It took goalkeeper Sam Warhurst a while to come through Lancashire and Cheshire football to Second Division fare with Bradford City. At the end of his fifth season at Valley Parade, City were relegated and Sam moved to Southampton, who had finished four points clear of that drop. He hardly missed a game over the next two years and played in all three matches of the aborted 1939-40 campaign.

During the War, he averaged 11 games per season for the Saints, guested locally for Cunliffe Owen and even managed to turn out for St Mirren.

In the managerial re-structuring of March 1946, Sam became the trainer-coach.In this capacity, he travelled with the first team. That included the 1948 tour of Brazil, on which the party included only one goalkeeper, but although there would be no need to bring Sam out of retirement to deputise for Ian Black he did make a playing return in the match v Botofogo when he deputised for an injured Saints player in the final few minutes.

Meanwhile Sid Cann, qualified both as a coach and a physiotherapist, had arrived in the summer of 1946, effectively to double as the club’s masseur and the Reserves’ trainer. In July 1949, the directors, concerned to clarify who was what, determined that Warhurst be “designated Trainer and Coach… in entire charge of the dressing rooms and players,” while Cann was “designated as Physiotherapist,” responsible for “all medical purposes and… the treatment rooms.” Four weeks later, those distinctions were revisited, consequent upon Bill Dodgin’s sudden departure for Fulham. Warhurst now became “temporary team manager”, but Cann would “be in temporary charge of the dressing room.” Both men were encouraged to apply for the managerial vacancy, along with captain Bill Rochford.

The best that can be said for the bizarre division of labour between Warhurst and Cann, which gave a most singular meaning to “losing the dressing room”, is that it lasted less than a week.  – whereupon Cann became manager and Warhurst would be Head Trainer, with Rochford as player-coach. Sam would survive the other two, retiring in 1953 and becoming the landlord at the St Mary’s Hotel in East Street (see scrapbook section) – until the pub was demolished to make way for a shopping centre in 1972.