He, John Craig Strang, is said to be the equivalent of Alex Watson Hutton, the Scots Father of Argentine football, except his influence was not to be in South but North America, and in a place not normally associated with the game, the eastern seaboard of Canada, specifically Newfoundland and its capital St. John's. There the Association code was said from 1878 to be first organised around Terra Nova, a Scot's owned foundry started in 1875, its team also known as The Gemmells after one of the owners.
In fact the start of the organised game coincides with Strang probable arrival in St. Johns. He was born in 1857 so would have been twenty-one in 1878 and, after what looks like an unsettle childhood, was quite likely to wanting to get away from Glasgow, for that was where he had been at least at thirteen, working as a Messenger Boy, staying in Hutchesontown with an uncle and aunt. But he had not been born there but in Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, the son of a joiner and a local girl.
Jimmy would be forty-two when he after just short of four hundred recorded starts finally hung up the boots, his son just three years from setting out on his own fifteen seasons and almost three hundred game career.
And from then on he and Annie seemed simply to have until their deaths settled back into local life. She would die in 1980 aged seventy to be buried in Cambusnethan Cemetery. And Jimmy would join her there nine years later, his death at home on Omoa Road literally just yards from where he had been born.
Birth Locator:
1857 - Polnoon St., Eaglesham, East Renfrewshire
Residence Locations:
1861 - Polnoon St., Eaglesham, East Renfrewshire
1871 - 41, Commercial St.(now Road), Hutchesontown, Glasgow
1881 - N/A
1886 - 41, Prescott St., St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
1898 - 331, Water St., St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
Death Locator:
1909 - Water Street, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
Grave Locator:
General Protestant Cemetery, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
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