Robert Blyth, sometime Blythe, was one of many players, who would emerge from a pit-village that not longer exists, that of Glenbuck, above Muirkirk in Ayrshire. Moreover, he was one of a dozen and more players, indeed the first, the pioneer, from the same to play at the top-flight, and amongst whom would be the Shankly brothers, Bill, Bob and the others, all of whom would have been known to Blyth Bob, not least because he was their uncle. The Shankly boys mother, Barbara, was a Blyth too, Bob's sister.

Where Bill Shankly was unlucky in that, whilst he was capped young and deservedly so, the Second War took from him perhaps the peaks of his peak-years as a player and thus more caps, Bob never at all had the international option. Like his nephew a fine half-back, age, he was born in 1869, and economics, football was infinitely better than the pit, particularly one artificially high up on a weather-blasted moor, meant that he was an Anglo, a Scot playing England at twenty-four and therefore ineligible for national selection. 

Blyth had begun as a Cherrypicker, probably called for the need to pick the lumps of good coal, the "cherries", from the crud that was cut with it, and the village team. But at twenty-one he was signed by Rangers, staying with the Ibrox club for two seasons in the infant Scottish League but very much as a bit-player. Yet it was enough for him in 1894 to be picked up by Preston, rebuilding after being the English Football league's first great team, and to stay for five seasons, with a short interlude at Dundee as captain, making well over one hundred starts for the Lancashire club, an ever-present from 1895 to 1897.

However, by 1899 the English League had put in place a wage-cap, Bob was coming up to thirty and the Southern League was expanding, paying better money, with new clubs being formed including in 1898 Portsmouth. But it on foundation had neither ground nor team and no club secretary cum manager. He arrived in the form of Frank Brettell in February 1899, Fratton Park was opened in August, by which time Blyth was a member of its first squad, indeed team and would remain so for two seasons, captaining, after which he would become player-manager, as such taking the club to the Southern League title in his first season.

Clearly well settled in Portsmouth and outwith football Bob Blyth would be a Licencee eventually of several establishments, notably the Pompey Hotel, next to the football ground itself. And in the port city he would raise his Anglo-Scots family. In 1893 he had returned home to marry  Glenbuck girl, Isabella Taylor. They were to have three children, the eldest born in the home village, the middle one in Preston and the youngest, also Bob, who himself would go on to play for Portsmouth, once again in the village. And his expanding businesses outwith the club were by 1904 enough for him, even though the team had finished fourth, to step down, with perhaps the excuse of  a temporary suspension by the FA over contact with several Liverpool players. 

But that would be far from the end of it. Emphasising the lack of rancour from the club he was first awarded a benefit match. Then, as the Portsmouth Evening News would succinctly put it, Bob would be:

"the only man to rise from professional player to be chairman of his club through all the intermediate positions: Captain, player-manager, manager, director, and vice-chairman."

Nor would Bob be the only member of the immediate family to have a followed a similar if not quite such a pivotal path specifically in the English game. Bill Shankly we know about but there was another. In 1883 his younger brother, William, would be born still in Glenbuck and, although the Blyth family would by 1901 have moved back to where his father had come from just across the line in Douglas in Lanarkshire, Bill there working as a miner, he too would become a professional footballer. Indeed he would follow in his elder brother's footsteps to Preston and Portsmouth before Carlisle, where in 1908 he married, to a lass from just across the border in Annan, would settle, raise a family, become a Carlisle director, as nephew Shanks would perhaps connectedly be first a player with the club and then manager, and pass away still in the town in 1950.

By that time Bob was already dead nine years, his passing in St James' Hospital still in Portsmouth in 1941 at the age of seventy-one but in the intervening years from the end of the playing and managerial careers he had become a director of the club he so helped to create, then Vice-Chairman and finally Chairman. The first he would do on stepping down as manager. The second would be by 1920 when the club achieved league-status and the third would be by 1929 by when it had in 1927 been promoted to the First Division and now reached but lost the FA Cup. And, although in the 1930s he would step down, he would at least see Pompey finally take that same Cup, in 1939 defeating Wolves  and appropriately captained from right-half by another Scot, Jimmy Guthrie.