However, that summer he was voted off the Queen's Park committee, on which at the age of still only twenty-four he stepped away from the club. At first he turned his attention to tennis and when he did return to football is was for Glasgow Amateurs, and then only briefly. By the age of twenty-six he was lost to the game. 

However, once away from it he would in 1901 marry Susan Croll, who appears to be literally the girl next door to his parents. And William and Susan were to have one son, born in 1903. William would work out the rest of his life in the auctioneers that his father had been a partner of and was to die relatively young, at not quite sixty. He would be buried along with several other family members in Cathcart Cemetery.