Would any rational manager buy a goalkeeper who his team had just scored nine goals against?

The answer to that question is yes, because that is exactly what Ted Bates did when a Campbell Forsyth broken leg sustained shortly after the club’s first season in the top-flight commenced, left him with only the inexperienced Gerry Gurr as back up. The year before, as Saints surged to promotion from Division Two, they had beaten Wolverhampton 9-3 at The Dell, and in goal for Wolves was David Maclaren, who nearly half a century later, recalled that his “defence went missing so much that day he felt he was playing in midfield and that the woodwork was hit so many times the score should have been 15-10”.

He further recollects looking at the Dell clock at 4.15 when the score was already 9-3 and dreading the final score.

The match is indelibly etched in his memory but, in the end, none of Saints’ nine goals were blamed on Dave, indeed the Echo credited him with a “magnificent” display, so it seems Ted had no qualms signing the 32-year-old Scot for £7,500.

Back in the 1950s, while completing his RAF National Service in the Far East as a radar fitter, Dave had turned out for Hong Kong and Malaya, and had won the Malaya Cup while with Penang. He returned to Scotland with Dundee, despite Ted Drake’s interest to take him to Stamford Bridge and then caught Ted’s eye while later in goal for Plymouth. Dave’s arrival to solve a Saints’ goalkeeping crisis was initially successful and he played a big part in some vital wins, most notably

at Elland Rd in October 1966 where his heroics ensured a priceless 1-0 victory. Recalling the match in 2011 he said being in goal for Saints that afternoon “was like being at the Alamo”,

and also mentioned with relish successfully overcoming Jack Charlton’s robust corner challenges – but, as the season unravelled and the battle against relegation intensified, Ted decided to introduce a third Scottish goalkeeper, Eric Martin from Dunfermline, and with the added handicap of a facial injury that affected his eyesight, that was it for Dave’s full-time professional career in the UK. He was quite a character according to Terry Paine, who remembers him “keeping the dressing room entertained with tricks that included flipping a coin from his big toe into his top pocket and balancing a cardboard box on his nose”. Those sort of skills don’t pay the mortgage and so, in the early 1970s, he returned to the Far East to oversee the Malaysian National sides’ progress to the finals of the Munich Olympics and then when politics intervened, he headed South for Australia where he continued to coach, first in Sydney and then Melbourne.

In the 1980s he worked for a Melbourne-based financial company administering private annuity funds but by 2011 he was, as he put it, “away from the city bustle, living a low profile life in a small town, deep in the rural central Victorian countryside”. He passed away late in 2016.