Between what was probably but not definitely the first formally constituted round-ball football club in the World, John Hope and Edinburgh's "Foot-Ball Club" and the Football Association, the founding body of our game there is a subtle but perhaps important and certainly interesting link across the very first participating generations. And early member of the latter was the man above, Sir James Kirkpatrick, 8th Baronet, the Quiet Baron. And thirty years earlier his father, Charles Sharpe Kirkpatrick, 6th Baronet, had been a member of the former.

Charles Kirkpatrick's birth had been in Scotland, at Capenoch, the then family home by Thornhill in Dumfries-shire, now owned by the Gladstones, and itself not far from the original seat of Closeburn, which had also been sold off. But he had gone to Canada to seek his fortune, only returning by 1844, and it was there in 1841 that James had been born.

Yet the family soon moved South to London and it was there James grew up, was privately-educated, so not a Public-school-boy before joining the Admiralty as a clerk, eventually rising to be Private Secretary to the First Lord. And it was also in the Civil Service that his sporting career seems to have started. He was a member of its Football Club, founded in 1863, just as Association football came into being, becoming captain in 1870. And he also played for The Wanderers formed as Forest F.C. in 1859. And, from his debut for that team in 1867 at the age of twenty-five, he made over the next eleven seasons, so till he was thirty-seven fifty-eight appearances occasionally outfield but mostly as "a goalkeeper [who] is always excellent".

It was some record. Perhaps fully eighteen years at the forefront of the new and developing game. It came to an end in the 1878 Cup Final, in which he broke his arm in the fifteen minute but carried on, letting in only one goal as the Royal Engineers equalised but his team went on to score twice more and take the trophy. But in the meantime he had been the umpire for The Wanderers in the 1872 Cup Final and had two years earlier been with Arthur Kinnaird the organiser in 1870 of the first of the series of five "unofficial" internationals played over the next two season at The Oval in London. It is a curiosity that these games in England at the initiation of the English FA, for the SFA did not exists, were made possible by two Diasporan Scots, albeit one who has remains until now very much in the background. But then it would be ever thus. In fact he himself played in the first four of the matches, and despite Kinnaird always being presented as the selecting the teams, he also captained the Scottish elevens in the first, led by the Scots until a final minute equaliser, and the second, lost by the one goal. Kinnaird captained only the third.

And as Fitzgerald played his part on-field so he did off it too. He represented Surrey on the FA Committee from 1869 until 1872 with the dates not insignificant. Charles Alcock, future FA Secretary from 1870, had joined the same committee in 1866, Kinnaird in 1868. Ebenezer Morley, founding father of the FA would step back in 1874, which point the organisation would change in nature, from one governed by the middle-class, Morley and Fitzpatrick amongst them, but not the Public School to be essentially then taken over, and certainly in terms of English football rather disastrously, for the next fifteen years before largely being limited to a secondary role by the rise of professionalism and the formation in 1888 on the initiative of yet another Diaporan Scot, William McGregor. James Fitzgerald would see it all before his death in 1899 in Kent at the age of just fifty-eight and one wonders what quiet thoughts he might have had.