Football of some sort came early to Rio de Janeiro, to Rua Paysandu and the Guanabara Palace in the suburb of Laranjeiras. When was in the 1880s. How was through the feet of members of the British community and its Paysandu Club. What form of football it took is unclear. Given the social background of those involved it was more likely to have been Rugby, or something similar, than Association. It in any case did not catch on. The game of choice would be cricket, the preferred sporting past-time, rowing.
Rio is the most wonderful city. I know it well. My father was born in there, in Laranjeiras itself, little more than a mile from the palace grounds. My grandparents were Scots forced to wander by war and economic necessity. But Rio is also a city that is not two-faced but has two faces. It had then too. One is its face to the World, what is called today the Southern Zone, with its commercially-generated wealth, and its famous beaches set against a mountain background. Laranjeiras is in this Southern Zone. The other is to the city's north and into its sprawling hinterland with its un-pretty industry and incipient poverty. A hundred years ago the hinterland did not sprawl but was a series of slowly connecting villages but otherwise little was changed. And if sport mirrors life then the games in Laranjeiras were just one of two entirely distinct reflections.
The story used to be that Association football eventually came to Rio to stay from Switzerland. There was even an argument that it come to both Rio and Sao Paulo, now Brazil's first city, then its third or fourth, specifically from Lausanne. It is fact that two very young men, still teenagers, one, Antonio Casimiro da Costa from Sao Paulo, and the other, Oscar Cox from Rio, aged seventeen, shared an education on the Geneva shore-line and that was where football was first implanted in Continental Europe. Both boys certainly played the game and knew what they were doing on the field. They were also wealthy and young with time and contacts off it.
Thus it was when Oscar Cox returned from Europe to Rio in 1897 he tried to introduce not football per se but organised football in a city with foreigners making up a quarter of its population. He failed. The game did not catch on widely. It was still played on an ad hoc basis by some of the British community, not least Rio Cricket club, where Oscar's father had been one of the founders, and the Paysandu Club. It is a club that exists today, with a slight name change to Paissandu, but still in Rio but in Leblon five miles from the street from which it took its original name. In the 1930s my grandfather and grandmother were both members and both club bowls champions but in August 1901 it and Rio Cricket played two Association football friendlies, the first recorded in the city. Each team won a match. We do not have the sides but Oscar Cox is likely to have taken part, probably for Rio Cricket, and the games may finally have been the opportunity he sought.
Cox Junior was nothing in not persistent. In 1901 he travelled to London and returned with more footballs, more equipment and the idea to create an area where the game could be better played. He appears also to have been organised and savvy. In that he may also have had some help behind the scenes. An
Alexander Lamont had arrived in Rio in 1894. He came from Buenos Aires where he had been captain of at least one newly-created club, a player with several teams, Secretary, that is organiser of both the first and second Argentine Football Leagues, a regular referee and described even thirty years later by those who had played with and remembered him as Argentine football's Alma Mater. He may even have played in the two Rio friendlies himself.
And Lamont was also a man who understood the value of publicity. In Buenos Aires it had been he who had made sure that Association football had been in the newspapers not just during the league seasons but before they even started. Prospective team-sheets were published in advance. Results and game reports were so assiduously filed that the rugby alternative was starved of oxygen. Yet there was in Rio at this time no attempt to form a league as had happened in Argentina. The plain fact was there were not enough teams. Instead an "event" was arranged. Cox had his contacts in Sao Paulo where the game had already taken off. There regular club friendlies were already being played and its league would be founded the following year. Indeed Antonio Casimiro da Costa would be its first president. And Cox used those contacts to arrange two friendlies between what are usually described as representative teams from Rio and Sao Paulo but were in fact groups of friends and acquaintances from the two places. The Sao Paulo team was put together by Casimiro da Costa and another of the pioneers, the Diasporan Scot, Charles Miller. Cox, and perhaps Lamont, saw to the Rio team.
The fixtures were played in October 1901 two months after the Rio Cricket and Paysandu games and in Sao Paulo. The Rio team travelled there by train and Alex Lamont travelled with them. Such was his footballing kudos that it had been agreed that he should referee both encounters. The games went well. Lamont was praised by both teams for the quality of his arbitrage. Oscar Cox returned to Rio, fully four years after his first attempts to promote the game but re-enthused, with plans and what was most valuable of all, a story to be converted into publicity.
Initially Cox's progress was to be thwarted and he perhaps not a little angered. It is said that there was a clash with a certain and probably Scottish Mr. Macintosh, captain of football or cricket at Rio Cricket, which is not clear. Why is perhaps clearer. Both wanted to form football clubs. Oscar wanted to call his Rio F.C.. Macintosh did too and must have thought he had priority, no doubt with his Rio Cricket connection. And Rio F.C. was indeed formed without Cox's involvement on 12th July 1902. The response from Cox was on 21st of that same month to found an alternative club independent of Rio F.C. and Rio Cricket, base it in Laranjeiras a short distance from Rua Paysandu and find another name. He chose Fluminense. He, aged twenty-two, became its first President. Rio F.C. would be dissolved in 1906. Rio Cricket continues to this day as an amateur team and is the city's doyen but Fluminense also plays still and very much in today's not just Brazilian or South American but World's top flight.
But remember the two-sidedness of Rio, not just north and south but city and hinterland and working-class and privileged. Twenty-miles north-west and a little inland from Rio itself is Bangu. Now it is bustling if distant city suburb. In 1890 it was little more than a hamlet, but one where the land was cheap, there was water from the surrounding hills and the railway passed through. It was then and there that a Brazilian company, but one registered in London, decided to build a textile factory. It was to be modelled after the cotton mills of Lancashire. Work was begun in 1891 and the building finished in 1893. What it needed then was machinery and new people after the building-workers had gone to install the machines, teach locally-recruited labour how to work them and supervise production. The installers-instructors came like the machinery from Britain, from the great textile regions, in England Lancashire and Yorkshire and from Scotland, from Angus with its linen production and Glasgow's industrialising southern suburbs.
These working technicians began to arrive in early 1894. Amongst them and others that followed soon after were John Stark, James Hartley, William French, the Proctor brothers, William and Andrew, Thomas Stirling, Clarence Hibbs and Thomas Donohoe. French and Hartley were Lancastrians. Stirling was born in Lancashire of a Scottish father. Stark, the Proctors and Donohoe were all Scots with a Scottish passion for the round-ball game.
And it was Donohoe, who started the ball rolling. Born in Busby into an Irish-immigrant family and aged 30 he had played the game at a good amateur level in the Cart Vale. Boys he grew up and worked with went on to a higher level, notably the Dunbar brothers, Mick and Tommy Dunbar. Life, however, took him in another direction. He arrived in in Brazil in April 1894 expecting to be able to continue to play at least for recreation. He found nothing not even a ball, either in Bangu or, three years before Oscar Cox's return, in Rio itself. He ordered equipment from Britain. The story is that is was bought but not packed. So he asked his wife, Eliza, to bring a ball and boots with her when she would with her sister visit him in August that same year. That she did and in doing so carried the first proper football not just to Bangu, but probably to Rio and even Brazil.
With the basic essentials Tommy Donohoe would rapidly mark a rough pitch, improvise some goals, gather together the twelve of so other Britons there at the time and play a first match, six-a side it is true but importantly to Association rules. He knew no others. It also seems certain that Donohoe would very early on liked to have formed a club. He was, shall we say, not encouraged by the factory management, although a social club was founded. But the ad hoc games that continued soon attracted attention, other non-British workers from European countries where football was being introduced were soon involved and full-sized games played on a regular basis. There was structured football even if there was no formalised club.
It would be the best part of a decade before with regard to a Bangu football club a change of factory management produced a change of heart. At the end of 1903 a meeting took place and it was Dundee-born Andrew Proctor, who suggested the formal formation of a sports club as a separate entity to replace the previous well-established but ad-hoc arrangement, with football in the winter and cricket in the summer. Athletic Club Bangu was the result with the factory director as Honorary President but in essence in the hands of by three Scots, Tommy Donohoe as Vice-President, Andrew Proctor as Secretary and Treasurer and John Stark as captain of football. And written into the constitution of the fledgling club was that it would be open to all employees of the factory as players and spectators without discrimination.
That regulation was in sharp contrast to the attitude and resultant rules that prevailed in other clubs, Fluminense amongst them, where players even in the less exclusive but still elitist clubs that had had been created in the Laranjeiras club's wake were white and crowds were segregated. It would see the club's first Black player, Francisco Carregal, already in the first team in 1905 and lead to twenty years of off-the-field, racially based conflict between Rio's clubs, conflict that would be settled only by the direct intervention of Brazil's President.
However, in the meantime back in Rio itself in 1902 Fluminense's first game had, despite argument, interestingly been against Rio F.C. It had won 6-0. In 1903 it began the season against Rio Cricket, a 3-1 win away followed by a 3-0 defeat to Paysandu. All three were British, in reality British teams. It would then travel to Sao Paulo for three games, a draw and two wins including one over the Sao Paulo's British club, SPAC. Edwin Cox, Oscar's younger and actually more talented footballing brother, was in the team. Then on returning it would have two more friendlies to round off the season, a draw at the Rua Paysandu ground against Paysandu itself and another against Scots-sounding Team Buchan, that of Albert Buchan, in Niteroi.
By a stroke of fate Bangu's first official game in July 1904 would also be in Niteroi against Rio Cricket. Fluminense had started the season with another draw in May against the same opposition. The Bangu score would be a 5:0 defeat but Bangu's next and first home game would be against Andarahy and that it would win. The Proctor brothers, Stark and Donohoe would play in both games with Tommy in his forty-second year. In fact he would play in all four fixtures that year, two wins, the second being against Andarahy once more at Rua Paysandu, and two losses before hanging up his boots. It was perhaps wise because fixtures one and two of the 1905 season were against Fluminense. The first at home with a team that already the introduction of non-British players was won 5-3, with Oscar Cox scoring one of the visitors' goal, and the second was lost in Laranjeiras, Cox again on the score-sheet. Carregal would play in both games with apparently not a murmur from the opposition. In fact for Bangu's third game against Riochuelo but still at the Laranjeiras stadium Oscar Cox would be referee.
Bangu would play eleven games that season, Fluminense at least fifteen against the same teams; Football & Athletic, playing at Rua Paysandu, Rio Cricket, Internacional and America, counter-intuitively the German club. 1905 would be much the same. For Fluminense it would begin in May once more against Rio Cricket, a 7-1 win away and the month would end with another away win, 3.0 at Bangu. In June Fluminense would travel to Sao Paulo again for three games, in July the Sao Paulo team, Paulistano, would come to Rio and for the rest of the season friendlies in Rio would continue, including the first against a new team, Botafogo, founded in 1904 and again playing at Paysandu. And 1906 would also begin with friendlies until the middle of May when discussions that had been taking place about the creation of a league along the lines of Sao Paulo that had been formed in 1902 came to fruition. The Carioca Championship was founded, consisting of two divisions with a first division of six clubs all with British connections, Fluminense, Bangu, Paysandu, Rio Cricket, Botafogo and Football & Athletic.
In that first season the league would be won by Fluminense. Oscar Cox would not play but Edwin did. Paysandu would be runner-up, Bangu second-to-bottom. John Stark and the Proctors would play. Stark would referee and another Scot, Glasgow-born Alexander Leigh would be the club's top-scorer. It seemed on the face of it that the championship had been a success. Yet the following season just four teams took part in Division 1. Rio Cricket and Bangu would withdraw, Bangu because of the decision the majority of league members to ban Black players. The club would instead host friendlies against a growing number of new teams in the city and surrounding towns. Tommy Donohoe would referee.
In 1908, as Bangu continued with its programme of friendlies, Donohoe also continue to referee. However, he would be joined with the whistle by Francisco Carregal as he probably became not just Rio's first Black player but now the country's first Black footballing official. Meantime, Fluminense would take its third championship in a row in a league from which Internacional had dropped out but Riocheulo, Rio Cricket and America had re-joined, accepting segregation, tacitly or otherwise. Fluminense would again be champions.
In fact Bangu F.C. was also to rejoin the league in 1909 in what was on so many fronts not to be its finest season. From 1908 it had had a new President, James McGregor, and there also seemed to be a new attitude to it from the factory management. As was happening at the same time with major teams based on British companies in Uruguay and Argentina support for expenditure that was not obviously profitable seemed to be lessening. Worker morale and loyalty seemed to be increasingly disregarded. A proposal was made to merge the sports and the social clubs. In reality it would have meant the sports club taken over by the social club. Part of the deal also seems to have been participation in the league and acceptance of its segregation rule. In fact Bangu would play just three league games, the final one a 9:0 defeat to Fluminense at Laranjeiras and is not included in that year's final, official league table. For reasons on the official face of it to do with refereeing and not colour it was decided not to play the other nine fixtures just as a new President came in and was able to thwart the take-over. That President was Dundee's Andrew Proctor.
1910 again saw a Carioca Championship of six teams. The non-British Mangueira had been relegated and replaced by the British Rio Cricket. It would also be the year that saw the departure of Oscar Cox to Europe. He would only be returned after his death. And it would see his Fluminense for the first time not take the title. It went to Botafogo and by a clear margin. Marginalised Bangu meantime hardly played a game, just three friendlies all season.
Fluminense's response to the loss of its crown was rapid and must have been connected with Oscar Cox living now in Europe and certainly spending time in London. In 1911, just had been the case four seasons earlier in Sao Paulo, a former player and professional coach arrived at the club. And he was by no means run-of-the-mill, a level even above
Jock Hamilton As a coach he had taken Denmark to the silver medal at the 1908 London Olympic Games, losing only to the hosts. As a player he was said vaguely to have, as a goalkeeper, played for “The Wanderers”. In fact, he had played for Arsenal, including forty appearances in 1893-94 and then well over two hundred times for Manchester City in the Football League. He had followed it with seventy-one games from 1902 for Tottenham Hotspur in three Southern League seasons with
John Cameron's FA Cup winners, a year after the triumph, including fifty-two times in 1904-5, and had finished his career still in the Southern League at Norwich and Brentford. He never played for England but must have been quite close to it.
His name is Charlie Williams. He worked at Rio's elite club in 1911 and 1912 between winter coaching in Denmark and France and again from 1924 to 1926 before going on to Botafogo, America FC, Flamengo and managing the social side of the Paissandu Club until retirement. There he must have played bowls with my grandfather and grandmother, both club champions at the time. And he would die in Rio having inadvertently but by his presence alone turned the city's football upside-down and in more than one way.
With Williams in charge Fluminense would win that year's Carioca Championship without losing a game but there would be indirect repercussions both externally and internally. In the league Riochuelo would not play a game and Botafogo would play just two before pulling out. Amateurism was seen as under pressure. It would also lead to a group of Fluminense players, including the captain, deciding at the end of the season in November 1911 to break away and approach a nearby rowing club to form a new team under its auspices. The reason was the players felt they were being shut out of the Fluminense first team on social grounds and not ability. That club was Flamengo and the result is an animosity, the Flu-Fla rivalry, that persists to this day.
The appointment of Williams had without doubt been a visible first step in the professionalisation of Rio football. Players were also being enticed and who is to say if they were being paid or not. The very British James Calvert, the league's top scorer and Fluminense player in 1911 had been a Bangu player in 1909. Ernest Coggins, Bangu's goalkeeper in 1906 was between Botafogo's posts in 1908. And just as in Sao Paulo and in other South American countries at the same time some teams thought the move from amateurism a move too far. The result was that in 1912 the league split. In one were the two teams from Botafogo, Botafogo itself and Internacional, and teams from the centre and north of the city. In the other was Fluminense and other teams split equally between the south, including Flamengo, and the north of the city, including Bangu.
Never could it be said that 1912 was a good season for Bangu. It won just two games of fourteen with eleven defeats, finishing in third last place. But Fluminense, shorn of the players, who had formed Flamengo, was just one place above. Flamengo in contrast finished as runners-up two points behind Paysandu, a first win for the British club. Meantime Botafogo had won the other league and there had been time to patch up differences. Certainly 1913 would see one league, only initially of ten teams. Bangu, Fluminense, Flamengo, Botafogo and Paysandu were all there but again there were not so much problems but intricacies. The three bottom teams after nine games were eliminated from a second round of six more. America would finish top and Botafogo and Flamengo joint second. Bangu was one of those that did not get beyond the first round and dropped down to the second division.
Bangu the following season would bounce straight back again. However, there would be a casualty of the new system, and it was Paysandu. In 1914 not only would it finish in bottom place and be relegated it actually ceased to play football altogether. The cessation was in no small measure due to the Great War. As the British club, as elsewhere in South America, many of its players returned to Britain to enlist. However, in Rio matters went further than most. Paysandu's ground was leased to Flamengo and the club itself was on the move, to Botogogo first and then to its present location in Leblon.
Flamengo would take the 1914 championship and on its new ground also take the 1915 trophy, when Fluminense would finish runner-up, in no small part due to the goal-scoring of a certain Harry Welfare. Bangu would be second-to-last, whilst there would, if temporarily, be a British casualty that year too. As its players also returned to fight Rio Cricket would suspend its footballing activity but unlike Paysandu would return to the game four years later.
The arrival of Harry Welfare in Rio might be said to mark a fundamental change of direction of not just Fluminense itself but also Rio football as a whole. Alternatively it could be seen as a reassertion of William's influence on the city's game. Welfare was one of two prominent British expatriate players of the time, the other being Sydney Pullen, or Sydney as he was often simply called.
Welfare was a big man, 1.9 metres tall and, shall we say, robust. He is said to have arrived in Rio to take up a teaching position. He had trained as such in Liverpool. In fact his travel arrangements were perhaps a little more complicated. He is listed as “a traveller” with passage to Buenos Aires on a ship from Britain that called in at Rio. He may have liked what he saw and simply decided to stay and once there have been simply offered a teaching job, not the other way round. He was also without doubt a fine footballer, one who might have had a substantial professional career in England, had he chosen. From the age of eighteen he had played for six seasons with a leading amateur team in Lancashire, the Northern Nomads; the Corinthian of the North. He then played eight games for Tranmere Rovers and was signed by Liverpool, still as an amateur, playing four games for the first team as a winger, although he was essentially a centre-forward. Liverpool was wanting him to sign professionally but he declined and aged twenty-four headed for the port.
On arrival in Rio towards the end of the 1913 season his talent had been spotted and he had been persuaded to join Fluminense. For the rest of the 1913 season he was in the second team, moving into the first team from 1914 onwards. 1914 itself would be a not entirely successful season for the club in spite of Welfare scoring nine times, however, he believed he had the solution, in attack at least. He began to coach his fellow forwards in the style he knew and which says a great deal about how the team had been playing until then. His instruction to them was simple, “Give me the ball and run beyond me to receive the ball again”, in other words show and “Give and go”, "Push and Run". It tells us that prior to his arrival, at Fluminense at least, carrying the ball, dribbling, the English style had been the rule and after his arrival the Scottish-style, the pass, became king. But then from a player with a Liverpool that two decades earlier had been the team of the Macs, with all eleven from Scotland, and in 1912 had been half-Scots little else should have been expected. Moreover it worked. In 1915 Welfare scored nineteen goals in twelve games. Fluminense rose from fourth to second place. The following season Welfare would have injury problems and the club would suffer. The table was topped by America. But once he was fit again his club would take the championship for the next three seasons. The run only came to an end in 1920 with Welfare by then aged thirty-two. Fluminense nevertheless runner-up.
Harry Welfare would play until 1924. scoring a phenomenal 163 goals in 166 appearances. He would then turn to management but not at Fluminense. From 1927 for a decade he take charge of the rival club, Vasco da Gama. And, as his personal mantle was handed on to a man known, Brazilian style, simply as Sidney, under him it would take three Carioca Championships and be runner-up another four more times. Sidney's career spans that of Harry Welfare and achieved an honour that alluded his contemporary, indeed anyone else. He is the only non-Brazilian to play for Brazil's national team, making three appearances in the 1916 South American Cup, where he also refereed the match between Argentina and Chile. He was born in Brazil in 1893 but his full name, Sidney McKinlay Pullen, betrays his true origins and perhaps his enthusiasm for football above all other games. He was the son of Charles Gordon Pullen, English-born, whose own father had been a Royal Navy captain, and who arrived as factory manager in Brazil becoming a merchant, and Brazilian-born Mary Jane Harper, from a Scots-Irish merchant family there. In 1910 aged seventeen he made his début as a forward for Paysandu, where his cousin, Hugh Edgar Pullen, had played alongside James Calvert in 1907 and he was twenty-one when the British club's football team was disbanded at the end of 1914 season. But he then joined not Fluminense, nor Botafogo, where Hugh Edgar had played the previous season, but Flamengo, where he would make 116 appearances and score 41 goals. However, the figures are slightly misleading. Pullen would make a significant immediate contribution to his new teams second championship in 1915, in spite of Harry Welfare's scoring exploits. Yet in 1916 after the South American Cup he would return to Britain to enlist, missing at least a season. It means his figures have to calculated over nine or even eight years not the full decade.
The 1916 South American Cup was officially the first ever, a decade after international football of a sort had come to the country. The first international match had been between a Sao Paulo selection and one from South Africa in 1906. The second two years later had been played at Fluninense's Laranjeiras stadium between a Brazilian team drawn only from Rio, including Edwin Cox and Ernest Coggins, and Argentina. Brazil lost by the odd goal in five. The third in 1912 was again against a Brazilian selection drawn this time from Sao Paulo and played there. Argentina would again win and easily. It would be followed four days later by a similar fixture in Laranjeiras, another heavy Brazilian defeat, after which the next would be again a Rio-based selection, in 1913 in Botafogo against a Portuguese XI. Sidney Pullen was inside-left in a goalless draw, in which the Brazilian goalkeeper saved a penalty.
It was followed the next year by Sao Paulo-based teams twice playing a similar selection from Chile with Brazil defeated in both fixtures. In fact Brazil would have to wait a year and two more games for a victory. A team drawn from both Sao Paulo and Rio would travel to Buenos Aires. It would lose the first game but a week later win the second. And that would be it until the South American Championships, where Pullen would play in all three games at centre-half, Scottish or English-style is unknown but since he was a converted inside-left the former is suggested.
Sidney Pullen would play five time for the Brazilian national team, four draws and a defeat, play form Flamengo until 1925 and even coach the team. Meanwhile outside Rio and outside the league's top division in Bangu 1911 had been relatively busy, twenty-four friendlies in all between April and November with a team that featured just two Britons, John, one of the brothers Hellowell, and for the first part of season, Edgar Calvert, brother of James. 1912 had seen it persuaded to rejoin one of the two leagues, finishing joint sixth of eight with Hellowell still in the team. 1913 would lead to relegation once more and there would be no Hellowell. But there would be a Patrick and James Stirling. James was the son of Thomas, himself the son of Scot who had moved south for work and had married James Hartley's sister. He slotted in neatly at right-half. Patrick at centre-forward and then right-wing was the Scottish-born son of Scot too. He was Tommy Donohoe's younger boy, now working in the factory as a chemist. And James and Patrick were cousins.
In 1914 Bangu had topped the Second Division and would be promoted. The team would also be reinforced with a second second-generation player, Archibald French, the son of another of the club's founder, William French. Aged 17 he had just returned from Britain. Edgar Calvert would also be back. However, that year too there was a loss. On a visit back to Britain with his wife, the sister of Eliza, Tommy Donohoe's wife, James Hartley had died in his home town of Oldham.
In 1915 Bangu would finish in penultimate spot in the league, however, with its new blood it would be in 1916 be third, above both Flamengo and Fluminense and it would be essentially the same Bangu team that at best held it own in the 1917 season, during which its players had been noticed. The following season only Patrick Donohoe remained. Archibald French would be poached by Fluminense and be in its Championship-winning team. Bangu would once more finish seventh of ten. In 1919 it would be fifth, Fluminense would again take the title but Archibald French would be dead, struck down by the epidemic of Spanish flu that swept the city. In 1920 it would be sixth but Patrick Donohoe would play his last game, turning his attention from football to the club's successful tennis team.
It seemed the British, often Scots dynasty at Bangu had finally come to an end but not quite. On the field the 1921 season for a few games at least Edgar Calvert returned. In 1922 Patrick Donohoe made two appearances and in 1923 there was a new, old name on the team-sheet, John Hartley. Son of James, with a Scottish mother, Eiza Donohoe's sister, so Patrick Donohoe's and James Stirlings's cousin had returned as a Bangu dentist. He would play until 1926. And off the field the club President was James Schofield.
Stirling-born once more of Irish parents, Schofield too had made his life in South America, had been involved in the textile industry for many years and had come to Bangu in 1919 already at the age of sixty-three. On arrival he seems to have been intent on reorganising, reducing working conditions. He was also a hard man. Strikes followed. However, things seemed to settle and in 1923 he took on the Director's traditional role of football club president. He would remain in position for seven seasons, a continuing Scottish presence at the club and in the town until 1927. Only then after thirty-three years would Scottish influence there and in the Rio game come to an end. with one small aside.
In 1871 an earlier textile mill had been built little further into the interior of the State of Rio at Paracambi. In 1894 its social club, Brasil Industrial, had been founded. In 1911 three of those who themselves had been founder-members of Bangu went to work there, Clarence Hibbs, Frederick Jacques and Bangu's first captain of football, John Stark. Stark, a chemist, the son of the manager of the Thornliebank Printworks, had returned home probably at the time of his mother's death in 1908. He was still in Thornliebank in 1911 but in 1912 they were all instrumental in the formation from the social club and following the Bangu model of Brasil Industrial Esporte Clube with a football team that too exists to this day.
Of the fate of those involved in the early days of Rio football knowledge is mixed. Of those who went to Bangu James Hartley had died in Oldham in 1914. Eliza Donohoe died in Brazil but the date is not known. Tommy Donohoe remarried and himself would died in Bangu in 1925. Patrick Donohoe would die in Rio in 1948.
Oscar Cox would died in France in 1931 and his body was brought back to Rio for burial. James Schofield would die the same year, aged 71 in Niteroi. Of Alex Lamont's life after Rio nothing is known, as is also the case with William French and Edwin Cox. John Stark would last possibly be seen travelling from Lisbon, perhaps on the way back from Brazil, in 1922. He had certainly returned home in 1915. He signed off his father's death in Thornliebank that year.
Alexander Leigh had passed away young in Glasgow in 1920 and William Proctor in Bangu in 1923. His brother, Andrew, who had married his girl from home, Mary Cameron, in Tijuca in Rio in 1899, witnessed by a third brother, who had also moved to Rio, would outlive William by twenty years, dying in Ipanema in 1945. The Hellowell brothers would also stay in Brazil and, indeed, in Bangu. William would live there until 1932 and Thomas 1954.
Francisco Carregal would remain closely associated with Bangu football into the 1940s. He would die in the town in 1949, whilst on the other side of the city Charlie Williams, who after arriving in Rio for a second time in 1924 had never gone home, passed away in 1952. It left few of the pioneers known to be alive and just three of them to see the 1960s. Sydney Pullen, James Stirling and Harry Welfare, would all live to see Brazil win at least one World Cup. Welfare would even just see England take one, dying in Angra dos Reis in September 1966.