For Bill the start in football, unlike that of the five years younger, Jock, was to be held up by The Great War. The former had begun playing for local junior-side, Kirkcaldy United, in 1912, aged nineteen and continued to turn out for the club until 1915 by when he was working at the Rosyth Naval Dockyard before being called up. Jock would begin with other local clubs and then Inverkeithing United, also working at Rosyth, from where in 1920 he went South to Hull. Bill, on the other hand, on demobilisation and his return to his home-town was rapidly picked up by the Stark's Park club, there becoming a part of a team alongside David Morris that in his second season finished third in the League, two years later, now also behind Alex James, was fourth with in-between the winning of a single cap. 

However, success would lead to pressure on club and player. Both Morris and James would in 1925 be transferred South to Preston North End and great things. Yet they would not be the first to go. Bill Collier had already moved on a year earlier, also to England but to Sheffield Wednesday, albeit without the same result. He would make only fourteen starts in a single season. 

In part it must have been because of his age. He was already in his thirties. It seems unlikely, as departure from Hillsborough did not prompt an immediate return North, to have been because that same year he had married, back in Kirkcaldy, his wife-to-be Elizabeth Thomson with whom he would have a son. In fact he moved southward, dropping down to Kettering Town and five more years as player cum manager. And from there it was further south still to Dartford in Kent for seven more purely-managerial seasons until 1937, at which point there was finally a return to Scotland that proved permanent. 

Meantime, John had and would not return. After five seasons on the Humber, marrying there in 1924, he spent two at Queens Park Rangers, before two spells, again to 1937, as manager of York City, a move to Co. Durham and then an early death in 1940 back in Hull at the age of just forty-three.