A schoolboy international, Jimmy McGowan was of an age when he could spend the Second World War acquiring a trade – coach-building – and play, during the second half of the War and the transitional season of 1945-46, for three clubs in the Glasgow-dominated “Southern” war-time League.

At Celtic, the first of those clubs, he was in the side that ingloriously lost 8-1 to Rangers on New Year’s Day 1943. Jimmy moved to England for the resumption of “official” football in 1946: to Grimsby Town of the First Division – until their relegation in 1948. He never gained a regular first-team place and, towards the end of his fourth season there, Sid Cann brought him to Southampton.

A provider and a forager rather than a scorer, Jimmy would spend eight seasons at The Dell.

In only two of those would he play in half of the League games or more: as a Second Division inside-right in 1951-52; and as the dominant right-half in the Third South season of 1955-56. It didn’t help that he lost almost the entire 1952-53 season to a lung infection*, but he bounced back to captain the Reserves side that won the Combination Cup in 1954-55. Jimmy became the license of a few pubs in succession, latterly the Drummond Arms in Portswood, where he hosted many a “lock-in” – and, in Jim Steele’s case, a live-in – for Ted Bates’s “Ale House” lads, most notably the Scots. This practice survived a change of managers, despite Lawrie McMenemy’s concerns, to the extent that the BBC sent a crew to the pub, to film a piece for its Cup Final-day programme in 1976 (see scrapbook). Sadly eight years later Jimmy drowned in the boating lake on Southampton Common, shortly after his 60^th birthday. The coroner report stated that he had become worried about the brewery plans for the future of the pub.

*Jimmy’s lung infection was diagnosed following an x-ray during the players’ annual check up in September 1952. The x-ray was sent to no less an authority than Geoffrey Marshall, the late King’s physician who confirmed that he would have to miss a season but “there was no reason why the recovery should not be complete”.