Yet, despite obvious talent and presumably no lack of attention from club scouts on the other talent being produced by the town and the wider area, he, after local, youth football with Orbiston Celtic and Bellshill Athletic, was at twenty playing the junior game with Ashfield in Glasgow before only at twenty-one stepping up. And he was to do it not with any of the several senior clubs within easy reach of his hometown but with Kirkcaldy's Raith Rovers. There manager James Logan, having taken the team to third in the First Division in 1922, was rebuilding and might well have achieved equal success but for the club needing to sell on, with one to go, in 1925, having just won a first cap, being James.

He went South to Preston as a fairly conventional, goal-scoring inside-left. He also did so as a married man. In 1924 in Edinburgh he had wed Margaret Willis, born in Gateshead in England but living just down the road in Kirkcaldy and with whom he was to have three children. And he was to stay with the Lancashire club for four seasons, James being top-scorer in the first, it starting right in the middle of the English Second Division but after gradually rising to fourth spot in 1928 only to drop back badly to thirteenth by 1929. 

But by then there were problems and tensions. The player was on the then imposed maximum of £8 per week. The club began refusing at times to release him for international duty, which not only stopped him playing for his country but also curtailed his potential income. Thus it was when Herbert Chapman's Arsenal came in for him in the summer of 1929, offering almost three times what he had cost, it was probably relief on both sides.

Now there is a tendency at this point to think that James, Arsenal and success were immediately one. But facts show otherwise. At the end of the 1928-9 season Arsenal had finished in ninth position in the English First Division. In 1930 it was thirteen having had a first half of the campaign to forget. There were two factors. First, Chapman found himself having to change the system half-way through. He introduced a centre-back. Second, James, whilst he played three-quarters of the games, was, at the age of twenty-eight having to change his game, not just once, converting from finisher to provider, but then twice, old system to new. 

Thankfully both changes were successful with the result at the end of the season of a Cup Final and a win. Moreover, it would start a run over six more seasons that would see for Arsenal and James two more Cups and four League titles and for him personally eight caps in all before the years and bad knees brought an end at the age of thirty-five. Arsenal itself would continue to have some success for another year but by then, remaining in London, he had turned to journalism, other business interests and some coaching including, post-War, the Gunners Third team. However, he was at fifty to develop cancer, passing away in 1953 at just fifty-two, to be cremated and his ashes scattered in Golders Green Cemetery. He would be survived by Margaret. She would die in 1993, aged eighty-six.