Harry Evans was brought up by an aunt, after losing his parents and a sister in the 1921 Spanish Flu epidemic, when he was only two. After leaving school, he worked as a clerk to a wine and spirits merchant while playing as an amateur for Sutton.He spent his war in the RAF, as a PT Instructor at Farnborough. In 1943, he signed for Southampton, for whom he played 53 times in war-time competitions, mainly as a forward.

His one League appearance in 1946-47 was at centre-forward, although his FA Cup run-outs in the previous, transitional season had all been at right-half – the position in which he featured in the Ex-Saints XI that lost 1-0 to Ted Bates’s team in April 1956. By then, Harry was at Third South Aldershot, following a brief spell in that division at Exeter. He’d gone to Aldershot as a player, but a bout of peritonitis forced him to retire. Having obtained coaching, physiotherapy and secretarial qualifications, he duly served the Shots in various permutations of coach, manager and secretary.

When sacked in 1959, he became Bill Nicholson’s assistant at Tottenham, in time to share in the Spurs’ “Glory Years”. In 1960, Harry offered lodgings to the up-and-coming John White, the Spurs and Scotland inside-forward, who soon wedded Harry’s daughter, Sandra. Harry died young of pancreatic cancer in December 1962 and, 18 months later, John died, even younger, killed by lightning on a golf course. In exploring John’s life and untimely death, almost 50 years on, his son Rob talked to Tottenham folk about his granddad’s contribution to those glorious early sixties at White Hart Lane. The verdict is that Harry’s ability to “smooth things” made him “a very good foil” to Nicholson, while his capacity for office-work freed the manager for the training pitch. He was allowed to get out of the office occasionally, in search of new talent, but signally failed to pester Terry Paine into signing for Spurs.