“UP THE MIDDLE TO CHARLIE”

was a constant refrain from the Dell terraces of the late 1940s. The fans knew that getting the ball up to Charlie Wayman, their idol in the No.9 shirt, was likely to produce some magic and – excitingly often – a goal. And so did his team-mates and their manager, Bill Dodgin. Charlie had been scoring freely for his first club, Newcastle United, in 1946-47, including a hat-trick v Southampton in the FA Cup.

But he’d been mysteriously dropped for the semi-final, which Newcastle lost 4-0. Dodgin, who’d had “the hardest time” marking Wayman, a sailor guesting for Pompey in 1944, had pencilled him in as a potential future signing. He got his man in October 1947 – for a record £10,000 – and would be repaid with 77 goals in 107 appearances.

If that strike-rate made Charlie a Dell legend, then how the side fared without him in the 1948-49 run-in has become the stuff of Saints’ folklore. On 2 April 1949, Southampton went to Tottenham, leading the Second Division by a mile, with Wayman on 31 League goals in 34 games – including five in a 6-0 defeat of Leicester, a club record for a League game that still stands (see scrapbook section).

That afternoon at White Hart Lane, Charlie made it 32 in 35 – with an effort that he later nominated, in a Daily Mirror series, as his “Greatest Goal”. Injured and hobbling on the wing, he somehow got himself into the box to score. Then he was carried off – the hero of a 1-0 win that took his side eight points clear, with only seven games to go. At two points for a win, how could they possibly be caught?  By having no “Plan B” for coping without Charlie is the straight answer. 

He would play, not fully fit, in two of those remaining games, but the runaway leaders would score only twice more and slump to third. Looking back at that anti-climactic month, Dodgin claimed that “Charlie was half the team”. If that’s an exaggeration – goalkeeper Ian Black and right-backs Bill Ellerington and Alf Ramsey were all capped during Charlie’s stay – Ellerington reflects that the team had got where it was, playing a style moulded on Wayman, while Black reasoned that a deputy capable of stepping into Charlie’s boots would have been far too good for the Reserves. Charlie was special, all right.

It got worse. In October 1950, he was transferred. His wife was unhappy with Charlie’s social life in Southampton and wanted to move back north. Preston came in with Eddy Brown in part-exchange. Despite a reasonable strike-rate for Saints of 34 in 59, the modest Brown was the first to admit that his style was “foreign to their way of caressing, holding and spraying the ball around.” And Eddy’s hero,

Tom Finney, felt that Preston had a “fantastic bargain… Charlie was a really superb centre-forward” –

a point Wayman proved with 105 goals in 157 League games. In 1954, he joined the elite who scored in every round of the FA Cup, but he left Preston, early in the following season, to return to his roots. He had three more seasons of high-ratio scoring – for Middlesbrough and Darlington, in turn – after which he joined Newcastle Breweries. He was living in Coundon, about three miles from his birth-place, until he was admitted to a Bishop Auckland nursing home in 2000. His consultant said his brain was the worse for heading the heavy ball of his day, although Charlie had mostly kept it on the deck, doing the business with his lethal left foot when the ball was played “up the middle”