Don Roper’s Southampton story is, for the most part, the story of his relationship with Ted Bates.

Brought to The Dell by Toby Keleher (see Tom Parker’s scrapbook section) after boyhood success while with Hedge End (see scrapbook section), the manager of the “B” team, Roper was soon playing war-time football for the first-team, while working on Spitfires at Supermarine. When it was not always clear who was going to turn up for a game,

his two-footedness and overall versatility meant that he would be played all across the forward-line.

That said, Bates and he were often paired, in the latter years of the War, on the right flank, with Don on the outside, and attracted some very favourable reports. Even when the team lost 10-1 at Aldershot in November 1943, Roper and Bates were reported to have been “a good right-wing,” constituting the team’s “chief source of danger.” That was typical of how the two of them would be praised as a unit– journalists would continue, for some time after the War, to assess the performance of a “wing” (singular), when reporting on the achievements of a duo. Even so, when “this enterprising young wing-partnership” was acclaimed for its contribution to a 4-2 away win v Arsenal in December 1944, Roper’s “remarkable” display made the headlines. One reporter – Bates’s boyhood hero, the former Arsenal and Scotland star,

Alex James – credited Don with the “nonchalance” of a Stanley Matthews and commended him to the England’s selectors as the maestro’s heir apparent.

Arsenal’s manager, George Allison, was monitoring Don’s progress towards becoming the Saints’ top-scorer in war-time competitions. But it was Allison’s successor, Tom Whittaker, who signed him in the summer of 1947, during which Don played cricket for Hampshire v Cambridge University at Portsmouth, a solitary first-class appearance for an accomplished batsman. Whittaker claimed in his autobiography that Roper was so “necessary” for his plans that he devoted “most of the summer” and made 11 trips to Southampton, in order to lure him and manager Bill Dodgin to “a little café hard by the Arsenal Stadium,” where the deal was at last done: £12,000, plus two players, George Curtis and Tom Rudkin – an effective valuation, it was calculated, of £24,000, compared with the going-rate of £20,000 or so each, for Tommy Lawton and Len Shackleton.

Don gave Arsenal good value, not least in his versatility, as he moved, during his stay, from outside-right to centre-forward and then to outside-left, the position in which he started the 1952 FA Cup Final v Newcastle United. But an early injury to Walley Barnes – a war-time team-mate at The Dell – meant that Don spent most of that Final at right-back. By all accounts, he “collapsed” with 11 minutes to go, thereby helping to set up Newcastle’s winner. It would not be until 1956-57, by which time he’d won two League championship medals and an England “B” cap, that Don’s season’s appearances dropped into single figures – four games at No.9, for three goals – and so the scene was set for a return to Southampton.

Echoing Whittaker’s 1947 evaluation, Bates “knew that I needed his ability.” He exploited that ability well, as Don, soon made captain, helped to nurture young talents, such as that of an appreciative Terry Paine. But there were problems. Bates was much respected by his players for his willingness to consult them, but there is a school of thought that Roper, returning from such a successful period at the top of English football, may have been too opinionated, for Bates’s comfort, in team-meetings.

Tony Godfrey, who valued Don’s contributions, wondered whether the manager was threatened by them. That would explain the commonly-held view that, when he no longer needed Don as a player in 1959, Bates reneged on an assurance that there would be a job for him at The Dell. Uncomfortable to be reminded of that, 40 years on, Bates insisted that their “difference of opinion” had been over wages.

Whatever the explanation, Don was done with Ted Bates and Southampton FC. After winding down in non-league football, he returned to the aircraft industry for a while and then worked for Moorgreen metals, until retirement. Bill Stroud, who had sometimes completed a triangle behind that war-time “wing”, visited Don’s Shirley home in 1993, begging him to bury the hatchet and attend the club’s big event for Ted’s 75th birthday. Don was unbowed. And he declined the opportunity to tell his side of the story to Bates’s biographer. By the time of the book’s launch in 1998, any chance of his attending was ruled out by his Parkinson’s Disease.