Chapter One
Perhaps it, the idea, the ideas began on a quiet street in Inverness with kick-abouts with a ball made of whatever was to hand. It, the street, is there still, an unspoilt but unprepossessing wynd at the back of the old town, up the hill and above the High Street, a long kick with hefty boot from, as Inverness is known locally, the Sneck's equally unprepossessing castle. Two lads, twa laddies were raised there a couple of years and a few yards apart. Both would grow up to be local footballers, turn professional, moving away, play for the same English club team, become multiple Scottish internationals and actually take that international field together, albeit on one single occasion.
The first laddie was
Andrew McCombie. He was born in 1877, his birth registered not in Inverness but in Dingwall. His mother had gone the few miles up the road to be close to her and her husband's childhood homes to have their son. He himself would go to play between 1904 and 1910 one hundred and thirteen games for Newcastle as a full-back, before that make one hundred and fifty-seven appearances for Sunderland and spend the rest of his working life on the Newcastle coaching staff, including training the first team.
But Andy McCombie, no matter that he was once the World's most expensive player, is not the subject of this story. He has his own. This one is of Peter McWilliam, known as “Pat” by his team-mates and by those watching him from the terraces, in 241 appearances, and 12 goals ostensibly from left-half, again for Newcastle and between 1902 and 1911, as “Peter the Great”. In those nine seasons he would be an increasing integral part of teams that won the Football League three times and an FA Cup finalist on four occasions, winning a winners' medal but once.
Peter McWilliam was born in 1879, on 21st September, at 23, Argyle St., the street in Inverness. He was not quite two years younger than McCombie, who for a time stayed, that is lived, on that same lane. The street, the houses are still there, typical wee, single-story, red-stone, Scottish terraced, working-man's houses of the time. His father, also Peter, was to begin with a grocers' porter in the city but neither he nor his wife, Jane, were local. Both had come to the capital of the Highlands from agricultural backgrounds in rural Aberdeenshire, from near Huntly, he from Gartly, she from Forgue and in 1881 Peter and Jane were still at the same address but recorded as MacWilliam. The father was now a warehouse porter, Peter junior the youngest of four children, the eldest of whom, Annie, had also been born in Forgue, with two more sisters, Ellen and Jeannie in Inverness. And ten years later later the family was nearby, on the same street but number 13. Young Peter was at school still with now four sisters, two older, Annie and Ellen, recorded as Helen, and two younger ones, Mary and Maggie, but there was no Jeannie and no mother. Jeannie had already left home and was working two streets away as a live-in, domestic servant. Peter senior was a widower, his wife having died in 1885, aged just 32, and therein lay perhaps an explanation of the house move. Another widowed McWilliam, Peter Snr's brother John and his family were living next door.
Thus it was that Peter McWilliam was an only son, growing up with sisters in the house, his uncle and cousins, including a second, slightly older Peter, close at hand and footballing friends literally up the road. Kick-abouts, would have been impossible to avoid; in the street, on the way to school, Raining School, at the top of Raining Steps, now Market Brae Steps, leading up from the High Street. Five hundred yards in one direction it had been set up in part to educate the town's less well-off, whilst also five hundred yards away but in the almost opposite direction lay the old Kingsmill Ground, the home on the then edge of town of Inverness Thistle, where the boys, at least from the age of six or so, were able to watch football from the terraces. It was but a short walk for laddies bitten young by the football bug that had swept through the Highlands from the Central Belt. Golspie Sutherland, probably the first Highland club, had been founded in 1877, presumably on the return of the Lindsay brothers from their role in the formation with George Ramsay of
Aston Villa, neighbouring Brora Rangers with its influx of textile workers and miners from outwith the Highlands in 1878, Inverness Citadel, Union and Crown F.C. all in 1883 and Inverness Thistle, Inverness Caledonian and Clachnacuddin in 1885.
A decade later still young Peter, aged twenty-one, continued to live with his father, now with just his two younger sisters. They had remained in Inverness but just round the corner from Argyle in Denny St., and both he and his father are working in a Bonded Warehouse, the son, a young man clearly with an education in the three Rs at least, as a clerk. In the meantime he had also been playing football and more than that, over the previous years he had followed McCombie in making himself a reputation now on the field with said Inverness Thistle, one of the six teams in the city playing in the recently formed Highland League. The League itself had been founded in 1893, originally consisting of seven teams, those from Inverness with Thistle and Crown F.C. having merged in 1889 and joined by the Cameron Highlanders, plus from Forres the Mechanics. For the first decade the title was shared between the Inverness clubs, with in the Spring of 1902 Thistle finishing as runners-up, having a year earlier won what is in now the North Caledonian League, By then Inverness Union had also merged with Thistle, McCombie was gone to play the game in England but with twenty-two year-old McWilliam, not big but big enough at 5 ft 9 and 11 ½ stone, in the first team, as he had already been for two years.
However, his beginning to play for Thistle had not been without its difficulties. McCombie had suggested he was ready. The management agreed. McWilliam asked his father's permission. It was denied so the young man decided to play anyway but under an assumed name, Robertson; that is until he had to return home with deep scars of battle. He took himself to bed but was visited by the doctor to find out how he was. The doctor had been at the game and why not. He was a supporter. He was also Dr. John MacDonald, ex. of Edinburgh University and Queen's Park, himself at that time the only Northern Highlander to have played for the national team. The cat was out of the bag. McWilliam was said to have been given thrashing, although its seems unlikely. Nevertheless he did not play for three months, but then it took that time for his injuries, his football injuries to heal, by when his father had had a change of mind. Perhaps the good doctor had had a wee word with the result that McWilliam re-joined the senior team in his own name and in return was given a first, new pair of football boots.
And it was that same year as Thistle finished runners-up that McWilliam in August 1902 decided to try his luck down south, not in Glasgow, Edinburgh or the other clubs in the Central Belt but in England. However, the plan was not to go to Newcastle, but simply to pass through, to change trains as required, on the way to Andy McCombie's Sunderland. The Wearsiders' manager was Alex Mackie. He was another North Scot, born in 1870 in Auchterless on the Aberdeenshire/Banffshire border. Auchterless is seven miles from Forgue, seventeen from Gartly. Mackie and McWilliam Senior would have talked the same tongue. Moreover, Mackie, after football first in Aberdeen, had himself been secretary and an early player in the 1893-94 season at Inverness Thistle before arriving as a player and then in 1899 becoming manager at Sunderland. McCombie had arrived the previous year perhaps even seen as a youngster in The Sneck and recommended to the Wearside club by Mackie the player, who as manager was clearly still aware of Inverness talent. However, it is said that one of McWilliam's sisters had married, moved to Newcastle and had a café in the Groat Market in the city centre. He stopped off to see her and then called on Frank George Watt, the Secretary come unofficial manager of Newcastle United. Watt had arrived at Newcastle via the founding of his home-town, Edinburgh team, St. Bernards, refereeing, a spell working as a joiner in England, football administration in the East of Scotland and Dundee F.C. Now he showed the young Highlander around St. James Park and set about changing his mind about Sunderland.
And he succeeded. The story is that the young man rapidly put pen to paper on Newcastle Central Station, for £10 down and £3 per week but true or not in that moment the club had found one part of a team that Watt would take a decade to build and rebuild, part of a club defence that would collectively and individually change football forever and in several, fundamental ways. Nor was it the only rapid decision he made. A message was clearly sent back to Inverness, to Isabella Macdonald, his girl from home, from Merkinch, she travelled south to Tyneside and on 29th September they were married.