And throughout this period, perhaps through Queen's Park's drapery connections, the club's way of retaining and rewarding off-field its layers, he worked as a drapery salesman and would do so most of his working life, with short interludes as a clerk and a seemingly a Ship's Steward. Certianly drapery was his employment when he married Clement MacNeill in 1890 in Tradeston before settling once more in the Pollokshaws/Crossmyloof. They were to have one son. And he would be recorded as a Soft Goods Salesman on his death certificate in 1933, he passing away at the then Western Infirmary, aged seventy-five, whilst by then living with family north of the river once more. 

By then he was a widower, Clement having died in 1919 and he staying as a boarder in Cathcart. And it would be there also that he, another early notable footballing figure, was to be buried, in Cathcart Cemetery itself.