Charles Ireland came through a pre-season trial match to sign amateur forms in August 1907, having previously played with local parks’ side, Crows Nest. (The Crow’s Nest Club was a night school for ‘a rough and neglected class of lads’). Although only an occasional player in the Reserves’ attack, he was given a first-team outing, during his second season, in the unaccustomed position of outside-left. Leaving the club at the end of that 1908-09 season, he found a goal-scoring niche in the Hampshire League, initially at Winchester and then – even more so at Bournemouth with whom he won the Hants County Championship. He had failed a trial with Boscombe, but was turning out for the local Southampton gasworks team for whom he worked and impressed in a match against the Poppies’ Reserves at Victoria Park. He was offered terms after the match. His form was such that in his obituary he was described as

“being the finest inside-right ever signed by the club and a most consistent goal scorer”.

He joined up on the outbreak of war with the 5^th Battalion, Hants Regiment  and was one of the first batch to be sent to India where he played football and cricket before being struck down with “lung trouble which necessitated his being invalided out of the Army”. He became an inmate of Netley Hospital and died there in December 1915.