Robert Brown was another player born on Glasgow's Southside, in 1870, but who soon moved away, in his case to Lightburn between Cambuslang and Blantyre. His father was a shopkeeper and came from the former, as did his mother. And it was with Thistle from the latter that Bob began in the junior game, as an attacking player with a preference for inside-right, going on 1888, just turning eighteen, that he stepped up to senior football with Cambuslang itself. 

From there his rise was meteoric. At nineteen he won a single cap against Wales, at twenty he represented Glasgow against Sheffield in Sheffield and in 1891 he turned professional with none other than Wednesday. At the time it was in Football Alliance, joining the League in 1892, Bob by then in his second season, the club then surviving in the First Division but only just. 

But in 1894 Bob returned North for a single season with Third Lanark. In large part it may have been simply an interlude because in 1895 in Cambuslang he married Jane Kerr from Blackburn by Bathgate and for the start of the 1895-6 season immediately returned South, this time to Bolton, There with the Wanderers he would spend seven seasons, dropping back to centre-half. 

And it would be in the Bolton area that Bob and Jane would live out more or less the rest of their lives, having five children, three girls born still in Scotland and from 1900 two boys in England. He would work on the side to begin with as a pattern-maker in the textile-trade before becoming an insurance agent. And it was as a retired agent that Bob would pass away in 1943 in a local hospital two days short of his seventy-third birthday. He was by then a Widower, Jane having died just four months earlier again in Farnworth.