Pat Parker considered himself “very lucky to come out of village football” at 20, to play with seasoned pros, first at Plymouth and then at Newton Abbot, where he felt that the ex-pros from Argyle and Torquay made him look better than he was.

That assessment was not shared by his manager, who was a friend of Sid Cann, the Southampton boss. Cann dispatched a couple of scouts – ex-Saints, Arthur Dominy and Stan Woodhouse – to have a look at his friend’s centre-half and then arrived himself, with a team of Reserves, for a friendly. He signed Parker after the game. Digs were found for him in the groundsman’s cottage at the County Ground, where his fellow-lodgers included Mike Barnard, the young cricketer who had just signed for Portsmouth. Pat liked to join him for an evening net. He made his debut (and his only Second Division appearance) almost immediately, but his progress in the League was impeded when he twice broke his right leg in friendlies, one of them back at Newton Abbot. Meanwhile, Cann was being replaced by George Roughton and the Saints were dropping into Division III(S). It needed Ted Bates to take over in October 1955 for Pat to become a regular.

He was ever-present in 1956-57, in a side that achieved the best defensive record in the division – which explains his selection to represent it against the Third (North). Having then shared the No.5 shirt with John Page for two seasons, he was among the 14 players purged in May 1959. After a season at Poole, he joined Cowes, where he remained, in various part-time capacities, into his fifties. Living in Southampton and working as a production controller at Racal’s Hythe factory, he would take the Isle of Wight ferry only for home games and Island derbies. Yet, despite being a commuter, he entered fully into the intra-Island rivalries.

If his team was seldom up to the secretary’s reminder that “we’ve got to beat Newport,” Pat had fonder memories, overall, of those years than of his eight seasons of League football. Despite problems with his knees, he took up a new sport at 80. He had been lunching and watching for a while at Atherley Bowling Club, when he decided to bring out his late mother’s woods – the ones with which she had played on Plymouth Hoe. Sir Francis Drake, eat your heart out. In August 2012, by now suffering from dementia and in a wheelchair, Pat turned upat Waterstone’s in West Quay, to greet Terry Paine who was signing copies of Suited and Booted, the pre-war photographic history of the club.