Sometime ago on this site a piece on the St. Petersburg McPherson's role in the arrival of several British sports including Association football was posted with an attempt at some explanation of the transfer of that same game to Moscow. But since then there has been a considerable increase in the scope of the explanation cum information that has become available on-line and much of it centres on another Scot, William Hopper. He had been born in Penicuik, his father from just across the border in Northumberland, his mother from the town and started his working life in the paper-making industry by Duns and then in Kelso.

But from there he had gone south, first to Manchester to work for also Scots, Sir William Fairburn, and then to Bolton, from where he was sent first to St. Petersburg to install the gearing in a cotton-mill before transferring to Moscow to do much the same, essentially never to return. Indeed, in 1855 he would marry in the city, his bride, Elizabeth Russell, from the local, British community centred around the British Church, which became St. Andrews (above), but her parents originally from Portsmouth, the couple going on to have seven children, four sons and three daughters born between 1856 and 1870.

But here more dates are useful. Hopper himself had been born in 1816. He was twenty-six or -seven when he had left for Russia, thirty-nine when he had married, forty when he became a father for the first time. There is therefore no chance he would in Scotland have had much meaningful contact with football, not least because neither of what would be known as Association or Rugby had been codified. It would also mean that when in the early 1880s the Hopper company is said first to have set out a sports-field, a football-field for its employees he was almost sixty and away from Scotland, indeed Britain for the best part of forty years.

However, with regard to his sons the youngest, Sydney, was perhaps fifteen but the three older ones about twenty-six, twenty-four and twenty-two respectively, at least two of them already qualified as engineers, presumably in Britain, and perhaps returned bitten by the football bug. The only caveat is that it was clearly rugby because in 1886 the Czarist regime would specifically ban it as being too brutal, on which there was something of a hiatus. It would not be until 1895 that further football would make a re-appearance. But this time it could certainly not have been due in any way to William Hopper. He had died still Moscow in 1885. Nor is it likely to have been any his first three sons, James, William Jnr. and Allan, all by now well into in the their thirties, James almost forty. But younger Sydney, seen as the driving force of the business and later very active in Moscow life and politics, is another matter. He was not quite thirty and, if he too, perhaps at school or college back in the homeland, might have picked up the football contagion, maybe it was for the round- and not the oval-ball version.