It was fortunate that the Southampton director who had gone to sign Ted Hough from a Walsall works-team was carrying a fat wallet: Talbot Stead agreed to release their promising centre-half for a fee of £200, but only if the director stood a round of drinks.

Such was the size of Hough’s send-off party that it cost the director 52 pints.

That was beer-money well spent, as Ted spent the best part of 10 seasons at The Dell. In the first three of them, he was a triple-understudy – to centre-half Alec Campbell and full-backs Tom Parker and Fred Titmuss – yet still saw very little first-team action. Matters improved in 1924-25 and then, in the spring of 1926, Tom Parker left for Arsenal, whereupon Ted became a fixture at right-back, hardly missing a League game until December 1927 and playing in every match of the run to the 1927 FA Cup semi-final at Stamford Bridge, where they had lost their last two semi-finals, in 1908 and 1925.

They lost again, 2-1 to Arsenal. The record books credit the Gunners’ first goal to Joe Hulme, but there is a school of thought that his cross-shot was not goal-bound until it deflected off Hough. That was sufficient to give rise to the line that, as far as Southampton’s semi-finals were concerned, that end of Chelsea’s ground was “jinxed”: Tom Parker had put the ball past his own ’keeper, in 1925, and had missed a penalty, both at that end.

Ted enjoyed long periods in possession over the next two seasons, during which a bid from Middlesbrough, newly-returned to Division I, was rejected.

At the end of the 1930-31 season, however, a season in which Ted hardly featured, Southampton got their money back when Portsmouth, also of the view that Ted was First Division material, paid £200 for him. It proved to be a waste of money: he would play only once for Pompey, followed by just one game for Bristol Rovers, down in the Third South. After which, he returned to Portsmouth, where he played locally, either side of a spell with Cowes, and worked at the local power station as a fitter’s mate. When war broke out in 1939 he gave his occupation as a “barman” in Portsmouth.