Wilfred "Wilfy" (& Harry, Willie and Norman) Low

The Low family as a first generation was to provide the North-East of England not one but two half-backs, the younger one, Wilf, to Newcastle for fifteen years, and Harry, three years older, to Sunderland for a dozen. And the next generation would give two more for the wider Scottish and the English game. 

Wilfy had been born in Aberdeen, as they all were, he in 1885, the son of parents from the rural north of the shire, his father a mason cum diver, later Harbour Works Inspector. And the younger began his football with the local side, Abergeldie, before in 1904 at eighteen signing for Aberdeen itself, his elder brother already in its first team. 

Thus it was that in 1904-5 Harry had twenty-four starts. Wilfy made five. The next season it was twenty-nine and fourteen, Harry moving up into the forward-line, and in 1906-7 it was thirty-two and thirty-one, with Harry then moving South and Wilfy staying with the Dons for a total of five years. That is before at twenty-four he would be signed by Newcastle and where, to be frank, the allowing of Andy Aitken to depart in 1906 and his replacement with Colin Veitch, the Englishman Colin Campbell McKechnie Veitch, had worked but not quite as well as hoped. In the interim two league titles had been won but there had been a third loss of an FA Cup Final. 

Low's arrival would change or rather reverse that. Veitch could move to right-half, the Cup would finally be won in 1911 but now the league would prove elusive. Nevertheless Wilf Low's contribution was enough for pre-Great War two caps in 1911 and a third in 1912, albeit that he was effectively second choice to Sunderland's Charlie Thomson. And post-War, with Thomson's playing career at an end there would be two more even by then he was approaching thirty-five with still four more seasons at The Toon, two with more than thirty starts per campaign before easing down. 

In the meantime off the field before Wilfy Low had left for Newcastle in 1908 in Aberdeen he had married Lizzie Mackie, he recorded as a Stonecutter. He was twenty-two, she was eighteen. They were to have at least three children born the Granite City between then and 1914, perhaps more after that in England but with no obvious record. 

After retirement Wilfy would stay on at St. James' Park as trainer and groundsman, the family settling in a house until 1933 across the road from the ground itself. But that year and within three hundred yards tragedy would strike, as he was struck by a car on St. Thomas St., was taken to hospital within a quarter of a mile but did not survive. He was just forty-seven years old, would be buried at St. Andrew's Cemetery in Jesmond with it thought that Lizzie might have survived him by thirty-six years, dying in 1959 in Newcastle at the age of sixty-nine.    

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