James Phillips appears to have been one of the first players to have been recruited to Queen's Park not for social or geographical but purely footballing reasons. He was not in the cloth or clothing trades. Nor did he ever stay locally. In fact he was born in 1853 in Gourock but the son of Glasgow parents, his father a Wright, carpenter, who became a building contractor, his son following him into the joinery trade. But when the family soon moved back from Renfrewshire it was to the city north of the Clyde and that was where, either side of Kelvingrove, in Partick and Milton, that James grew up and learned his first football, as a strong back, initially with local team, Blythswood. 

And it was from there that James was in 1874 invited to join The Spiders, to be in the Cup-winning eleven at full-back alongside Joseph Taylor following season and at half-back with Charles Campbell the next, effectively replacing James Thomson as he moved South. And, although, Queen's Park would be eclipsed for the following three seasons more personal honours were to follow Phillips, including three caps, against England in 1877 and twice against Wales in 1877 and 1878, all at half-back, all wins.

Yet by that time James was just twenty-five years old and for no obvious reason took the decision to leave Scotland and, with a gold-watch from and a life's membership of Queen's Park, seemingly finish with football for good. In October 1878 he also moved South, to London, to Lambeth initially and finding work in the building trade. But there he seems fairly soon to have been joined by Margaret Parker, the Aberdeen-born daughter of a Ship's Captain. She had been working in Glasgow as a Domestic Servant and still from Lambeth the couple married in September 1880. 

They were to have two daughters ten years apart with only the older one seeming to survive and their progress in life can be seen by where they lived, he from Carpenter becoming a Contractor's Foreman and then Manager and possibly building the houses, in which they would stay, first in London's Battersea and later in Clapham. Indeed it would be in the, as estate agents would now say, very sought-after Clapham Common West Side that in 1932 James would pass away at the age of seventy-nine, seemingly by then a widower and with not a single sign in more than fifty years of any involvement at all in London football at any level.