Willie ( and Hugh) Mills
William "Willie" Mills was, in comparison with the game's earliest days, one of the few footballing talents, apart, of course, from the Jacksons, to emerge from the Vale of Leven between the wars. Born in 1915 he was the eighth of nine children of another family that had come into the Vale from Highland Stirlingshire. An elder brother, Hugh, nicknamed Bunty, would also be a professional footballer with West Ham but without the same success. They were the sons of a stonemason, who would die in Balloch, and be buried in Vale of Leven Cemetery. But Willie, whilst he was born in Bonhill would end his days in Aberdeen, the club he had joined from junior football as an inside-forward and, aged just seventeen, as something of a prodigy. In fact he was a player, who might have gone on to greater things but for the interruption of his prime years by the Second World War.
With the original Vale of Leven F.C in 1924 only playing in the soon to be discontinued Scottish Division Three and with dissolution following in 1929 Hugh began his junior footballing career at Bridgeton Waverley in the East End of Glasgow. Whether the whole family had moved to the city is unclear but, since his father had been employed by the North British Railway, there is every chance that it had. Nor is it therefore clear whether he, indeed the brothers actually learned their football on the streets of Bonhill or Glasgow, with it most likely it was a bit of both. Certainly when he stepped up to the senior game it was Paddy Travers, who recruited him and he before The Dons had been manager of Dumbarton.
Willie Mills would spend five seasons at Aberdeen, making almost two hundred league starts at over a goal every two games. He was in the Dons team that lost the Cup Final in 1937, meantime, in 1935 and 1936 winning three caps and in 1937 marrying Margaret Reid Low again in The Granite City. They were to have one daughter, born that year. Then in early 1938 Huddersfield Town came in with a substantial fee and, still only twenty-three he moved South. However, in what remained of the season, he played just one game and was not in The Terriers' team that lost the 1938 Cup Final. It was only the following season that he made a contribution with twenty-six appearances and seven goals before league football was suspended for the duration of the war and he came north once more.
During the war itself Willie served as an army fitness instructor first in Perth, playing a few guest-matches, then in Germany. Then after the hostilities he would return to football and Huddersfield but in 1947 was released. Again he came immediately North, eventually becoming player-manager of both Lossiemouth and Huntly. In 1950 he coached on Malta, that is before managing again in the Highland League, at Keith and at Huntly for a second time then, whilst settling back in Aberdeen and working as a Machine Operator, simply returning to coaching more generally.
Willie Mills would pass away in 1990 at the age of seventy-five in hospital in Aberdeen, having outlived his wife by three years and sadly his daughter by five.
Birth Locator:
1915 - Dillichip Terrace, Bonhill, Dunbartonshire
Residence Locations:
1921 - 43, Dillichip Terrace, Bonhill, Dunbartonshire
1937 - 5, Orchard St., Aberdeen
1990 - N/A
Death Locator:
1990 - Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen
Burial Locator:
Hazlehead Crematorium, Aberdeen
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