David Drummond Bone

Born in 1841 and dying in 1911, David Drummond Bone was a Scottish journalist and author whose work ranged across sport, social observation, and local history. He wrote for a broad reading public and is now best known for Scottish Football: Reminiscences and Sketches, a 1890 book often noted as one of the earliest substantial histories of the game in Scotland.

Bone also wrote beyond football, with titles including Miller's Son and Other Stories and Children of the Sea. The picture that emerges is of a versatile Victorian man of letters: interested in ordinary people, keen on lively anecdote, and drawn to subjects that connected readers with the places and pastimes around them.

He is also remembered through his family, as the father of the celebrated Scottish artist Sir Muirhead Bone. Although not as widely read today as some of his contemporaries, his books still offer a vivid glimpse of Scottish life and sporting culture at the end of the nineteenth century.