Stan Cutting had been interesting Chelsea while playing for Norwich City’s Reserves, but he elected to follow the Canaries’ manager, Tom Parker, to Southampton in May 1937, along with Ted Bates. He would get plenty more Reserves football over the next two seasons, until he had his first-team break, with three games at right-half, at the end of the 1938-39 season. But he moved on to Third Division Exeter in the summer of 1939, for the season that was abandoned after three games.

He joined the RAF and, while stationed in Egypt, represented Suez Canal v Cairo Zone. During a later posting to India, he played for the RAF against an All-India XI. After the War, Stan returned to St James’s Park, where he played until 1948. Then, as Jimmy Gallagher arrived there as a trainer, Stan became his assistant. When Gallagher followed the manager, George Roughton, to The Dell in 1952, Stan remained to serve Norman Kirkman during his short managerial reign, leaving when Kirkman did in 1953. Stan now became a publican in Exeter, initially at the Globe, then at the Crown and Sceptre.

In his retirement, he played bowls at the club literally across the road from his home near the City’s ground. Despite a stroke that affected his balance, he continued to bowl in his eighties, but declined an invitation to Bates’s 60th-anniversary dinner in 1998, on the grounds that he would be unable to hold his cutlery in an expected manner.

 In 1939 when there was a mini census conducted to find out who was working where Stan Cutting informed the government that he was working on his father’s poultry farm in St Faiths.