In the 1914-15 season the top scorer in the First Division of the English football league with thirty-five goals was twenty-four year-old Bobby Parker of Everton. It was his second season at the club, for which he would in all make eighty-four appearances and score a remarkable sixty-eight goals, a goals to games ratio of 0.81. But that does not tell the full story. In a first part season at Goodison Park having been signed in November 1913 he had played twenty-five games, netting seventeen times, a respectable 0.68, and including all games in that second campaign his full tally had been thirty-eight goals in 40 starts, so 0.95 and Everton for the first time topped the League. It is not quite Lionel Messi at his best, nor Gerd Muller or Archie Stark. It is not even quite as good as his ratio at his previous club but then he was young, still perhaps not even quite in his prime  and time should have been on his side. 

Yet, of course, time was not to be his. The Great War intervened not once but twice. Parker was twenty-seven when it concluded and, whilst he played on until the age of thirty-four, his top flight career was essentially over before he was thirty. In 1919-20 he made just eight starts, scoring four time. In 1920-21 it was nineteen and twelve respectively before in 1921 he was sold on to Nottingham Forest for two more seasons before returning home. On the face of it the sale by Everton seems to have been a mistake. It sank from seventh in the First Division to twentieth and a place above relegation as Nottingham Forest was promoted from the Second to he First. But then Everton recovered and Forest found themselves at the end of the 1922-23 season precisely where Everton had been.

So to this question of Parker's home. He was born Robert Norris Parker on 27th March 1891.  His father was John Parker, a clerk, his mother Jean Ramsay, their seventh child and fifth son, and the birth-place. Maryhill in Glasgow. His first club was Ashfield in Possilpark, from where he was signed at nineteen by Rangers. It was there he scored a goal a game but always as a back-up to the older and more experienced, Scotland centre-forward, Willie Reid. However, Parker, at five feet six or eight depending on what you believe and reportedly a leader of the line in the robust, bustling, old, Scottish mould, who was clearly considered highly as a selling price to Everton of £1,500 indicates, a successor to Jimmy Quinn, the predecessor of Hughie Gallacher.

Bobby Parker would during the First World War return to Rangers for a single game and in 1917 turn out eighteen times for Morton, scoring nine times. He was able because he was by then back in Glasgow in the Labour Corp. But his wartime had begun far away from the game with enlistment as a private in the Royal Scots Fusiliers and it was whilst serving with them in France that the event took place that had both meant his return to Scotland and would be the cause of him never being able to post-War to pick up his career in the same way and perhaps receiving the international recognition his proven, pre-War, goal-scoring prowess might have deserved.  You see, in 1915 whilst serving presumably in France he was invalided away from the front line with a German bullet in his back and there that bullet remained, the assumption being too close to his spine or organs to operate and on the football field  affecting his mobility enough to mean the difference between immortality that might have been and rapid, Highland League near-invisibility.

After his abortive spells back on Merseyside and in Nottingham Bobby Parker would finish his playing career in 1925 with Fraserburgh. He would then turn to management with a year still at The Broch and then in 1926 a move to  Dublin and Bohemians in the newly emerging, professional game in Southern Ireland. There he proved an almost immediate success., in the 1927-28 taking the club to a quadruple, champion of the League of Ireland,  the  Football Association of Ireland Cup, its Shield and the Leinster Cup. He did so by including seventeen year-old Peter Kavanagh, who two seasons later would be on his way across the Irish Sea to Glasgow and Celtic Park.  

However, how long Bobby Parker stayed at the Bohs was unclear as is much of his later life. What was known is that in 1925 he had married to Jeannie Skinner in Glasgow, he recorded as a Draper's Assistant and she a Tailoress, and that he died, again in Glasgow, in Cartyne in 1950 at the age of just fifty-nine.  To that can be added that cause of death was a heart attack but that at that time he was still a "football club trainer". It says just that on his death certificate.  Yet he may not have been long returned to Scotland. Liverpool's Football Echo shortly after the end of World War II reported

"Bobby Parker today lies at his Dublin home, a cripple through a hole in his back - the last-but-one-war caused this. Everton FC, to their everlasting glory, have never said a word about it, but I will tell you they have pensioned Bobby Parker all these years - a good deed done, without stealth or advertisement."

And the Echo itself went on to say,

"Whether the public was unaware of Parker's injury, or whether it was felt public morale would suffer after the appalling losses sustained during the War, is unclear. But the press were hardly charitable when he made his long-awaited comeback four years later ... in December 1919 in an Anfield derby. Parker, predictably, scored - in a 3-1 defeat - but the Daily Post report the next day mean-spiritedly stated: "Parker was hardly a success.""

So it appears Bobby Parker may have remained in Dublin through the 1930s and war-years seemingly in decline from his war-wound, a sad end to a life that for no fault of his or, indeed, Everton's but to the loss of both, and, of course, Scotland, had at the very least in football terms realised a fraction of what might have.