A Scottish junior international, Jim McAlpine was one of the many signings made by Southampton’s new manager, George Swift, in the summer of 1911. Most of them turned out, like Swift himself, to be short-lived failures, but McAlpine proved to be a lasting asset, missing very few games at left-half over the next four seasons, up until the suspension of “official” football in 1915.

He made up for a lack of height by being tenacious and tireless, thus guaranteeing that he would become both a firm favourite of the crowd and an irritating frustration to forwards, when they found, as the Echo put it, that they could

“beat him once, and you meet him again 10 yards further on, unable to acknowledge defeat.”

In 1915, he went back to Scotland to work in the Glasgow shipyards and to guest for a couple of Scottish clubs. But he had married a Southampton girl and brought her home in 1917 to his home in Aberdeen Road in St Denys. He now worked at Harland & Wolff and played for their works-team during the final season of war-time football. After which, he moved to Millwall, where he remained for their first season (1920-21) in the Football League. He then had two years with Gillingham in the Third South, before returning to Southampton, where he became the landlord of the Robbie Burns in Albert Road. In 1939 he told the government he was a stevedore at Harland & Wolff.