When Spain's doyen club, the country's oldest still in existence, Receativo de Huelva was founded in 1889 it was at the instigation of the doctor, William Alexander Mackay, born Lybster, and Charles Adam, born Paisley, the manager of the local gas-works. Adam became the club's first President but there was a third Scot involved, one who became Vice-President of that first Board of Directors. His name is Gavin Speirs. And whilst at that time Adam was already forty-seven years old and unlikely to have been playing Speirs was twenty years his junior and did figure as a forward in the club's earlier game before switching to his other sporting passion, sailing. He would a founder and equally on the Board of the city's first yachting club, El Club de Regatas Onubense. 

Gavin Spiers was born in 1862 in Strathaven, so he was two years younger than Mackay, with whom he would forge a great friendship. His father and his mother were also Strathaven-born, his father a weaver, who became a weavers' agent and prospered. That prosperity seems to have allowed the young Speirs in his early-teens to have been sent to study in France, which in his mid teens took him to Bilbao in the Spanish Basque Country for five years from 1876. Already presumably French-speaking he there added Spanish to his linguistic catalogue. And it was from Bilbao in 1882 that he was recruited by another Scot, John Broadfoot, the Commercial Manager of Rio Tinto Mining based in Huelva, as his secretary.

John Broadfoot would died in 1888, at which point Speirs stepped up into his position. He was also clearly travelling probably on business and to Liverpool, for in 1892 in Claughton by Birkenhead he married Florence Wheeler, the couple then settling back in Huelva. However, Florence did not stay long in Spain, the summer heat not suiting her and in 1894 she returned to live back in Claughton. Gavin, however, remained in Huelva, moving from a house in the city to close to Mackay in the English colony at Punta Umbria. In 1891, again alongside Mackay, he became the first President and administrator of the city's Seamen's Institute. 

By then he was still not quite thirty. However, in 1895, so aged thirty-three he was struck down by a serious but unspecified illness, which just four years later in 1899 saw his death of pneumonia in the "English Hospital" in Huelva at the age of just thirty-seven.