It was from then he began to accrue representative honours leading in 1885 to his first and only cap. But in 1886 he was accused of over rough play and fell out with the club. It prompted a trial for Partick Thistle but clearly also contact with St. Mirren, which he would join, of which he became club captain and where he stayed until 1890-ish. 

He is then reported that he remained in Paisley until his early death in 1912, working as a joiner. The profession is correct. The history is not quite. In fact he remained in the Renfrewshire town probably for a decade or so. There in 1895 he had married Mary Duncan with whom he was to have two children, a girl and then a boy, also Hugh. But Mary, aged just thirty-three would die in 1899 and Hugh would move with the children to stay with his younger sister back in Anderston. 

However, connections with Paisley were clearly still maintained. In 1903 he married in the town for a second time. His wife was Eliza Wylie, a widow with two children who had lost her husband two years earlier and it might have been expected that they and the four children should have settled. Yet that would not be the case. In 1907 Hugh sailed to New York and there joined a younger brother, another carpenter, and his wife in Belleville in New Jersey, just across the Passaic River from Kearny. Meanwhile Eliza remained in Scotland with her own two and her two step-children and it was to that home Hugh in April 1912 returned. And he may well have done so to die. Certainly seven weeks later he was to pass away aged fifty-one to be buried locally in Woodside Cemetery. And Eliza was to follow him not long after, her own death still in the town being in 1917.