Ross & Ross
They were brothers, James and Nicholas Ross. Both were born in Edinburgh, the sons of Highland parents fittingly from Ross-shire, who, like so many, had drifted south. Both would be born before football arrived in Scotland, find fame and some fortune from the game in England and be dead by their mid-thirties. Nick, born in 1863, was the older. He was mainly a centre-half brought up, before Renton's and James Kelly's attacking variety emerged, in his home city's defensive
2-3-5 culture but also a sometime full-back, sometime centre-forward. Jimmy, born in 1866, was an out-and-out forward.
Beginning as a teenager Nick would from 1881 to 1884 play for Hearts , captaining the team. That was before he was persuaded south, aged just twenty-one, with, like another of the early professionals, Fergus Suter, a promise of a “job”, in his case as a “slater” and by Preston North End. However, in 1885 with professionalism made official in English football he could drop the pretext of any other work and concentrate on his real calling, becoming in turn captain of his new club and an integral part of its rise. In 1886-87 in Glasgow in the first round of the FA Cup it beat Queen's Park, one of seven Scottish clubs in the competition, reaching the semi-finals before losing to West Bromwich. In 1888 it went one stage further, to the FA Cup Final itself, losing by the odd goal in three again to West Bromwich.
The Preston team that year consisted of three locally-born players, a Welshman in goal and six and three-quarter Scots. The three-quarter Scot at centre-forward was
John Goodall. He had been raised and schooled in Kilmarnock but born in London, the son of a Clackmannan-shire soldier, sadly based in the capital at the time, and his Ayrshire wife. Jimmy Ross, who had joined the club that year, lined up beside him at inside-right. The first West Brom goal was scored by their inside-right, which suggests, if Preston was playing the Scottish system of half-back marking inside-forward, a problem at left-half. That was another of the Scots, Johnny Graham. However, if the English system of full-back marking inside-forward was being used that day and Nick Ross, playing at left-back was blamed, perhaps he took it badly and explain why at the end of the season he was on the move, to captain Everton.
Nick Ross' stay on Merseyside lasted just a season. At a cost of £10 per month, extremely good money at the time, he was possibly simply too expensive for his new club and for 1889-90 returned to Preston, when it, The Invincibles, had not just won the FA Cup but also completed the double, winning not just the first ever Football League title but without losing a game.
On the face of it Preston was a team that had no need to be changed but Nick's return John Goodall had moved on to Derby County. Jimmy Ross was still there, having with 18 goals been the previous year's second top scorer behind Goodall. And it was with the latter's departure that the returnee converted to centre-forward to play alongside his brother. That season Preston was to take the League title for a second time. Jimmy Ross with 24 goals would now be top-scorer.
During his second spell with Preston Nick Ross would play ninety-five games over four seasons. However, his health started to deteriorate. In spite of the good money he was earning and the better life-style he no doubt enjoyed he had developed the scourge of the Scottish working-classes at the time, consumption, tuberculosis. No doubt, as with many, its seeds had been planted during an impoverished childhood and was simply re-emerging but with no effective treatment it was soon debilitating. In 1893 he was forced to retire from football. Just a year later at the age of thirty-one he was dead in the same year that had also seen the death of Aston Villa's Archie Hunter at the age of 35, he after a heart-attack, and Jimmy Ross leave Preston, after three seasons as League runners-up and then a tumble to 14th.
The younger Ross had taken a route to England only slightly different to his brother's. He had begun his career at Heart's then Edinburgh rivals, St. Bernards, from where in 1888 he had arrived at Deepdale, aged twenty-two. There he is said to have scored two hundred and fifty goals in two hundred and twenty appearances, eighty-five goals in one hundred and thirty top-flight games over six seasons. Then, like his brother five years earlier, he would also move to Merseyside, not this time to Everton but across Stanley Park to recently formed Liverpool.
In 1894-5 at his new club things initially did not go as well as had been expected. The younger Ross scored just twelve times in twenty-seven games. Liverpool was relegated. However, the following season his form returned with 23 goals in 25 games and the club was re-promoted. Then his scoring again dropped off, just five in twenty-matches and he was transferred in March 1897 to an almost relegated Burnley.
With a single goal in four games he could not save them. However, back in the Second Division and finding the net once more with twenty-three goals in twenty-seven games Burnley immediately bounced back. And then the pattern reproduced itself. Again struggling for goals in the top flight he was once more moved on, down a division to Manchester City, where even at the age of 32, scoring seven times at the back end of 1898-99 in nine games, for a third time with three different clubs back into the top division he climbed. And it was there with Ross playing most games, not scoring the goals, just twenty-one in sixty-seven games, but in all probability providing brains and experience the club remained until in 1901 he too was forced to retire because of ill-health. Although it is not said, once more it was in all probability tuberculosis and, in spite of earning as much as £10 a week, four times his brother's wages a decade earlier, a year later, aged 36, Jimmy Ross too was dead.
The life of an early, Scottish professional footballer, a Scotch Professor, could at the top be lucrative in comparison with what working-class men could otherwise earn at home. For many it was a way out of genuine poverty but for the Rosses, or indeed the Hunters and many others, at home in Scotland, in Britain as a whole and the world-wide Diaspora there was no immunity from background. They carried contagions with them. Football was one and benign. Others were sadly much less so.