Arthur Holt burst upon the local soccer scene by scoring plenty of goals and winning medals for Bitterne Park Congregationals (see scrapbook) before being taken on by the Saints. He had a year as an amateur, and a few months as a pro, before he got his league opportunity at centre-forward at Old Trafford in January 1933 when Ted Drake went down with flu. Holt would deputise a few more times for Drake, that season and the next, although by the autumn of 1933, he had established himself at inside-forward. After Drake left for Arsenal six months later, centre-forwards would come and go, the one constant in the forward-line for the seasons up to the War being Arthur Holt, reputed to be one of the hardest kickers of a dead-ball in the Football League.

A projected move to Bournemouth fell through in the summer of 1939 and, after playing his last “competitive” game for the Saints on the eve of war, Arthur made more appearances than most in the first war-time season – mainly as a full-back.

He also guested for Cunliffe-Owen, whose Len Wilkins he recommended to Southampton. After the War, he coached the Reserves for a while, but soon retired from football to concentrate on playing cricket for Hampshire, where he would later have a much longer stint as coach. And he opened a sports shop – Holt & Haskell – in Southampton, which remains one of the country’s leading cricket specialists. In 1986, he was the principal speaker at the Saints’ centenary dinner, where his anecdotes included an apocryphal, self-deprecating recollection of the way in which Ted Drake, 16 months his junior, had overtaken him 55 years before. Arthur Holt played 79 first-class matches for Hampshire, from 1935 to 1948, for a batting average of 22.46. He then served the county as a coach, bringing through a generation of cricketers in the 1950s and the 1960s, affectionately known as “Holt’s Colts”. All of which explains why one of the pavilions at the Rose Bowl was named the Arthur Holt Pavilion in 2004.