FORMER central defender and Cherries' youngest ever league debutant, Jimmy White, has died at the age of 75.

Parkstone-born Jimmy played football for his school, Kemp Welch, and appeared for both Poole and Dorset Schoolboy teams as wing half. He also represented his county at athletics and reached the quarter-finals of the National Schoolboy Boxing Championships.

Football was his main interest and on leaving school he was employed at Dean Court, now Vitality Stadium, the home of Boscombe Football Club, later AFC Bournemouth, as a ground-staff boy and was still employed in this capacity when on April 30 1958 he played for Boscombe in a 3-1 win at home against Port Vale.

"Spectators witnessed one of the club's most important games that season when Boscombe's no.9 shirt was not being worn by Brian Gibbs as usual but by a little-known 15-year-old lad called White, who that night became the youngest player to appear for our first-team," reported Joe Goodwin at the time.

The ex-England Youth central defender, Jimmy, then followed Freddie Cox to Portsmouth FC, making 34 appearances and scoring six goals. In 1963 he moved to Gillingham and became captain of the club. Jonathan, Jimmy and and his wife Susan's son, was also born in the town.

In July 1966 Jimmy returned to Boscombe FC where Freddie Cox was manager again and this second stint saw him star as the Cherries took Liverpool to an FA Cup replay in the 1967/68 season as well as playing in the side that famously beat Sheffield Wednesday in the 1969/70 League Cup second round.

In 1970 he received the J. H. Paterson Memorial Trophy as Boscombe Football Club's 'player of the year'.

In the six years he was with the club he made 177 League appearances before he joined Cambridge United in December 1970. He was then manager and coach of King's Lynn, Cambridge City, Chatteris Town, Histon and the Finnish side TP Sienejuki.

Jimmy and the family then settled in Over, Cambridgeshire, and he became an operating theatre assistant at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.

Jimmy talked fondly of his time spent at Boscombe FC and proudly displayed photographs of the team in his room at the Arthur Rank Hospice in Cambridge where he spent the last three weeks of his life.

His funeral was held at Cambridge Crematorium on August 9 with donations going to the hospice.