After playing for Swindon between non-starts at Huddersfield and Chelsea, Jack Bradley spent eight years on Southampton’s books. When he reported at The Dell on Sunday 3 September 1939, he hoped that Saturday’s goal for the Reserves might earn him a first-team debut on Monday at White Hart Lane. But as the gathering in the dressing room listened to the Prime Minister’s declaration of war, Jack knew his official debut would have to wait – although his duties with the Police War Reserve left him free to play (and top-score) for Saints in an odd season that lasted until 8 June 1940.

On his way to the final game, at home to Charlton, he was the best man at the wedding of Ted and Mary Bates. Called up that year and posted to Bedfordshire, he guested for several clubs, notably Reading and Luton. Back at Southampton by the end of the war, he brought his “war-time” appearances to 62.  It would have been more, had the hitch-hiking thumb on which he often relied been as dependable as his left foot. When Football League action resumed in 1946-47, he duly made his delayed debut, in his preferred No.10 shirt, and again top-scored. A fellow-1939 signing, Bill Dodgin, was by now the manager and, although Bradley found Dodgin’s blackboard tactics “too fussy”, they got on well enough until Saints went to Germany for a Liberation Day match in June 1947, when the player’s drinking upset the manager. So, even though he was scoring freely at the start of the next season, Jack was packed off to Bolton, where he would play more than half of his 171 League games, alongside an appreciative Nat Lofthouse, who swore that Jack

“had the best-left foot I’ve ever seen in my life.”

After a few games for Norwich, Jack remained in Norfolk, player-managing Great Yarmouth in the Eastern Counties League and then running the Jolly Farmers pub in Ormesby for 27 years.

His player-managerial feats – most famously in a 1953 FA Cup win against Crystal Palace – were affectionately commemorated, upon his death, by the scattering of his ashes at the Bloaters’ ground, an event that attracted a “Farewell to Football Hero” headline in the local press. Jack’s father, Martin, played for Grimsby, Sheffield Wednesday and Bristol Rovers, while his uncle James won a Championship medal with Liverpool in 1906.