And there in Lancashire much the same happened, straight into the team, two hundred and thirty-four League games in eight seasons, average over thirty, with in the first campaign as a left-winger an FA Cup win and in 1934, on the other, less-preferred flank, three consecutive caps, sadly only one a win. In any case, by then Willie was already thirty-one so a long international career was unlikely and two seasons later even at club level he was on the move. He went first for a single campaign to Blackpool in the Second Division. The club was promoted. Then it was another at Reading in the Third Division and finally a return for him and his wife and family to Dundee, at the club into the War years and to the city for good.

In 1929 he had had come up from England to marry Gertrude Marshall, the following year a daughter would be born in Scotland and then a son in England. Now the four of them would resettle into Tayside or rather Carnoustie life, Willie working as a clerk in a timber firm and then running a bar in Hilltown, where he had grown up. And that for Willie would it to retirement with for him indulgence in golf and until a passing in 1981 at the age of seventy-eight in the then Royal Infirmary, Gertrude outliving him by two decades, she dying in Arbroath in 2003 at the age of ninety-four.