Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian capital until the building of Brasilia, is a city of outstanding beauty because of its location but also one of contrasts. Within the city itself there is the largely white and prosperous south, with its beaches - Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon - backed by imposing hills, and the working-class north. But there is also the city itself and its industrial hinterland. Twenty miles north-west into that hinterland is Bangu. Now a bustling, if distant, city suburb in 1890 it was little more than a hamlet, where the land was cheap, there was water from the surrounding hills and the railway newly passing through.
It was then and there that a London-registered, Brazilian company decided to build a textile factory to be modelled after the cotton mills of Lancashire. Work was begun in 1891 and the building finished in 1893. What it needed then was machinery and new people after the building-workers had gone to install the machines and teach locally-recruited labour how to work them and to supervise production. The installers and the instructors came like the machinery from Britain, from the great textile regions, in England Lancashire and Yorkshire and from Scotland, from Angus with its linen production and Glasgow's industrialising southern suburbs.
The worker-technicians began to arrive in early 1894. Amongst them and others that followed soon after were John Stark, James Hartley, William French, the Proctor brothers, William and Andrew, Thomas Stirling, Clarence Hibbs and Thomas Donohoe. French and Hartley were Lancastrians. Stirling was born in Lancashire of a Scottish father. Stark, the Proctors and Donohoe were all Scots with a Scottish passion for the round-ball game.
And it was Donohoe, who started the ball rolling. He was the son of Irish parents, who had come to Scotland after An Gorta Mor. A big man, well over six feet tall, part of a family of seven children he was brought up in Renfrewshire, in Busby, an industrialising village, where he, his father as foreman, and his brothers all were employed at the local dye-works. He played his football, his Scottish football, in the local leagues. On Saturday, March 2, 1889, he featured up front against Cartvale, the more senior club, for Busby, a local derby, scoring in a 5-2 defeat. And he did so alongside and against several players who went on to be professionals, Robert Calderwood and the Dunbar brothers, Tom, the first of just two to play for both Celtic and Rangers, and Mick, later a celtic Board member.
It is clear when Tom Donohoe arrived in Bangu in April 1894 his expectation was to be able to continue to play his favourite sport at least for recreation. However, he found nothing, not even a ball either in Bangu or even in Rio itself, so asked for balls, boots and other football equipment to be sent from Britain with the next machinery delivery. The story is that is was bought but not packed, at which point he turned to a simple alternative. He asked his wife, Eliza, to bring a ball and boots with her when she would visit him in August that same year. That she did and in doing so carried the first proper football not just to Bangu, nor to Rio but to Brazil.
So who was Eliza Donohoe. In 1890 aged 27 so born in 1863 Donohoe married in Glasgow; to Elizabeth Montague from Hutchesontown, known as Eliza and also employed at the Busby dye-works. In 1891 they were living next door to Thomas’s older brother and his family of seven still in Busby. It was in that same year their first son, John, was born and to be followed in 1895 by a second son, Patrick, also born in Scotland but conceived in Bangu, when Eliza visited. She had travelled with her sister, who would marry one of Bangu’s other first footballers, James Hartley.
So at the beginning of September 1894 and now with the basic essentials Tommy Donohoe would rapidly mark out a rough pitch, improvise some goals, gather together the twelve of so other Britons there at the time and play a first match, six-a side it is true but importantly to Association rules. He knew no others. It also seems certain that Donohoe would have very early on liked to have formed a club. He did try but, although a factory social club was founded, was in 1897, shall we say, not encouraged by the Company Secretary. But the ad-hoc games had soon attracted attention. Other non-British workers were soon involved and 11-a-side games began to be played on a regular basis. There was structured football even if there was no formalised club.
It would be the best part of a decade before with regard to a Bangu football club a change of factory management produced a change of heart. At the end of 1903 a meeting took place and it was Andrew Proctor, who suggested as a separate entity to replace the previous well-established but informal arrangements the formal formation of a sports club, with football in the winter and cricket in the summer. Athletic Club Bangu was the result with the factory director as Honorary President but it was in essence a Scots club, one run by not one but three Scots, Tommy Donohoe as Vice-President, Andrew Proctor as Secretary and Treasurer and John Stark as captain of football.
Andrew Proctor and younger brother , William, had been born in Dundee and Coupar Angus in 1864 and 1874 respectively. In 1881 at seventeen Andrew was a Yarn Stretcher. Their father was a flax factory supervisor, like their mother too born in Lundie. Stark was a chemist, the son of the manager of the Thornliebank Printworks in the Glasgow suburbs. He was born in 1868, so younger than Donohoe and Proctor yet still thirty-six in 1904, an old hand but not the oldest in a new team. However, they had all had their early football education, when Andrew Watson, the first Black international player, was captaining Scotland and playing his club football at Hampden Park and Queen's Park also in the south Glasgow suburbs. And no doubt emigrants of all nationalities and locals of every background were already playing informally. It was therefore perhaps no surprise, also given the new Company Secretary's insistence, that written into the constitution of the new club was that it would be open to all employees of the factory as both players and spectators without discrimination. It was a regulation in sharp contrast to the attitude and resultant rules of clubs in the city of Rio, its first, Fluminense, amongst them. There and even in the less exclusive but still elitist clubs that had had been created in its wake players were white and crowds were segregated. It would see Bangu's, rio'a and perhaps Brazil's first Black player, Francisco Carregal, already in the First team in 1905 and lead to off-the-field, racially and colour based conflict between Rio's clubs, conflict that would only be settled twenty years later and in the end by the direct intervention of Brazil's President.
In 1902 Fluminense's first game had been against Rio F.C., interestingly formed by a McIntosh. It had won, some say, 6-0, others 8-0. In 1903 it began the season against Rio Cricket, a 3-1 win away followed by a 3-0 defeat to Paysandu, Rio's British club. It would then travel to Sao Paulo for three games, a draw and two wins including one over the Sao Paulo's British club, SPAC and Charles Miller. Then on returning it would have two more friendlies to round off the season, a draw against Paysandu, and another against again Scots-sounding Team Buchan, Albert Victor Buchan, in Niteroi.
By a stroke of fate Bangu's first official game in July 1904 would also be in Niteroi and against Rio Cricket. Fluminense had started the season with another draw in May against the same opposition. Bangu would be at the wrong end of a 5-0 defeat but its next and first home game would be against Andarahy and that it would win. The Proctor brothers, Stark and Donohoe would play in both games with Tommy in his forty-second year. In fact he would play in all four fixtures that year, two wins, the second being against Andarahy once more, and two losses before hanging up his boots. It was perhaps wise because fixtures one and two of the 1905 season were against Fluminense. The first at home with a team that already the introduction of non-British players was won 5-3, with Oscar Cox, the club's founder, scoring one of the visitors' goal, and the second was lost at Fluminense's stadium in Rio in Laranjeiras, Cox again on the score-sheet. Carregal would play in both games with apparently not a murmur from the opposition. In fact in Bangu's third game against Riochuelo but still at Fluminense Oscar Cox would be referee, again with no objection.
Bangu would play eleven games that second season, Fluminense at least fifteen against the same teams; Football & Athletic, Rio Cricket, Internacional and America, counter-intuitively the German club. For Fluminense it would begin in May once more against Rio Cricket, a 7-1 win away and the month would end with another away win, 3-0 at Bangu. In June Fluminense would travel to Sao Paulo again for three games, in July the Sao Paulo team, Paulistano, would come to Rio and for the rest of the season friendlies in Rio would continue, including the first against a new team, Botafogo, founded in 1904 and playing at Paysandu.
1906 would also begin with friendlies until the middle of May when discussions that had been taking place about the creation of a league along the lines of Sao Paulo that had been formed in 1902 came to fruition. The Carioca, i.e. Rio, Championship was founded, consisting of two divisions with a first division of six clubs all with British connections, Fluminense, Bangu, Paysandu, Rio Cricket, Botafogo and Football & Athletic. In that first season the league would be won by Fluminense. Oscar Cox would not play but his brother, Edwin, did. Paysandu would be runner-up, Bangu second-to-bottom. John Stark and the Proctors would play. Stark would also referee and another Scot, Glasgow-born, recently-arrived Alexander Leigh would be the club's top-scorer.
It seemed on the face of it that the championship had been a success yet the following season, 1907, just four teams took part in Division 1. Rio Cricket and Bangu would withdraw, Bangu because of a decision of the majority of league members to ban Black players. The club would instead host friendlies against a growing number of new teams in the city and surrounding towns. Tommy Donohoe would referee.
In 1908, as Bangu continued with its programme of friendlies, Donohoe also continued to referee. However, he would be joined with the whistle by Francisco Carregal as he probably became not just Rio's first Black player but now the country's first Black footballing official. Meantime, Fluminense would take its third championship in a row in a league from which Internacional had dropped out but Riocheulo, Rio Cricket and America had re-joined, tacitly accepting segregation. Fluminense would again be champions.
In fact Bangu F.C. was also to rejoin the league in 1909 in what was on so many fronts not to be its finest season. From 1908 it had had a new President, James McGregor, and there also seemed to be a new attitude to it from the factory management. As was happening at the same time with major teams based on British companies in Uruguay and Argentina support seemed to be lessening. A proposal was made to merge the sports and the social clubs. In reality it would have meant the sports club taken over by the social club. Part of the deal also seems to have been participation in the league and acceptance of its segregation rule. In fact Bangu would play just three games, the final one a 9-0 defeat to Fluminense at Laranjeiras and is not included in that year's final, official league table. For reasons on the face of it apparently to do with refereeing and not colour it decided not to play the other nine fixtures just as a new President came in and was able to thwart the take-over. That new President was Andrew Proctor.
1910 again saw a Carioca Championship of six teams. The non-British Mangueira had been relegated and replaced by the British Rio Cricket. It would be the year that saw the departure of Oscar Cox to Europe. He would only be returned after his death. And it would see his Fluminense for the first time not take the title. It went to Botafogo and by a clear margin. Marginalised Bangu meantime hardly played a game; just three friendlies all season.
Fluminense's response to the loss of its crown was rapid and must have had something to do with Oscar Cox living now in Europe and certainly spending time in London. In 1911, just had been the case three seasons earlier in Sao Paulo, a former player and professional coach arrived at the club. And he was by no means run-of-the-mill. As manager he had taken Denmark to the silver medal at the 1908 London Olympic Games, losing only to the hosts. As a player he was said, as a goalkeeper, to have played for the somewhat vague “Wanderers”. In fact, he had played for Arsenal, including forty appearances in 1893-94 and then well over 200 times for Manchester City in the Football League, seventy-one times in three Southern League seasons for the FA Cup winners from 1902, Tottenham Hotspur , including 52 times in 1904-5, and had finished his career still in the Southern League at Norwich and Brentford. He never played for England but must have been quite close to it. His name was Charlie Williams. He worked at Rio's elite club in 1911 and 1912 between winter coaching in Denmark and France and again from 1924 to 1926 before going on to Botafogo, America FC, Flamengo and managing the social side of the Paissandu Club until retirement. There he must have played bowls with my grandfather and grandmother, both club champions at the time. And he would die in Rio having inadvertently but by his presence alone turned the city's football upside-down.
With Williams in charge Fluminense would win the Carioca Championship without losing a game but there would be indirect repercussions both externally and internally. In the league Riochuelo would not play a game and Botafogo would play just two before pulling out. Amateurism was under pressure. It would also lead to a group of Fluminense players, including the captain, deciding at the end of the season in November 1911 to break away and approach a nearby rowing club to form a new team under its auspices. That rowing club was Flamengo and the result is the Flu-Fla derby that continues to this day.
The appointment of Williams had without doubt been a visible first step in the professionalisation of Rio football. More covertly players were also being enticed and who is to say if they were being paid or not. The very British James Calvert, the league's top scorer and Fluminense player in 1911 had been a Bangu player in 1909. Ernest Coggins, Bangu's goalkeeper in 1906 was between Botafogo's posts in 1908. And just as in Sao Paulo and in other South American countries at the same time some teams thought the move from amateurism a move too far. The result was that in 1912 the league split. In one were the two teams from Botafogo, Botafogo itself and Internacional, and teams from the centre and north of the city. In the other was Fluminense and other teams split equally between the south, including Flamengo, and the north of the city, including Bangu.
Never could it be said that 1912 was a good season for Bangu. It won just two games of fourteen with eleven defeats, finishing in third last place. But Fluminense, shorn of the players, who had formed Flamengo, was just one place above. Flamengo in contrast finished as runners-up two points behind Paysandu, a first win for the British club. Meantime Botafogo had won the other league and there had been time to patch up differences.
Certainly 1913 saw one league, only initially of ten teams. Bangu, Fluminense, Flamengo, Botafogo and Paysandu were all there but again there were not so much problems but intricacies. The three bottom teams after nine games were eliminated from a second round of six more. America would finish top and Botafogo and Flamengo joint second. Bangu was one of those that did not get beyond the first round and dropped down to the second division for the following season only to bounce straight back again. However, there would be a casualty of the bounce-back – Paysandu. In 1914 not only would it finish in bottom place and be relegated it actually ceased to play football altogether, its ground was leased to Flamengo and it was on the move. The cessation was in no small measure due to the Great War. As the British club, as elsewhere in South America, many of its players returned to Britain to enlist.
Flamengo would take the 1914 championship and on its new ground also the 1915 trophy, when Fluminense would finish runner-up, in no small part due to the goal-scoring of a certain Harry Welfare. Bangu would be second-to-last but there would, if temporarily, be a British casualty that year too as its players also returned to fight. Rio Cricket would suspend its footballing activity. However, unlike Paysandu it would return to the game four years later post-War.
The arrival
of Harry Welfare in Rio would be momentous for Rio football. He was one of two prominent British expatriate players of the time, the other being Sidney Pullen, or Sydney as he was often simply called. Welfare was a big man, 1.9 metres tall and, shall we say, robust. He is said to have arrived in Rio to take up a teaching position. He had trained as a teacher in Liverpool. In fact his travel arrangements were perhaps a little more complicated. He is listed as “a traveller” with passage to Buenos Aires on a ship from Britain that called in at Rio. He may have liked what he saw so simply decided to stay and once there have been offered a teaching job.
And he was without doubt a fine footballer. From the age of eighteen he had played for six seasons with a leading amateur team in Lancashire, the Northern Nomads; the Corinthian of the North. He then played eight games for Tranmere Rovers and was signed by Liverpool, still as an amateur, playing four games for the first team as a winger, although he was essentially a centre-forward. Liverpool was wanting him to sign professionally but he declined and aged twenty-four headed for the port.
On arrival in Rio towards the end of the 1913 season his talent had been spotted and he had been persuaded to join Fluminense. For the rest of the 1913 season he was in the second team, moving into the first team from 1914 onwards. 1914 would be a not entirely successful season for the club in spite of Welfare scoring nine times. However, he believed he had a solution, in attack at least, one that change the direction of the city's game. He began to coach his fellow forwards in the style he knew and which says a great deal about how the team had been playing until then. His instruction to them was simple, “Give me the ball and run beyond me to receive the ball again”, in other words, "Show, give and go”. It tells us that prior to his arrival, at Fluminense at least, carrying the ball, dribbling, the English style had been the rule and after his arrival the Scottish-style, the pass, just as it was in Sao Paulo, became king. From a player with a Liverpool that two decades earlier had been the team of the Macs, with all eleven from Scotland, and even in 1912 had been half-Scots little else should have been expected.
In 1915 Welfare scored nineteen goals in twelve games. Fluminense rose from fourth to second place. The following season Welfare would have injury problems and the club would suffer. The table was topped by America but once he was fit again his club would take the championship for the next three seasons. The run only came to an end in 1920 with Welfare by then aged thirty-two but with Fluminense nevertheless runner-up.
Harry Welfare would play until 1924. scoring a phenomenal one hundred and sixty-three goals in one hundred and sixty-six appearances. He would then turn to management but not at Fluminense. From 1927 for a decade he take charge of the rival club, Vasco da Gama. Under him it would take three Carioca Championships and be runner-up another four more times.
Sydney, Sidney McKinlay Pullen's career spans that of Harry Welfare and achieved an honour that alluded his contemporary, one that is unique. He is the only non-Brazilian ever to play for the country's national team, making three appearances for Brazil in the 1916 South American Cup, where he also refereed the match between Argentina and Chile. Yet in spite of being deemed foreign, presumably with a British passport, Pullen was actually Brazil-born, in 1893. He was the son of Charles Gordon Pullen, English-born from a British-Brazilian merchant family, and Brazilian-born Isabel Harper, from a Scottish merchant family there . He was at least half-Scots. In 1910 aged seventeen he made his début as a forward for Paysandu, where his cousin, Hugh Edgar Pullen, had played alongside James Calvert in 1907 and he was twenty-one when the British club's football team was disbanded at the end of 1914 season. He then joined not Fluminense, nor Botafogo, where Hugh had played the previous season, but Flamengo. There over six years he would make 116 appearances and score 41 goals. But the figures are slightly misleading. Pullen would make a significant, immediate contribution in his first season to his new team's second championship in 1915, in spite of Harry Welfare's scoring exploits. And in 1916 after the South American Cup at the height of his powers he would return to Britain to enlist, missing at least a season.
The 1916 South American Cup was officially the first ever, a decade after international football of a sort had come to Brazil. That first international match had been between a Sao Paulo selection and one from South Africa in 1906. The second two years later had been played at Fluminense's Laranjeiras stadium between a Brazilian team drawn only from Rio, including Edwin Cox and Ernest Coggins, and Argentina. Brazil lost by the odd goal in five. The third in 1912 was again a Brazilian selection drawn this time from Sao Paulo played there against the same opposition. Argentina would once more win and easily. It would be followed four days later by a similar fixture in Laranjeiras, another heavy Brazilian defeat. And the next fixture was again a Rio-based selection, in 1913 in Botafogo against a Portuguese XI. Sidney Pullen was inside-left in a goalless draw, in which the Brazilian goalkeeper saved a penalty. It was followed by Sao Paulo-based teams twice playing one from Chile. Brazil was defeated in both fixtures. In fact Brazil would have from 1913 to wait a year and two more games for a victory. A team drawn from both Sao Paulo and Rio would travel to Buenos Aires. It would lose the first game but a week later win the second. And that would be it until the South American Championships, where Pullen would play in all three games not up front but at centre-half, whether an English, defensive one or a Scottish attacking one is unclear.
Meanwhile outwith the city and the league's top division at Bangu 1911 had been relatively busy, twenty-four games in all between April and November with a team that featured just two Britons, John, one of the brothers Hellowell, and for the first part of season, Edgar Calvert, brother of James. 1912 had seen it persuaded to rejoin one of the two league, finishing joint sixth of eight with Hellowell still in the team. 1913 would lead to relegation once more and there would be no Hellowell. But there would be a player simply called Patrick, another, James Stirling, and a family connection. James was the son of Thomas, himself the son of Scot who had moved south for work and had married James Hartley's sister. He had slotted in neatly at right-half. Patrick at centre-forward and then right-wing was the Scottish-born son of a Scot too, Tommy Donohoe's younger boy, now working in the factory as a chemist. And James and Patrick were cousins.
In 1914 Bangu had topped the Second Division and would be promoted. The team would also be reinforced by the inclusion of another second-generation player, Archibald French, the son of another of the club's founders, William French. Aged 17 he had just returned from Britain. And Edgar Calvert would be back. However, that year too there was a loss. On a visit back to Britain with his wife, Tom Donohoe's sister-in-law, James Hartley had died in his home town of Oldham.
In 1915 Bangu would finish in penultimate spot in the league. With its new blood it would be in 1916 be third, above both Flamengo and Fluminense and it would be essentially the same Bangu team that at best held it own in the 1917 season, during which its players had been noticed. The following season only Patrick Donohoe remained. Archibald French would be poached by Fluminense and would be in the Championship-winning team. Bangu would once more finish seventh of ten.
In 1919 Bangu would finish fifth in the league as Fluminense would again take the title. However, Archibald French would be dead, struck down by the epidemic of Spanish flu that swept the city. In 1920 Bangu would be sixth but Patrick Donohoe would play his last, regular game, then turn his attention to the club's successful tennis team. It seemed the British, more often than not Scots dynasties at Bangu had come to an end. But is was not quite the case. On the field in the 1921 season for a few games at least Edgar Calvert returned. In 1922 Patrick Donohoe made two appearances and in 1923 there was a new, old name on the team-sheet; John Hartley, son of James, now a Bangu dentist not just with a Scottish mother, but also, of course, Patrick Donohoe's and James Stirlings' cousin. He would play until 1926. And off the field the club President was James Schofield, Stirling-born once more of Irish parents. He too had made his life in South America, had been involved in the textile industry for many years and had come to Bangu in 1919 already at the age of sixty-three. And he was also a hard man, a man apart on arrival intent, no doubt under orders from London, on reorganising, reducing working conditions. Strikes followed but matters seemed to settle, in time allowing him inclusion. In 1923 he took on the Director's traditional role of football club president and would remain in position, a continuing Scottish presence at the club and in the town until 1927. Only then after thirty-three years would Scottish influence there and in the Rio game finally come to an end.
Of the fate of those involved in the early days of Rio football the knowledge is mixed. Of those who went to Bangu James Hartley had died in Oldham in 1914. Eliza Donohoe died in Brazil but the date is not clear. Patrick Donohoe would die in Rio in 1948. Tommy Donohoe remarried and himself had died in Bangu in 1925, where now he is honoured by a huge statue in the car-park and in front of Bangu's shopping centre, the old textile, mill, and with the Bangu's club history around it base.
Oscar Cox would die in France in 1931 and his body be brought back to Rio for burial. James Schofield would die the same year, aged 71 in Niteroi. Of William French and Edwin Cox nothing more is known. John Stark would possibly last be seen travelling from Lisbon, perhaps on the way back from Brazil, in 1922. He had certainly returned home in 1915. He signed off his father's death in Thornliebank that year. Alexander Leigh had passed away young in Glasgow in 1920 and William Proctor in Bangu in 1923. His brother, Andrew, who had married his girl from home, Mary Cameron, in Tijuca in Rio in 1899, witnessed by a third brother, who had also moved to Rio, would outlive William by twenty years, dying in Ipanema in 1945. He is buried in the English Cemetery. The Hellowell brothers would also stay in Brazil and, indeed, in Bangu. William would live there until 1932 and Thomas 1954.
Francisco Carregal would remain closely associated with Bangu football into the 1940s. He would die in the town in 1949, whilst on the other side of the city Charlie Williams, who after arriving in Rio for a second time in 1924 had never gone home, passed away in 1952. It left few of the pioneers known to be alive and just three of them to see the 1960s. Sidney Pullen, James Stirling and Harry Welfare, would all live to see Brazil win at least one World Cup. Welfare would even see England take one, dying in Angra dos Reis in September 1966.
And there is one small additional aside. In 1871 a textile mill had earlier been built a little further into the interior of the State of Rio at Paracambi. In 1894 its works social club, Brasil Industrial, had been founded. In 1911 three of those who themselves had been founder-members of Bangu went to work there; Clarence Hibbs, Frederick Jacques and Bangu's first captain of football, John Stark. And in 1912 all three were instrumental in the formation, following the Bangu model and based on the textile mill's social club, of the works' football team, Brasil Industrial Esporte Clube, one that again like Bangu exists to this day.