Like the rest of us, he didn’t get to choose his time of death, but had he been granted that wish, this might just have been the date he would have picked.

Throughout his long-life, Ellis had thrived in the glare of publicity, and on the day before he finally shuffled off his mortal coil, Dean Smith and John Terry were being announced as the new managerial dream team just down the road at Villa Park.

Smith was greeted as a relatively ho-hum appointment to a project as complex as rebuilding Villa, particularly as they had publicly, but unsuccessfully, courted high profile candidates such as Thierry Henry.

Smith had earned his progression through a solid body of work at Walsall and Brentford, but the media coverage was really all about his number two, and whether Terry, the iconic captain, leader, legend would thrive in a mere supporting role.

Aston Villa were all over the news on October 11 and then Deadly Doug Ellis leapt aboard for one last ride.

Ellis was a throwback to the days when English football clubs were governed by local merchants who had made good in life and used some of their earnings to buy a piece of respect.

Owning the home team seldom did any harm to a businessman’s position in the community.

Often as active in the dressing room as the boardroom, they were the face of their club in a way that will never be replicated by faceless representatives of Middle Eastern sovereign funds or semi-detached American business moguls.

Doug Ellis spent 40 years as owner and/or chairman of Aston Villa. When he went to his eternal reward last week, he left his name on the main stand and a club that languished in a lower division, the very place he’d first found them all those years ago.

The time in between was a rollercoaster ride, bitter division punctuated by intermittent success. For some Villa fans he was the epitome of corporate evil, extracting far more from the club than he had ever invested and whose reluctance to loosen the purse strings had led directly to a generation of misery and underachievement.

For others, he was a knight in shining armour who would bleed claret and blue and whose resources saved the club from a fate far worse than they currently experience.

Ellis was born on The Wirral in 1924. When he was only three he lost his father to a lung condition that was originally caused by a gas attack in the trenches of World War One. He inherited a strong work ethic from his mother, Jane, who he watched toiling long hours to ensure that he and his sister had the education to give them at least a half-decent chance in life.

Her son was later known for excursions of fantasy and told tales in later life of football trials with Tranmere, his prowess as an amateur boxer, and how he had invented the bicycle kick.

What is definitely true is that he served in the navy during the Second World War and was posted to Sri Lanka where the sunshine, the beaches, and the deep blue ocean gave him the blueprint for a business plan that was to define his pathway to tremendous wealth in the post-war world.

In one of his last press interviews, he described how the idea for the package holiday had come to him at this time. “I can see myself now,” he reminisced, “looking fairly disgusted as the sailors came back half-drunk and covered in tattoos from Gibraltar, Malta, Bombay. They would all be talking about bringing their wives and girlfriends back to these places. Me, always there sober as a judge, would think they were stupid, they couldn’t arrange anything, so I made up my mind to go into the travel business.”

By 1952 he was flying tourists to Majorca who were served drinks on the flights by his mother. His company, Sunlight Travel, thrived and expanded by moving thousands of people around Europe which indirectly made him one of the more influential social engineers in post-war British society.

He made a fortune large enough to be invited to join the board of Aston Villa and to eventually to take over as chairman in 1968.

He was a notoriously difficult person to work with, and his unflinching embrace of discord cost him the role in 1975 and eventually complete ejection from the club in 1979.

It took him three years of political and financial manoeuvring to regain control but as luck would have it, Ellis was at an airport when his ship came in. During his three-year absence Villa won the league in 1981 and then the European Cup a year later when goalkeeping heroics by the substitute Nigel Spinks and an opportunist goal by Peter Withe combined to beat Bayern Munich 1-0 in Rotterdam. Five years later, now back under his full stewardship, the recent champions of Europe were relegated to the second division.

Ellis earned his nickname ‘Deadly Doug’ from Jimmy Greaves during his ‘Saint and Greavesie’ punditry period in the 1980s, due to his penchant for discarding managers. He claimed the moniker was unjust.

I hired 13 managers and only sacked 11,” he protested.

In reality, his batting average wasn’t quite that callous — a mere seven were fired from 14 of his appointees, although many of these were high profile and controversial, including Tommy Docherty, Ron Atkinson, and the first ‘foreign’ manager employed in England the zany Czech scientist, Dr Jozef Venglos.

Following his return as chairman and majority owner, Ellis dedicated the next 25 years to spending as little money as possible to ensure survival in the top flight of football and picking up the odd trophy along the way.

Villa won the League Cup twice and finished second in the Premiership twice in the 90s, but despite this, he was

always a divisive figure who infuriated fans by refusing to pay the extra couple of million it would have taken to lure world-class players to the club.

Ignoring the ugly abuse and frightening threats of violence, he continued to drive around Birmingham, courageously identifiable in his Rolls Royce, number plate AV1. But by 2006, even Deadly Doug Ellis had had enough and sold the club on to the American Randy Lerner for £63 million (€71 million).

The fans who had hunted his head are probably thinking now they should have been more careful in what they’d wished for, as Aston Villa are languishing near the bottom of the Championship.

On top of that they now face into a daily media circus that will surround the most prominent ‘number two’ appointment in soccer since, well, you know who.