The Chile Six
The arrival of football in Chile is quite simply down to four men , all Scots. And its implementation on and off-field was due to one more, a Diasporan, and his two brothers and a further Diasporan, as a player and then a pioneering official.
Of the four three were born in the Central Belt, in Stirlingshire, Ayrshire, and The Borders. And, whilst the birthplace of the fourth had been Drainie, the parish of his mother's home-town, Lossiemouth, he grew up and learned his football in and around Glasgow in Port Glasgow. That is before they all by one means of another found themselves in Valparaiso, at the time before the devasting earthquake of 1906, both Chile's major port and most vibrant and international city, with an early British population large enough for the foundation already in 1857 of the Scottish Mackay and Sutherland School. It was only post-quake that Santiago, the political capital took over the lead-role with football there taking off, slowly at first, from 1897.
However, by then the Chilean Football Association had already been was formed, in a cafe in "Paradise Valley" in 1894. Peter Ewing, aged fifty-two, was its Honorary President. He had been born in St. Ninians by Stirling before the family had moved to Glasgow, his father a Currier, he a Merchant. President was David Scott, thirty-two years old, born in Earlston by Melrose but brought up in Tyninghame, his father a coachman and he a journalist. Secretary was Andrew Gemmell, born on the Moray Firth, aged twenty-six and a Teacher/Lecturer at the time, as his Ayrshire-born father had been before him. And Treasurer was Robert Reid, fifty, another newspaperman, born in Ardrossan and the only one to return to Scotland. He would die in Glasgow in 1919.
And of the two others, both Juan, both in Santiago, both Diasporans so Chilean-born, one had his origins in Bo'ness and the other in the south-west Fife. The first was John Ramsay, player and administrator, one of four footballing brothers, another of whom, Joe, also would be a significant figure in the game. John and Joe's parents, Alexander Ramsay, an engine-minder/machinist and Jessie Frew, had grown up as neighbours in the former West Lothian town before taking themselves first to the the mining area of north Chile and then the country's capital. And the other was John Livingstone, whose father, also John, had been born in Inverkeithing, where his his parents in turn had married, his father from Dunfermline, his mother North Queensferry. John Livingstone Jnr. would not only make his mark first as a player and then referee but also be the father of Sergio Livingstone, El Sapo, Chile's first great goalkeeper and captain of his country, including at the 1950 World Cup, including against England.
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Plinths & Plaques
As with not just this but all our country-trails we believe that merely recording is not enough. To do justice to the pioneers, as several countries, to which they went, have done and in Scotland Busby has also in following the lead of Bangu in the case of Tommy Donohoe there should be place for more plinths, and if not them then plaques. So, whilst we research and provide biographical details of as many of those, who through deed and feet spread the word, we also look at where some form of visual, outdoor recognition would be both appropriate and feasible.
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Hugh McColl (with grateful thanks to Andy Mitchell)
In 1873 the West End Cricket Club based initially at Burnbank in Glasgow's Woodlands and then Cowlairs founded a football off-shoot. It competed in the Cup between that season and until 1878 with as its first Secreary, Hugh McColl of the now demolished 15, Richard St. in Anderston.
He had been born in 1852, his father was an engine pattern maker. He himself was a commercial clerk and intially a cricketer, who was one of the first to adopt the round-ball, winter game, playing at full-back. However, West End was to be wound up at the end of the 187708 season, McColl was in his mid-twenties and may well have moved South for a period. Certainly in 1879 he married in then Cheshire in Dukinfield by Aston-under-Lyme a Staleybridge girl, Harriet Waterhouse, before returning to the Clyde, settling in The Gorbals as a Stationary Clerk and starting a family. There would be five in all to 1888 born in Scotland at least but there would be a sixth born in 1891 in Chile.
However, the family's arrival in the Chile, in Valparaiso had been at least by 1889 because that year he was again a founder with David Scott from the city's cricket club of a football section with him as first President. Interrupted by revolution it by 1892 would be formalised as Valparaiso F.C. its initial team,
MacNaughton, Scott himself and Reynolds, Crangle, Drummond and Roberts, Norton, Millie, Fullerton, Melrose and Simpson
Meantime McColl seems to have moved on to Santiago and there, at the age of forty he was in 1893 involved in 1893 by the Santiago Cricket and Athletic Club with a ceratin Peter Ewing as President to play in the first intercity match between Valparaiso and Santiago but not as a player but coach.
Santiago Club, 1893. Hugh McColl ringed
9, Roxburgh St. Glasgow
Having spent at least five years in Chile the McColls returned to the UK. By 1901 they, he described as a Shipping Clerk, were staying back at 9, Roxburgh St. in Glasgow. There he went into partnership in a shipping agency cum ship and insurance brokers, commission agents and export and produce merchants, a business that after The Great War became McColl and Sons on Wellington St.. McColl himself, staying by then on Bath St., would pass away in 1928, an Export Merchant, aged seventy-six.
Peter Ewing
That three men, three Scots, Robert Reid, Andrew Gemmell and David Scott, were in 1894 in the port city of Valparaiso founders and, as Treasurer, Secretary and President respectively, first office-holders of the Chilean Football Federation is known and undoubted. But more research from the country cast up another name as its Honorary President. His name is Peter (Pedro) Ewing, and in Chilean records he is described also as a Scot and by birth.
Goosedubbs, Glasgow
Moreover, we know a Pedro Ewing would die in Portales, a suburb of the Chilean capital in 1912, with the additional information that he was seventy-one, born in 1841 to be buried in the city's Protestant cemetery and, Chilean-style, that his father's name Archibaldo and his mother's Isabel "MacLearn".
However, the fly in this ointment was that there is no obvious record of a Peter Ewing, born in Scotland in or near either of the years in question with an Isabel McLearn mother. However, there was one an Archibald as a father. He was born in about 1842 in St. Ninians by Stirling, one of eight children, but at the age of nine he and the family were staying in Glasgow on Goosedubbs, where there is perhaps just place for a memorial, his father, son of a Balfron, Stirlingshire farmer, a currier to trade, his mother, the daughter of a local weaver, not a McLearn but a McLaren and not sabel but Elizabeth. So it was a return to the Chilean records for a deeper search and more checking revealed "McLearn" to be a misspelling. Pedro was indeed Peter McLaren Ewing. Moreover, "Isabel" was elsewhere recorded as Elizabeth.
And with that a story unfolded. At nine young Peter he was at school, at nineteen an apprentice currier. However, by 1871, whilst the parents were still in Glasgow, indeed they would in The Gorbals, he was not. In fact he disappears post-1861 entirely from the Scottish, indeed British records, with the strong possibility that on reaching maturity in 1862 he might have found his way to Chile and a new life. Moreover, thanks to the unstinting cooperation of the Chilean football historian, Sebastian Nunez Mardones, we know, if we have the right man, his last resting-place. It is in the Ewing-family mausoleum confirmed as in Santiago's General Cemetery but its Dissident i.e. Protestant section.
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Earlston
Tyninghame
David Scott
When in Valparaiso in 1894 the Chilean Football Association was founded it was with the journalist the local David Scott as first President and, unlike Peter Ewing, his origins have proved much easier to trace.
Recorded elsewhere as David N. Scott, he married in Chile in 1896, having stepped down from the Presidency of the country's FA after just a year. And the “N” in his name stands for Napier, as confirmed by John Alexander Napier Mcnab Scott, his great-great grandson as is also that his great-grandfather was born in Earlston in then Berwickshire in 1862, passing away at the age of not quite fifty in 1912 to be buried in Valparaiso in a grave crowned by a Celtic Cross.
In fact, David's parents, John Marshall Scott, a coachman working for the great estates, and Mary Napier, were both born in East Lothian and married there before moving to the Borders. However, when Mary died still in Earlston in childbirth in 1865, John remarried and moved back nearer to his roots to work at Tyninghame House, outside Dunbar.
And so in Scotland for Scott we have not but three sites, all more than suitable for a memorial. First there is the in the centre of Earlston itself The Green formed between High St. and Station Rd. And then there are the grassy junctions of the A198 and Tyninghame High St. or even South Row opposite the lane leading to Tyninghame House.
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Andrew Gemmell
Andrew Gemmell was born in 1868 the home village of his mother, Lossiemouth, in parish of Drainie in Moray. His father, a teacher and then headteacher, was from the Ayrshire-Dumfries border, who was soon to move south once more. Gemmell's child-hood and youth were spent mostly in Glasgow and Port Glasgow as his father moved for work and football. That until, as the result of a prize won, whilst at Glasgow University, his arrival in 1892 at the age of 23 and for a year in Chile to Valparaiso, still at the time the largest city in the country.
He went initially to the Chilean Naval Academy to teach English, then seems to have been recruited back to Valparaiso by the still existing Mackay and Sutherland School, its Scots to teach mathematics, and on the field to play in and captain its football team. And off it he is also thought to have been instrumental in the laying the school's first football pitch on school ground.
That was until at some point about 1898 he seems to have resumed working at the Naval Academy, there becoming “Superintendent of Games”, marrying in 1901and then becoming involved athletics. In 1903 he took part in the "Great Naval Athletics Championships", between the Naval Academy, the Naval Engineering School and the School of Accountants, also also teaching at all three.
But he would return to football. It would be he who in Chile first translated the London FA's rules from English into Spanish. He also became be a noted referee in the city, indeed internationally, was in 1910 the treasurer of the Valparaiso Football Association and in 1912-1 became the Chilean Football Association's last British President.
So it is for Andrew Gemmell there are perhaps three locations for a memorial. The first, perhaps for a plinth, is in the heart of Lossiemouth. The second might be Port Glasgow. And the third fro a plaque is where, before departure to Chile, he is recorded as a young teacher, lodging on West End Park St. in Glasgow.
Lossiemouth
14, West End Park St., Glasgow
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Barr Lane, Ardrossan
Robert Reid
Of the fourth of the four, early, Valparaiso Scots footballing pioneers, Robert Reid, specifically Robert H. Reid, nothing initially was really known except that he was, although Treasurer, regarded by some as the real, initial administrative force behind the early Chilean game. There is no mention of him as a player, which suggests he was older, but he is said to have worked both as a journalist and in 1898 in known to have published the The Illustrated Sporting Annual of Chile.
But more would emerge despite Robert Reid being a not an uncommon name in Scotland with the suggestion from Chile his middle name was Harvey. In fact he was Robert Harvie Reid, born in 1844 in Dalry or perhaps Ardrossan in Ayrshire, the son of John Reid, a weaver, and Janet Harvie and so was already forty-nine or fifty years old in 1894. That he is unlikely to have been a player at the time is therefore confirmed.
Harvie Reid was like Scott a journalist. In 1861 he had been a printer's apprentice, in 1871 was a 26 year-old reporter in Ardrossan with football being played there in 1874, Reids amongst the players, having in 1870 married Janet Irvine from Kilbirnie, living, a site for a plinth, on Barr Lane in the seaside town and the couple starting a family. Then from 1880 he was on the move, editing a newspaper in Paignton in Devon, and said to have arrived in Chile in 1885-6 to take up a newspaper post, possibly in Santiago. He seems certainly to have been in the Chilean capital in 1889 but after a short spell in the town of Victoria he moved to Valparaiso. There he settled, working for the English-language Chilean Times until in 1905 accepting the post of night-editor of The Buenos Aires Standard, also English-language, moving to Argentina, and then becoming editor of The Herald, equally English-language, in that same city before retirement, a return to Scotland, settling in Milton in Glasgow and dying there at what was 90, Cambridge Street in 1919 at the age of seventy-three.
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John Ramsay and the other Ramsay Brothers
More or less at the same time as the Valparaiso foundation in 1894 of the Chilean Football Association some eighty miles inland Santiago would see the formation of its first clubs, the wonderfully- and explicitly-named, Santiago Rangers-non-Sunday-Playing Club, National Athletic and the German, Atletico Aleman, with games to begin with friendlies, often 5-a-side with players frequently coming and going and changing teams. However, gradually more stable clubs were being created and 11-a-side becoming the norm. From an ad hoc team from Santiago Cricket and Athletic Club, which had a year earlier had challenged Valparaiso to a one-off match, a more permanent entity also emerged. It was Santiago Athletic that like the previously scratch eleven it too had a remarkably Scottish input, its President a Ewing, the vice-president a MacCarthy, the Director, H. Hume, Treasurer, John Melrose and Secretary, and probably a Canadian, Mr. A. Smith. And its first known team,
Allan, Anderson, Hood, Rogers, Scott, Madden, Coat(e)s; to whom had been added Davies, Stewart, Campbell, Anderson, Simpson and MacGregor
also consisted of several, who had both played Valparaiso and were more than likely Scots or of Scots origin, all alongside the known name of trainer, Hugh McColl.
1897 had also seen the formation the clearly Spanish club, Club Union Espanola, as initially the Centro Espanol de Instruccion y Recreacion. 1900 saw the foundation of Santiago National. Two years later it was Santiago Badminton with Morning Star following in 1903. Elsewhere too 1902 had seen the creation in Talca, 160 miles south of Santiago, of Club Social de Deportes Rangers and a myth. One of the club's founders was Luis, Lewis, Greenstreet, and the club's name is said to have been chosen by his father, John Greenstreet, both also said to be Scots and with a Glasgow affiliation. The problem is that the story is wrong. It is unlikely that the Greenstreets were Scots either by birth or origin. "Greenstreet" is not a Scottish name. There is, in any case, no record of them in Scotland. And the club's name came from Amalia Neale, John Greenstreet's employer, and derives not from Scotland but Eastbourne. There was, however, a Scots connection. One of the club's other founders was a Ramsay, a member of Chile's first footballing family.
As local matches in Talca gelled into the city's Municipal League, won by Rangers, back in the capital July 1903 saw the formation of the Santiago Football Association. It was an organisation, of which Frank (Francisco) C. Campbell, a product of the Mackay and Sutherland School, was one of the instigators, with a league of sixteen teams in two divisions. The trophy played for in that first year was the Copa Subercaseaux, donated by the Honorary Chairman of the association. The Secretary of its first Board of Directors came from Union Atlético, a certain Jorge (George) Dan Ewing, the thirty-two year-old son of Pedro (Peter) Ewing, the Scottish merchant, who had been the first Honorary President of that Chilean Football Association, founded entirely by Scots in Valparaiso a little under a decade earlier. And the first winner of the Cup was Ewing’s club, captained by another Ramsay, John.
John Ramsay was Chilean-born, in 1879. He was "crillo", one of five brothers, sons of Diasporan Scots, Alexander Ramsay and Jessie Frew. (For more see: Our Man in Chile and Bo'ness and the Santiago Ramsays) Alex Ramsay, a railway employee, seems to have taught all his boys the game from a young age. Described as a clean and brilliant defender at fifteen John was already playing for that Santiago Rangers-non-Sunday-Playing Club. It may have been in a five-a-side league with the Ramsay brothers forming the entire team. Certainly a picture has survived of them all together as a team. One, James, was to die aged 33 in 1915 in France having returned to Britain to enlist as so many did from British communities in South America. Another, Alexander, like Juan, was also a noted defender. It was he who would be instrumental in the formation of Rangers of Talca, went on to become a referee and also died young, in 1917 and in Chile. Joseph, José Ramsay, a forward, played until 1910. And youngest of all was Manuel, also known as by his second name, Arthur.
Kirk Wynd, Bo'ness
However, John Ramsay was not only to be a significant player but also an important football official and administrator, in Santiago initially and later nationally. Still a teenager he was firstly to be one of the founders of school team, Instituto Nacional FC, before, in his early-twenties, with his brothers moving on to Union Atlético. After victory in 1903 in 1904 it, Union Atlético, took the Copa Subercaseaux for a second time with a team that included a mainly Scots spine, John and Joseph themselves and Frank Campbell, Frank Morrison, Andrew Taylor, now captain, Fred Anderson, Hugh Sutherland and George Hood. In fact, from 1903 Union Atlético was to be the predominant club in Santiago and John Ramsay perhaps the most recognised figure in the local game. That is until 1906, when the club disbanded seemingly because of bad results, he went on to form English F.C. and play for two more seasons, whilst brothers Joseph and Arthur joined the Loma Blanca club. Founded in 1904 in 1907 with Jo in attack and Arthur at left-back, plus a MacNiven and a Jackson, it would win the Santiago Football Association's Copa Unión.
Here two things are worth noting. The first is the name Anderson. It is the same as that of the captain of the first Argentinian national team in 1901, the son of a Scot, who then seems to have disappeared from the Argentine footballing scene. Might he have move on to Chile? And 1907 saw Valparaiso largely flattened by a powerful earthquake from which it never fully recovered. Santiago, already Chile's political hub, filled the void also becoming the country's economic hub and eventually its footballing one also.
It was in the year following the Valparaiso earthquake, in 1908, that John Ramsay took the step from player to football administrator. He was elected, aged 29, to the board of the Santiago Football Association. He was also involved in the Referees’ Association, with the leading, local Santiago officials, a certain John MacDonald and his brother, Alex Ramsay, and in Valparaiso, Andrew Gemmell, before in 1910 being promoted from treasurer to president of the Santiago F.A. It was fortunate timing because there was increasing conflict between the Santiago-based, Spanish-speaking National Sports Federation and the still British-orientated Football Association of Chile in Valparaiso.
It was a situation not dissimilar to that developing in Buenos Aires at much the same time, remembering too that in Chile as in Argentina there was a degree of then century-old antipathy to Britain that continues to this day. In Buenos Aires it was because of two repelled invasions in 1806 and 1807 and a third more serious one again in 1807 only aborted by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. In Chile it was not least because Bernardo O'Higgins, the country's liberator from Spain, was the son of an Irish family dispossessed of its ancestral land in Ireland by a Britain under Cromwell.
The inter-city problems had not been resolved with the stepping down as president of the CFA of Valparaiso's Alfred Jackson, probably John Alfred Jackson, in 1908. The election of his replacement, Horace Cooper, also did little to alleviate the cultural clash then Cooper’s rapid replacement by William Bailey, with Robert Bailey one of those at the organisation's Valparaiso foundation, and the brief return of Jackson simply added instability.
Nor even were problems resolved with the transfer in 1912, once again under Cooper, of the Chilean FA to Santiago, nor its name-change to the equivalent in Spanish, the Asociación de Football de Chile. Nor did the creation of a National Football Championship, won in its first season by a club neither from Santiago or Valparaiso but Antofagasta, seem to help, nor even the change of affiliation that same year to FIFA in Paris from the FA in London. The arguments continued. On one side were the British, still with a power base, if a much-weakened one, in Valparaiso, and on the other the new Chilean FA establishment in the capital eighty miles away. It even seemed they would continue, in spite of Andrew Gemmell, with a foot somewhat in both camps, was chosen as President in 1912 . It had been he, after all, who had begun the hispanicisation of the Chilean game with his rules translation, a hispanicisation that had continued throughout the intervening years. It had even caused a temporary split in the Santiago Football Association, one that John Ramsay was fortunately able to overcome at a local level but which at a national level was seemingly intractable.
In fact it appears Gemmell's tenure did have an effect, although it was not until 1915 that the disagreements were finally ended under Juan Estaban Ortiza, Chilean FA president from 1914-17, with the Scotsman the last Briton to hold the office. And at that point not only did Andrew Gemmell take a step back but so too did the Ramsays. They remained in Chile but seemed to have no further impact on the future Chilean game.
To a great extent the confusion, if not conflict, that characterised the Chilean domestic game in the decade from 1905 had also been reflected in the country’s international football. In May 1910 a national team played its first games, travelling to Buenos Aires with a fifteen-man squad that included eleven Britons, and Andrew Gemmell as the travelling official. Seven of them, Gibson and Hamilton, Allen, Hoyl, Simmons, Davidson and Campbell, were to feature in a first, one-off game, against Argentina, a 0-2 win for Chile. Gemmell refereed. Three days later there was a second match, against Uruguay in the Copa Centenario Revolucion de Mayo, with the addition of Ashe, MacWilliams and Robson, and a third in the same competition, once more against Argentina the following week, this time with Talca's Herbert Sturgess in the eleven.
The team changes seemed to make a difference, but negatively. After winning the first the second and third games were lost, 3-0 and 5-1, but one player of interest featured in all three and scored in the third. He was centre-forward, Campbell, the same Colin Campbell, who had played for Argentina in 1907. On leaving Buenos Aires he would settle in Chile, playing for Santiago National and his sons, Donald and Ian, go on to represent their adopted country at rugby. Donald, would return to Britain and was killed in action in 1944 aged 25, whilst serving with the RAF. Ian, nine years younger, would at fly-half and centre, post-War play internationally for thirteen years.
Colin Campbell was a typical South American “Scot”. Ian Campbell, now in his mid-eighties and living in Santiago recounts that his father was the son of a Scottish-born sea captain, Donald Campbell, operating out of Liverpool. He had met, presumably on his travels, and married Catalina Lazonby and they had settled in Southport, where Colin went to school. However, he was born not in Scotland, England or even Chile, despite his mother coming from another well-known, Valparaiso, merchant family. Lazonby & Co had been founded there in 1886 as Lazonby and Campbell. Colin had been born in Callao, the port of Peru's capital, Lima, and no doubt one of his father's other ports-of-call.
Chile would again play Argentina in September 1911. In 1912 there were no internationals but in 1913 an Argentine Select XI came again to Chile for three matches, one in Vina del Mar, one in Valparaiso and lastly in Santiago. It was not until 1914 that there was a repeat of a full Chile-Argentina fixture. The result was a 2:0 win for Argentina with for Chile this time five Britons in the eleven. 1915 once again seemed fallow internationally and then in 1916 came the first South American Championship, the forerunner of the Copa America.
It was held in Argentina. Chile would lose its games against Argentina itself and Uruguay, drew with Brazil and finish in last place but with a team that notably with a now "crillo" Chilean FA included no British players or even players of British heritage. The only such players in the competition were the Argentines, Juan Domingo Brown and the Hayes brothers. However, Chile's participation in the competition is remembered for something else. After the first game against a Uruguay team that included Isabelino Gradin, who scored twice, and Juan Delgado it objected to the fielding of “Africans”. It was an attitude to Black players, which even for those times was found shocking and was not repeated when Brazil and its Black star, Arthur Friedenreich, were faced.
A Chilean national team again with no British names was fielded in 1917. The following year too it was to be the same and by then Valparaiso F.C. had also ceased to exist, for the saddest of reasons. Like James Ramsay from Santiago the majority of Valparaiso's players had returned to Britain to join up to fight in the First World War and many did not live through the conflict.
As to the other Ramsays, Jose, who had married in 1908, remained in Chile and was visiting the United States until the early 1950s. Alexander married in Chile in 1909. He seems to have had a daughter, who died young. Juan married in 1916 and seems to have died childless in 1940. Of Manuel nothing more is known. However, none of the brothers appears to have had any further significant role or effect on the Chilean game. That was to be left to another Scots-Chilean father, John Livingstone, and his still more famous son, Sergio.
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North Queensferry
John Livingstone
At the Parque Pereira in Montevideo in the final game of the 1917, round-robin South American Championship held in Uruguay a smallish, dark-haired man took to the pitch as referee. He came from Chile, but with a twist, his name, Juan (John) Livingstone, the clue
In terms of background he had been the founder of his country's Referees Association and before that at club level a player, a left-winger with Santiago Nacional and the Universidad Catolica, a Diasporan Scot amongst more than several others just as the game took off. But whilst he had certainly been born in Chile it had not been in the capital but in the Estacion district of the town of Los Andes with his surname the pointer to his origins. His father had been a Scot, registered at birth as John Pringle Livingston, originally from Inverkeithing in Fife, a railway engineer, dying still in Chile but in Valparaiso just five months after his son's arrival in 1889, his mother, An(n)a Eves, English, who would marry twice more again still in Chile, both times to Scots. and with her third husband have three more children; Macdonalds, two boys and a girl.
Thus John Livingstone would grow up in Santiago. Indeed he would die there too, in 1955, having trained as an architect but working finally as a journalist, with football administration on the side. He would be one of Chile's first three delegates ever to FIFA, travelling to Europe in 1928, perhaps even to Scotland, to attend its 1928 Congress in Amsterdam. He would also marry in Santiago, in 1918, and have two children, two boys, the second of whom, Sergio, El Sapo, The Toad because of his crouching stance, would from a start in the club-game in 1938, at twenty-one in 1941 become his country's goalkeeper, perhaps its greatest ever, captaining the national team at the 1950 World Cup including against England, retiring first internationally in 1954 and then from club football at almost forty in 1959.
Sergio Livingstone, "El Sapo", The Toad, was until the modern era perhaps the greatest of South American goalkeepers. Not particularly tall at just under six-feet, but agile he was given his nickname because of his crouching stance in goal. But he was more than just a player. On retirement he would become his country's foremost football commentator and pundit on radio and then television.
Born in 1920 he was the younger son of Juan Livingstone, John Livingstone, himself the son of a wandering Scot, also John, who arrived in Chile and married and died there. Juan Livingstone had himself been a footballing pioneer in the Chilean capital, Santiago, as a player, a referee and journalist and it was in Santiago too that Sergio came into the World.
Where exactly he played his first football is lost in time but he clearly showed early promise. At fifteen he would join league-club, Union Espanola, and in 1938 at eighteen make his senior début as an amateur for Universidad Catolica, his father's old university, in the year before it also joined the league. And there at Catolica he clearly impressed at club level and internationally. He won his first cap in 1941 then in 1943 played in Argentina for a year. That season he was between the posts for all thirty games for the Buenos Aires team, Racing Club de Avellaneda, which finished safely mid-table, before returning on his marriage in 1944 to Chile, once more to Universidad Catolica.
He would stay with the university club essentially until retirement in 1959. There was a loan-period at Colo-Colo still in Santiago, still in the First Division, in 1957, the year in which Catolica was briefly relegated but otherwise his team normally finished mid-table with two exceptions. In 1949 and 1954 the Universitad would top the national league.
It would also be in 1954 that Sergio would play his last game for his country. His father would live to see it. He would die in 1955. It was Sergio's fifty-second cap, including six South American Championships and the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. Its final would see Uruguay defeat the hosts in Rio. Chile, however, was in the same group, from which Spain had qualified with three wins but England failing to do so. It, having beaten Chile in the first group game, would in the second extraordinarily lose to the USA, the team that in its last game would give Chile its only win of three, then critically also lose to Spain by a single goal. Livingstone was Chile's 'keeper and captain throughout.
At the end of his playing career Sergio Livingstone would like his father became a newspaper journalist. Then with the coming of television he became a regular with Chile's state broadcaster, TVN, almost to his death. That was in 2012 at the age of ninety-two a national figure in his South American homeland but also the last visible link between his country's football today and the Scots passion for the game that had seen its arrival first in Valparaiso and then in Santiago one hundred and twenty years earlier.
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