The footie 1898 style

This photographic card is in very bad condition. I put it in a flickr photo restoration group once and Eric Dege did the most wonderful job on it. Stupidly, I took it off my flickr photostream, have not kept it on my hard drive and so it’s lost.

Anyway, here’s a Scottish boys’  football team from around 1898. My grandfather, John (Jack) Somerville is the boy seated at the far right, aged around 10. The specialist kit comprised a striped jumper, knickerbockers and big boots- how would today’s footballers cope with that?  I imagine that this was a school team and they supplied the football strip. None of these boys’ families would have been well-off enough to afford it. In Jack’s case, he came from a single parent household (the redoubtable Betsy).  (See Betsy’s story here)

There are only 10 boys, one short of a team – I wonder if somebody didn’t turn up on the day they were due to have their photo taken?