Charlie Brown was 22 by the time he left his Northumberland village for Southern League Southampton. Essentially an outside-right, he initially had to take his chances at inside-right. Effectively the understudy to the right-wing pairing of Joe Barratt and Arthur Dominy, Brown’s flexibility enabled him to make 16 appearances in 1920-21, the Saints’ first season in the Football League and to take over at the outside right, as Barratt left for Birmingham, in the following season’s run-in to promotion. He took a firmer hold on that shirt during the club’s first season in Division II when his 40 appearances included most of the matches in a protracted FA Cup-run.

A darting winger with crowd-pleasing skills – including a subtle way of drawing a defense before crossing –

he could nevertheless be unnerved by the Dell crowd and most of his best games came away from home. In 1924, he joined a QPR side, struggling at the foot of Division III(S). After two seasons there, he returned to Southampton. But his football was now non-league, latterly at Supermarine, where he worked for a while, before moving to Thornycroft’s, whence he retired in 1967.