Len Wilkins was a local boy made good.

Not good enough to have been lured away from Southampton, maybe, but good in the sense that football fans appreciate – he did all that could be asked of him, and more, within his limitations and would be going nowhere until he retired: in his case to emigrate to Canada.

A Shirley Warren schoolboy, he made war-time appearances for the same Cunliffe Owen side as the former Saints captain, Arthur Holt, who has been credited with bringing the young Wilkins to The Dell – although Mr Cosgrove, a sometime chairman, claimed to have spotted him playing on the Common.

Either way, Len would get three games in 1945-46, the transitional season when “official” League games had yet to be resumed. His debut, at centre-half in a 5-2 home win against Swansea, pitched him against the free-scoring Trevor Ford, 41 goals in 41 games that season. His official debut would have to wait the best part of three years. In the meantime, though, he would be on the 1948 tour of Brazil. There is no shortage, in Dell Diamond, of team-mates recounting the 11-day Atlantic crossing – with special attention to the seven-course meals, when war rations still existed on dry land and the adult male meat allowance was 13 oz a week. Not that any of that mattered to Len – for two reasons. First, he was a vegetarian: “Spud” was one of his nick-names. Secondly, he was unable to get to the dining room, anyhow, for the first six days at sea.

He was confined to his bunk – so sea-sick that his team-mates came in to drape a Union Jack over him, in mock-solemn preparation for his inevitable burial at sea. The side returned from Brazil to play some stunning football. For the first third of that 1948-49 season, Len replaced George Smith at No.4, where he would then remain. That included the fateful Third Round FA Cup-tie at Hillsborough, which was Alf Ramsey’s last “official” appearance for Southampton. Len was in a good position to witness how Alf’s version of catching the Wednesday forwards offside upset left-back Bill Rochford, a revered captain acclaimed by his lieutenants as the absolute master of the offside trap. Which is why Len considers it to have been Ramsey’s “Humpty-Dumpty” match – the moment of his great fall from favour that club and player would be unable to repair. Ramsey’s side of that story is told in his profile.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, Alf went off sulking to Tottenham, instead of waiting his chance. The irony is that the next season had barely started before Bill Ellerington and Rochford were both injured and Wilkins had become a right-back. Not for long, though – he had soon worn every shirt-number from 2 to 6, with a couple of games at No.8, and even one at centre-forward, thrown in. Nor was he a regular. As late as 1951-52, he was in the Reserves squad that won the Combination Cup. In 1954-55, though, he was captaining the first team for his only ever-present season.

In his final season, 1957-58, he had 27 games, of which Terry Paine missed only two. When you think that Ted Bates missed but one of Len’s first-season 30, it gives you some idea of his span. So, yes, Len made good. Which is why they cheered him all the way to the toss-up at his last game in April 1958, even as the Albion Silver Band played Auld Lang Syne, knowing that he was off to Canada.

Nor were old acquaintances forgot during his 45 years in North America – he temporarily left Canada for Los Angeles, continuing to play, wherever he was. As he reported back to the club historians in 1989, he’d “like to think I did have a part in the progress of the game in North America.”

He returned to his roots for Ted Bates’s 75th birthday-spectacular in 1992 and would love to have come again to the 1998 bash for Ted’s 60 seasons at The Dell. He settled, instead, for a trans-Atlantic ’phone chat about his time with Ted, in which he enthusiastically relived those early post-war years, with special reference to the previously untold story of Humpty-Dumpty Ramsey.