Jimmy Fleming was born Townhead in the centre of Glasgow, the third son of a Tinsmith cum Gasfitter, working on the railways, cum Millwright. By eighteen Jimmy was working as a clerk and playing junior football before, aged twenty, turning professional with St. Johnstone. There at centre-forward his sixteen goals in fourteen games helped the The Saints to gain promotion to the top flight for the first time and two seasons later Rangers came in for him He would remain at the club for almost a decade with not far off two hundred goals at about two very three games. Yet such was the forward talent available to the national team at the time that he was capped just three times. 

His footballing career was to end with two final seasons from 1934 at Ayr United but in the meantime in 1935 in Glasgow he married Agnes (Nancy) Watson and they appear perhaps to have had at least one child, a son. But he did so not as a footballer but listed as an Iron and Steel Manufacturer's Accountant. Indeed, whilst kicking a ball professionally he had also completed his accountancy qualification, pursuing that profession and acting as a Manufacturing Agent until retirement. By then they had moved to East Kilbride, living in a tower block there. And it would be in Hairmyres Hospital in the town that he would die in 1969, to be cremated at Linn Crematorium and outlived by Nancy by the best part of a decade.