Of the earliest Millwall players probably most easily traced is early captain, Duncan Hean. He had been born in 1862 so was 22 or 23 years old in 1885. His birthplace was Dundee on Shepherds Loan, a road that is still there, cleared now but by the jutes mills, where his father, David, worked, having arrived with his wife and young family from Longforgan in Perthshire in about 1855. Duncan was the seventh of nine children, a tinsmith and working also in the canning factory, and he came south at some point after 1881, possibly in 1882, to settle. His elder brother, also David, again a tinsmith, was there already.

And Duncan too would stay. In 1891 he was married to a locally-born girl again of Irish parents and they had two boys, David, of course after his father and his elder brother, also at the cannery, Richard after hers. Both would end up emigrating to the States and Canada with both marrying and living the rest of their lives in Manitoba but not before their father had died in Poplar in 1892, aged just 30 of consumption, and their mother remarried.