Football came to Brazil at almost the same time in three places. The time was 1894 and the pioneers were all Scots or Scots Diasporans, drawn across the South Atlantic by two of the three main transmitters of the football contagion not just to South America but world-wide. One worked in textiles. Two were railway men. One would come to Rio de Janeiro and two to Sao Paulo, or at least one to the city of and the other to the State of Sao Paulo. Two were individuals and one was a family, the Scots Scotts. All should be equally lauded.
Thomas Scott, the Scott-family patriarch, was one of the many Britons, particularly Scots, who travelled the globe first building and then running railways. He arrived in Sao Paulo probably in the late 1880s possibly a little earlier but he did little more than pass through the city en route for the north-west of the state and Campinas. If the city of Sao Paulo was the generator of the thrust of the railways into the interior of Southern Brazil then Campinas was its junction-box. A line from the port of Santos had first reached Sao Paulo in early 1867. It was extended to Campinas later that same year year from where there was over the next half century a gradual extension north-west to the Mato Grosso and south-west into Parana. Campo Grande, Mato Grosso's capital, was reached in 1914 and North Parana’s Londrina a decade later.
Thomas Scott, Thomas Archibald McTaggart Scott had been born in 1865 at 114, Glebe Street, Glasgow. His father, Hugh Webster Scott, was an engine fitter. His mother was Jane McTaggart. They had been married a year earlier. She was Glaswegian but he had been born in Perthshire, at Smiddyhaugh by Auchterarder just a few miles and years from William McGregor, the founder of the English Football League and from one of my own great-great grandfathers.
In 1871 the family, Hugh, Jane, Thomas and his brother also Hugh were living in Denniston. A decade later still , now one of six sons, Thomas and Hugh plus John, William, Archibald and Robert, were at 238, Springburn Road, their father described as an engine fitter at a railway works, no doubt the Springburn Works itself. They were a railway family.
In 1901 Hugh Scott Snr. had retired to Port Dundas with Jane and Hugh Jnr, yet a year later and not quite sixty he was dead and he had died in the Glasgow City Poorhouse. By then Thomas had been working abroad for more than a decade. By the 1891 census he had left the family home in Barony and that same year a T. Scott travelled alone from Britain but to Rio for Rio not Santos for Sao Paulo. He would do the same journey again, alone in 1896 but having also travelled to the same destination with his wife, two children and Hugh, his brother in 1894.
Thomas Scott's wife was Helen Cowie. She was also born in Glasgow, in 1864. Her father was John Traquair Cowie, a clothlapper, whatever that is, and her mother, Helen McCredie. They had married in 1863 when Helen Snr. was two months pregnant. Two more sisters, Eliza Traquair and Mary had followed Helen Jnr. and in 1871 they were all living in Pollockshaws. Yet the following year their mother was dead, struck down by the scourge of the Scots working-classes, tuberculosis.
John Cowie would remarry, to Mary Allison, a milliner and dressmaker from Edinburgh. They would have two sons and in 1881 all seven would be living in Eglington Road in the Gorbals, Helen, known as Nellie, aged 16 and listed as an unlikely sister-in-law. It is not the only curiosity in the story. There was no record in Scotland at least of Thomas Scott and Helen Cowie ever marrying. Their first child, John, was born somewhere between 1886 and 1888 and probably not in Brazil, yet again there was no record. Still they were certainly a couple. They were to raise seven children in all, six boys and a girl. They would both die in Brazil and are buried in the same grave in the town of Jundiai.
In the end the explanation would be simplicity itself. By 1890 Thomas Scott was already in Brazil, presumably on the railways, where his father's work and contacts in Scotland would have been useful. And also in 1890 Nellie Cowie sailed alone not to Rio but Santos. She went to marry Thomas Scott. Their marriage is recorded in the Consulate in the port. Their daughter, also called Nellie, was born later that year or early the next in Brazil and it would be with John and Nellie and his wife that Thomas returned from a trip home in 1894, presumably at the end of a first, standard, four year contract.
Whether the Scotts were living in Rio, Santos or Sao Paulo by 1897 is unclear but they were on the move. That year or in early 1898 they arrived in Campinas, he to work or continue to work for the Sao Paulo Railway Company. He was still aged just thirty-three and having spent his youth in the hay-day in Scotland of the Scots game, clearly very much a football fan, teaching the game to and playing it with his growing boys. John would have been about ten. Hugh, their third child and also born in Brazil, was four.
The family lived in the Ponte Preta quarter of the town, named after the black bridge that spanned the railway. And Thomas and his boys were soon teaching neighbours the rudiments of the game, the local High School took it up and football caught on to such an extent that 1900 saw the foundation of a first club, the Ponte Preta Athletic Association. It played its first game in October that year, a 2-0 win against what sounds like a scratch team, Carlos Gomes, and it remains the doyen of Brazilian clubs, older than any of the more famous ones in Rio and Sao Paulo. And importantly its first Treasurer was Miguel do Carmo, a young Black man, perhaps Brazil's first Black player, five years before
Bangu's Francisco Carregal, and certainly its first Black football administrator.
It is said two of Thomas Scott's young boys at the time played in the Ponte Preta second team. John was aged around thirteen, so likely, Hugh just six or seven so impossible. But they would not ever have the opportunity to move up into the first team as once again the Scotts were on the move. Yellow fever broke out in Campinas and in 1902 the railway company moved its personal, the Scotts amongst them, twenty or so miles down the line to Jundiai. There Thomas Scott already had footballing connections. Two years earlier he had with others of the town's railway workers helped to found Gremio C.P. In 1903 a year after his permanent arrival he would also be a founder of a second perhaps more dedicated football team, Jundiahy F.C.. It would not last long, folding in 1908 for lack of members. But just a year later Thomas Scott would be on the first board of directors of yet another local railway club, his third, Paulista, and on the field his sons, John and Hugh, would be organising its football. In 1910 Hugo, aged about fifteen, was even playing in the team. Both Gremio and Paulista exist today, the first, as might have been its raison d'etre from the beginning, more a social club with a football team and the second still playing at a good level in the fourth layer of the Brazilian game.
Thomas Scott seems not to have travelled home in the first decade of 20th Century as might have been expected but he would returned to Scotland on leave in 1912. Whilst there he would be told he was seriously ill. He would sail back to Brazil and the following February in Jundiai he would die and there be buried. He was just forty eight. By then his eldest son, John, aged twenty-five or so had moved to Sao Paolo. His mother, Helen and the four younger children, Robert, James, David and Archibald, joined him. Alexander and Hugh were seemingly elsewhere.
For Helen the move to the state capital proved fatal. She died there in January 1914 not quite a year after her husband and the same age as he had been. Her body was laid beside his in Jundiai and that might have been the end of story, footballing and otherwise. Certainly it seemed like it when Hugh left that same year to Britain to enlist. In fact Hugh Scott survived the war and returned to live in Brazil, but in Rio. Meanwhile football in Sao Paulo had been going through an explosive period, both in terms of growth and organisation, a period and subsequent embedding, of which John and several of the younger
Scotts, not least through Britania F.C., were to be a part for almost the next two decades.