Without doubt one of the greatest full-backs ever to grace the club, Tom Parker won every honour the game had to offer during a long and distinguished career.

He served his apprenticeship playing in local war-league football and was invited to The Dell for a trial. In 1918-19, when the Saints’ fixtures consisted of 16 war-league games, the Victory Cup and lots of friendlies, Tom played every game, as an amateur. He took 10 penalties, scoring from them all, and grabbed two more goals in open play, making him the club’s second-highest scorer in that last season of war-time football. Whereupon, he signed pro, in readiness to be the Saints’ right-back in their final season in the Southern League. Never the fastest of players, he had an excellent positional sense and timed his tackles well. Which explains why he became a fixture in that position, in a formidable partnership with Fred Titmuss for the next six seasons, as Southampton progressed to Division II and enjoyed some decent Cup-runs.

Titmuss and he would start a seventh season – 1925-26 – together but, with the club needing the money to buy The Dell, both would be sold during that season, in Tom’s case to Arsenal. For all that he achieved in his 280 games for the Saints, Parker’s most memorable moments while with the club were concentrated in the spring of 1925. On 28 March, he had a night-mare semi-final at Stamford Bridge, gifting Sheffield United the lead with an own goal and missing a chance to equalise by driving a penalty into the shoulder of the Blades’ goalkeeper (see Scrapbook section). United soon added the clincher: 2-0. Two months later, Tom was in Paris, winning what would be his only cap in England’s 3-2 defeat of France.

Back at Stamford Bridge for the 1927 semi-final, Tom would be on the winning side – for Arsenal, as they beat Southampton 2-1. Arsenal would famously lose to Cardiff in the Final and Tom, who had been made captain in 1928, would collect a second runners-up medal against Newcastle in 1932. In the meantime, though, he had received the trophy from King George V, following Arsenal’s 2-0 win against Huddersfield in 1930, and had collected a League championship medal in 1931. He was coming 35 when he played the last of his 294 games for Arsenal in October 1932. Before that championship season was over, he left to manage Norwich City. In his first season, 1933-34, he led Norwich to the Third South championship but opted to move within Division II to Southampton in February 1937.

Two of his young Canaries, Ted Bates and Stan Cutting, soon followed him as he began to reinforce a side from which so many promising players had been sold. His rebuilding efforts were thwarted by the outbreak of war. He accepted the Board’s £3-a-week offer to manage the club from his home in Chandlers Ford, popping in to The Dell from time to time, to “answer all correspondence and keep in touch with all concerned.”

Those concerned included some likely local lads, who saw some first-team action during the War. But Parker would not be around for the post-war reconstruction. He fell out with the Board (see a letter to one of his assistants in the scrapbook section) and resigned in 1943.He went to work with the Ministry of Transport as a ship’s surveyor in Southampton Docks. Apart from a two-year spell back in management with Norwich between 1955 and 1957, he remained in that job until his retirement in 1962.

Whereupon, Ted Bates offered his own first manager and mentor the chance to scout for the Saints, which Tom did for the next 13 years, the last two of them as the local scout, in Lawrie McMenemy’s reshuffle. He had not long become the chief scout, when Bates took him, one Sunday afternoon in March 1964, to Orcheston on Salisbury Plain – not to watch a youngster but to impress him into signing. In the hope of doing that, Parker took along his medals. But all the 15 year-old Mike Channon wanted to see was a signing-on form: he was not remotely interested in the memorabilia of an exceptional career.