Hamilton Casey

John Buckle

The 1882 foundation story of London's Tottenham Hotspur involves principally three young men, Hamilton Casey, Bobby Buckle and John Anderson at fourteen little more than boys, at school together seemingly local, getting together to form a "club". In fact still semi-rural Tottenham was outwith the city, in the now defunct county of Middlesex, a hail above the River with Essex on the other bank. It would not be incorporated in the city for another eighty odd years. A comparison with Glasgow and its Southern Suburbs is not unreasonable.

Nor were the boys local. Casey had been born actually in London, on the edge of The City itself, so having moved out. Buckle's parents, his father a coachman, were incomers from Suffolk. And John Anderson, with brother, Thomas, a year younger and also on the founder list, was a Scot; or at least his parents' were, making the young Anderson a grandson of Renfrewshire, indeed of Lochwinnoch. His mother, a Caldwell, (Thomas was Thomas Caldwell Anderson) had been born there on Harvey Sq. and his father on Church St., a matter of yards away. They, Presbytarians, had, having probably just taken the Road South, been married in England, at Waltham Abbey, just up the way and in 1867. John had been their first child, born the following year, 1868, his father, Alexander, by then a Commission Agent cum Iron Merchant.

So by months Anglo-Scottish, John Anderson, John Connell Anderson, had been five when the first Scottish-England international had been played, eleven when his parents' national team had first and until 188 for the only time lost one, and thirteen when it had inflicted the heavy defeat of England in London and so fourteen, when in March 1882 it had been repeated in Glasgow. It would have been remarkable, if the family and therefore he had not known about it. It is unlikely that his enthusiasm for the game came from a pride in what England were showing on the field. However, what Scotland was doing was entirely another matter. Can you imagine the josh at break?

Buckle, Casey and Anderson would play for their club for eleven season, Anderson for precisely a decade, one that at the end still put them in their mid-twenties. Two matches are recorded in in 1882-3, twenty the following season, thirty one in 1881-2. John would become an engineer to trade, a Locomotive engineer, still in Tottenham but his father having passed away. And that work would clearly sometime after 1891 take him to China because there in 1910 in Tianjin, just south of Beijing, he would marry Annie Leggat, originally from London, indeed a Stepney-girl.

And in China the seems to have stayed. He can be seen at forty five journeying with Annie from there in 1913 to San Francisco. The same is true to West Coast Canada the following year. And in 1921 he travelled this time to Shanghai and back again from China in 1923, probably permanently.

By then Anderson was sixty-five and perhaps on retirement to Buckinghamshire. Scots founder of Tottenham Hotspur F.C. was to die, survived by Annie, in 1931 in Speen by Princes Risborough. The house is still there. He was seventy-six and, whilst his parents and Thomas (death 1942), whose work as a bank manager took him to also to China, including marriage in Shanghai, to local-girl, "Kathleen Grant Finlay", then India and retirement in Colchester, are all in Tottenham cemetery, John is buried in the churchyard of St. John the Evangelist in nearby to Speen in Lacey Green, grave condition unknown.