The ever-modest Ted Bates never tired of emphasising how much luck you need to succeed in football.

His first lucky break came when Hertfordshire Juniors arrived in his native Thetford a man or two short for a game against Norfolk. The 17 year-old Eddie (as he was then known) was summoned and caught the eye of a most significant spectator, the former Saints full-back, Tom Parker, who was by now managing Norwich City.

He never made the first team there, but when Parker became Southampton’s manager in 1937, Bates soon followed him.

He signed for the Saints on his 19th birthday and would continue to serve the club, in an unbroken succession of eight capacities, until his death 66 years later.

By the time war intervened, Eddie had had a couple of decent spells in the first team and played in one of the games at the start of the 1939-40 season that was then abandoned. Parker said not to enlist, as the War wouldn’t last long, so Ted joined the Police War Reserve. He soon moved, however, to Folland Aircraft. He played almost 200 war­-time games for Saints, quite a few for Follands and, when he eventually joined the Army in 1946, once for Northampton.

By now, his wife Mary was at The Dell as Assistant Secretary. Military service did not prevent Ted turning out for the Saints in 1946-47, latterly at left-half, a position in which he had represented the Army. Having spent the following season competing with new signing, Augie Scott, for an inside-forward berth, Ted settled into a steady relationship with another new arrival, Charlie Wayman, in 1948-49. If Wayman lacked anything it was inches,

but Bates, himself only 5ft 9ins, made up for that with his exceptional ability in the air. What’s more, he took off, as Wayman’s successor, Eddy Brown, observed, “without a running jump. He jumped like Zebedee. Straight up!”

By the time he stopped playing in 1952-53, the season in which Saints were relegated to Division III(S), Bates had taken on some coaching duties – jointly with Jimmy Easson, the former Pompey international and trainer who had recently transferred to The Dell – but was soon put in sole charge of the Reserves.

Then, in 1955, the Board turned to him as the man to lead the first team back into the Second Division. He achieved that in 1960, with a blend of home-grown youth, notably Terry Paine and John Sydenham; three summer bargains (Dick Conner, Cliff Huxford and George O’Brien); and the record-breaking Derek Reeves. Ted continued his careful team-building and, six years later, led Southampton into the unknown territory of Division I. Further astute manoeuvres in the transfer market kept them there, as he captured the likes of Ron Davies, Hugh Fisher, Jimmy Gabriel, Brian O’Neil, John McGrath, Joe Kirkup and Jim Steele for comparative “peanuts”, while selling Martin Chivers for a British record of £125,000, secure in the knowledge that “the boy Channon” would soon come good. In 1969, that blend proved good enough to take the Saints into Europe for the first time, in the Inter Cities Fairs Cup. In November 1973 – by which time he had succeeded Matt Busby as the longest-serving manager in the game – Ted handed over to Lawrie McMenemy.

He continued, first as Chief Executive and then as a director, to lend an unobtrusive hand: see his biography for a roll-call of managers who appreciated his counsel, often solicited on the bus home from an away match – the team-bus on which he continued, into his eighties, to travel. Men who had played with and/or for him came from all over the world to a dinner in his honour in 1993, as he retired from the Board and was made Vice­-President. Many of them re-assembled in 1998, to celebrate his first 60 seasons at the club.

By then, he had become the club President, ­appropriate recognition of the dedicated service that entitled him to be widely known as “Mr Southampton”. That popular label was more formally bestowed in 2001 when he was made a Freeman of the City. He had been appointed MBE earlier that year and then, in the August, the man who had transformed Southampton’s fortunes at The Dell performed the opening ceremonies at St Mary’s. As his health declined in 2003, he watched his last game at St Mary’s – the FA Cup quarter-final against Wolves. There was talk of the Board’s chartering a helicopter to take him to the Final, but he wasn’t up to it. Two days after the Final, he made his last public appearance, in the Terry Paine Suite, where Terry presented him, on behalf of the club, with his first England cap. Sydenham joined the modest ceremony. So the two wingers who had been with Ted Bates all the way from the Youth team to Europe were there for his swansong. At his funeral, six months later, Rupert Lowe justifiably announced to a packed St Mary’s Church that “the position of the game’s curator of honesty and decency is now vacant.”

Ted Bates believed he could have been a professional cricketer, had his father – forever away from home playing county cricket – been available to nurture his talent. W.E. (“Eddie”) Bates, who had joined Glamorgan in 1914, after failing to make the grade at his native Yorkshire, had also been a centre-forward with Bolton Wanderers in Division I and mainly a full-back with Leeds City in Division II.

Eddie’s father, “Billy” Bates, had been a considerable all-rounder with Yorkshire and a record-breaker on England’s 1882-83 tour of Australia, when his half-century and 14 wickets in Melbourne included the first Test hat-trick by an Englishman. Which is why that Test became known as “Billy Bates’s Match” and why his name is prominent on the Ashes urn.