However, Thomas's father was to die in 1906, he aged just just forty-four and Thomas nine, and the family grew up with the elder boys going down the pit and Tommy joining them at fourteen. But at sixteen he was also playing for Hearts of Beath, as a versatile inside-forward cum half-back, whilst in 1915 enlisting, incidentally lying about his age by three years, serving as a clerk in the Army Pay Corps for the duration of the hostilities, but at nineteen stepping up for a season with Hibs and at twenty joining Rangers.

And it would be at Ibrox that he would spend the rest of his playing career, save one small interlude, into the first team at twenty-two and winning the League eight times from 1920 to 1930. And in that same period he was also to win eight caps, twice as captain, and tour with both the SFA and Rangers to North America. And the curious interlude was also to be in the USA. In the early summer of 1924 he sailed to Boston, recorded as an Accountant on only a sixty-day visa, with the intention perhaps for the summer to coach the local Wonder Workers team. That autumn it would enter the American Soccer League for the first time, with a raft of Scots players in the squad, he by then persuaded to stay on as a player. And he clearly had prepped them well. By season's end in March 1925 the teams not only had finished fourth but also won the Lewis Cup. However, by then was long back home and from Christmas back playing in Govan, whether by choice or demand is unclear.

In all Tommy would make about three hundred appearances for Rangers,  on stepping back turn first to journalism and then to management; with St. Johnstone for five seasons from 1931, taking them at first attempt into the First Division and easily keeping them there throughout, and briefly Preston for 1936-7. But he seems to have been something of a home-bird. During the 1930s he lived in Cardonald with siblings and their mother, from 1937 returning to the newspapers, eventually become sports editor of the Scottish Daily Express, and that only changed with her death in 1940. In 1943 aged forty-six he married.  His wife, Helen Griffiths, was from Bo'ness, they were wed in Abercorn just down the Forth and were first to settle in Glasgow once more and finally in Helensburgh. And that is where they would both pass away, he in 1979, aged eighty-two, and she two years later, at eight-four.