The Rio Tinto, the Red River, runs from mountains in the interior of South-Eastern Andalusia, reaching the sea fifty miles to the south at
Huelva. Its name comes from the trace minerals that had stained its waters for thousands of years and still do, minerals that have been mined since Roman times and continue to be to this day. However, as far as football is concerned the time of interest began a almost exactly a hundred and fifty years ago.
In 1873 a cash-strapped, Spanish government was persuaded to sell local mining rights cheaply to a new, British company, named Rio Tinto Mining after the river itself,. Its president and major shareholder was a Scot, Hugh Mackay Matheson. He was the nephew of James Matheson, also Scots-born in Achness by Lairg in Sutherland and joint-founder of Jardine Matheson, the present-day trading conglomerate based in Hong Kong that had through its the base, Shanghai, made its money, indeed, a very great deal of money, from the opium trade. It is even "credited" with starting the first Opium War from 1839 to 1842, which resulted in the concession of a lease on Hong Kong Island to the British.
Hugh Matheson had followed his uncle into what was in part a family-firm. Now on retirement he was using the fortune he, like his uncle, had also accrued to finance Rio Tinto Mining's plan to use the then most modern techniques to exploit ore deposits that had appeared to have been worked-out but were not. In fact Mackay Matheson's southern Spanish concession would prove itself to be very profitable. It soon became the World's largest copper producer, allowing the company to invest in further mining activity and to become in time Rio-Tinto, the world-wide, mining conglomerate.
Once the deal with the Spanish had been completed mining operations began almost straight away. The need for the latest technology meant mining engineers and other workers being brought from where technology was most advanced, Britain. With them came their game of choice, football. And the new arrivals had to be housed. The building of the town of Minas de Rio Tinto was begun and there, it is said, William Bice organised what must have been the first kick-abouts in Spain. Who William Bice was is unknown but there is a candidate. He was born in 1850 in Calstock in Cornwall. In 1871 he was still there, the son and grandson of copper miners and a copper miner himself. And in 1875 aged 25 he took the boat to Queensland, Australia and never came back. But might he travelled to the Antipodes having already tasted the sun in Western Andalusia.
More formalised football games are said in Rio Tinto to have followed the initial ad-hoc ones by August 1874. Meanwhile, however, the company also needed to get the ore once produced to Britain so in the next two years an eighty-three mile long railway was built following the course of the river with four tunnels, ten bridges and from 1875 its own wharf in Huelva's port. Part of the railway still operates and the wharf is still there, restored. And the building of both railway and wharf required still more British expertise. British troops were even brought onto Spanish soil to protect them, and railwaymen, dockers and soldiers alike in the port are also, said to have played football, of some sort at least, with again more organised games soon following.
Then, back in Minas de Rio Tinto in 1878, the British residents did what they always did. They founded a club, the "English Club". However, its first president was a Scot, the newly-arrived company doctor, 30-year-old John Sutherland Mackay, a son of the Free Kirk, born in Lybster in Caithness in 1848. It was perhaps not such a surprise. By 1881, when the Bishop of Gibraltar, the Anglican Bishop, came to visit he found in Rio Tinto
a mostly Scots community of eighty employees and their families with a Presbyterian minister but no priest. A Scots doctor for a majority Scots community seems axiomatic, as does he as a figurehead.
By 1880, with the development of the mine it was becoming clear that the Rio Tinto settlement that had grown up was in the way of expansion so between 1882 and 1884 a new, British- and Spanish-style quarter, Bellavista, of twenty
houses including the mine manager's was built around a new club-house and a kirk, St. Andrew's, still
the only kirk in Spain to be maintained by the Catholic Church.
And organised football was then played at the new club, out of which emerged Rio Tinto F.C., the first footba'-club on Spanish soil. In 1882 there were games between Rio Tinto and Huelva, as recorded by one of the Scots mining employees, Daniel Macmillan Young from Ayrshire, who lived out the rest of his life there in Southern Spain, and published on 6th May that year in La Provincia, the local English-language paper the following report.
Rio Tinto's time as the largest producer of copper in the World would be from 1877 until 1891. There were other mines in the region too. As well as copper large quantities of iron ore were also being moved through Huelva with increasing numbers of boats with their crews docking. Thus with Rio Tinto’s staff there also ever increasing it was decided a doctor was needed not just in Minas de Rio Tinto but also in the port itself and in 1883 John Sutherland Mackay’s younger brother, 23 years old, William Alexander Mackay, born in 1860, again in Lybster, was recruited.” On a beautiful afternoon and before a large crowd the long awaited game between the teams from Huelva and Rio Tinto was played. We may have to wait for some time to witness another match as well organised and balanced with teams of equal strength. Although Rio Tinto had some tough players, Huelva played with greater subtlety and craftiness. Huelva was on the attack right through the game, but at the last minute it was Rio Tinto that slipped in the winning goal.”
Having qualified at the age of 22, like his brother from Edinburgh University, and at the peak of his sporting prowess Alexander Mackay brought with him a belief, the then increasing widely-held understanding, almost a mantra, of the importance of exercise for health. By June 1884 he was already taking the notion of the existing, company football team in Rio Tinto a stage further and organising specifically in Huelva a “Society for Ball-Games".
He was soon joined in his work in Huelva by another young Diasporan doctor, Robert Russell Ross, the son of Edinburgh Scots, born in Canada in 1864, brought up in Surrey. By 1888 Mackay and Ross were again organising games but now not just against the miners in the interior but also crews of incoming ships and with Spanish involvement through what already had in Spanish been given the nickname, “Recreo de Huelva”. And in the meantime he had also returned to Britain in 1885, where in Edinburgh he married Catherine Robson and she came out to join him in Southern Spain.
It was perhaps at that moment, the return of William Mackay and his new wife, that embryonic Spanish football could be said to have transferred its focal-point from Rio Tinto to Huelva. Mackay would spend the rest of his working life in the port city. Catherine Mackay would die there and when William remarried his second wife, Louisa Brown, would also come out. His children would be born there and the club that would emerge there and be formalised in 1889 as Recreativo de Huelva, is today Spain's oldest, surviving football club. Minas de Rio Tinto still has a football club, Rio Tinto Balompie, but it is a Spanish club not the original Rio Tinto Football Club. It hung up its boots temporarily like so many British-origin football clubs world-wide at the outbreak of the Great War, restarted at the end of the hostilities but finally folded in 1932. However, that does not mean that nothing remains of the original British sporting presence in the town. Perched amidst the pines on the edge of the modern mine's huge open-cast pit and opened in 1890, is that other sign of specifically Scots presence, the original but now vanished community's eighteen-hole golf course.