Francis "Frank" Shaw

Francis "Frank" Shaw was an East Indian Merchant, albeit a latter-day one, who played a little football but very well. He was born in Tradeston, one of twelve children, the son of a Glasgow-born Commercial Traveller in Ironmongery, who opened his own ironmongers, and a mother from a wee village between Airdrie and Cumbernauld. However, the family was soon able to move from the city's Southside to its Southern suburbs. Thus it was that at seventeen Frank joined Pollokshields Athletic, which played at Pollok Park, just down the road. 

And there it became very quickly clear, whilst working as a Bleachers and Dyers Clerk, that here was a young man of very great footballing promise. He played for Glasgow at eighteen and a year later, described as "the best right wing forward in Scotland", was capped for the first time and against England, a 1-0 win at Third Lanark's first Cathkin Park. It was an easy day out for Frank, the ground a twenty minutes walk from home for the fit young man he was. 

And he must have been seen to have done well because a fortnight later Frank was in Scotland's team against Wales, another win, he scoring. And a month after that turned out for Queen's Park in the Glasgow Charity Cup Final but not its replay, albeit as a last-minute substitute on the day. Yet that was more or less it, not due his services being no longer required but because he had other plans. In November 1884, aged only twenty, he boarded a ship for India and effectively until retirement did not return apart from four-yearly home-leaves, during one of which in 1889 he turned out for Battlefield and during another in 1897 married. 

In India he, perhaps building on his work experience in Glasgow, became a Cotton Merchant, an increasingly prosperous partner in Fleming, Shaw and Co., with branches in Bombay and Karachi. It therefore would be no surprise that when in Britain he spent time in the cotton-towns, there meeting Margaret Parlane, Lancashire-born but the daughter of another merchant, by then retired but born in Glasgow. 

Margaret and Frank were to wed in Chorlton by Manchester in 1897 and both would return to Bombay, their first child born there but not surviving. And it then seems the decision was taken for her to return. Their two children, who would survive, were both born in Chorlton and by 1911 the couple had bought a house by Woodbridge in Suffolk with Margaret, the two wee ones and her widowed mother staying there and, given the household servants, clearly by then very comfortably-off. 

Frank Shaw seems then soon after to have returned to Britain permanently, the couple moving to Berkshire, to a village just south of Wokingham. During The Great War he would serve as Special Constable in the town but, perhaps as a legacy of the Sub-Continent, began to suffer from ill-health. Indeed so serious was it that on a family holiday in Minehead in 1920 and at just fifty-six he passed away, leaving a relatively young wife and family. And he would be buried in the churchyard of the next-door village in a grave marked by a Celtic cross, to be joined by Margaret but only almost two decades later. Her death would be still in Wokingham in 1957 at eighty-three. 

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