The Saints’ second season in the Southern League had begun badly when Tom Cain, who had kept goal in the Football League with both Stoke and Everton, arrived. Conceding seven goals at Clapton was not the best of starts, but he kept clean sheets in most of his remaining games.

The arrival of George Clawley who had also displaced him at Stoke precipitated a return to the Football League in a club-record £20 transfer to Grimsby. But he was soon playing out his career in his native north-east, where he had spells of running the Royal Oak in Hebburn and labouring in Gateshead’s dockyards although, according to the 1939 roll call, he was officially a plater in the Sunderland dockyards.

N.B. The cap Tom is wearing in the photo was awarded to the winners of the Merseyside Derby in 1894 when he was at Everton.