Early in 1878 Birch F.C., a football club based in Rusholme, a suburb then and now of Manchester made the decision to return to playing association rules. In fact it had actually been founded in about 1870 as an Association Football club, had turned to rugby but "lately been practising the dribbling as well as the Rugby game". The reason for it was that a home-game had been arranged for April 1878 against Queen's Park. And it was played too with the Birch captain of football a certain James Strang, almost thirty, ex. of  the Glasgow club but perhaps not its first team, indeed its Treasurer in 1876-7 and no doubt the instigator of the fixture. It makes Strang perhaps the unheralded first and certainly one  of earliest of our countrymen to come South bringing the Scottish game with him.   

So who was James Strang? As a product of the first Hampden he was likely to have been staunchly amateur. He was also relatively local. He had been born in 1848 officially in Carmunnock then in Lanarkshire but actually between it and East Kilbride, his father initially a farmer. But he was one who became a Drysalter, a seller of dyes and other chemicals, the trade his eldest son would also follow and probably be the reason for the move to England. In September 1877 in Bury north of Manchester he married. His bride was a local girl, Emma Openshaw, the daughter of an owner of cotton-spinning mills, the couple settling, as Mancunian football began to develop, in Bowden in the Cheshire-suburbs to the south of the city but a train-journey to it. In October 1878 Birch's football section broke away to form Manchester Wanderers. In 1879 it merged with Manchester Association, dissolving in 1888.  

And the Strangs would stay in England, it seems,  until at least 1888 once more when they were living in Buxton in Derbyshire but at some point after that date return North of the Border. James would die young at forty-eight in clearly wealthy retirement at Cluny Hill House in Forres to be buried in Woodside Cemetery in Paisley.