George Curtis was a make-weight who made good.

Having played in the same Essex schools side as Alf Ramsey, he joined Arsenal at 17. After two pre-war appearances partnering Ted Drake upfront plus an appearance in a friendly at The Dell, he served as a PTI in India, where he became player-coach to a leading Indian club side. A dozen games for Arsenal in 1946-47 proved false dawn: Tom Whittaker was so determined to pluck Don Roper from Second Division Southampton that he paid £12,000 and threw in Curtis and winger Tom Rudkin.

While Rudkin would barely feature, Curtis missed but three games in the three seasons of 1947-50, in each of which Southampton so narrowly missed promotion. For the first two of those campaigns, he was the play-maker at inside-forward. In the third, he was mainly at No 4 while, for the following season-and-a-half, ‘Twinkletoes’ fluctuated between those two positions. He had a busy summer in 1948, coaching the Indian team in the London Olympics, upon his return from the Saints’ Brazilian tour (see image below). He was impressed by his hosts’ ball control and thought them “extremely good at throw-ins.” If that observation seems eccentric, then you should have heard George on the virtues of head-tennis, such a “fantastic activity” in his coaching manual. Always keen to play in The Dell’s top foursome, he would “almost plead” to join head tennis’s “group of many talents”: Joe Mallett, Ted Bates, and Charlie Wayman.

His overall admiration for Mallett knew no bounds and it is ironic that the three brains he most esteemed were Joe’s, Ramsey’s and Bill Rochford’s, since each of these thinkers rejected Walter Winterbottom’s call to become a qualified coach. But it was George who encouraged Ted Bates and Frank Dudley to get their badges. After leaving Southampton for 2nd Division football in France, he coached across continents, most notably in Norway, where he twice managed Rosenborg – Bates’s opponents in Southampton’s first European tie – either side of managing the national team. Until his final years in residential care suffering from Alzheimer’s, he remained a committee member of the London Football Coaches Association, where he would meet up with some of his numerous disciples, including Bob Wilson, a passionate admirer of the “wonderful manner and fantastic knowledge” of a “truly outstanding coach and a real gentleman.”