In 1906-7 it fell from fifth to seventeenth, the following season it was third, yet at the end of 1908-9 was relegated only to bounce back immediately and then stick but little more. By then Stewart was just twenty-eight so it was perhaps surprising that at that point he made the choice to return north of the border to Partick Thistle. In fact he did not settle but then was not picked up by any major team anywhere. Instead, suggesting perhaps the carrying of an injury, he spent a season in the lower leagues with Stalybridge on the outskirts of Manchester and then one more in Wales with Merthyr Town before retirement. 

But it would not be to Scotland. That same year, iIn 1914 and back in Manchester in Chorlton, he married Olive Kirkham, with whom he would have a daughter, the family settling in Stretford, he working as a mainly as a driver, perhaps of lorries, perhaps even of busses until his death in Davyhulme in 1962 aged, eighty-one, to be cremated at the Manchester Crematorium.