(This piece could not have been written without meeting, talking to and receiving the help of Michael Black, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, John Scott and members of clans Reid and Gemmell in Valparaiso and at the Prince of Wales Club, Santiago.)
It was 1894. In Valparaiso
Scott, Gemmell and Reid
began, based on several established clubs and with the foundation of the Chilean Football Association, the formalisation of the sport they had been instrumental in introducing to their city and to the country as a whole. More or less simultaneously eighty miles inland Santiago would see the formation of its first clubs, the wonderfully- and explicitly-named, Santiago Rangers-non-Sunday-Playing Club, of National Athletic and the German, Atletico Aleman. That same year too from the scratch team from Santiago Cricket and Athletic Club that had a year earlier challenged Valparaiso to a one-off match a more permanent entity also emerged, Santiago Athletic. Like the scratch team it too had a remarkably Scottish input. Its President was a Ewing, vice-president a MacCarthy, the Director, H. Hume, Treasurer, John Melrose and Secretary, probably a Canadian, Mr. A. Smith. Its first known team also consisted of several, who had both played Valparaiso and were more than likely Scots or of Scots origin;
Allan, Anderson, Hood, Rogers, Scott, Madden, Coat(e)s; to whom had been added Davies, Stewart, Campbell, Anderson, Simpson and MacGregor
all alongside another known name, Hugh McColl, the trainer.
And it is McColl, who is of especial interest. A photo survives of the team plus trainer. In it Chilean McColl looks uncannily like another of the same name, the one, who captained the
Seville
team. which three years earlier in 1890 had played Recreativo de
Huelva
in the first ever, officially recognised, Spanish football match, a fixture with McColl, still captain, repeated for two more seasons.
Seville's McColl was an engineer born in Glasgow, who would also die there suddenly on a visit in 1915. He is buried in
Cathcart
Cemetery. In the meantime in Sunderland he would found in 1895 the first of two ship-building and -repair business after arriving there early that year or in late 1894 but might his travels have taken him not directly back to Wearside but from Spain in 1893 briefly to Chile? Certainly not just the face but the dates fit. And from Seville he must have had both enough knowledge of Spanish to take with him to Chile and sufficient footballing kudos once there to have been seized upon by the British community as both player and trainer. It and his shipping interests might even have been enough to take him back. At the end of July 1896 a Scottish Hugh McColl, a “traveller”, took the long journey from Liverpool to Valparaiso, a Hugh McCall, described as a manager and also Scottish, did it again in 1898 and an H. McColl in 1902. If it were the same person then remarkably he would have had a major, if unsung, hand in the development of football first in Spain for three year, playing in the first ever match there, and then also for a year at least and perhaps for almost a decade in Chile.
However, thanks to the work of the inestimable Andy Mitchell, the mystery of the two McColls is both resolved but at the same time the depth of Scots influence in early Chilean football only increased still further. In 1852, so before the Seville's, a second Hugh McColl had been born again in Glasgow. He was the son of pattern-maker and grew up to be a ships clerk but one at the heart of football as it exploded in the city. In 1875 he is listed as the contact, presumably the Secretary, of West End F.C., based in Cowlairs. It was the second year the club had competed in the Scottish Cup. In 1874 it had been knocked out in the second round by Queen's Park, albeit 7-0. The following year it would be in the same round, this time 6-0 and against Rovers. But despite the heaviness of the defeats West End was a club of importance from 1872 and for five years until its disbandment in 1877, by which time McColl may have left Scotland. Certainly in 1879 he married a Harriett Waterhouse in Cheshire, so south of the border.
However, the McColls returned to Scotland. Their first child was born in Forfar in 1879 and six more arrived in Glasgow and Gourock over the next decade by which time he was a commercial clerk. But it is the couple's seventh child, Lillias, who is of particular interest. She was born in October 1891 in El Puerto, Valparaiso , Chile. He is now listed as Scots businessman, one whose footballing credentials clearly became known and who in 1892 became, like fellow Scot and football pioneer in Chile Andrew Gemmell, a freemason still in the port city and is listed as a merchant as he can bee seen returning still from Valparaiso to Liverpool in 1897, the family presumably already long back in Scotland. A further daughter had been born there in 1893. Indeed the whole family was in 1901 living in Govan, he once more listed as a shipping clerk, which became a "South American Merchant" in 1911 almost two decades before his death still back in Glasgow in 1928.
Meanwhile, it had also been in 1897 that, coincidentally or not, the Santiago Athletic Club team would become Union Atletico, the greatest of the Chilean capital's early clubs. The name-change is perhaps the first indication of how in the three final years of the 19th Century and the first years of 20th outwith
Valparaiso and Vina de Mar
and in Santiago specifically the craze for football would take hold and gather momentum. By the turn of the century in Chile's capital there were perhaps as many as fifty college clubs with names like Deutscher Sport Verein and Scotland F. C. reflecting, not least the ethnic diversity of immigration to a rapidly developing city. Santiago's population had almost doubled in two decades to about 250,000. It would double again in the next twenty years.
Games were to begin with friendlies, often 5-a-side with players frequently coming and going and changing teams. However, gradually more stable clubs were being created and 11-a-side becoming the norm. 1897 had also seen the formation the clearly Spanish club, Club Union Espanola, as initially the Centro Espanol de Instruccion y Recreacion. 1900 saw the foundation of Santiago National. Two years later it was Santiago Badminton with Morning Star following in 1903. Elsewhere too 1902 had seen the creation in Talca, 160 miles south of Santiago, of Club Social de Deportes Rangers and a myth. One of the club's founders was Luis, Lewis, Greenstreet, and the club's name is said to have been chosen by his father, John Greenstreet, both also said to be Scots and with a Glasgow affiliation. The problem is that the story is wrong. It is unlikely that the Greenstreets were Scots either by birth or origin. "Greenstreet" is not a Scottish name. There is, in any case, no record of them in Scotland. And the club's name came from Amalia Neale, John Greenstreet's employer, and derives not from Scotland but Eastbourne. There was, however, a Scots connection. One of the club's other founders was a Ramsay, a member of Chile's first footballing family.
As local matches in Talca gelled into the city's Municipal League, won by Rangers, back in the capital July 1903 saw the formation of the Santiago Football Association. It was an organisation, of which Frank (Francisco) C. Campbell, a product of the Mackay and Sutherland School, was one of the instigators, with a league of sixteen teams in two divisions. The trophy played for in that first year was the Copa Subercaseaux, donated by the Honorary Chairman of the association. The Secretary of its first Board of Directors came from Union Atlético, a certain Jorge (George) Dan Ewing, the thirty-two year-old son of
Pedro (Peter) Ewing, the Scottish merchant, who had been the first Honorary President of that Chilean Football Association, founded entirely by Scots in Valparaiso a little under a decade earlier. And the first winner of the Cup was Ewing’s club, captained by another Ramsay, John.
John Ramsay was Chilean-born, in 1879. He was "crillo", one of five brothers, sons of Diasporan Scots, Alexander Ramsay and Jessie Frew. Alex Ramsay, a railway employee, had taught all his boys the game from a young age. Described as a clean and brilliant defender at fifteen John was already playing for that Santiago Rangers-non-Sunday-Playing Club. It may have been in a five-a-side league with the Ramsay brothers forming the entire team. Certainly a picture has survived of them all together as a team. One, James, was to die aged 33 in 1915 in France having returned to Britain to enlist as so many did from British communities in South America. Another, Alexander, like Juan, was also a noted defender. It was he who would be instrumental in the formation of Rangers of Talca, went on to become a referee and also died young, in 1917 and in Chile. Joseph, José Ramsay, a forward, played until 1910. And youngest of all was Manuel, also known as by his second name, Arthur.
However, John Ramsay was not only to be a significant player but also an important football official and administrator, in Santiago initially and later nationally. Still a teenager he was firstly to be one of the founders of school team, Instituto Nacional FC, before, in his early-twenties, with his brothers moving on to Union Atlético. After victory in 1903 in 1904 it, Union Atlético, took the Copa Subercaseaux for a second time with a team that included a mainly Scots spine, John and Joseph themselves and Frank Campbell, Frank Morrison, Andrew Taylor, now captain, Fred Anderson, Hugh Sutherland and George Hood. In fact, from 1903 Union Atlético was to be the predominant club in Santiago and John Ramsay perhaps the most recognised figure in the local game. That is until 1906, when the club disbanded seemingly because of bad results, he went on to form English F.C. and play for two more seasons, whilst brothers Joseph and Arthur joined the Loma Blanca club. Founded in 1904 in 1907 with Jo in attack and Arthur at left-back, plus a MacNiven and a Jackson, it would win the Santiago Football Association's Copa Unión.
Here two things are worth noting. The first is the name Fred Anderson. It is the same as that of the captain of the first Argentinian national team in 1901, the son of a Scot, who then seems to have disappeared from the Argentine footballing scene. Might he have move on to Chile? And 1907 saw Valparaiso largely flattened by a powerful earthquake from which it never fully recovered. Santiago, already Chile's political hub, filled the void also becoming the country's economic hub and eventually its footballing one also.
It was in the year following the Valparaiso earthquake, in 1908, that John Ramsay took the step from player to football administrator. He was elected, aged 29, to the board of the Santiago Football Association. He was also involved in the Referees’ Association, with the leading, local Santiago officials, a certain John MacDonald and his brother, Alex Ramsay, and in Valparaiso, Andrew Gemmell, before in 1910 being promoted from treasurer to president of the Santiago F.A. It was fortunate timing because there was increasing conflict between the Santiago-based, Spanish-speaking National Sports Federation and the still British-orientated Football Association of Chile in Valparaiso.
It was a situation not dissimilar to that developing in Buenos Aires at much the same time, remembering too that in Chile as in Argentina there was a degree of then century-old antipathy to Britain that continues to this day. In Buenos Aires it was because of two repelled invasions in 1806 and 1807 and a third more serious one again in 1807 only aborted by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. In Chile it was not least because Bernardo O'Higgins, the country's liberator from Spain, was the son of an Irish family dispossessed of its ancestral land in Ireland by a Britain under Cromwell.
The inter-city problems had not been resolved with the stepping down as president of the CFA of Valparaiso's Alfred Jackson, probably John Alfred Jackson, in 1908. The election of his replacement, Horace Cooper, also did little to alleviate the cultural clash then Cooper’s rapid replacement by William Bailey, with Robert Bailey one of those at the organisation's Valparaiso foundation, and the brief return of Jackson simply added instability.
Nor even were problems resolved with the transfer in 1912, once again under Cooper, of the Chilean FA to Santiago, nor its name-change to the equivalent in Spanish, the Asociación de Football de Chile. Nor did the creation of a National Football Championship, won in its first season by a club neither from Santiago or Valparaiso but Antofagasta, seem to help, nor even the change of affiliation that same year to FIFA in Paris from the FA in London. The arguments continued. On one side were the British, still with a power base, if a much-weakened one, in Valparaiso, and on the other the new Chilean FA establishment in the capital eighty miles away. It even seemed they would continue, in spite of Andrew Gemmell, with a foot somewhat in both camps, was chosen as President in 1912 . It had been he, after all, who had begun the hispanicisation of the Chilean game with his rules translation, a hispanicisation that had continued throughout the intervening years. It had even caused a temporary split in the Santiago Football Association, one that John Ramsay was fortunately able to overcome at a local level but which at a national level was seemingly intractable.
In fact it appears Gemmell's tenure did have an effect, although it was not until 1915 that the disagreements were finally ended under Juan Estaban Ortiza, Chilean FA president from 1914-17, with the Scotsman the last Briton to hold the office. And at that point not only did Andrew Gemmell take a step back but so too did the Ramsays. They remained in Chile but seemed to have no further impact on the future Chilean game.
To a great extent the confusion, if not conflict, that characterised the Chilean domestic game in the decade from 1905 had also been reflected in the country’s international football. In May 1910 a national team played its first games, travelling to Buenos Aires with a fifteen-man squad that included eleven Britons, and Andrew Gemmell as the travelling official. Seven of them, Gibson and Hamilton, Allen, Hoyl, Simmons, Davidson and Campbell, were to feature in a first, one-off game, against Argentina, a 0-2 win for Chile. Gemmell refereed. Three days later there was a second match, against Uruguay in the Copa Centenario Revolucion de Mayo, with the addition of Ashe, MacWilliams and Robson, and a third in the same competition, once more against Argentina the following week, this time with Talca's Herbert Sturgess in the eleven.
The team changes seemed to make a difference, but negatively. After winning the first the second and third games were lost, 3-0 and 5-1, but one player of interest featured in all three and scored in the third. He was centre-forward, Campbell, the same Colin Campbell, who had played for Argentina in 1907. On leaving Buenos Aires he would settle in Chile, playing for Santiago National and his sons, Donald and Ian, go on to represent their adopted country at rugby. Donald, would return to Britain and was killed in action in 1944 aged 25, whilst serving with the RAF. Ian, nine years younger, would at fly-half and centre, post-War play internationally for thirteen years.
Colin Campbell was a typical South American “Scot”. Ian Campbell, now in his mid-eighties and living in Santiago recounts that his father was the son of a Scottish-born sea captain, Donald Campbell, operating out of Liverpool. He had met, presumably on his travels, and married Catalina Lazonby and they had settled in Southport, where Colin went to school. However, he was born not in Scotland, England or even Chile, despite his mother coming from another well-known, Valparaiso, merchant family. Lazonby & Co had been founded there in 1886 as Lazonby and Campbell. Colin had been born in Callao, the port of Peru's capital, Lima, and no doubt one of his father's other ports-of-call.
Chile would again play Argentina in September 1911. In 1912 there were no internationals but in 1913 an Argentine Select XI came again to Chile for three matches, one in Vina del Mar, one in Valparaiso and lastly in Santiago. It was not until 1914 that there was a repeat of a full Chile-Argentina fixture. The result was a 2:0 win for Argentina with for Chile this time five Britons in the eleven. 1915 once again seemed fallow internationally and then in 1916 came the first South American Championship, the forerunner of the Copa America.
It was held in Argentina. Chile would lose its games against Argentina itself and Uruguay, drew with Brazil and finish in last place but with a team that notably with a now "crillo" Chilean FA included no British players or even players of British heritage. The only such players in the competition were the Argentines, Juan Domingo Brown and the Hayes brothers. However, Chile's participation in the competition is remembered for something else. After the first game against a Uruguay team that included Isabelino Gradin, who scored twice, and Juan Delgado it objected to the fielding of “Africans”. It was an attitude to Black players, which even for those times was found shocking and was not repeated when Brazil and its Black star, Arthur Friedenreich, were faced.
A Chilean national team again with no British names was fielded in 1917. The following year too it was to be the same and by then Valparaiso F.C. had also ceased to exist, for the saddest of reasons. Like James Ramsay from Santiago the majority of Valparaiso's players had returned to Britain to join up to fight in the First World War and many did not live through the conflict.
As to the other Ramsays, Jose, who had married in 1908, remained in Chile and was visiting the United States until the early 1950s. Alexander married in Chile in 1909. He seems to have had a daughter, who died young. Juan married in 1916 and seems to have died childless in 1940. Of Manuel nothing more is known. However, none of the brothers appears to have had any further significant role or effect on the Chilean game. That was to be left to another Scots-Chilean father,
John Livingstone, and his still more famous son,
Sergio.