NOTE: The grave of David Wotherspoon, one of the first Eleven ever to represent Scotland, is in a deplorable condition (see below). His last resting placed is unmarked and that it remains so is a disgrace on the part of our national footballing establishment and the operators of the Southern Necropolis, Glasgow City Council; one which can easily be corrected by a relatively small amount of money from the former and some restorative cooperation between the both.
The three Wotherspoon brothers — David, Thomas, and John —were original or near-original members of Queen's Park, as their names appear on the 1868 roll but with the younger Thomas's no longer there in 1869. Indeed David was from April 1869 a member of the committee, remaining in place for five years, had been club-secretary from November, 1869 and Robert Smith's move to London until the annual meeting in 1872, when Archibald Rae replaced him and is even credited with the club's black and white hoops. That is until both he and John left for Clydesdale with Robert Gardner in February, 1874. Moreover over the same period on-field David also played at half-back for The Spiders, but as a forward in both the first and second internationals, at Partick in 1872 and in London in 1873, plus in the FA Cup. And after the move he was the full-back for Glasgow against Sheffield in 1874 and in Clydesdale's losing team to Queen's Park in the Scottish Cup that same year, this whilst elder brother John also played, once more as member of Clydesdale against Sheffield but the following year, 1875 .
David Wotherspoon was born in 1849 in Hamilton, the son of a baker and one of ten children. But as early as late 1861 with the family he had moved to Glasgow, to Paterson St. in Tradeston. His father died there in December that year. Certainly by 1871 he was a clerk to an Iron Merchant and living at number 24, after which came first the Clydesdale move and then marriage, in 1876 to Mary Galbraith, with whom he would have five daughters.
And it would be shortly after marriage that Wotherspoon seems, aged about twenty-eight, to have given up the game. By 1881 the family was living at 13, Kenmure St. in Pollokshields; he now an Iron Merchant in his own right and increasingly prosperous, they then moving out of town. In 1891 the family is to be found in Bothwell, possibly actually Uddingston, on Clydeford Drive.
Yet by 1901 wife and daughters were to be back in Pollokshields at Leven Street but with David not recorded. The same Leven St. was, however, given as his home address in 1906 when in a Kelvin nursing-home he was another to succumb to tuberculosis, plus complications, aged just fifty-six, to be buried in Glasgow's Southern Necropolis, in a since very much neglected grave.
Birth Locator:
1849 - Townhead St., Hamilton, Lanarkshire
Residence Locator(s):
1851 & 1861 - 40, Townhead St., Hamilton, Lanarkshire
1871 - 24, Paterson St., Tradeston, Glasgow
1881 - 13, Kenmure St., Pollockshields, Glasgow
1891 - 1, Clydeford Drive, (Bothwell), Lanarkshire
1906 - 4, Leven St. Pollockshields, Glasgow
Grave Locator
Southern Necropolis, Gorbals, Glasgow
Other Sources:
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