Woodville "Woody" Gray was distinctive in several ways. The first was his name, the second that his family was Quaker, the third that his mother was English, the fourth that he learned his football in England and fifth that he was a precocious talent, playing the representative game at sixteen and invited, and refusing to play for Scotland at seventeen.
He was born in Pollokshields in 1866, his father the Aberdeen-born owner of a well-known, Glasgow biscuit bakery. Thus his first decade was spent as football exploded all around before then being sent at thirteen sent to a footballing, Quaker school in York.
It meant firstly that he could hardly have escaped the bug, secondly, that by the time he had competed his education at rugby-playing Glasgow Academy he not only knew the oval-ball game but had maintained his involvement with the round-ball by joining not nearby Queen's Park or Third Lanark but truly local, Pollokshields Athletic and, thirdly, that when at sixteen he represented Glasgow against Edinburgh he did so from his lesser, home club. Indeed it was a club, a team that he was to remain loyal for essentially eight seasons even as it foundered and in 1888 amalgamated with Battlefield and from which in 1885 he turned down the opportunity of a cap, was reserve for two more and finally in 1886 made his only international start, albeit against England.
That is not to say that he was not admired by other clubs and, as an amateur, could not on occasions appear for them. Indeed again at sixteen he won the Glasgow Charity Cup with the Hampden club and two years later in 1885 he was part of again The Spiders eleven that reached and lost the FA Cup Final for a second and last time.
But in 1890 at just twenty-three, working as a Lithographic Printer, he simply stepped away from it all. Then in 1891 in Barnsley in Yorkshire married a Quaker-girl from York, Gulielma Payne and for or a short while they returned to Glasgow. Their first child was born in the city, that is sometime before by the turn of the century they were to move to Rock Ferry in Cheshire by Birkenhead. There Woody would set up a printing, printers' agent and stationary business in Liverpool until retirement, they would settle, apart form a short period in the 1920s back in Glasgow, in a house they would call Kilmory and have three more children, a boy and two more daughters, all Wirral-born. And it would be from Kilmory that Woodville would end his days, dying in hospital in Birkenhead in 1938 at the age of seventy-seven, survived by Gulielma by eighteen years, she passing away still in Cheshire in 1956 at eighty-nine.
Birth Locator:
1866 - Fir Bank, St. John's Road, Pollokshields, Glasgow
Residence Locations:
1871 - Fir Bank, , St. Johns Road, Pollokshields, Glasgow
(1881 - Fir Bank, ,2, St. Johns Road, Pollokshields, Glasgow)
1891 - 2, St. John's Road, Pollokshields, Glasgow
1901-2 - 38, Rock Park, Rock Ferry, Wirral
1906-38 - Kilmory, 26, Ravenswood Ave., Rock Ferry, Wirral
Death Locator:
1938 - General Hospital, Birkenhead, Glasgow
Grave Locator:
Bebington Cemetery, Wirral, Cheshire
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