Peter Nellies
Two international footballers were born in the wee, Fife, ex-mining village of Kingseat north of Dunfermline. Both would live on Main St. and briefly at the same time three or so doors apart, Peter Nellies the younger, And both would be part of what could be for work a highly mobile group with the elder, Harry Allan, staying on but the Nellies family, , the father a Colliery Engineman, taking itself to Lanarkshire.
Thus, whilst both his parents were Fifers, Peter Snr. from Inverkeithing, his mother, Elizabeth, from Dunfermline, Peter Jnr. might have started his early football education in the Kingdom but finished it certainly in Douglas Water and Carmichael, both above Lanark itself.
There it had started with junior football for Douglas Water Thistle, where Nellies spent as a full- cum half-back the seasons to 1908, so aged almost twenty-three. There too he captained and from there led the Lanarkshire and Scotland junior teams, winning three caps at that level before stepping up to the senior games with Hearts. And he would stay at Tynecastle for thirteen campaigns, albeit including the War years, when he returned to the pit. And once more he captained club plus also winning two caps, again one with the armband.
Meantime, he had returned home quickly in 1907 to Carmichael to marry Agnes Knox, with whom he would have two daughters and two sons. They were eventually to stay not in Auld Reekie itself but in Musselburgh and it was from there at the age of thirty-five he would step down a division to Stirling's then other team, Kings Park for a season and then join Berwick Rangers for another outwith the League altogether.
In fact he would do so as player-manager but towards the end of the campaign was sacked for simply not turning up for a game. And at that point he went back both to Douglas Water and the pit, that is until in 1930 he was involved in a motor-cycle accident near the village, taken to Glasgow for treatment of a skull injury but failed to overcome it and at the age of just forty-four was dead. He was buried in the family grave at Douglas Water Cemetery, the ceremony attended by a senior delegation from Hearts itself. But there was more to the story than first meets the eye. Peter was by then a widower. Agnes, also at forty-four, had died the previous year, seemingly unexpectedly, of heart disease and back in Edinburgh.
Birth Locator:
Residence Locations:
1891 - 5, Main St., Kingseat, Fife
1901 - Douglas Water Row, Ponfeigh, South Lanarkshire
1911 - 21, Hyndland St., Carmichael, South Lanarkshire
1921 - 21, Lochend Road, Musselburgh
1930 - 9, Carmichael St, Douglas Water, South Lanarkshire
Death Locator:
1930 - Royal Infirmary, Glasgow
Grave Locator:
Douglas Cemetery, Douglas, South Lanarkshire
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