In the summer of 1902, fresh from their FA Cup Final win over Southampton, First Division Sheffield United brought Bill Clarke from home-town football to Bramall Lane. After an unhappy season there, Bill moved into the Southern League, initially with Northampton and then with the Saints.

Generally considered to be among the most promising right-backs in that League – and certainly the fastest according to the Echo when he arrived – Bill was reckoned to be the club’s best capture of the 1905 close-season.

Over the next two seasons, he played in well over half of the Saints’ Southern League and FA Cup matches, but then his health failed him. He never really recovered the form that had brought him to prominence and he then suffered the additional misfortune of a serious knee injury. After a year out, he struggled to regain his fitness and finally retired in October 1908. He had taken a pub in Cottenham when he joined the Coldstream Guards in January 1916 and embarked for France later that year.

In one fortnight of action, he incurred four separate gunshot wounds yet remained in France. But then, in an inter-battalion football match in February 1918, “he fell down”, in the words of the accident report, “and hurt his knee”. The anxiety of the army to detect “self-inflicted injuries” is palpable in this report, but his commanding officer concluded that neither Pte Clarke nor any other player was to blame for this incident during “recreational training”, an activity that qualified as being “in the performance of military duty”. And so he was sent home and saw out the War as a Lance-Corporal in Windsor. After this, he still had a pub to run, while turning out for the local side.