitude to the company's sporting activities.
The turn of the century would see seven football clubs in Montevideo, Albion, CURCC, Deutscher, Uruguay Athletic, River Plate, Libertad and Nacional. An eighth was added with the formation in 1900 of Triunfo. Three of the teams were British in origin, three were non-British, the German club, Deutscher, Libertad and River Plate. Uruguay Athletic was mainly British and the final one, Nacional, had resulted from the merger of non-British elements of Uruguay Athletic and the non-British Montevideo Futbol Club with a third club, Defensa, absorbed in 1900. It was in 1900 too that the Copa de Competencia was created with the winners then qualifying for the semi-finals of the Argentine Tie Cup founded that same year and further evidence of the links between the British-based football in the two countries. And Enrique Lichtenberger also suggested the formation of the Uruguayan Football League, along the lines of what already had existed in Argentina for eight years. It would in time become the Uruguayan Football Association but not until 1915.
Four teams were included in the League, the three British ones and Deutscher, all under the presidency for the years of Pedro Charter of CURCC. Nacional applied to join and was refused on grounds of quality of player. It is a refusal that still rankles. And that first league was comprehensively taken by CURCC, winning all its games, scoring thirty four goals and letting in just two in its six matches. Albion was runner-up but duly won the Copa de Competencia, in addition to which an Uruguay XI played an Argentine selection, captained by
John Anderson.
William Leslie Poole would succeed Pedro Charter as UFL president in 1901 and now Nacional was admitted, not least because in friendlies it had performed well enough to have been invited to join the Argentine Football League. How good would it have looked to have an Uruguayan team excluded at home but playing just across the water. CURCC, now without James Buchanan, again won the local league, this time without losing a game. One game was dawn. Nacional, however, was second and Albion last of the five with a single win all season. CURCC would also take the Cup but progress no further and the first official international between Uruguay, mainly consisting of Albion with some Nacional players but none from CURCC, and Argentina was played. Uruguay lost 3:2. Then in 1902, now with Charles Rowland of Albion as President, Triunfo would join the league and Nacional would take it. Indeed Triunfo would prop it up with CURCC, finishing in second place, taking the Cup, whilst Argentina, with mainly players of British origin, would beat with the exception of Juan Sardeson a non-British Uruguay 6:0 in Montevideo. And it was also at the end of the season that Juan Sardeson, his brother and several young Albion players, who were perhaps not getting a game, finally broke their ties fully with the club and with some student players formed Montevideo Wanderers.
Albion itself was a club in flux. William Leslie Poole was into his thirties. William John Maclean had ceased to be President in 1900. He had married and his son, William Alexander, was born that same year. And Enrique Lichtenberger was also married and had started a family. Given the possibilities of mis-spellings of names it could be that Maclean, whose wife was Emilia Alonso and Lichtenberger, whose was Maria del Pilar Olonzo, had perhaps married either sisters or cousins and certainly had other focuses for their attention. The club would finish in penultimate place with worse to come with Montevideo Wanderers, that like Nacional and CURCC exists to this day, soon becoming it's natural replacement.
The Wanderers on formation would immediately be accepted into the 1903 league. A second division would also be introduced. Uruguay Athletic, the Sardeson's other team, would finish last in the first division, the Wanderers mid-table and CURCC and Nacional tie for top spot, each with no games lost. Nacional had a slightly better goal difference so it was perhaps fitting that it took the play-off by the odd goal in five against a CURCC squad that now had just one player of British origin. Nacional would also take the Cup and it would get better still for the crillo game . A friendly international against Argentina in Argentina was won for the first time by Uruguay.
However, in 1904 there would be no league football, disrupted by the Uruguayan political situation.There was Civil War. Yet, the Cup was still played for and won by CURCC. There would also be no international matches but both they and the league would return in 1905, the league with just five teams. CURCC would top it, winning every game. Albion would not win a single game and drop out. CURCC would also take the Cup and become the first Uruguayan club to make the Tie Cup final, beaten by the odd goal in seven in Buenos Aires by Rosario Athletic, whilst two new and distinctive cups, the Lipton and the Cousenier, would be competed for the first time.
The Lipton Cup was an international competition sponsored by the Glasgow-born grocery and tea magnet,
Thomas Lipton, It was introduced probably by Argentine-born Arnott Leslie, erstwhile football manager, the South American Alex Ferguson of his day, whose own father had grown up alongside Lipton in the Gorbals and it was different because it was specifically restricted to only players born in Argentina or Uruguay. No British-born footballer could be included. It first playing was in Buenos Aires and a goalless draw. The Copa Honor de Cousenier, on the other hand, was sponsored by a French liqueur manufacturer to be played not between countries but teams from Buenos Aires, Rosario and Uruguay, in essence, Montevideo. And Uruguay's Nacional won its initial final, defeating
Alumni.
The following year, 1906, would see Argentina win the Lipton Cup in Montevideo 2:0. It also won a further new competition open to all players, the Newton Cup. Domestically too in Uruguay one team predominated and for the first time it was Montevideo Wanderers. It would win the league ahead of CURCC and Nacional and without losing a game. It also took the Cup but would progress no further. But 1906 was also to be important in others ways. It would also see the arrival of one important player and the only Briton to be in the CURCC squad that season and of thirty-four year old Charles Bayne. The player was twenty year old Leonard Crossley, an English goalkeeper said to have had league experience in London but having failed to make the grade because of his height. This, before the change of goalkeeping rules in 1911 that restricted them to penalty areas, was in the English league the era of giant 'keepers, of Leigh Rouse and literally above all, “Fatty” Foulke at 1.93m and 152kg. Crossley was in his eight years at the railway club to change the style of Uruguayan 'keeping and thus prepare it for the new era after 1911 and ultimately for World success. In the air he replaced the clearing punch with the catch. In front of goal he worked the angles and on the ground gathered the ball at and distributed it to feet. It was a more scientific style to a large extent honed by Harry Rennie, Scotland's goalkeeper between 1900 and 1908. Charles Bayne was the successor to Frank Hudson, a man who when he retired to London named his house Villa Penarol. But Bayne, though a railway man through-and-through, was cut from a different cloth. He had been sent by headquarters but not from London. He had spent time in Argentina. He was already there in 1895 at the age of twenty-three. He had married a British Argentinian, Katherine Blythman. His first child, a son, had been born in Buenos Aires. He had come to Montevideo to make the business more profitable in a country in economic crisis. And he had no obvious interest in football. When offered, as was customary, the presidency of CURCC he refused it. It spelled trouble but not quite yet.
1907 not only saw CURCC reinforced by Crossley but now by four other Britons, all of whom curiously had played for the club in 1904 but not between. The result was remarkable. CURCC won the league once more ahead of Montevideo Wanderers and a newly introduced River Plate and again without losing a game. It also won the Copa de Competencia and reached the final of the Tie Cup, losing to the redoubtable Alumni at the ground of Ferrocarril Oeste, Western Railway. Its club had been founded in 1904 and one of its first recruits had been a certain James Buchanan. CURCC would also reach and lose the final of the Copa de Honor Cousenier and that pattern would be repeated at international level where the Lipton and Newton Cups were also lost, if narrowly, both by the odd goal in five.
The years between the nadir of 1904 and 1907 had seen the formation of nine new clubs. Four of them plus Intrepido, founded in 1903, would join the league in 1908, with seven others making eleven in total. The title was won by River Plate but not without rancour. After ten of the eighteen games Penarol refused to continue as did Nacional after fourteen. The reason given was non-observance of the rules of play on the field. Had either stayed league positions would certainly have been different. Montevideo Wanderers won the Cup, reached the final of the Tie Cup and won the Cousenier. There too the results might have been different with the inclusion of the two refusniks.
The league again numbered eleven in 1909 but with differences seemingly patched up. Both returning teams did well. CURCC lost just a single game all season but drew too many and finished a point behind Montevideo Wanderers. Nacional was fourth. However, quietly a revolution had begun at CURCC that was not so much to change their fortunes but change the style of Uruguayan football. Crossley was still there in goal and he had been joined by yet another Scot, John Harley.
Harley had been born in 1886 in Cathcart, then an industrialising village to the south of Glasgow, now a city suburb. He had also had a hard, working-class childhood, his father an iron-turner, losing his mother very early and being a sickly child himself. However he had grown up with football that he seems to have practised locally. He had not been picked up by any of the city's major teams before in 1907 he decided, aged twenty, to employ the railway experience he had gained at the Springburn Works in Glasgow in Argentina. But he did not at first go to Buenos Aires but to Bahia Blanca. From there he returned the following year to Glasgow before deciding on Argentina once more, this time to the capital. In Buenos Aires he worked for the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway (BAGSR) presumably at its works at Remedios de Escalada between the British, footballing hotbeds of Lanus and Banfield, Lomas and Quilmes, all of which had or had had teams in the Argentine league.
BAGSR was controlled by Alexander Henderson, the same man as owned CURCC. He had major shareholdings in both and a number of railways around the World. In Britain he was a long-time director of the Midland Railway. The building of the Remedios Works was begun in 1901. It would be the largest railway workshop in South America, in essence a larger version of what Alex Henderson's brother, Frank had already overseen at Penarol a decade earlier. Indeed Frank having completed the task Montevideo had clearly earned his spurs. Entrustment with the planning and execution of remedios more than explains his move in 1898 from Uruguay to Argentina.
It is inconceivable that John Harley's footballing talents were not noticed at BAGSR. It is stranger still that he was not incorporated into a local team, notably Lomas or Quilmes. However, although both were British in origin they were amateur in ethic and just hanging on in the league. Lomas would be gone the following year and Quilmes briefly in 1911 and again in 1916. Given that and Harley's Scottish background it is not altogether surprising that he should soon moved to the Western Railway. It made footballing financial sense. As a club is was obviously ambitious and prepared to back that ambition with money. In 1913 it would be promoted to a First Division that was shamateur or, as it is known in Spanish, “brown amateur”. And if they offered Harley work, perhaps over-paid work at Caballito, the Western Railway's equivalent of Southern Railway's Remedios and the chance to play regularly in its team, why should he not accept it.
Ferro Carril Oeste still exists as a club. Its football stadium is just yards from the site of the old Caballito yards. It teams play, just as it did in 1908, in the Second Division and it was, it is said, during two friendlies against CURCC in Buenos Aires in October 1908 that twenty-two year-old Harley's talents were spotted. However, there may have been more to the background than meets the eye. Firstly, CURCC's star forward, Juan Pena, the son of Montevideo Cricket Club's groundsman, had crossed the River Plate to Buenos Aires to join Belgrano. With his input it would win the 1908 Argentine league and in Penarol he was missed. Secondly, playing alongside Harley in defeat against CURCC, no doubt for some form of financial consideration, was James Buchanan. He may even have already tipped his old club the wink about the young man.
What Harley had presumably shown at Western Railway was organisation and precision, but of a specific kind. This was the period in Scottish football of the great
centre-halves, first
James Cowan, then
Alex Raisbeck
and
Charles Thomson. They were not the defensive ones of later English football but the attacking, distributive lynch-pins of a series of great teams. And James Buchanan would have known all about them. He had after-all played and lost two finals against
James Kelly, the man who had created the attacking centre-half mould at Renton in 1888 and was to take it to newly-formed Celtic and for the first time to the Scottish national team.
In spite of only second place inthe 1909 Uruguayan league for CURCC there would be success. The Cup was won and the team would go on to take the Cousenier Cup as well although it would lose the Tie Cup Final to Alumni for the second time in three years. Internationally too there would be partial success. The Lipton Cup without Harley would be lost. The Newton Cup with him in the team would be a 2:2 draw, whilst the Honor Cup, played the previous year for the first time and won, was lost. And 1910 was on the face of it domestically a carbon-copy of the previous year. CURCC was runner-up in the league, this time behind Nacional but took the Cup. However, that was a far as it went. Because of problems in Argentina mainly to do with the playing there of the first South America Cup, today's Copa America, and a trip by Argentina to Chile the cups involving teams from there were abandoned or not played at all, although the two international cups were played for later in the year. Argentina would win what is now seen as an inaugural South American Cup, the Copa Centenario Revolución de Mayo, whilst Uruguay would take both the Lipton and Honor Cups.
Meanwhile a quiet revolution was taking place, the first steps in the development of what in Uruguay is called simply, “Paso cortito y a pie”, “Wee short-pass and to foot”. That is, in other words, quick and accurate interchange. It was not in essence a new style. It was what John Harley knew,
The Cross. Its source, of course, was the same as his, Scotland. Scots brought up with its immediate antecedent, "scientific" football, Scots like McGregor and Buchanan in Uruguay, must already have demonstrated some of its potential in all the countries of the south of South America. That is why they had stood out on the field. However, Harley was fortunate to be of precisely the right generation to see and absorb it at its fullest potential. He was born two years before The Cross's inception and grow up and evolved as a footballer as it evolved. He was also fortunate in Uruguay to find a place where he could properly demonstrate its adaptability to local conditions and suitability for local requirements. But it was no fluke. At almost exactly the same time in Sao Paulo 1,200 miles to the north another Scot,
Archie Maclean, with the same influences would be be doing much the same with almost equal, long-term effect on the Brazilian game.
CURCC would win the Uruguayan League in 1911 by nine clear points. Harley with Crossley in goal would build up a formidable playing relationship with the team's centre-forward, Jose Piendibene, both at club and national level. But Montevideo Wanderers would take the Cup and go on also to take the Tie Cup. Internationally however Uruguay would not do so well, two wins and a draw in six games but at least the Lipton Cup was won. The Lipton would also be won the following year, showing the growing strength of the football played by Uruguayan-born players. It would also be reflected in other international results. Uruguay would win two of the other four trophies played for that year, and draw a third. But CURCC would neither win the league or take the cup. Both would be Nacional's, which would then only lose the Tie Cup final by a single goal.
In contrast 1912 would be the first of three years of Nacional success in the Cup but not the league. In both 1913 and 1914 it would be won by River Plate but in the latter only after finishing joint first on points and three play-offs against a new, old team. Bayne was still the managing director of CUR and continued to see not CURCC per se but its football as an unnecessary and increasing expense in the face of his desire, admittedly under orders from London, to maximise the company's profitability. It is an interesting standpoint because it reflects the true costs, indirectly in terms of shamateurism, to the company of running the team. They were costs that had clearly already been trimmed causing a number of players to move to Argentina to play. However, CUR had also come to see the club's reputation as detrimental. There had been an incident in which a CUR railway carriage used for supporters of opposition teams had been burned by CURCC fans. And Bayne, having dealt with the immediate problems he faced on arrival in 1906, unions and political upheaval, and returned to Britain on leave in 1910 was eventually in 1913 finally to force the issue. Support of the team as was would be withdrawn. Reform proposals were put forward by the club including a name change to CURCC-Penarol but rejected in June of that year and in the following December the company definitively decided upon separation. The prospect was of the team's and therefore Penarol football's collapse.
In fact neither would happen. Although funding of the existing team was withdraw company support of the CURCC club continued and therefore support of an amateur CURCC team playing outwith the league. Meanwhile, the CURCC that had been simply continued. It played its next game the day after the definitive separation, deleting CURCC altogether from the proposed new name and becoming what it is known as to this day, Penarol. That name change is still used to back a claim that between CURCC and Penarol there was no continuity. However, the fact is that the players that wanted to move to the new entity did so, seemingly without sanction. They included John Harley, yet he continued to be employed by CUR until his retirement long after he had ceased to play football. And those players who did not want the move remained.
As in all the countries with British, Diasporan populations 1914 in Uruguay was to be a difficult year. There would be choices to be made. When war was declared at the end of July young men had to decide whether their ties were stronger to the old country than their new home. Many stayed. Many went back to Britain to enlist and many of those never returned as the Great War took as heavy a toll of them as all the troops. British-based football in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and in Uruguay itself tried to struggle on but most teams folded or were so weakened that they never recovered.
At the club level including Penarol the timing of its separation from CUR had perhaps been fortunate. The South American football season was in July 1914 well under way. It had finished by the time it was realised that the War would not be short-lived. Its effect would really be first felt in 1915, when CURCC's amateur team would actually be dissolved, however for Penarol there seems to have been little implication. In 1914 in the league it had finished with a fractionally better goal-difference joint first with River Plate, both just a single point ahead of Nacional, and was only beaten by a single goal in a third replay of a play-off. In 1915 it was again second, this time two points behind Nacional. It was only in 1916, the year both Crossley and Pena retired and with an ageing Harley, that it seemed to struggle to an extent. It finished twelve points behind Nacional but still in second place yet would take the Cup and, in defeating Rosario Central, the Tie Cup, just as Nacional had a year earlier. Meanwhile at the international level it would be initially different, Although 1913 had seen Uruguay win two games to Argentina's three, 1914 saw no games at all and 1915 only one of three, won by Uruguay. However, there was recovery, reflecting what was essentially a replacement of combined British-Non-British involvement with Crillo. In 1916 there would be a total of ten encounters that were remarkable in their contrast and context. In five matches against Argentina just one was won. A friendly in Montevideo against Brazil would also be lost whereas one against Chile was a victory. Yet earlier in the season in the second South American Cup, the South American Championship of Nations, with two wins over Chile and Brazil and a draw against Argentina Uruguay took the trophy.
It was done with a squad that had not one single British name in it. In fact in all four squads there were only four -
Domingo Brown
and three from Rosario, Ennis and Harry Hayes and Carlos Wilson - and all played for Argentina. And it was not without controversy. The Chileans accused Uruguay of playing Africans. What they were referring to was two, Black players, Isobelino Gradin and Juan Delgado. Delgado had played the season with Boca Juniors in Buenos Aires but had previously played in the Uruguayan First Division and would return for the next season and to Penarol, where he was seen as the replacement for Harley. Harley himself at the age of thirty had not gone to the South American Cup and, although he would play for another four seasons he would do as he passed his style to Delgado, who in turn would pass it on eventually but in a direct line to Lorenzo Fernandez, Penarol and Uruguay's No. 5 at the 1930 World Cup. Gradin was Pena's successor on the left not the right, a winger with pace, a fierce shot and the ability to cross the ball. He would in 1916 at the age of nineteen finish as the South American Championship's top scorer. He had joined Penarol and gained his first caps as an eighteen year old. Also an outstanding athlete in 1919 in the South American Athletics Championships he would take the gold in the 200m and 400m, repeat the feat the following year and take the 400m again in 1922. He would by then have left Penarol. Both he and Juan Delgado did so at the end of the 1921 season, just a year after Harley's retirement and Juan Delgado had been made captain of football. Indeed it is unlikely that it was coincidence that both Gradin and Delgado joined Penarol when John Harley was about to be or had just been captain and left the club just a year after he had. He must have been instrumental in the introduction of both with no heed to their colour. It was on the face of it an approach not without its dangers. Racism was rife in the sport and not necessarily white on Black.
At this point it bears repetition that the “Ingles” were seen as superior by other immigrants, falsely so for they had no understanding of the yawning social gap between the British merchant-class and the equally British but infinitely poorer, working-class men who, for example, built and manned the railways. Nor did those same other immigrants understand the difference between the English and Scottish and British middle- and working class attitudes to football. For the English middle-class it was a past-time. For the Scots working class it was a passion and, for those who could play, a way in Uruguay and elsewhere to make good money on top of a hard day's work. They had exactly that system at home. Furthermore those same working-class Scots had already if not seen then known of multi-racial football, selection according to ability and nothing else. There had been since the late 1870s a number of Black players in Glasgow. The first Black man to play international football, indeed to captain an international team, had been a Scot, bit a Diasporan one. Extremely highly regarded for his ability, said by some to have been the finest full-back of his time in Britain, his name was Andrew Watson. He had played full-back for Scotland in 1881 and 1882 in the two greatest victories over England to that date and he had even not been born in Glasgow where he had played for Maxwell, Parkgrove and Queen's Park but in South America. He was the son of a Scottish lawyer and Black woman, herself probably the daughter of Scots father and a freed slave, and born in present-day Guyana.
Penarol would win the Uruguayan league in 1918, 1920 and 1921, having finished as runners-up in 1916 and 1917, finishing again second in 1920 and third in 1919 and before there was an organisational schism in Uruguayan club football in 1922. A new league was formed led by Penarol without the other major Uruguayan teams. It meant Penarol players were not considered for the 1924 Olympics. Indeed differences were not resolved until the 1927 season, when Penarol finished in second place, before becoming champions the following year and again in 1929. Thus its players were included in both the 1928 Olympic and 1930 World Cup squads.
Of the first generation of those involved with football in Uruguay Poole, Lichtenberger, Maclean, Henderson and McGregor would live to see or at least hear of Uruguay's winning of all three trophies. William Leslie Poole would die in 1931, Enrique Lichtenberger in 1934 and John McGregor in 1945, all in Montevideo. Frank Henderson would die in 1935 in Wimbledon. London. William Maclean probably spent the latter part of his life in Argentina. He can be seen travelling between Britain and both Montevideo and Buenos Aires into the 1930s with and without his wife and son. John Sardeson would live to see it too. He would die in Montevideo in 1963. Only the fate of James Buchanan is entirely unknown. There is no record of anyone who might have been the big man having travelled from Argentina or Uruguay after 1909. He does not seem to have returned to Scotland either.
Of the second generation Juan Pena, Leonard Crossley and John Harley would remain associated with Penarol throughout the period and for the rest of the lives. Charles Bayne would be buried in Rio de Janeiro in 1938. Crossley, who would die in Montevideo in 1958 had been made an Honorary Member of Penarol in 1917 and having been club treasurer in 1935. He would travel to Britain and back with his Uruguayan wife and daughter on a several occasions over the years. Juan Pena's death would be in 1964 having been a Penarol member all his life and an Honorary Member from 1946. John Harley would die in 1960, again in Montevideo. Having arrived there he would travel home once in 1929 with his Uruguayan wife on the death of his father and stay with his brother in Glasgow. Otherwise, having been player-manager of Penarol and Uruguay from 1909 to 1910 he managed the club once more in 1942, was a club member until his death and in 1951 a crowd of 40,000 watched a game in his honour, between his Penarol and fellow Montevideo team, Rampla Juniors and played at the Centenario, the stadium, still there today, that had witness the 1930 World Cup triumph.