By the time he arrived at Second Division Southampton, Ken Wimshurst had failed  to break into First Division football, with either Newcastle or Wolves, but had managed half-a-dozen Division IV appearances for Gateshead, before they were voted out of the Football League in 1960. Ted Bates’s former team-mate, Bill Rochford, by now farming near Gateshead, had recommended his fellow-Geordie and, when Ken was doing his National Service as a corporal in the RAF Police, Bates had ventured onto Salisbury Plain to watch him playing for RAF Netheravon (see scrapbook section).

Which is how the 23 year-old Wimshurst came to be rescued from Wolves’ Reserves. He duly made his debut at inside-left, but he was not going to dislodge Tommy Mulgrew in a hurry. He played the last five games of that 1961-62 season at right-half, however. He had found his niche. In the summer of 1962, Bates bought a more defensive wing-half in Ian White but,

Ken saw him off and settled into an exquisite right-wing triangle with Terry Paine – a formidable quadrilateral when Stuart Williams joined in, as noted in his profile.

In 1962-63, the triangle performed, unchanged, from October onwards, including a run to the semi-finals of the FA Cup. When the Saints reached the quarter-final stage v Nottingham Forest, there was press speculation as to which of the tie’s right-halves – Forest’s Jeff Whitefoot, with one U-23 cap, or Ken – might be capped by England. As the tie went to a second replay, Whitefoot was missing, injured, but

Wimshurst was chaired off by jubilant fans, celebrating a 5-0 win in which he’d turned in “one of the best wing-half displays” the Echo reporter had “ever seen in a Saints’ side.”

Ken never won that cap, though. Paine, who would make his England debut within two months of the semi-final, feels that

Ken “was extremely unlucky not to get an England call-up, about the same time as I did.”

As Terry explained, when picking him for his Select XI in his biography, Ken was “a great passer of the ball, good vision, he gave me good service.” Although Stuart Williams recalls that Ken would cover his forward runs, Terry takes the pragmatic view that, “like a few of us, his strength wasn’t in chasing back.” So what if Ken wasn’t “a great tackler or a good header, with a big engine?” The reality is that “you don’t get all of that in Ken’s position,” Terry concludes – “unless it’s Duncan Edwards.” For all of his scouting, on the Plain and beyond, Bates never did find a Duncan Edwards and so had to wrestle with the kind of Wimshurst v White conundrum explained in the latter’s profile. In the 1965-66 promotion campaign, Ken lost out to David Walker at the start and White at the end.

In the sixth game of the season, he became the Saints’ first-ever substitute – provided you discount the Victorian instances, of dubious legitimacy. Ken was a regular in the side’s first season in the top flight, until the arrival of Hugh Fisher effectively ended his Southampton career. He joined Second Division Bristol City and would coach the side that won promotion in 1976.  After coaching in Scotland and Egypt, he had a sports shop near Bristol and coached at the Saints’ Bath-based School of Excellence. He had always said that living on the south coast, after the north-east, was “like being in Majorca.” But Ken retired even further south than that, to the Costa del Sol. The former Bristol City player, Ian Broomfield, recruited him to scout in Spain for David O’Leary, first at Leeds and then at Aston Villa.