Peter the Great
- football's quiet revolutionary
Postscript
The legacy of the football thinking of Peter McWilliam has continued for almost a century and survived him by over sixty years. Where it goes from here is more problematic. With Wim Jonk now trainer at Volendam and perhaps with more of the talent he nurtured at Ajax still to emerge over the next five year before that well once more runs dry, maybe it will re-emerge in a decade or so when North Holland might produce its own own version of Frisia's Abe Lenstra. It will be not a disappointment but disappointing because it would have good also to believe that it could, indeed should, be possible in Catalonia at Barcelona. Even as the golden generation of its players comes to an end and, although none is old enough to have worked with Cruyff, let alone Michels or Buckingham, it would be comforting to know that one or more of them might take up the trio and Costas and ultimately McWilliam's baton and run with it. And it would be better still if it might be rediscovered here in its original home and reapplied. Certainly the Scottish game would be no worse for it.
But as it happens thinking about football is not the only McWilliam legacy, indeed one that should survive a little longer. High in the hills of North Bengal there is to this day the McWilliam Higher Secondary School. That the name should be celebrated there in India is another and a rather touching story. The school itself is in the town of Alipurduar in the province Jalpaiguri in the foothills of the Himalayas south of Bhutan. It stands in an area still know as McWilliam Gunge, "McWilliam's Place", with six other educational establishments all with the McWilliam name and several thousand pupils in total, and was opened originally as the McWilliam Upper Primary School, named after the man, who raised the funds for it, the man who was the local Sub-Divisional Officer in the late days of the Raj, Peter McWilliam.
After a childhood and schooling in Tottenham, at the County School, now Woodside High School and on White Hart Lane itself, from 1918 to 1925, where he was known as both scholar and footballer, a degree, in Spanish, and time spent at San Sebastian University in the Spanish Basque Country McWilliam had first seen Alipurduar in 1930 as a newly arrived member of the Indian Civil Service, which he had joined a year earlier. By 1932 he was a Sub-Divisional Officer near Calcutta but had always remembered Alipurduar. Perhaps it was the Highlander in him. And in time he was offered the chance to move to the hill country, returned to Britain to marry Roma Johnson, she a singer, a well-known contralto with her own extensive stage and radio performing and recording careers, and in 1935 he arrived with her to take up his new position.
Once installed in Alipurduar and seeing that there was no schooling for the younger, local children he and Roma immediately set about raising funds. By the following year, 1936, he had enough to begin construction, which was finished the following year, 1937, the year his own daughter was born, a wooden building with a corrugated-iron roof, for up to fifty pupils, aged six to ten. It now has more than 1,000 students. However, in addition McWilliam also found time to form and play for Alipurduar Town F.C., organising fixtures against neighbouring towns and surrounding tea estates and featuring, the only booted player in an otherwise bare-footed eleven, on the right wing. This was whilst he rose to become Deputy Commissioner for Jalpaiguri Dsitrict and eventually, before retiring from the Indian Service in 1947 just prior to independence, District Magistrate and Labour Commissioner for Bengal.
The Peter McWilliam in question was obviously not Peter the Great. He was managing Middlesbrough and Spurs, scouting for Arsenal and retired to Redcar at the time. It was his son, Peter Neish McWilliam, born on 21st October 1906 in Redcar, who had clearly inherited footballing ability, a love of the game, some wanderlust, a penchant for originality of thought and innovative implementation and had developed an enduring love of his adopted country. In 1953 after living in Suffolk and his father's death he returned to the Sub-Continent for a decade, living in Assam as Secretary of the Assam branch of the Indian Tea Association, finally retiring to Bristol, his wife's home-town, in 1962 and dying there in 1999 at the age of 92. He was survived by his wife, Roma, and daughter, Peter the Great's granddaughter, Janice, who herself after half a lifetime in Southern California died again in Bristol in 2013.