Moses McNeil

Moses Mc Neil was the youngest of the footballing McNeil brothers and the last to make the move from the Gareloch to Glasgow. But he was not the youngest of the founders of Glasgow Rangers. That was Peter Campbell

Moses was born in the family home at Shandon, his father a gardener at Belmore House. At fourteen/fifteen he was still staying with his parents, who had moved across to the other side of the loch to Roseneath but would soon be away. In the May of the following year he with brother, Peter, Peter Campbell and William McBeath was one of the quartet, which on a walk through Kelvingrove Park came up with the idea of a new football club.  

At that stage young Moses's knowledge of football must have been minimal. He might have gathered something from brother, Harry, five years his elder and already involved. But that was probably it. Yet it did not stop him, firstly, suggesting the name for the new club and, secondly, playing from its earliest days. In fact he was to give a decade's service to the club as a player, as a wing-forward, being in the losing side in the Scottish Cup Final of 1877 and winning two caps, in 1876 even winning for Scotland alongside his brother in the first ever international played by Wales.      

Outside football Moses worked as a travelling salesman, except for a short period helping Harry run the hotel he and his second wife took on in Bangor, Northern Ireland. Moses himself never married, living on arrival in Glasgow with his elder sister, Elizabeth, two brothers, William and fellow Ranger's founder, Peter, and James Campbell, brother of Peter Campbell, who was also founder, then boarding at various addresses in the city before finally retiring back to the shores of the Gareloch, to Clynder by Rosneath and a house he would share with another sister, Isabella. She died in 1935 and it was both from and to there that in 1938 that Moses at the age of eighty-two would also pass away. Whilst his death would actually be at the Central Hospital in Dumbarton, his final resting place is Roseneath Churchyard.  

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