From playing as a teenager in local football, Bert Shelley enlisted soon after the outbreak of WW1 despite not yet 16. His elder brother, William persuaded their mother that it was important Bert got the “experience before the war was over before Christmas”. Bert survived the carnage, William died at Amiens in 1918.

Serving with the 2nd/5th Hampshire Territorials in India, he was able to develop his game on foreign fields. He was a member of the battalion side that reached the semi-finals of the Calcutta Cup in 1915. Then, in 1918, he was with the 1st/4th Wiltshires, when they won the Divisional Cup in Egypt. Following his demob’, Bert joined Eastleigh Athletic. It didn’t take Southampton long to snaffle him and he was very soon in first-team action. Recent signing, Alf Andrews, broke his leg in an FA Cup replay and a replacement right-half was needed for the Southern League match, two days later.

The trainer, Bert Lee, is credited with the suggestion that the manager “give the young Shelley a chance.” Andrews would never play professional football again and Shelley settled in for the long-term. He featured in every remaining game of that 1919-20 season and missed only four the next, the Saints’ introduction to the Football League. Then, from the start of the 1921-22 season in the Third South, he had an unbroken run of 158 League and Cup appearances as the side won promotion and achieved respectability in Division II. And so Bert played on, occasionally switching to centre-half, but otherwise a fixture, when fit, at right-half. In either position, his anticipation of through-balls was the key to his “stopper” qualities.

During the 1923-24 season – his third ever-present campaign on the trot – there was talk of selection for England, who had long been without a settled right-half. But when Bert was watched to that end in the spring of 1924, he was obliging the manager by playing at centre-half. So his chance passed, although he achieved part-recognition, later on, when he toured South Africa with an FA XI in 1929 (see scrapbook section).

His final appearannce in 1932, was his 465th in all competitions, a club record that lasted until Tommy Traynor overhauled it in 1964. Recently arrived as manager, George Kay established a “nursery” side in 1932. Shelley became its first trainer – until Bert Lee, his mentor of 1920, was asked, in July 1935, to resign as first-team trainer, so that Shelley might be appointed “trainer-coach”. The Board wrote his job description into the minutes, meticulously distinguishing the two responsibilities: “training” would entail “arousing an intelligent interest in a load of specified exercises and in “correct breathing”, while “coaching” would range from “ball practice (both feet)” and passing, to “throwing in [and] offside tactics”. The following summer, the Board threw a spanner into those works.

Having sold off the cream of the nursery, the directors came up with the ultimate economy: they would get by without a manager. Obliged to find another job, Kay went to Liverpool – and Shelley soon followed him, initially as coach to the “A” team, but he assumed first-team duties in 1939. Whereupon, he had a quieter war, football-wise, than in 1914-18, although he did get to be trainer to a Football League XI in 1940. Once the peace-time game resumed in earnest in 1946, the Kay-Shelley partnership immediately guided Liverpool to the League championship and then, in 1950, to the FA Cup Final. Kay retired in 1951, but Bert remained at Anfield.

Bob Paisley, who had been Bert’s assistant from 1954, effectively swapped jobs with him a few years later. When Bill Shankly arrived in 1959, he kept faith with the occupants of what would become famously known as the Liverpool “boot-room”. That included Bert Shelley, who remained “a member of staff at Anfield up to his death” – as the Liverpool Echo put it when he died, aged 72 – “assisting in many of the vital jobs behind the scenes.”