Bob and his brother, Alex, six years younger and also a Morton player, were the sons of a Glasgow-born Engine Fitter and a mother from a croft officially in Kilmacolm but actually above Greenock itself. But the boys were raised essentially in the Ingleston area of the town, in fact Alex, n the field a half-back, was to live the while of his life on Ingleston Road, dying there unmarried, aged fifty-nine in 1926. Bob, on the other hand would marry in 1889, his bride, Mary Blain, and they would have five children. But by then he was about to come to the end of a decade of football with his home-town club and the county. An inside-right he had begun just as football reached the town with locals teams either side of where the family stayed that is before at twenty moving to Cappielow, the home from the previous year of Morton. And he would remain there for the decade, captaining for much of that time until in 1890 at thury he hung up his boots, tuning instead to cricket and married-life.