Although signed on amateur forms in 1910, Fred Bright had to wait until April 1913 for so much as a run-out in a friendly with the Reserves. That was because his occupation – ship rivetter – meant he commuted between the Southampton and Sunderland shipyards and basically grabbed a game when he could. He became a regular for the Reserves when he returned to the Southampton yards in September 1913 and got a first-team outing in November 1913, when he impressed the Echo both with his

“quick perception and neat execution” and by the way in which he “responded to the pace of first-class football.”

That would earn him only two more games in that Southern Alliance season, however, followed by a trial at Southend that led nowhere. And then came the First World War and he never returned to Southampton. Marrying in Sunderland in 1924, he was in 1939 employed as a boilermaker in the Sunderland shipyards.