So Matt Busby was just eight when his father had been killed, nineteen on the remarriage and eighteen when his step-father emigrated alone to New York in 1927, with his mother seemingly due to join him and Matt himself actually to depart for the States in February 1928; an entry on the manifest to Boston struck through suggesting he was booked but did not sail. And that was because, having begun his football locally, as an inside-forward, he, himslef a  collier to trade, had been signed by junior club Denny Hibernian and was already catching the eye. Indeed, the result was that in the summer 1928 aged nineteen he was signed by an about-to-be-promoted Manchester City with its Denny connection. Jimmy McMullan, Scotland captain at the time, was at Maine Road and himself had started at the same Stirlingshire club.  

In fact the young Matt was at his new club at first to struggle. He did not appear in the first-team squad until 1930-31 and by then had dropped back to right-half. It would be the position he was to fill for the rest of his playing-career that comprised over two hundred starts for The Blues, to 1936 and including just a single cap in 1933, then over a hundred more with a rising Liverpool, officially to 1945 by when he was thirty-six but essentially to the start of the war, during which he served an army PE instructor.  

And all had taken place with first a settling and then a regulation of his personal life. In 1931 he had in Bothwell from both Manchester and Bellshill addresses married Jeannie Menzies. They had met in 1926 through football, she from a mining community, Bothwell Haugh, just down the hill from Orbiston and now under the waters of Strathclyde Loch. They were to have two children both Manchester-born. And at some point, if his mother had ever gone to the USA, by the mid-1930s she was back, indeed back to Orbiston once more, where she, recorded as twice-widowed, would pass away in 1973 by when Matt had become Sir Matt and completed twenty-five years of management at Old Trafford as well being briefly manager of both Great Britain and of Scotland.