Hampshire League Totton became a goalkeeping nursery for the Saints in the 1920s, producing James Thitchener, Bert Scriven and Bill Soffe, in turn. Having signed amateur forms for Southampton in the summer of 1924, Thitchener would continue to play mainly for Totton, with just the occasional run-out with the Saints Reserves and County games for Hampshire (see below).

His only first-team appearance came at the end of his second season, in one of the annual charity-cup games against Portsmouth. He fluffed his lines when “pulling the ball down from Fred Foxall’s header,” the Echo reported, and “put it into the net.” But far from taking the can for a 4-2 defeat, he was given a professional contract and duly established himself, in 1926-27, as the second-choice ’keeper – albeit with no sign of even a temporary promotion: Tommy Allen was in the middle of an unbroken run of 64 games, in the League and FA Cup, in the first-team goal. Jim left the club at the season’s end and moved to the Peterborough area, where he was re-instated as an amateur, after a while, and kept goal as a permit-player.