Lost Football Grounds of Falkirk District - Blinkbonny Park
For most of this week I have been looking for the location of Falkirk FC's second permanent home: Blinkbonny Park. All of my life the only Blinkbonny Parkin Falkirk has been a public space between...
View ArticleJohn Rattray - Falkirk FC 1910-1913
John Rattrayb c1891, Ballingry, Fifed c1958Debut – Saturday December 24th 1910 v Raith Rovers (A) Scottish League Division 1Positions – Centre-ForwardKnown Career – Lumphinnans Swifts, Falkirk...
View ArticleRobert Godfrey signs up for McCrae's Battalion 1914
After digging about on the internet today, I came across the attestation papers of Falkirk FC's Robert "Bob" Godfrey, one of the Falkirk players who joined the 16th Royal Scots in the very early days...
View ArticleEben Taylor - Falkirk FC 1902-1903
When researching football players in the dim and distant past I often have to try to find out about their lives outside of football, this can help since it adds more than just puting a players name and...
View ArticleJames Laing WWI
I haven't posted anything in a while mainly because I like to space posts out and because I have been taking advantage of Ancestry's free weekend to look up stuff [for example I found four Falkirk...
View ArticlePlagiarism
I find it frankly sad when the supposedly educated people at Edinburgh University take my own, shoddy, work and try and pass it off as their own.The devil is in the very last sentence of both articles,...
View ArticleAlva, Stirlingshire?
You often hear about people's favourite moment in sport, whether it be a player droning on about such and such a goal, or a fan droning on about how [insert team/player] beat [insert team/player] and...
View Article1900 - East Stirlingshire's Summer of Cricket
During the football off-season of 1900, just on the brink of their entry into the Scottish League, East Stirlingshire decided to convert their ground, Merchiston Park, into a cricket ground for the...
View ArticleFootball and Drunkenness
As I have previously noted, James 'Midgy' Tennant liked a drink, so much so it often got in the way of his football career. I just found this article about his 'exploits' being reported as far away as...
View ArticleGeorge Thallon
Edinburgh Evening News - Tuesday June 19th 1894This is the closest thing to an obituary I have found for the former King's Park & Falkirk FC centre-forward George Thallon. His inclusion in the...
View ArticleGrandsable Cemetery
Having finally got my bike back into working order, I decided to get out again and look for more gravestones of footballers from the district. Since I have almost exhausted Camelon this time I decided...
View ArticleFalkirk FC Graves - Archie Jack
Signed from prominent Grangemouth junior club Forth Rangers, Archibald Jack was a promising Outside-Left who Falkirk signed at the beginning of the 1913/14 season, but who seemed to have made a good...
View ArticleFalkirk Amateurs FC Graves : Peter Auchinachie
Falkirk Herald - Wednesday May 4th 1910 Another chap who was better known locally for his place in the upper echelons of civic society than for his youthful exploits on the football field, was Peter...
View ArticleLost Football Grounds of Falkirk District - Muirhead Park
Grangemouth Football Club, never world-beaters, nonetheless had one of most centrally located and easily accessable grounds in all of Stirlingshire. Their home for most of their history was Caledonian...
View ArticleLost Football Grounds of Falkirk District - Inns Park
The home ground of Carron FC [1884-1888] was Inns Park, neither of which names have remained with us through history. To be fair Carron were never a great club, I'm not sure most people would class...
View ArticleJohn MacIntosh
Falkirk player from way back then, seems to have been done a slight injustice by the Falkirk Herald, I have gone through the usual places, and it seems that the MacIntosh Family were only ever McIntosh...
View ArticleFalkirk FC Graves - Patrick McKay
I cannot take credit for finding this grave other than coming across it when searching his name on the internet, in fact I do not believe I have ever been to Kilsyth Cemetery so someone else found it...
View ArticleThe Curious Case of Johnny Dora
I wrote a blog post about John Dora a long time back, he was a Centre-Forward Falkirk signed from Arbroath who scored 2 goals in 3 games before breaking his leg and disappearing from the game.The very...
View ArticleLost football Grounds of Falkirk - Randyford
Nobody knew where Randyford was, for a long time I believed Randyford was the same as Woodburn Park which was a Junior ground in the Modern Day Boag used by several minor teams in the 1890s.But I have...
View ArticleCharles Edward Napier
Last summer, when I was out and about in Grandsable Cemetery I found the stone of a man that was far more famed in Scotland when playing in the Green & White Hoops than in Falkirk's Navy Blue...
View ArticleWilliam Ritchie or Finnigan
Sadly footballers are human beings too, therefore suffer from the same foibles we do. This occasionally meanders into the territory of what we call a person, and that that can differ from what the...
View ArticleKick meaning Kink
There is thing in Cartographic Archeology called a "kick", the word is etymologically from the same source as kink, it is wherein a normally straight road deviates because of a feature, be it natural...
View ArticleDid Falkirk FC invent the diamond formation?
Falkirk FC were undergoing one of their regular poor seasons in 1892/93 - Their demon Goalkeeper John Patrick had been poached by St Mirren, John Drummond had been theived by Rangers, John Gillespie...
View ArticleSunday Football in Stenhousemuir 1890
Falkirk Herald - 1st March 1890Stenhousemuir Local NewsSUNDAY FOOTBALL"The craze for this not particularly elevating pastime appears to be developing beyond the bounds of common decency. This was...
View ArticleLost Football Grounds of Falkirk District - Lochside Pk, Limerigg
Football came in fits and starts in Slamannan & Limerigg, arguably the first team to make a real fist of the game was Barnsmuir (from Limerigg) from about 1885 to about 1887.Now, it has to be said...
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