Sport, Education and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-century Edinburgh: The Emergence of Modern Forms of Football

Abstract

This paper looks at the way in which an ethos of the importance of sport developed in some of Edinburgh's schools in the early part of the nineteenth century; how football was deliberately encouraged by a group of city schoolmasters to develop manly virtues and a competitive spirit; and how one pioneering city philanthropist set up perhaps the first football club in the world, then passed on his enthusiastic love of the game to some of the poorest children in the city, thereby laying the foundations for some of the city's first football clubs. Many of these developments in Edinburgh took place years, if not decades, before similar events in England, and therefore had a major and previously unrecognized impact on the history of both codes of football in Britain and throughout the world.