But he left having played some football with Wishaw YMCA and in his new home on the banks of the St. Lawrence River he joined first the local town club, then in the city Grenadier Guards, where he emerged as a fine left-back. Indeed such was his growing reputation that in 1925 he was offered an expenses-paid trial at Everton but instead chose to turn professional with Montreal Carsteel. In great part the decision to remain may have been because in 1924 and back in Lachine he seems to have married Nancy Ferguson, born in Coatbridge, but the marriage was to brief. She would die in 1928 to be buried by Lachine at Pointe-Claire, by which time Bob had in footballing terms just moved on to play in burgeoning American soccer for Rhode Island's Providence Clamdiggers. 

In the circumstances Bob might have then returned to Canada but instead he chose after a single season to move on to two more just across the state-line in Massachusetts with Fall River Marksman, winning the US Challenge Cup in 1930 and then come back to Scotland. Moreover, he joined Rangers, albeit not featuring until the end of the season because in the meantime in 1931 he had married once more and this time in Edinburgh, his bride, Agnes Munro, plus travelling back in Montreal, there playing for the Bluebonnets in winning the Quebec Cup.

Rangers were to win the League title in 1931. He had made three starts but the following season in winning the Scottish Cup he made forty-eight, but again did not stay. Instead he went South to Chelsea for four campaigns and seventy-four games before then at thirty-two there was a season at Cardiff City, another as player-manager in Ireland with Sligo Rovers, a further one with Workington and a final year to the outbreak of the Second War at Raith. 

By then he was thirty-six, would return to Edinburgh, where Agnes seems already to have settled after Chelsea, he and she would stay in Haymarket, have four children and he work as a warehouse foreman, coach Dalkeith Thistle and be a scout, it is said Chief Scout for Rangers, until 1979 and the age of seventy-five, beyond which he would live another decade and half. He, staying still in the city, would die in 1994 in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital at eighty-nine to be cremated at Warriston Cemetery, Agnes having predeceased him by four years at the age of eighty-nine.