If there was one city where there is almost total confusion about the origins of football it is not Rangoon or Calcutta, St. Petersburg in the midst of the Russian Revolution or Cairo. It was Paris. It was the place in the World where in the end it is best just to throw up one's hands, shrug one's shoulders, mutter Je m'en foux and move on and that is precisely what I did but now, with, thanks to Andy Mitchell once more, new information we return to the puzzle.
It is said that when Jack Wood, an amateur player back in England, arrived to work in Paris in 1891 one of his first thoughts was to organise games of football in his new home. However, they would not be the first match to be played in the city, nor would the club that would emerge from the efforts even be the city's first. There had been ad-hoc games as early as the 1877 or 1878, played not exactly in Paris but on the Madrid Lawn in the Bois de Boulogne and from which in 1879 emerged a first Paris Football Club. A second was founded only in 1969. The original club was to flourish briefly but faded away in the early 1880s and as a result senior football was to lie largely dormant for almost a decade. Where football was to survive, however, was in schools and colleges, being played at a junior level and as an alternative to rugby. Some sports clubs too would play the occasional game, such as the one between the International Athletic Club and Association Athletique Monge in March 1890, once more in the Bois de Boulogne but it would not be until the following year and Wood that football in the Paris region restarted seriously.
Except that there were problems with the Jack Wood story as there remain, frankly, with much of the second phase of football's development on the other side of La Manche. Wood's circle of footballing friends is described as Anglo-American. And it was he and it, including apparently his brother, Tom, who after ad hoc games and still in 1891 formed their own football club, the White Rovers. Additionally, for a very short time, just seven months, again so the story goes White Rovers had as its main competition a Gordon F.C., seemingly made up of Scots like McBain and McQueen. This before the two clubs appeared to have merged.
The story suggests that Tom Wood was either already in Paris or arrived with or soon after Jack. Furthermore other sources suggest the White Rovers' majority membership was in fact Scots. It might well have been after the merger and even before if by Anglo-American was meant Brito-American with the observation that Jack Wood himself is in French sources noticeably referred to as "britanique" not "anglais".
Some of Wood's "circle of friends" are known. The club's de facto if not official Secretary was a Mr Pullard, its treasurer, William Sleator. There was a Cox and a Cotton. And then there was Walter Hewson, Edward Barclay, Claude Rivaz, Robert MacQueen and Jack Wood himself. Of Mr Pullard there is no more information than that he worked for Galignani, the English bookshop in Paris, specifically on the Galignani Messenger, its English-language newspaper. William Sleator is a different matter. He was born in Worcester and was a tailor. Of Cox there might be the slightest hint; Emile Ernest Cox, born 1870 in Paris. Of Cotton there is perhaps a little more. A Louis Cotton was a rugby and a football player and a banker born in Paris in 1875 to a major in the French army and who in London in 1897 married a Millie Johnson in Stepney in London. Hewson and MacQueen were also tailors, Barclay a lawyer, Rivaz an artist, who like Barclay is said to have gone to Westminster School and had, whilst previously living in Belgium, played for Royal Antwerp, aged between 14 to 18. As for Wood, however, he remained a dilemma.
Yet in terms of finding Scots amongst them, one has to look hard. Sleator, although said to be English, actually had Irish parents. Edward Barclay is said to have been a Scots lawyer but if he is Edward George Barclay he was born in London in 1872 and married there in 1897. MacQueen is the only exception. He was Robert James MacQueen and on his father's side there was a Scottish-born great-grandfather and on his mother's were grandparents, grandfather from Fochabers, grandmother from Elgin. His mother had even been part-raised in Scotland but like her husband and her son had been born in London. However, as for Jack Wood, who knew. Of his later life we know he was referee, and said to be British. He officiated the game between the University of Bruxelles and the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques at the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris. Both he and Cox were involved with the USFSA, a sort of forerunner to FIFA. However, with regard to his early life there is confusion. His full name is said to be John Bertram perhaps Bertrum Wood, born in 1872, but that year incredibly two appear to have been born, one in Edmonton in Middlesex i.e. North London, and the other in Devon. Of the one in North London nothing more is known. He seems simply to disappear. Of the one in Devon, he is there in 1881, apparently goes up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1892, aged 20, having been at Lancing College until presumably 16, 17 or 18, is in Devon again in 1901 and 1911, then married to an American wife, Evelyn, is childless and living on "private means". He dies in 1930, she in 1939 both still in Devon.
Nevertheless, three additional things should be said about Jack Wood. Firstly the Devonshire John Wood's father's birth was also in Middlesex so the family might have had a house there too. They were wealthy enough. Thus the two John Bertrams could have been one and the same. Secondly he/they could easily have been in Paris in 1891, have helped found White Rovers, returned to go to Oxford and gone back after 1892, been in Paris in 1899 as the Rovers dissolved and still there in 1900 for the Olympics. It is just that we do not know if he did any or all of it. Oh, and, finally, there was no brother Tom. In fact it was Robert MacQueen who had a brother Thomas, who died in 1917 in Lens in France, perhaps fatally wounded in action.
And if Jack Wood were not quandary enough there are White Rovers' origins. It has to be said there appears to be no real Scottish connection as claimed. The founders were a curious blend of upper-middle-class English or international professionals cum gentlemen and some gentleman's outfitters. As young men they came together and almost a decade later went their separate ways. With White Rovers' dissolution in 1899 for Wood it meant time perhaps eventually to get back to Devon for 1901, whilst others hatched other and bolder plans. It was that same year that Robert MacQueen married a French girl in Paris, from where they soon headed off for Santiago in Chile. They came back to Britain once, in 1917 at the time of his brother's death, their son, also Robert, born in London married a Chilean girl in 1919 in Santiago, he claiming to be twenty-six and probably nineteen at the most, with Robert Snr dying back in England in 1921. As for Barclay he lived out his life in France dying there in 1932 and Rivaz, the only one of whom there are known photographs, having been born in Cheshire, living in Belgium from 1886 to 1890, was in Vancouver in Canada by 1901, returned to live in London's Mayfair and died in 1958 just outside Basingstoke.
But all the above was changed twice over by an email exchange between Andy Mitchell and Cotton's great grandson, that is Ernest Cotton, born Kidderminster, and not Louis. He joined White Rovers in 1892 having previous stayed and played in Berlin. And the following year we start to get other names, cosmopolitan ones, Mestre and Lequin, Warden, Muller, Murray, Thompson, Callaghan, Pimbury, Tuxford and Holland. And a Rovers team emerged, Thomas, Ernest Cotton himself and Cox, Pullar, Burns and McQueen, McBain, English, Wood (presumably Jack), Wilson and Tile. Then from 1894 we learn of a changing eleven of Thomas, Cotton, Cox, Pullar, MacQueen and McBain once once, but now two Woods, J. and S, Van Copenolle, Keppel and Young and from 1895 of a tour of a Paris Select XI, Cotton somehow included, to England. We also learn from October 1894 that firstly Cotton is Captain with Jack Wood now described as "Late Captain" and from December that he intends to leave not just the team but Paris.
Which leads us neatly to back Jack Wood. From the same source it is confirmed that our John Bertram Wood was born in 1872 in Tottenham, now London, then Middlesex. He is the Middlesex one. And once in France he seems to have stayed. He would die in Neuilly by Paris in 1921 at the age of just forty-eight and a widower remarried. Before France he had played for Robin Hood F.C. when not in 1891 but 1893, he aged twenty, it had won the Middlesex Junior Cup. A lawyer by profession he was the son of a draper, had two brothers, the elder Thomas William, born in Edmonton who had died in or by 1904, and the younger Frank Sidney, born in Dalston, and perhaps White Rover's S. Wood. In 1881 the family lived at 22, Tilson Road, still a mere four hundred yards from White Hart Lane.