It has been said that it was Lang who first gave Hunter the idea of moving south, where under the counter payments were beginning to come into football. If there had been some inducement for Archie to travel to Birmingham, it was certainly not made by Villa because his first intent on arrival was to seek out the Calthorpe club, who by then had formed an association with the pre-eminent Scottish club Queens Park. However, he could not find their headquarters in the booming city and upon being told by his work colleague George Uzzell that Villa’s driving force was the “brother Scot” Ramsay, he agreed to join them instead. Villa certainly gained from Archie’s decision as did the player himself, because Calthorpe soon began to be overshadowed by other clubs in the area.

It has always been generally reckoned that the reason for this decline was that they were unable to charge admission to their Calthorpe Park ground but there is evidence that they later moved to an athletics stadium in Bournbrook where there was no such restriction, although their members insisted on remaining amateur and were therefore unable to attract top-quality players. By this time Archie Hunter was established as the star of the Villa team. He played alongside Ramsay and his own younger brother Andy in the FA Cup match against Stafford Road in 1880 as well as the 1880 Birmingham Senior Cup final win against Saltley College. When Ramsay was forced to retire from playing Archie was a natural choice to inherit the captaincy and under his charge the team’s reputation began to grow even further.

As one of the ‘Scottish Professors’ who transformed football in these early days Archie was playing as a back when he came down to England and it was in this position that he first played for Villa although he soon moved upfield. He was nominally a centre-forward although at this time positions on the pitch were less rigid than they became and Archie’s strengths lay in his running with the ball and passing. He was a great influence on the team and superb at what we would now call motivation. These were the days when rough tackling was a regular occurrence and Hunter was often the target of thuggish defenders, yet would never have dreamt of such behaviour and refused to retaliate. His even temper and fair-mindedness won the respect of everyone in the game. Archie was also responsible for introducing a new element to the English game – his playing the ball out to the wings provided a further attacking element.

Archie was a regular during the years when Villa’s only senior appearances were in the FA Cup. He was undoubtedly the star name of the team, the first celebrity footballer even if such terms were not yet in use, playing for several years alongside his brother Andy, who had travelled down from Ayrshire with Archie and later went to live in Australia for a while. Archie played in a total of 73 league and FA Cup games, scoring 44 goals and his total of 36 in the FA Cup is still the highest number by a Villa player. His finest moments came in the successful 1886-87 cup run, where he became the first player to score in every round, a feat that has still only been achieved by eleven others.

In the first round Archie scored a hat-trick in the 13-0 win over Wednesbury Old Athletic, which is the club’s record score. He got two goals in a 3-1 victory over Rangers in the semi-final played at Crewe, which was the final time a Scottish club played in the competition, and then scored Villa’s second in the 2-0 win against West Bromwich Albion in the final, which took place at the Oval. Less happily, two years later he took part in Villa’s heaviest cup defeat, when they went down 8-1 at Blackburn Rovers in the third round. It was said that this poor performance was due in part to the team having just returned from one of their regular tours of Scotland, where the social side of the trips were reckoned to have been as important to the players as the football.

It was in 1888-89 that Archie took part in what was to prove his final full season for the Villa. His league debut was at home to Stoke and he scored in a 5-1 win. Archie played 22 games and scored ten goals as Villa finished runners-up to double-winners Preston North End, and no doubt he was as disappointed as anyone that William McGregor could not have seen his team win the league for which he had been responsible. He began the following season in his usual fine form but was out of the team after a 2-1 defeat at home to Everton in November 1889, and played just two more games. The first of these was a 1-1 draw at Wolves a month later and Archie’s final appearance was in the return at Everton on 4th January.

The game took place at Anfield in torrential rain on a pitch that Villa officials had complained was unfit for play. An eventual 7-0 defeat was overshadowed by Archie being taken ill with what was described as either a stroke or a heart attack. This was the end of his playing career and although he became a Villa director for a time, he never shone in the boardroom as he did on the pitch. He also wrote a book, Triumphs of the Football Field, that was republished in 1997. Archie was plagued by ill-health for the rest of his life and could only watch from the sidelines as the team carried on without him. He died on 29th November 1894, at the beginning of Villa’s first golden age, and was buried in Witton Cemetery, in the Old Villans corner. Here he and his former colleagues remain within earshot of Villa Park, even though growing industrialisation and house building means that they can no longer enjoy an uninterrupted view of the ground.

Like many of his contemporaries at the start of organised football, Archie is credited as being at the centre of several apocryphal tales, most of which cannot be verified. For example, it was said that he would often turn up at the last minute, either at Wellington Road or the appointed meeting place for away games, because he worked for a man who did not like football and would not let him take time off for games. While this cannot be confirmed, contemporary records show that Archie did occasionally miss matches for no apparent reason although it was also reckoned that his work would regularly take him back to Scotland. Villa were even once said to have chartered a train to take Archie to an away game when no other method was possible.

Again, although there is no record of when this took place or where he travelled to, in those days it would have been possible for such a charter to be arranged. The most memorable tale where Archie was concerned was written about his final days. In his magnificent centenary book Aston Villa – The First Hundred Years, author Peter Morris paints a wonderfully evocative picture of the dying Archie asking brother Andy to pull his bed closer to the window so he could watch the crowds hurrying along to Wellington Road for one last time. Sadly for lovers of the romantic, this story is one that can easily be debunked – Andy had died six years earlier.