Albert Day

At 16 years of age Day was playing with the Sussex-based Preston Rovers club: in consecutive seasons they won the Second and then First Division of the Worthing and District League and progressed to the Brighton, Hove & District League. He next joined leading Southern Amateur League club Hastings & St Leonards and additionally between November 1937 and March 1938 was attached as an amateur player to Football League Division Two club Fulham. Whilst he was with Hastings, in the spring of 1938, they won the Amateur Football Alliance Cup and the Sussex Senior Cup (in which he scored a hat-trick). From March 1938, after cessation of his arrangement with Fulham, Day was registered as an amateur player with Brighton & Hove Albion of the Third Division South. In August 1938 his arrangement with Brighton was upgraded when he signed as a professional. However, he did not make any league appearances during the immediately succeeding season, after which his career was interrupted for seven years by the cessation of competitive football owing to World War II. Day played as a war-time guest player for Reading, Lincoln City and Ipswich Town – for the latter club during the 1945–46 wartime season he played in 21 matches scoring 15 goals. Thereafter football returned to its pre-war competitive format and in the summer of 1946 Day signed for Ipswich Town who resumed playing in the Third Division South. In the ensuing 1946–47 season, now aged 28, he made his football league debut and was the…