FOOTBALL is a passion in Argentina and its clubs and players have long played an illustrious role in world football. There can be found some of the most passionate fans in the world, along with some spectacular, and sometimes violent, club rivalries. But its roots lie with the British and can be traced back a long way.
There are the usual reports of British sailors as early as 1840 playing some kind of football on shore leave in the bustling port of Buenos Aires, described in the local newspaper as men behaving curiously by ‘running around after a ball’.
While the majority of those occasions are likely to have been no more than kickabouts, there were enough sightings in the ports of Argentina and other South American countries to suggest that some at least had the semblance of a proper game. But it was all too transitory to last and another generation was to pass before any serious attempt was made to introduce the game in Argentina.
In the 1860s and 1870s foreign capital and waves of European immigrants poured into the country, attracted by its immense agricultural and mineral wealth, especially in the Río de la Plata area around Buenos Aires. British arrivals and investment were playing a prominent part in the development of Argentine agriculture and its railway and tramway lines. However, the initiative to form a football club came not from expatriate railway workers, as has commonly been thought, but from two young Yorkshire-born brothers and their companions who were employed in commerce and banking firms in Buenos Aires.
On 20 June 1867, James and Thomas Hogg, together with their close friend Walter Heald, organised the first official football match to be played on the continent of South America. It was a significant and praiseworthy occasion but in the event it turned out to be something of a false dawn.
It was the wool trade that had first brought the Hogg family to Argentina in the early part of the 19th century after the country had won its independence from Spain. The brothers’ father, also named Thomas, was the owner of a textile factory in Yorkshire and like many other English immigrants of the time he was keen to take advantage of the commercial opportunities offered by the growing population and resources of Argentina. Thomas soon became an active member of the expatriate community in Buenos Aires and helped to found a British commercial centre and British Library. A cricket club soon followed, a game which apparently left the local community bewildered.
Thomas Hogg encouraged his two sons to be as enterprising and sporting as he was. They did not disappoint him. They made a wide-ranging contribution to the introduction of modern sport to Argentina. The record speaks for itself. The young Thomas Hogg was the founder of Dreadnought Swimming Club in 1863. With his brother James, he organised the Buenos Aires Athletic Society which held its first events in 1867. Thomas played in the inaugural game of rugby that took place at Buenos Aires Cricket Club in1874; he was also responsible for founding what appears to be the first golf club in Latin America. And James took up playing tennis, a game that had just arrived in Argentina.
It was not surprising that the Hogg brothers should want to add football to their sporting interests. They would have been made aware of the rising popularity of the game in Britain. But they knew very little about how to play it and its rules, and unsure whether there would be any enthusiasm for the game in the city. However, early in 1867 Edward Mulhall, the editor of the Argentine/English newspaper The Standard, knowing that Thomas Hogg was a keen sportsman, gave him a copy of the laws of football that had been drawn up in 1863 in England by the FA to differentiate it from rugby.
On Monday 6 May 1867, the Hogg brothers felt confident enough to place the following notice in the The Standard, ‘A Preliminary Meeting will be held on Thursday evening next at 7.30p.m. in Calle Temple. Opposite No.46 for the purpose of making rules and regulations for Foot Ball Matches to be played on the Cricket Ground during the winter. All persons interested are requested to attend.’ [Quote by Victor Raffo in Gordon Bridger, Britain and the Making of Argentina. WIT Press. Southampton.2013]
A small group of young men, all from the north of England, responded to the advertisement, and at the Calle Temple on 9 May they reached the decision to found what would be known as the Buenos Aires Football Club. The founding committee consisted of Thomas and James Hogg from Skelton, Yorkshire, Thomas Jackson from Cumberland, Thomas Barlow Smith from Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire, and Walter Heald from Pendle, Lancashire. The committee drew up its rules and decided that the club’s first match should take place later in the month on 25 May – the anniversary of Argentina’s first national government in 1810.
Thomas Hogg, the elder brother, was employed by the London & River Plate Bank (he later became manager), and his brother James was a stockbroker. Their close friend Walter Heald was appointed secretary to the new club. He worked for a property development company and was very active socially within the British community.
All three were the trailblazers, men who literally started the ball rolling. They went out in search of a suitable playing field (one turned out to be planted in alfalfa – a fodder crop), marked the pitch, carried the goal posts from place to place, ensured that the local English newspapers publicised the matches, and generally looked after all the administrative work.
For a country which was to become one of the greatest football nations in the world, the early days were not auspicious. The first games scheduled had to be abandoned because of torrential rain or simply for the lack of sufficient players. For example, a match held in La Boca, a residential area of Buenos Aires popular with the expatriate community, was restricted to just four-a-side (Boca is now best known for later being the home of Argentina’s famous football club Boca Juniors). It was recorded that the game started at the astonishingly early hour of 7am, perhaps to avoid the heat, drawing one observer to comment, ‘Many would doubt the mental sanity of the players if they had seen these youths running after a ball in the early hours of the morning – how else could football be considered other than as a game for the mad English!’
At last, what is considered to be the first authentic football match in Argentine history finally took place on the afternoon of 20 June 1867, Argentina’s National Flag Day and a bank holiday. Historically, this was a significant development, second only to the development of football in Britain itself. The first English club (Sheffield FC) had been founded just ten years earlier, and 1867 was the same year as the founding of the first Scottish club – Queen’s Park in Glasgow.
The Hogg brothers and their companions had not found it easy to find a ground suitable for the match and the football club was grateful for permission to play at the Buenos Aires Cricket Club ground in Palermo, a suburb of Buenos Aires. Not so many players as expected turned out, as some of those who had promised to take part seemed to prefer to see how the match went off.
Once a discussion over the propriety and etiquette of wearing shorts in front of the ladies had been resolved, two eight-man teams competed against one another. They were all British except for William Boschetti who had been born in St Lucia. Thomas Hogg captained the team calling itself the Rojos (Reds), and the other side was led by Walter Heald – the Blancos (Whites). Each team took their name from the colour of the caps they wore. The Reds defeated the Whites 4-0, chiefly owing to what The Standard termed the superior play of the Hogg brothers.
The newspaper concluded, ‘The day was all that could be desired, there were many spectators and the natives honoured the game with their presence and without doubt they enjoyed themselves and were astounded by the performance.’
Thomas Hogg and his colleagues were delighted with the success of the game, with Thomas declaring that football ‘is the best pastime, easier and cheaper for the youth of the middle class and for the people’, although he was probably thinking more about the British in their exclusive clubs rather than the wider community.
Walter Heald has left us with this vivid account of the game together with a glimpse of his busy social life:
‘June 20th, Thursday. This being a holiday and the football match day, J. Hogg and I went out by the 10 o’clock train to Palermo to mark out the pitch as we had settled to play on the cricket ground, after placing all the flags we adjourned to the Confiteria and had some bread and cheese and porter and soon after that, the rest of the players came out by the 12 o’clock train; we could not muster more than 8 on a side and that made the work very heavy, we played for about 2 hours and then shut up, being utterly exhausted; we returned by the 3.30 train and I forthwith proceeded to dress for the Louvre.
‘As I was going out to dine…my back was very painful and indeed to take away all my appetite as I could hardly touch a thing at dinner…I had to hold out to 7 o’clock as our Lodge (Heald was a Mason) opened at that hour and they are very punctual in commencing business…and the proceedings lasted until 10 o’clock…on leaving the Lodge I went straight back to the Temple and then at once to bed, but alas! No sleep as my back was so painful that I could not rest long in any one position and there was no doubt that I was injured internally (probably in the region of the kidneys) in the side that I accidentally received from J. Hogg in a charge.’ [Andreas Campomar. Galazo! A History of Latin American Football. Queros Publishing. 2014]
The newly created club played its final game of the season on 7 July in difficult playing conditions. The playing field was very muddy, and the players had to cope with a soaking and flabby ball. But their enthusiasm and support for the game remained high, and by the opening of the following 1868 season, five new footballs had been purchased from England. Further matches were planned against other expatriate sides, although only two were officially recognised. The Standard newspaper was now fully behind the club and helped arrange a full 11-a-side match which attracted a good deal of public interest.
The newspaper reported that ‘hundreds of carriages and horsemen gathered around to witness the odd behaviour of these English youths’. Once again, the Hogg brothers and Heald were the stars and scored most of the goals.
However, this promising start came to virtually nothing. The game made little real progress over the next decade and popular support proved difficult to sustain. A dispute arose among the Buenos club’s members over the interpretation of the rules of play. The problem was that its players came from different cities in England where versions of football were still played more akin to rugby, often allowing the use of hands instead of feet, or indeed both. Finally it was accepted that play had to be standardised, and in 1874 a meeting was held which, after much debate, decided to adopt the rules of rugby union.
Consequently in 1875 the football wing of the club was officially dissolved in favour of the sport of rugby. Although some members continued to play football according to their interpretation of the rules, interest in the game had lost its momentum (it was not until 1878 that final agreement was reached in England on a unified set of football rules based on the so-called Sheffield rules and those drawn up by the London-based FA).
A number of external disasters also restricted the growth of football and other sporting activity in the city. First was the deadly yellow fever epidemic of 1870 which killed over 26,000 people. It led to the mass evacuation of Buenos Aires, leaving only 60,000 inhabitants out of a population of some 200,000. There was little appetite for organising and running social and recreational activities within the city and in 1870 the Buenos Aires club itself was temporarily dissolved. Two years later however it was re-established and presided over by Thomas Hogg.
Secondly there was the financial collapse of 1873–75 which led to widespread unemployment and political unrest in Argentina. The depression affected particularly British commercial and industrial interests in the capital. A civil war broke out between the province of Buenos Aires and the national government which was not resolved until the 1880s when the new president, General Roca, took power.
Once political stability and law and order had been restored in Argentina, British investors were confident enough to again make massive investments in the infrastructure of the country, such as its railways and other public utilities.
By the mid-1880s about half a million immigrants had arrived in Argentina from the British Isles and continental Europe in search of fortune and a better life. The British community in Buenos Aires had become a relatively large and prosperous one, numbering about 40,000, with its own churches, hospitals, clubs, newspapers and the emergence of schools with organised sporting activities. It was going to be the schools and colleges providing education for the children of the British community, which would now provide the main impetus behind the development of football in Argentina.
As for the Hogg brothers, they continued to play an active part in the city’s social and recreation activities but the football baton had now passed firmly to another British immigrant – Alexander Watson Hutton.
Among the arrivals in Buenos Aires from Britain in February 1882 was Alexander Watson Hutton, a Scottish schoolteacher with an evangelical commitment to physical education. The Hogg brothers and their peers have a legitimate claim to be the first to introduce football to Argentina, but Hutton is the man whom the Argentinians regard as the true Founding Father of the game in their country.
Hutton was later to become highly esteemed in Argentina, but he was born and bred in the toughest of circumstances. His parents, Robert Hutton and his wife Ellen, were from humble agricultural and coalmining families in Fife in Scotland. They moved to the Gorbals in Glasgow in the 1840s where Robert set himself up as a grocer. It was there on 10 June 1853 that Alexander Watson Hutton was born.
At that time Glasgow was one of the fastest-growing cities of the world with a large population boom. The Gorbals on the south side of the River Clyde had become an overcrowded slum, with run-down houses and a predominantly working-class population living cheek by jowl with factories. It was an unhealthy place to live in with chronic problems of drunkenness, crime and disease. Nonetheless Robert Hutton’s business seems to have done reasonably well, employing two men, before the family relocated to Edinburgh.
However, between 1855 and 1858, Alexander was orphaned at five years old, when both his parents together with his two-year-old brother died of tuberculosis, it was a tragedy that he would not forget and would heavily influence his views on the importance of public health and regular exercise. He was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in Edinburgh, and then, upon her death in 1862, he was admitted into the Daniel Stewart Hospital School.
The Daniel Stewart Hospital was opened in 1855 by the Merchant Company of Edinburgh. Daniel Stewart, upon his death in 1814, had left a sum of money with instructions that it should be used to create a hospital and education for needy boys within the city. The hospital was transformed into Daniel Stewart’s College in 1870.
Getting a place at the school enabled Hutton to escape a life of destitution and raised his aspirations. Academically bright, he studied hard. It took him nearly ten years to complete his studies as he had to pay his way, but in 1872 he finally matriculated at Edinburgh University. By now he was also taking a close interest in sport, particularly football. During the 1860s and 70s, football in Scotland had become very popular, notably in the urban areas. It was in Glasgow where soccer mania was most intense and it is very likely that Hutton had been caught up in it.
When in 1880 Hutton received an invitation to become the headmaster of St Andrew’s School in Buenos Aires in Argentina, he had no hesitation in accepting the offer. For some time he had harboured ambitions of a career in education, a vocation nurtured by his experience of working for six years as a general teacher at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. At the college he had established a good reputation. His reference for the new post referred to him as a ‘model of excellence’, and that his classroom was a ‘happy and lively scene of activity’ and that he had a ‘special skill in teaching English’. [The reference provided for Alexander Hutton by George Watson’s College, Edinburgh, 1880]. Hutton formally graduated in philosophy at the university in 1881 and in the following year he took up his new position at St Andrew’s having been selected from about 100 candidates.
By the late 19th century, large numbers of Scots had emigrated overseas. Many settled in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but for some South America, and notably Argentina, was the popular choice. The River Plate area, in and around Buenos Aires, proved to be an attractive choice for members of the professional and business communities – ministers of religion, doctors, teachers, engineers and managers.
Since the public schools in Argentina were Catholic and taught in Spanish, the Scots at that time preferred to found their own schools. Given the strong links that remained with Scotland, it was expected that their new schools would recruit graduate schoolmasters from that country. One of these schools was St Andrew’s School in Buenos Aires, founded in 1833 by the first wave of Scottish immigrants, and by the time Hutton had arrived it had established itself as one of the leading schools in the city.
Hutton arrived at the school with firm views on what a modern progressive school curriculum should look like. He seems to have been much impressed by the reforms of the leading public schools of mid-Victorian England which placed the games ethic at the heart of the curriculum. This was the model he was intent on replicating in Argentina. He was himself a keen sportsman and was firmly convinced that there was a close relationship between physical, mental and moral health.
He shared the opinion that playing team sports would help to form character and promote values such as fairness, self-restraint and respect, all of which would stand them in good stead when they went out into the world. He once told an audience of his old boys that he had ‘done everything in his power to mould them both physically and mentally to take their places as leading citizens of this great republic’. [Alexander Hutton, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2014]
It was no surprise therefore that one of his priorities at St Andrew’s would be to introduce sports into the curriculum, and particularly football. It did not take him long to put together a promising soccer team at the school but it soon ran into difficulties. Despite the early efforts of the Hogg brothers, many of Buenos Aires’s expatriate middle-class community had no liking for soccer, and Hutton’s decision to teach their sons what some derided as ‘the animalistic game of football’ was not generally welcomed.
He also clashed with the management of the school over his request to expand the school’s playing fields and to construct a new gym. Exasperated, in 1884 he took the bold decision to leave and to set up his own school. (“I am grateful to Estela Rueda, the present Director of the High School, for information about Alexander Hutton’s time at the School.”)
Hutton was an enterprising and persuasive man and he seems to have got the backing of some of the wealthy and influential friends he had made in the city. He placed advertisements for his new school in The Standard newspaper. In February 1884 the English High School of Buenos Aires officially opened its doors as a bilingual, co-educational private school. The progressive nature of the school seems to have appealed to many in the expatriate British community and others, and within a relatively short period of time it had established a high reputation. Alexander’s personal life flourished as well. In March 1885 he married Margaret Budge who had been an elementary class teacher at the George Watson’s school he had worked at in Edinburgh. In the following year their son Arnold was born, the first of their three children. Sadly, Margaret died early in 1893, aged 39.
By 1886 the school had grown to 50 boarders and 500 day pupils and it had to move to bigger premises. Under Hutton’s direction a wide range of sports was introduced – cricket, swimming, tennis, boxing – and of course, football. Apparently, the school’s sporting facilities were placed near to a local madhouse, a location arousing wry amusement among those upper-class Argentines who remained mystified by some of the British recreations. [Guttman p.58]
To help improve the soccer skills of the students, Hutton persuaded a young friend of his and a good footballer, William Waters, with whom he had once lodged in Edinburgh, to come out to Argentina and take up an appointment as the school’s sports master. Hutton had ordered some regulation leather soccer balls from Britain and it may well be that it was Waters who brought them back in his bag. Apparently, when he arrived in July 1886 the puzzled Buenos Aires customs officials did not know how to classify them and were said to have fabricated a new customs category – ‘items for the crazy English’.
Waters later carved out a career for himself in Argentina as a successful footballer and as an importer of sporting goods. In 1902, Hutton married Catherine Waters, the sister of William.
Over the next few years football proved very popular with the students at the school. Hutton was himself not a talented footballer, but he was a good teacher and insisted on the Scottish style of playing that involved close passing and dribbling. That technique had been pioneered very successfully in the 1870s by the Glasgow club Queen’s Park, a team Hutton would very likely have watched and appreciated as a young man. The success of the game at Hutton’s High School soon caught the attention of other leading schools in the city and was adopted by them, including, ironically, Hutton’s former school, St Andrew’s.
Interest in the game spread from the schools into the wider community. Young employees of local companies in Buenos Aires, together with former students, began to form their own clubs, and started to play against one another regularly. In 1891 another Scot, Alec Lamont, a teacher at St Andrew’s School and a soccer enthusiast, formed the idea of gathering together five teams to play against one another in a league. William Waters, the football coach whom Hutton had recruited from England, captained the St Andrew’s club team which won the competition. It was a constructive idea but unfortunately, due to poor management and the lack of funds, the infant league collapsed after only one season.
Although Hutton’s own school had not been part of Lamont’s original league, he appreciated that it was an initiative whose time had come but to prosper it needed to be properly run and funded. He immediately set about making the necessary arrangements, and on 21 February 1893 Hutton launched what became known as the Argentine Association Football League (AAFL).
It was the first proper national association in South America and the eighth oldest in the world. Making up the league were Quilmes Athletic Club, Caledonians, St Andrew’s, English High School, Lomas Athletic Club, and Flores. Nearly all of the players and officials were expatriate Britons or of British extraction. Hutton was helped by his high personal standing in the local community but he was the one with the organising skills to drive the venture forward. From its very modest start in 1893, the league now boasts a structure which contains nearly 500 teams.
Hutton remained as president of the AAFL until 1896 and occasionally refereed matches. His efforts to promote the game in the Argentine educational system were given a significant boost in 1898 when physical education was made mandatory in all schools. By 1899 enough new clubs had emerged to warrant the setting of a Second Division of the league. Teams simply made up of students had to play in a Third Division.
Hutton acted swiftly to protect the interests of his own school so it could play at the senior level. In 1898 he founded the English High School Athletic Club, or the Alumni as it was renamed two years later, which consisted of pupils, former pupils and teachers of the school. The club joined the Second Division of the league in 1899 and the next year had been promoted to the First Division.
For the next 11 years, the Alumni was the pre-eminent club in Buenos Aires football, and achieved legendary status by winning ten First Division titles in the amateur era. They are regarded as the first great team of South America. The Alumni’s playing style remained essentially gentlemanly with the emphasis on fair play and the need to avoid unseemly conflicts on the field. In true Corinthian fashion, Hutton was quite prepared to intervene and overrule the referee if he felt the opposition had not been treated fairly.
In 1906 they became hugely famous in Argentina when they defeated a visiting South African side. On that day the Alumni team included five Brown brothers and four others with British surnames. Alexander’s son, Arnold Pencliffe Watson Hutton, became a star of the Alumni’s team and played a prominent part in some of its greatest triumphs. He went on to play for the Argentine national side on several occasions in the early 1900s.
Hutton was behind another important landmark in Argentine football as he helped arrange the first ever official game of international football outside the UK when Argentina played Uruguay on 16 May 1901 and won 3-2. When the match was played again the following year, an extra incentive was offered by the tea magnate, Sir Thomas Lipton, who had put up a trophy for the winning team.
A feature of those early fixtures was the formal dinner for players and officials after the match at which polite and respectable behaviour was de rigueur. Unfortunately, football rivalry between the two countries intensified to such a degree that the international match in 1933 to celebrate Hutton’s birthday had to be abandoned when rioting broke out among rival fans.
As early as the turn of the century it was apparent that the British era of Argentine football was coming to an end as the popularity of the game spread well beyond the cities and schools. Once started the process was unstoppable. Like the tango, soccer blossomed in the slums. It required no money and could be played with nothing more than sheer desire. In fields, in alleys, and on beaches, native-born kids and young immigrants improvised games using balls made of old socks filled with rags or paper, and a couple of stones for a goal.
The new clubs emerging all over Buenos Aires and other cities had little to do with the British influence, several of which were to become famous names in world football such as River Plate (1901), Racing Club (1903), Independiente and Boca Juniors (1905). Teams that had been previously made up of just British-born players were now more likely to be Anglo-Argentinian. This meant that the pool of players available to clubs, like the Alumni, which rarely admitted players outside their feeder schools, were simply no longer strong enough to succeed in the growing competitive atmosphere of Argentine football. The Alumni battled on as best they could, but by 1911 a combination of insufficient players and money made the decision to dissolve inevitable.
In 1912, Quilmes Athletic Club, with several former Alumni players in their team, won the league’s First Division. They were the last predominantly British team to do so. The following year, Racing Club won the first of seven consecutive titles with a team including only three players of English origin. Racing Club are regarded as the first creole (native-born) champions of Argentina.
The future of Argentine football clearly needed to rest in Argentinean hands, and not with the British. The move to Argentine control began in 1903 when the AAFL changed its name to the Argentine Football Association (AFA) and affiliated to the Football Association in London. Until then the AFLA had been made up entirely of British and Irish immigrants, had conducted its business in English and had a general policy of excluding the local indigenous population. The new association ensured that the rules of football were drafted in Spanish as well as English, and that meetings were no longer held in English.
Alexander Hutton died on 9 March 1936 and was buried at the British Cemetery at Chacarita, Buenos Aires. He has been well remembered in his adopted country. The library of the Argentine Football Association is named in his honour, and in 1950, Hutton and his Alumni team featured in a popular film, Escuela de Campeones (School of Champions).
Overall his contribution to the development of Argentine football was immense. Many British settlers, and those from other nations, played their part in bringing football to the country, and the Hogg brothers are a very good example.
Alexander Hutton, unlike many of the other Fathers, is not associated with the founding or development of a particular club which later would become world famous, although in the amateur era his Alumni team had enjoyed great success. His legacy is broader than that, and one which in time would see Argentina become famous as one of the world’s capitals of football. Perhaps he would not have been happy with the way football and politics in Argentina have become inextricably intertwined, nor the excesses of professionalism, but he surely would have been proud to bear the title of Argentina’s Father of Football.