By the time Frank Hill arrived at The Dell, aged 31 (not 29 reported in The Echo at the time, see scrapbook section), he had experienced playing at the top, without ever having become one of the game’s top stars. After four seasons with Aberdeen, during which he played almost 100 games in the Scottish First Division and won three caps for Scotland, he joined Arsenal in time to participate in their three consecutive championships from 1933 to 1935.

Having appeared in the majority of the matches in the first two of those triumphant seasons – and in what was arguably the great FA Cup shock of the inter-war years when Arsenal lost to Third North Walsall in January 1933 – he was less often deployed either in the third campaign or in 1935-36. He then had a season captaining Blackpool to promotion to Division I and had started the 1937-38 season at Bloomfield Road when he agreed a September move to The Dell. He made his Southampton debut, at right-half, a week after his former Arsenal team-mate, Ray Parkin, had made his at inside-right. Having been reluctant to return to the Second Division so soon, Hill had apparently changed his mind when he learned that Parkin had signed for Tom Parker – who had been at Highbury with both players – as Southampton’s recently-arrived manager completed the haul of signings that had begun on the first day of the close season.

Frank Hill’s ball-winning ways had earned him the nickname of “Tiger”. Already a proven leader, this elder statesman among Parker’s new boys was immediately made captain.

Ted Bates, a teenage hopeful in Parker’s first batch of signings, appreciated Hill’s commanding ways: “he was always niggling me, keeping me working – running.” Having hardly missed a game in the remainder of 1937-38 – playing mostly at left-half – Frank’s appearances were limited by injuries in 1938-39, even though he played in four different positions. This was a sad demise: he succeeded not only in upsetting some sections of the crowd, but he reportedly had a set-to with one of the coaches and displeased the Board when his covert applications for managerial positions came to light. When he left to take up a position as assistant-trainer at Preston, the Board, hoping to recoup some of the £2,250 they had paid for him, held on to his playing registration.

The outbreak of war would render that a futile gesture. In 1943, he obtained his first managerial post. He would keep moving regularly, always within the Football League, apart from a spell in Iraq in the late 1950s. His hopes of becoming Southampton’s manager – his acrimonious departure notwithstanding – were thwarted in 1952 when the Board rejected him and appointed George Roughton. All that managerial mobility added only one honour to his glittering prizes of yesteryear: promotion to Division III with Notts County in 1960 – just as Ted Bates, who had soon succeeded Roughton, was taking Southampton up from that division. After a spell in charge at the Valley in 1967, he moved to California, where he became the owner of the Piccadilly Circus Fish ‘n’ Chip shop in Lafayette.