For three seasons until his retirement in from playing 1882 David "Davie" Davidson formed with Charles Campbell the half-back pairing that was to lift the Queen's Park club from the slough, into which it had slipped in the second half of the 1870s. Indeed, with his muscular physique, famed for his powerful kicking and four year's seniority he was yin to Campbell's yang, or perhaps vice versa. They even lived at the time within a mile and a half of each other, Davidson literally yards from their ground, the first Hampden.

Davie had been born in 1850 in Glasgow, the eldest son of a Foundry Manager, the same profession he would eventually follow and give him the footballing soubriquet, The Iron Horse. But his parents were not Glaswegian. His father hailed from from the Methil/Kirkcaldy area of Fife and his mother from south Stirlingshire. And within a decade of the future footballer's birth the family had moved from north to south of the river, to Laurieston. It was there he actually grew up with Tradeston on one side and The Gorbals on the other. It was there too as a young man he joined the Third Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, learned the game as in the early 1870s it exploded in South Glasgow and from 1873 to 1877 turning out for their footballing off-shoot, Third Lanark, including defeat, but only after a draw and a replay, in the 1876 Scottish Cup Final.

However, by the end of the decade the family, he with it, had moved to Crosshill and Davie to Queen's Park. Who prompted what or whom is unclear. And it was during the years of reinvigoration of Scotland's doyen club, to which he was to prove just as central as Campbell or Andrew Watson, that not only would he be in the Cup winning teams of 1880, 1881and 1882 but also win, once as captain, his five caps, including the 1881 at the age of thirty the 1-6 away-defeat of England. That would a year before his retirement and two before marriage in Glasgow to Agnes Frame, a move for work as an iron-moulder to Paisley and finally the foundation of his own foundry-management company, which allowed a further move to Garelochhead. And it was there the couple would largely raise a large family and remain for the rest of their lives. Davie Davidson would die in the then Dunbartonshire now Argyll village in 1919, at the sixty-eight. His wife would survive him by just over thirty years, passing away still there only in 1951, at the age of eighty-seven.