Peter Dowds would remain at Celtic for two more seasons, in the team in 1891-92 that would win the league title for the first time. However, there was constant interest from Down South and in 1892 he left for a season at Aston Villa and another at Stoke, twenty starts at the first and fourth place and seventeen at the second and eleventh. 

But who knows if the effects of what was to come all too soon were already being felt. Certainly in the Potteries they must have been for when he returned to Celtic for the 1894-5 season he managed only four starts before falling ill. And just a year later, a week after his twenty-fourth birthday, he was dead. Mary-Jane Dowd(s) would outlive him by half-a-century, passing in Dundee in 1946. He was buried in Elderslie's Abbey Cemetery in a grave unmarked until in 2014 action by the Celtic Graves Society.