Moreover, between at least then and 1921 the family was actually within sight of Tynecastle staying on the Gorgie Road with the father having turned to trade, at the time working as a Fruiterer and recorded on his death in 1938 in Morningside as a Coal Merchant. Yet perhaps the explanation of the Jambo oversight was in part history. Although young James would in 1922 win a school-boy cap presumably from West Edinburgh he actually begin his junior football journey on the other side the city and beyond not in Portabello itself but with Tranent. That was before at twenty being signed to the senior game by Hamilton Academicals and by early 1933 being such a stalwart that he would then be transferred, now more an inside-forward and for good money, South to Manchester City as at season's end an eventual replacement for the inestimable Jimmy McMullan.

And such was his showing at the start of 1933-4 that he was rapidly awarded a cap, but only before form dropped off badly and despite being part of the road to the FA Cup Final he was left out of the team on the day itself. Nor did his play recover, to such an extent that by mid-Winter he had been sold to Aston Villa, stayed just a season and half, including relegation, and was again moving on and at only twenty-eight. 

And this time it meant a drop out of the League, into the Southern League at Ipswich, on the face of it perhaps the beginning of a slide out of the game. In fact it proved to be nothing but. At Portman Road he returned the half-back line, to form, then was made captain and under the managership of Scott Duncan in 1938 led the club not just to election to the top-flight but also then finishing a very creditable seventh in the Third Division South. That was just before War broke out, the game was suspended and he was recorded as working as a Brewery Drayman, quite likely with Cobbold intervention.

He had by then and also in Ipswich married. The wedding had been in 1936. His bride was Olive Faulkner and they were to have two children again in the Suffolk town, where they would remain. In the War years he played a few ad-hoc games for Chelmsford City and Leyton Orient, whilst serving in the Home Guard. At the end of hostilities he returned to the town club as trainer, then tried his hand at management with Clacton Town before stepping back altogether.  

However, it at this point that matters become a little vague. Olive McLuckie would pass away at the age of sixty-one in 1959 still in Ipswich, at which point Jimmy's father was long deceased but his mother was still very much alive. She would die in 1976 in Leith, widower Jimmy perhaps returned home by then with his death to be exactly a decade later in Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary, he to be cremated at Warriston Cemetery.