He was to stay at The Black Cats for fifteen seasons, albeit including the war years, to at the age finally of thirty-six drop down for a season to County Durham club, Spennymoor United. By then he had racked up over 260 starts for his senior club, winning with it the League in 1936, having been runners-up the previous season, the FA Cup in 1937 and that same year a single cap, against Czechoslovakia. He had also met and in 1934 married locally, his wife Frances Bailey. 

After football Charlie in a sense returned to the family business, becoming a painter, but in a shipyard in his case. And that would be his life until retirement, the couple settling in Sherburn, a Durham village north of Sunderland and seeming not to have had any children. It would be there he would die in 1984 at the age of seventy-three, survived by Frances by two decades. She would pass away, still in Co, Durham, in 2005 at the age of ninety-three.