The deal, in the summer of 1949, that brought Ernie Jones, plus £6,000, from Spurs to Southampton, in exchange for Alf Ramsey, suited both parties.

Bill Dodgin suspected that Tottenham had been “tapping up” Ramsey, while the Saints’ left-back and captain, Bill Rochford, had met Jones to discuss Southampton’s need of him at outside-left. Even though the 1948-49 season had been the best yet in the club’s history, for a very  “settled” side, no fewer than nine men had worn the problematic No.11 shirt. Although he had played a few times for Spurs on the right and had won three of his four caps for Wales on that flank, Ernie had been a regular on the left for Spurs in 1948-49.

With Eric Day a fixture at No.7 for Southampton, Ernie would have to play at No.11, where he would be expected, like a parade of predecessors before, tirelessly to track-back. As a goal-scoring winger at Tottenham, he was accustomed to dropping deep only to “to collect a ball” resented now having to “chase another winger”, so as to assist the veteran Rochford. That role soon ended as Rochford’s career faded out, under Dodgin’s successor, Sid Cann, and Ernie was sidelined for a while, after breaking an ankle.

It did not help his cause that Cann, who had had medical experience, both in the army and since, had forthright opinions, which Ernie did not share, on the treatment of injuries. Although he got to play on the right, and even at centre-forward, his appearances in 1950-51 would be few and he would become Bristol City’s player-coach early in the following season.

After 50 appearances for them in the Third South, he went to play, and then manage, at Rhyl in the Cheshire League. Having left them for Southern League Poole in 1956, Ernie came to see Ted Bates, who devised a fiendish plan to exploit his dual interest in football and engineering. Bates’s scheme centred on Charles Henwood, of CPC Engineering, who was keen to help the club.

Ernie, who had designed and erected Rhyl’s floodlights, would be paid to work at CPC and would coach their football team, made up mainly of teenagers on the Saints’ books.

Those youngsters would form the nucleus of the club’s first-ever Youth team, who would wear CPC-emblazoned shirts – effectively the club’s initial venture into sponsorship. Henwood would be designated the club’s “Youth Organiser”. Ernie would coach the lads – on expenses, only – on the Dell carpark, two evenings a week, and on the Rownhams estate of the club chairman, John Barber, on Sunday mornings. Even by Ted Bates’s standards, this was ingenious wheeler-dealing on the cheap. It is, however, to Bates’s credit that, after

Ernie had coached the club’s first-ever entrants in the FA Youth Cup all the way to the 1957 semi-final – in which they became the first side ever to beat the Busby Babes, albeit losing 7-5 on aggregate –

he persuaded the Board to supplement Ernie’s salary from Henwood by £2 a week. But when Ernie, who envied the fact that Manchester United’s youths were on their ground-staff, expressed a wish to leave CPC and coach Southampton’s youngsters full-time, the Board opted, in July 1958, to terminate the entire arrangement.

Ernie went back to Bolton – where he had first played professionally, if only in war-time football – to work at Hawker Siddeley. Upon his retirement, in 1980, he became a busy member of the National Association of Inventors and Innovators. He invented water-leisure products and worked on wheels for supermarket trollies. But nearest to his heart was his design of a bicycle with a wheel-chair on its front, in which he could transport his wife, Hilda, a long-time sufferer from MS.

A speaker at Ted Bates’s Dell Diamond dinner in 1998, Ernie was frustrated, in his final years, when neither Southampton nor any of his other clubs would take up his suggestion for a half-time race, of a matchday, between a couple of his bikes-with-wheelchairs.