The Englishman who founded AC Milan and the people keeping his legacy alive

They weren’t wrong when they named the Cimitero Monumentale, just to the north of Milan’s city centre and a few miles east of San Siro.

It isn’t a typical cemetery: before you get to what looks like a usual graveyard, there’s a massive marble and stone building, the Famedio, that looks more like a stately home than a crypt. It’s grand, it’s slightly foreboding, it dominates the surrounding area, it’s… well, monumental. This is where you need to be buried if you want to be remembered as among the cream of Milanese society. Mayors, artists, politicians, titans of industry, poets, musicians, war heroes and philanthropists: they’re all here.

Some of the city’s sporting greats are here, too. Cesare Maldini, the father of Paolo and former national team manager, is buried here. Giuseppe Meazza, the World Cup-winning striker for whom the home of Inter and Milan is named, too.

In the crypt beneath the main building, a few feet to the left and above the memorial stone for Meazza, is one commemorating Herbert Kilpin.

He wasn’t from Milan, or even Italy. Kilpin was a textile worker from Nottingham who moved from England to northern Italy in 1891. He takes his place among the great and the good, some 134 years later, because in 1899, he founded the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club. You’ll know them better as AC Milan, 19-time Italian and seven-time European champions.

Kilpin hasn’t always been here. He died in 1916, aged 46, and for the better part of a century, he was forgotten, occasionally referenced in Milan history books but overtaken by the modern feats of the team as they grew into the giants of today.

And he might have remained that way were it not for the efforts of a few: a distant relative who grew up with little idea of his significance, a half-Italian lawyer from Manchester who was inspired by his story, but mostly a Milan fan and amateur historian who has pretty much dedicated his life to ensuring that the history of the club, not least its founder, is remembered.

The first Milan game Luigi La Rocca can remember was the European Cup final against Benfica, when he was five years old. “May 22, 1963,” he says, in the raspy voice of a committed and lifelong smoker.

He was smitten immediately. His parents weren’t really bothered about football, but his uncle would take him to games. And not only games: on Saturdays, they would go to the hotel where the team would stay the day before the match, to get autographs and to see his heroes up close. When he was around eight, he started collecting memorabilia: photos, books, scarves, anything he could get his hands on.

In his early twenties, he developed an interest in statistics and the history of Milan. At some point in the late 1970s, he set himself a task: he would find out a piece of information, however small, about every single player who had ever played for Milan, with half an eye on the club’s centenary a couple of decades later.

In pre-internet days, this was, frankly, an insane undertaking. But La Rocca set about it with gusto. And while there were a few books he could lean on, information was relatively scant. He decided to go to the source.

“I started looking through the phone books,” he says. “Every summer we would go to Liguria (on the coast, near the French border) on holiday, and there was a bar that had all the telephone directories for all the regions of Italy.

“I would call up people and ask if they played for Milan. The first person I went to go and meet was Attilio Kossovel (a midfielder who played in the 1930s), who had a gas station near Monza.”

La Rocca had a little information to go with these cold calls, some of it gleaned from a book, Vecchio Milan, published in 1963. He pauses our conversation to retrieve his well-thumbed copy from another room. That was where he first saw a reference to Kilpin, along with other Englishmen involved in the founding of the club.

Few seemed to have any idea of what happened to Kilpin so, alongside his other work, La Rocca set about trying to track down his club’s founder. With the 1999 centenary approaching, he intensified his search, further spurred on by the discovery of the grave of James Richardson Spensley, another English pioneer who had founded Genoa.

La Rocca searched the many municipal cemeteries around Milan, and finally, in 1998 in the archives of the Cimitero Maggiore to the north of the city, he happened upon a reference to an ‘Alberto Kilpin’. The birth and death dates matched up: clearly, this was an ‘Italianised’ version of Herbert, an administrative error that had ensured Kilpin’s obscurity. After years of searching, La Rocca had found the hitherto ignored and forgotten grave of AC Milan’s founder.

“It set my pulse racing,” says La Rocca. “The grave where he was buried was pretty shabby and neglected. We thought he deserved a more dignified resting place. When I knew Kilpin was buried there I contacted the club, but at that time, when Silvio Berlusconi was in charge, they weren’t really very interested in the history of the club.

“So I spoke to the Gazzetta dello Sport and they did an article with the headline ‘Customs agent finds the remains of the founder of Milan’. That gave the impetus for the club to get involved. They then transferred Kilpin’s remains from the municipal cemetery to the main, grand cemetery. If it was just me, as a member of the public, they wouldn’t have listened to me.”

Initially, the remains were put into a fairly modest vault that incorrectly named the club’s first name as ‘Milan Cricket and Football Club’ (“They didn’t consult with me, so they got the detail wrong…”) and would be removed after 30 years. But last year, on the occasion of the club’s 125th anniversary, they were moved to the crypt alongside the other denizens of the city, where they will stay in perpetuity.

La Rocca was there at the ceremony, alongside the club’s current hierarchy. There are other amateur historians, advocates for the club, and committed fans. But none quite as dedicated as La Rocca. He found the holy grail: a life’s work, rewarded.

Helen Stirland grew up in Sherwood, a neighbourhood just to the north of Nottingham city centre. So she would walk past the fairly nondescript shops and flats near the top of Mansfield Road frequently.

Back then, she had no idea that one of her relatives was born in one of those flats, much less that he was a figure of some significance.

“Herbert is my great, great uncle,” she says. “Just before he moved to Italy in 1891, he lived with his brother’s family, including his niece Lucy Kilpin, who was my grandmother. We knew a bit about how he went to Italy, and one of our aunts would tell us that he took football to Italy, but nothing really happened for a long time after that. We didn’t realise the enormity of it until Milan started to get excited about it.”

The family became aware of Kilpin’s significance after La Rocca contacted the Nottingham Evening Post in 1995, asking for information about him. Kilpin married but never had children, so there are no direct descendants, and as such his story got a little lost even among the family. But even then, his true significance wasn’t made clear to them until Helen’s husband, Roger, started to research the family and, by extension, Herbert.

Now though, Stirland is a minor celebrity in Milan. She was invited to the celebrations of their 120th and 125th anniversaries, the latter of which featured the unveiling of Kilpin’s memorial stone in the Famedio. Daniele Massaro, who played more than 200 times for Milan and scored twice in the 1994 Champions League final, asked for a photograph with her. One fan tracked Helen and Roger down at Casa Milan, the club’s headquarters, because he knew they were in town.

The plaque outside Kilpin’s birthplace, Mansfield Road, Nottingham (Nick Miller/The Athletic)

“They all want to kiss Helen and get photos,” says Roger.

“I’ve met so many people through it,” she says. “It was a very moving experience. I feel proud of what he managed to accomplish from such humble beginnings, and that they think so much of him. People talk about it so much, and they’re so pleased to see you.”

Not that much is actually known about Kilpin. He was born in 1870 and played for a few amateur teams in Nottingham until moving to Italy in 1891, initially to Turin and later Milan. He formed the club with a mix of other English immigrants and locals in 1899. The nationality of Kilpin and some of his contemporaries is why the club is, to this day, called AC Milan, rather than Milano.

He married Maria, a woman from nearby Lodi, in 1905. Kilpin was a midfielder, and played until 1908, part of the teams that won their first three Italian titles. But after his retirement, he seemed to lose his way slightly. He refereed a few games, but was often seen as a solitary figure watching Milan games. His health declined and he died, aged 46, in 1916.

The lack of information, even with the help of archives and La Rocca’s assorted dossiers, was a problem for Robert Nieri. Nieri is a lawyer, originally from Manchester but who lived in Nottingham. He saw a story in the Nottingham Evening Post in 2007 proclaiming ‘local lad is Milan hero’, and became fascinated with the story. “I’m half Italian, and it just resonated with me,” he said. “Richard Williams, the former Guardian writer, was quoted in the article, said it would be great if someone could write Herbert’s story.”

So, despite having never written a book before, Nieri gave it a go. But the dearth of reliable information meant that a straight biography wasn’t feasible, so instead, he wrote a fictionalised version of Kilpin’s story, The Lord Of Milan, published in 2016. “I tried to be as true as possible to the facts. I just tried to weave in what probably would have happened.”

Around the same time, Left Lion, a local Nottingham magazine and media company, made a documentary about Kilpin and his legacy, executive produced by Nieri, also called The Lord Of Milan. The heart of the film is when La Rocca, along with fellow fans/historians/enthusiasts Enrico Tosi and Pierangelo Brivio, are taken by Nieri to the place where Kilpin was born, the nondescript flat above what used to be his father’s butcher shop on Mansfield Road in Nottingham.

The place has since been turned into student flats, but at the time, it was essentially abandoned and pretty bleak, and it was a struggle to even find out who owned it. When the three Italians walk into the room, there is a palpable sense of ‘…is this it?’ among them, before a light goes on in their eyes and they collectively regain a sense of wonder.

“I can still remember when they came into the room,” says Nieri. “One of them muttered, ‘It’s so shabby… but it’s amazing for us to be here to see where our founder was born’. It was almost like a religious experience. It was like going to Mecca or something. They were really moved. Pierluigi was going round picking up stuff, stones and bricks to take as mementoes, like he was picking up treasure.”

There’s a plaque on the wall outside commemorating Kilpin’s birthplace. That was supplemented by a display explaining his story on the bus stop outside, but that has since been vandalised and is no longer there. You can, however, get a beer at the Kilpin, a pub in Nottingham city centre, while efforts have been intermittently made to get a street named after him, something Nieri is keen to revive.

That would be slightly better than in Milan: the only thing that carries his name is, bizarrely, a roundabout. La Rocca would like some aspect of Milan’s new stadium, should it ever materialise, to commemorate their founder.

Maybe it’s just as good that his legacy is less tangible.

(left to right) Jared Wilson, Robert Nieri, Luigi La Rocca, Adriano Galliani, Enrico Tosi, Pierangelo Brivio, Georgianna Scurfield (Robert Nieri)

“The most magical thing for me,” says Nieri, “wasn’t necessarily writing the book, it was going to the schools in that area, which is a bit down at heel, to talk about this guy who’s from round here — he’s like you, and look what he did with his life. You should have seen the look on these kids’ faces. It was so satisfying and rewarding to try and inspire them.

“He was in the right place at the right time, but he had that passion. He wasn’t a wonderful player or a Machiavellian schemer, but he was an everyman who had this incredible story, which has only really been appreciated after he’s long gone.”

And it’s been appreciated, thanks to Helen and Roger Stirland, Robert Nieri, and the directors of the documentary, Jared Wilson and Georgianna Scurfield.

But mostly thanks to Luigi La Rocca.

Now that the world knows about Kilpin and the Milanisti have learned a little more about their history, does La Rocca think his work is done?

Sort of.

“I’m very proud,” he says. “As far as Kilpin is concerned, I think I’ve done my job. But I am going to retire next year, and I would like to find out some more about Hoode, Milan’s first goalkeeper. Also, David Allison, who was the first captain.

“I’d like to find out where his wife, Maria, is buried. She’s disappeared into history. She probably died a year or two after Herbert. I’d like to close that story, and maybe bring a flower to her grave.”

(Top photo: left, Herbert Kilpin; Associated Press/right, Kilpin’s stone in Milan’s crypt; Nick Miller/The Athletic)