JIMMY SCARBOROUGH, one of that select band of Football League players to have borne the name of another team in the league – Alan Sunderland, Colin Blackburn, Jermaine Darlington, Ricky Villa – has died. He was 88.

Born in Nottingham, he was a West Brom junior before taking the king’s shilling and being posted to the 17/21 Lancers at Catterick. “I asked my mother where Catterick was and said she hadn’t a bloody clue. That made two of us,” he told the column in 2007.

At Catterick he also discovered Darlington – or, possibly, Darlington discovered him – 15 goals in 49 centre forward appearances for the Quakers, though he also played Wensleydale League football alongside Newcastle United and Scotland goalkeeper Ronnie Simpson for the Lancers.

Hundreds would turn up to watch village games, the goalie perhaps the greater attraction. “I think we had a good side with me and Ronnie,” Jim supposed.

“John Charles was at Catterick at the same time, but unfortunately in a different regiment. With him we might even have beaten Leyburn.”

A photograph of him in Quaker hoops shows him alongside the likes of future leading coach George Wardle and the memorably named Baden Powell – the one scouted from South Shields.

Subsequently he played for Scarborough themselves, while in the Midland League. “There’d be many a time in the visitors’ dressing room that someone would come in and say we must have made a mistake on the team sheet,” he recalled..

In Darlington he’d met future wife Kathlyn, who worked at Fred Robinson’s auction house – “we’d stand at the back making a nuisance of ourselves” – and took little persuading to stay in the town. “She was the head of the family,” Jimmy conceded.

We’d meet periodically at the little former players’ gatherings organised by the late Bob Elliott at the Lord Nelson in Gainford, now also gone, the column supposing Jimmy – doubtless myopically – to be a ringer for Genial Harry Grout, the silk-clad supremo of Slade Prison.

A celebration of Jim’s life will be held at the West Cemetery chapel in Darlington at 1.30pm on Monday.