Remember the name… Alex Provan

Jamie Yates

Alex is a name synonymous with greatness in Everton footballing folklore.

‘Dirty’ Alex Dick was a cult hero and early master of the dark arts of defending during the Anfield era; sharpshooting centre-forward Alex ‘Sandy’ Young scored the winner in the club’s first F.A. Cup triumph, over Newcastle United in 1906; quicksilver right-winger Alex ‘Chico’ Scott provided many an assist for the greatest of them all, ‘The Golden Vision’ himself, Alex Young, in the halcyon days of the 1960s. All happen to have been Scotsmen. All had nicknames fondly bestowed upon them, often a sign of the high esteem and affection in which a particular player is held by supporters.

What follows is the story of possibly the first Alex ever to play for Everton Football Club and one of the first Scotsmen. A name which has flown under the radar for over 140 years. A player who was every bit a pioneer and favourite of the founding Evertonian faithful in his own right.

Everton Football Club’s first recorded home fixture of the 1880/81 campaign took place on Saturday, 30 October 1880 against Lancashire rivals Darwen at Stanley Park. The game ended in a 1-2 defeat for the home team but is notable as the first Everton line-up on record to feature a forward by the name of Alex Provan, who was also the scorer of the game’s opening goal.

The season had actually commenced three weeks earlier, on Saturday, 9 October 1880, when Everton faced a Liverpool Association XI at Newsham Park. Early Everton stalwarts Bob Morris and Jack McGill were among the goal-scorers as Everton emerged victorious, winning by three goals to one. Full team details have not survived, but there is a good chance that Alex Provan played in that game too. What better way would there have been for him to celebrate what was also the day of his 16th birthday?

Either way, with his goalscoring exploits versus Darwen, aged just 16 years and 21 days, Alex Provan is, by some distance, the youngest known player and goal scorer for Everton Football Club at men’s first team level. For broader context, it is also worth noting that, at this stage, Everton Football Club had not yet been Everton Football Club for a full 12 months. The St. Domingo’s membership had only voted to rename the club in November 1879.

Something special was brewing, and the lush green turf of Stanley Park was the stage upon which Evertonian ambitions were beginning to materialise.

Records from the pre-Football League era are incomplete, but contemporary newspaper reports indicate that Provan played in at least 13 of Everton’s 22 friendly games, plus the replay of their controversial debut Lancashire Senior Cup fixture that season. He appeared on more occasions than any other player and scored a creditable nine goals, just one behind top-scorer, Jack McGill. As well as the goal against Darwen, Provan scored in home victories over St. Mary’s (7-0), Earlestown (5-0) and Birkenhead Association (3-1), before netting twice in another comfortable home win versus Liverpool Association (5-0). His first away goal came at Haydock before a final two goals of a successful rookie campaign were notched in a 4-0 home win over Halliwell Jubilee.

The 1881/82 season saw Alex Provan build on the solid start he had made in Everton colours. The club won nine of their opening 10 games, in a storming run which saw the team score 27 goals and concede just one, in a 1-1 draw versus Chester Rovers. Once again. Alex again figured amongst the club’s top appearance makers and finished second only to the prolific McGill in the goal-scoring stakes. At least 14 of Everton’s goals that season were scored by a Provan – although not necessarily A. Provan – as Alex was no longer the only Provan on the Everton team roster.

During the winning opening to the campaign, inside-forward David Provan scored twice for Everton in the home game against Burscough, while Alex matched his older brother with a brace at home to Northwich Victoria, and netted Everton’s goal in that lone draw at Chester Rovers. Alex’s next goal came in a 2-6 reverse in the return game at Northwich, as Everton hit a mid-season blip in form. A week later he slotted two more in a 4-0 home win over St. Peter’s. His fourth brace of the season came in a 3-0 win at Haydock. The Liverpool Daily Post’s correspondent made a point of highlighting the progress being made by Everton’s young talisman in his report in the edition of the following Monday, 4 March 1882:

‘Everton (Association) went down to Haydock to play the return match, and, though the team was without its leader (McGill), success attended its efforts, as they won by three goals to nothing. Provan, who secured two of the goals, is a coming man.’

A fortnight later Alex Provan opened the scoring in a 1-1 draw versus Chester College at Stanley Park. Provan’s season, and Everton’s, was rounded off in style when he scored the first recorded hat-trick of his football career in a 6-1 romp at Bennett’s Lane in Bolton, the home of Halliwell Jubilee.

The future looked bright. At this point Alex Provan’s career statistics read (at the very least, based on what statistics survive) in the region of 30 appearances and at least 21 goals, behind only the great Jack McGill in the all-time goal-scoring list of the nascent Everton Football Club. The surname Provan appears without a forename or initial in some team line-ups from the era, so it is not possible to know for certain exactly how many times either Provan brother played for Everton. There is no evidence that the brothers ever played together in the same match – perhaps the selectors deemed that would have been unkind on the opposition, such was their inherent goalscoring prowess!  

On the afternoon of Monday, 29 May 1882, Alex Provan lined up at centre-forward alongside Jack McGill as part of a Liverpool Association select XI, comprising Everton and Bootle players. He was still only 17 and a half years of age. Darwen provided the opposition as part of a week-long fundraising gala, featuring an array of sporting contests and musical performances, in aid of the Stanley Hospital extension fund. The club from the West Pennine Moors filled their boots on this occasion, winning by six goals to one, but to all intents and purposes it appeared that Provan’s footballing stock was rising.

Alas, as fate would have it for Alex Provan and Association Football in general, that was that. No further records exist of Alex ever playing football for Everton again. His football career done and dusted well before his 18^th birthday, the teenage goalscoring sensation of Stanley Park unwittingly became perhaps the first entry of note into the great pantheon of “what ifs” in Everton Football Club history.

However, the Provan family weren’t quite done just yet. A few weeks into the 1882/83 season, on 21 October 1882, David Provan played and scored at least one of the goals (one report credits him with scoring both) in a 2-2 draw at Stanley Park versus Crewe. David was never seen in an Everton jersey again either, despite possibly finishing with tantalizing Everton career figures of three (or maybe even four) goals in what might have only ever been two appearances as stand-in for his brother.

Alongside the records he established, which survive to this day, Alex Provan was very possibly only the second Scottish-born player ever to represent Everton. Once more he followed in the footsteps of his venerated teammate and fellow Glaswegian Jack McGill. Like McGill, Provan had settled in Liverpool prior to the advent of the rudimentary St. Domingo’s Church soccer team, their evolution into Everton Football Club and the first meaningful rumblings of Association Football on Merseyside. These were the days before football transfers, where local lads would try out for a local team and, if they made the grade, take things from there. Everton were certainly not yet at the stage where they had the means or confidence to purposely “import” players from beyond the boundaries of their local community , never mind “foreign” Associations elsewhere.

Jack McGill had arrived at Everton the season prior to his young striking accomplice, with a degree of footballing nous a few levels above that of his new clubmates. He was installed as a kind of prototype ‘player-coach’, captaining the team and drilling the players in the finer arts of the Association game, in which they were all novices at this point. It seems safe to assume that McGill would have taken the Provan brothers, his fellow countrymen, four or five years his junior, under his wing and helped nurture some potentially explosive talent alongside him in the Everton front-line.

Although no records exist to confirm as such, it is possible that Jack McGill was reimbursed financially for his efforts by the Everton directorate. Such transactions were illegal in those early, strictly amateur days, of the sport. Nonetheless, the Everton board, in similar fashion to their rivals up and down the country, would almost certainly have been more than willing to gamble in an effort to advance the development of their club. ‘Veiled professionalism’, as it was known at the time, was rife, with club president’s often claiming to be employing players in their mills or breweries, when in fact the wage they were providing was at least in part, if not entirely, in return for the individual’s efforts on the football pitch.

The first draft form of legalised professionalism was not put in place by the Football Association until 1886, by which time clubs in the north of England were at the point of staging a breakaway from the national governing body of the sport, with the intention of forming a ‘British Association’ of their own with professionalism their key aim. By this time both Alex and David Provan had long since moved on. At the time they had hung their football boots up, the notion of ‘professional football’ was a fantasy, beyond the murky world of illicit remuneration. Both brothers were already training in the field of accountancy by the time they first ran out at Stanley Park as members of an Everton team. The bright lights of the big city and a successful career in business offered a world of possibilities to a well-educated young man from a family of decent standing.

By coincidence, just a few months before Alex Provan’s Everton debut, a Londoner by the name of Sidney Chalk, who was lodging in Liverpool while serving his own apprenticeship in accountancy, had played for and captained Everton at Stanley Park on a handful of occasions. Chalk soon vanished into obscurity in a footballing sense, later returning to the capital to pursue a career in finance, including overseas dealings with the East India Company, where the Provan boys’ own grandfather had also once worked in his capacity as a physician. Alex and David, meanwhile, returned north of the border to follow entrepreneurial ambitions of his own.

Where it all began

Alexander Giffen Provan was born at 7am on Sunday, 9 October 1864, at 4 Portman Place, in Hillhead, Partick, a fairly affluent suburb two miles to the west of Glasgow city centre. 4 Portman Place was the family home of Provan’s mother, Mary Wylie Giffen. It was at that address where Mary married Alex’s father, James Neilson Provan, who is listed on their marriage certificate as a “Landed Proprietor”, on Friday, 19 February 1863. Mary’s father Alexander Giffen was a wine merchant in Glasgow. The grand sandstone tenements of Portman Place still stand today, close by to the bustle of Byres Road, although the road itself has since been renamed Glasgow Street.

James Provan is listed on his son’s birth certificate as a farmer, resident at Peacockbank Farm, just outside the Ayrshire town of Stewarton, a little over 20 miles southwest of Glasgow. James was the son of David Provan, a medical doctor, and Emma Berry Reid, who lived at the stately Lochridge House, a 17th century mansion at the heart of a large estate on the outskirts of Stewarton, where James was born in October 1837.

David Provan was born in 1775 into a respected family with strong ties to the rural expanses of Strathblane and Killearn, north of Glasgow. After qualifying as a doctor, David became an employee of the Honourable East India Company’s Service and served as personal physician to the Rajah of what was then the Kingdom of Travancore in southern India in the early decades of the 19th century.

Upon returning to Scotland, David purchased the Lochridge Estate in 1830 and, that same year, aged 55, married Emma, daughter of William Reid (1764-1831), of well-known Glasgow booksellers Brash and Reid. William was himself a poet, who, according to the Dictionary of National Biography wrote ‘humorous verse in Scottish dialect’ and was ‘said to have been on friendly terms with Robert Burns’. Emma was born in the Gorbals district of Glasgow, in 1812, and was just 18 at the time of her marriage to David.

David Provan died aged 76, at Lochridge House, on 6 December 1851 when James was just 14 years of age. By the time of the 1861 census, the 23-year-old James Provan is listed at Lochridge as ‘farmer of 14 acres; employing one man and one boy’. A decade later, by now married to Mary Giffen, James and the couple’s five young children, including seven-year-old David (who was born in Glasgow on 7 May 1863, just three months after his parents’ wedding) and six-year-old Alex, had relocated to Paisley Road, Govan, on the south bank of the Clyde, and James was making a living as an insurance agent.

A lot can happen in ten years, and by 1881 the Provan family had made a much bigger move, 220 miles south to the Everton district of Liverpool. James was still working as an insurance agent, and he and Mary had set up home at 171 Towson Street, just a few hundred yards from St. Domingo’s Church, where the Reverend Ben Chambers had in recent times encouraged the young men of his congregation to muster an Association Football team to keep them fit and gainfully occupied throughout the winter months.

James appears to have remained in possession of Peacockbank Farm back home in Ayrshire, until at least 1881 when it is mentioned as the Provan family home address in the Liverpool Mercury acknowledgements column, announcing the birth of youngest son John Reid Provan.

The eldest of the Provan children, brothers David and Alexander, aged 17 and 16 respectively, were by now both working as trainee accountants, and the boys were in the midst of their footballing escapades at Stanley Park with Everton. In addition to James and Mary, David and Alexander, the Provan household by now comprised three sisters Eveline, Emma and Janet and another brother, James, all of whom were born in Scotland. They had been joined by an infant brother Robert, born in Liverpool, on 22 April 1878. The children’s paternal grandmother, Emma, passed away, aged 72, at Lochridge House on Boxing Day 1884.

The 1891 census return recorded the Provan family now living at 49 Clarendon Road, off Townsend Lane on the fringes of the Anfield ward, in an area known as Richmond Park. James’ occupation now read ‘oil agent’ and he and Mary’s brood was by now complete, with the addition of the previously mentioned John Reid Provan. Eldest son David had left home and was boarding at 106 Duke Street, back in Glasgow, where he was working as a ‘commercial traveller’.

Both Provan brothers’ dalliance as players with Everton Football Club had by now come and gone in a flash and, still only in his mid-20s, Alex also found himself having returned north of the border. Listed as ‘living by private means’, he was boarding with a couple by the familiar surname of McGill, on Kilburn Street, Cunningham’s Land, in Neilston, Barrhead, in the suburbs to the southwest of Glasgow.

The front page of the Glasgow edition of the Daily Mail newspaper for Monday 29 February 1892 carried under the ‘proclamation of banns and marriage’ notices the announcement that Alexander Giffen Provan of George Street, Barrhead, was to be married to Janet Hutcheson (her family surname appears as Hutchison in several records) of Travellers’ Rest, Neilston. The wedding took place in Neilston a few days later, on 4 March 1892.

Alexander G. Provan is listed as a confectioner in the 1893/94 Register of Electors for Glasgow, working from rented premises at 596-598 Eglinton Street, Govanhill, not far from where he had lived as a boy on Paisley Road on the banks of the Clyde. Janet, who was 11 years Alex’s senior, stated her occupation as ‘confectioner’ on the couple’s marriage certificate, while Alex listed himself as a ‘commercial traveller’. The couple never had children.

And in the end

Everton Football Club’s youngest ever player and goal-scorer, Alexander Giffen Provan, died back in Liverpool at the Provan family home, 49 Clarendon Road, Richmond Park, on Thursday, 30 July 1896. He had suffered from Plithisis, more commonly known today as pulmonary tuberculosis, for the preceding 12 months, and Asthemia (physical exhaustion). It would appear he had returned from Glasgow at some point during his final months, presumably to be nursed at home by his mother. He was just 31 years of age.

Alex was buried at Everton Cemetery, and later joined in the family plot by his parents James and Mary, and two of his younger siblings, brother James and sister Eveline. His probate record listed his address as 156 Gallowgate, Glasgow – by bizarre coincidence the street upon which Alex’s erstwhile Everton teammate, on-pitch chaperone and goal-plundering role model Jack McGill was born in 1859. He left an estate to the value of £212 7s 4d. Janet Provan never remarried, and passed away aged 81, in Neilston, on 30 December 1934.

No further information beyond the 1891 census entry in Glasgow has so far come to light as to the fate of Alex’s older brother David Giffen Provan, who may perhaps have emigrated at some point.

Alexander Giffen Provan: known Everton appearances and goals*:

30 Oct 1880 (h) 1-2 v Darwen (1 goal)
13 Nov 1880 (h) 0-0 v  Birkenhead Association
20 Nov 1880 (h) 7-0 v St. Mary’s (1 goal)
27 Nov 1880 (a) 1-7 v Great Lever (Lancashire Senior Cup, first round replay)
4 Dec 1880 (h) 5-0 v Earlestown (1 goal)
27 Dec 1880 (h) 3-1 v Birkenhead Association (1 goal)
29 Jan 1881 (h) 5-0 v Liverpool Association (2 goals)
12 Feb 1881 (a) 3-2 v Haydock (1 goal)
19 Feb 1881 (a) 1-0 v Garswood Park
26 Feb 1881 (h) 2-0 v Haydock
5 Mar 1881 (h) 1-0 v Bootle
19 Mar 1881 (h) 4-0 v Halliwell Jubilee (2 goals)
26 Mar 1881 (h) 2-0 v Garswood Park
2 Apr 1881 (a) 1-0 v Earlestown
24 Sep 1881 (h) 3-0 v Chester Rovers
15 Oct 1881 (h) 2-0 v Northwich Victoria (2 goals)
22 Oct 1881 (h) 5-0 v Middleton (Lancashire Senior Cup, first round)
29 Oct 1881 (h) 4-0 v Halliwell Jubilee
5 Nov 1881 (a) 1-1 v Chester Rovers (1 goal)
12 Nov 1881 (h) 1-0 v Liverpool Association
19 Nov 1881 (h) 1-0 v Over Wanderers
26 Nov 1881 (a) 1-0 v Earlestown
3 Dec 1881 (h) 1-0 v St. Peter’s
10 Dec 1881 (a) 1-3 v Turton
31 Dec 1881 (a) 2-6 v Northwich Victoria (1 goal)
7 Jan 1882 (h) 4-0 v St. Peter’s (2 goals)
14 Jan 1882 (a) 4-1 v Bootle
4 Feb 1882 (h) 5-0 v Haydock
11 Feb 1882 (a) 4-0 v Over Wanderers
25 Feb 1882 (a) 3-0 v Haydock (2 goals)
11 Mar 1882 (h) 1-1 v Chester College (1 goal)
18 Mar 1882 (h) 7-4 Bootle XI (Bootle team comprised Bootle and Liverpool Association players)
25 Mar 1882 (h) 2-2 v Oswestry
1 Apr 1882 (a) 6-1 v Halliwell Jubilee (3 goals)

Liverpool Association XI (Stanley Hospital Cup fundraiser)
29 May 1882 (h) Darwen 1-6 (combination team featuring Everton and Bootle players)

David Giffen Provan: known Everton appearances and goals:

1 Oct 1881 (h) 8-0 v Burscough (2 goals)
21 Oct 1882 (h) 2-2 v Crewe (1 goal)

*It is possible that the ‘Provan’ who appeared in some of the matches listed under Alex’s name above might have been David. Alex was, as far as records indicate, the brother who appeared most consistently in the Everton starting line-up.