Well sort of........
Whilst researching a completely different matter, I came across the fact that Hampton resident, Robert George Graham, who lived at St Albans Lodge on the Hampton Court Road (now demolished), was one of the original member of the Football Association in 1863. He acted as Treasurer and Secretary in its formative years and played for Barnes F.C., one of the original members of the FA. He was an all round sportsman, rower and athlete and became a stockbroker in the City of London. He moved to Hampton in the late 1870s/early 1880s where he was much better known as the Captain of the Fire Brigade, whose station can still be seen on Thames Street.
Graham's importance in the development of the rules of football cannot be under-estimated. As Secretary of the FA he wrote to all known football clubs in the country asking them to become members of the FA and sought their opinions on how the rules should be set. At this time the game was heavily dominated by the public schools, universities, the armed forces and ex public school boys who had started teams after leaving education. Teams played under all different sets of rules many of which today would not be considered that different to rugby. This made it difficult for teams to play each other as there was no real common set of rules that each team understood or liked. The establishment of the FA was the first attempt to create some order out of the chaos of competing rules and over the next few years the game began to take on most of the characteristics we see today. After a slow start when just 10 clubs joined the FA, membership grew to 30 by 1867. Graham, a forward, played in the very first inter County match when Middlesex played Surrey & Kent at Battersea Park. His team, Barnes F. C. were the first team in the Borough of Richmond to play in the FA Cup. Players were drawn from the local rowing club, of which Graham was an active member, and from a local "crammer" for army officer entrants. This was most definitely posh boys only, with two Lords playing as forwards alongside Graham.
Despite his footballing history, Graham doesn't seem to have got that involved in the emerging clubs in Hampton that started to form in the 1880s. His role in the fire Brigade seems to have been his major contribution to the local community but nonetheless his importance to the game nationally and globally cannot be denied.
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Unofficial forum for supporters of Hampton & Richmond Borough FC