Jimmy Yates was a most restless footballer, moving not only from club to club and league to league but even between continents, seldom staying anywhere for more than a year. The greatest exception to that rule was his stint with Sheffield United. Joining them from Second Division Ardwick, he had the best part of four seasons at Bramall Lane, culminating in United’s being Division I runners-up in 1897.

Whereupon, he joined St Mary’s, who had just won the Southern League for the first time. He started well enough at outside-right, scoring more than a winger’s share of the goals, but – not for the last time in his career – then missed games through illness, as the Saints lost in their first FA Cup semi-final but retained their title.

He decamped to Gravesend but, without having played in their Southern League side, returned to Southampton, for the run-in to their third successive championship. And he now stayed for two more seasons, occasionally, still at outside-right but at inside-right throughout an FA Cup-run that took Saints to a replayed Final in 1900 and more often than not as they won their fourth Southern League Shield in 1901.

He now wandered to St Leonards, Holland and Denmark (see below), returning to Southampton in March 1905 for just one more game in the Southern League and goal in his Western League swansong. On his next journey, he revisited both Gravesend and St Leonards, joined a colony of ex-Saints at Salisbury (as seen in Tom Metcalf’s profile) and coached in both Americas. And he found time to recommend Horace Glover, once of St Leonards, to Southampton. After all of which, he worked as a stevedore in Southampton Docks, while during WW1 he was a general labourer at Thornycrofts. Thereafter, dogged not only by ill-health but by unemployment, he took his own life by slitting his throat on The Common in 1922, aged only 52. At the inquest his son told the coroner that he had been suffering from delusions and had not been eating or sleeping. He had refused to take medical advice.