Extract from

WILL YE NO COME BACK AGAIN?

Hampshire v Yorkshire

August 1962

chosen by Alan Castell

Alan Castell was born in Oxford in 1943. A leg-break bowler, he made his debut for Hampshire against Oxford University in their championship-winning year of 1961. Later in his career he switched to bowling fast-medium, staying with the county till the end of 1971 when he went to work in the drinks industry from which he has recently retired.

He remembers an eventful championship debut at Bournemouth.

Dean Park, Bournemouth. “Everybody at Hampshire used to like coming down here,” Alan recalls. “It was a lovely place to watch cricket, and there were always good crowds.” With its six miles of sandy beach and its cliff drives, they say that Bournemouth is the only English town to be built as a holiday resort. ‘The town of a million pines’, and there are pines here at Dean Park amid the horse chestnuts and holme oaks. All round the ground they can be seen above the white marquees. Then behind them are the detached Victorian houses, red brick with ample gardens, that front onto the road that circles the ground. Alan stands on the square where as a nineteen-year-old he made his debut, and he looks up at the window of one house. “We lost five quick wickets once, and one of our team was in that bedroom. I think everybody on the ground saw him racing round to the pavilion, doing his shirt up. He was in terrible trouble.” Alan pauses for thought. “I rang him up last night. I said, ‘War secrets are released after thirty years. I think we can let this one out, can’t we?’”

It is August 1962. Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie, the dashing Old Etonian who fits in his cricket between a hectic round of society parties and race meetings, is coming to the end of his fifth summer in charge here in Hampshire, and for the first time he welcomes the young Alan into his side. “Ingleby was a really genuine person. He had a way of making everybody feel important, even down to the stewards. I didn’t feel isolated at all.”

It is ten o’clock on a sunny August morning. Alan walks nervously into the beautiful Bournemouth pavilion, past the corner where soon they will introduce cask ale to the bar - “The first barrel exploded, and there were hops and stuff up on the ceiling for years” - and into the home dressing room. “I remember the lovely wooden boards with all the splinters. Two years later they’d still be in the bottom of your socks.”

“Morning, Ingleby,” comes a deep Yorkshire voice. “Who have we got on show here today?” Here in the midst of his new team mates stands Fred Trueman. “What’s going on here then?” he asks. “We’re pressing for the title, going great guns, and you’re fielding the bleeding second eleven.” Thirty-six years have passed, and Alan can still recall his first meeting with England’s most feared bowler. “And who are you, sunshine? What do you do?”

“I’m Alan Castell. I bowl a few leg-spinners, try to bat a bit.”

Fred’s eyes light up. He has already counted himself a hatful of wickets - “Burden, Baldry, Ingleby twice, that’s six” - and now he sizes up the nineteen-year-old Alan. “Bat a bit, bat a bit. Think you can bat, do you? Can you hook? Can you hook? If not, you’ll have to learn. I’m sorry, you’ll have to learn.”

Alan has appeared in only two first-class matches, both against Oxford University. All summer he has been playing for the Second Eleven and for the Club and Ground sides, and nothing in his life has prepared him for this match. “When you played Yorkshire, it was another world,” he reflects. “A real scrap. They didn’t give anything away. The atmosphere on that last afternoon, you could cut it. It certainly sticks in the mind.” Alex Bannister has been the Daily Mail’s Cricket Correspondent since 1947, and he agrees: ‘The atmosphere became as tense as I have experienced in a county match.’

Hampshire versus Yorkshire. County cricket clubs come rich and poor, grand counties with Test match grounds like Lancashire and Surrey and humble provincial ones like Leicestershire and Essex. From 1914 to 1960, from the end of cricket’s Golden Age to the start of the professional sixties there have been only two occasions when a county without a Test ground has won the championship title - Derbyshire in 1936, Glamorgan in 1948 - and there is a sense of an order upturned when Hampshire fly the ’61 pennant at their modest Southampton headquarters. And if the order is upturned, it is Yorkshire who feel it most. Champions in ’59 and ’60 and runners up to Hampshire in ’61. At Headingley that May they played out a draw of cautious declaration and aborted run chase and, as the Hampshire players left, Fred Trueman turned to them. “Never mind,” he said. “We’ll have a nice friendly match at Bournemouth in August, as we’ll have won the bloody championship by then.”

The championship was indeed won by the time Fred arrived - but not as he anticipated. ‘When Yorkshire visited Bournemouth last year,’ the Times reports, ‘Hampshire had just won the championship and Dean Park was en fête.’ “I came along that morning,” Alan recalls, “and the first thing I saw was Butch White’s car, parked on its own, right in the middle of the road. He’d got so pissed, somebody had had to take him home.” In the afterglow of those late night celebrations, few in Hampshire remember the Yorkshire match that followed. Butch White, 23 overs, nought for 106; Ray Illingworth, 49 overs, twelve for 102. But Yorkshire folk remember it well, and there are not many in the North who accept that Hampshire were the better side in ’61. ‘The Southern counties gave them generous declarations,’ they say. ‘They never gave us anything.’

 “This is the most wonderful occasion of all time,” Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie declared from the pavilion balcony during those celebrations. “I just hope I won’t wake up tomorrow morning and find that we’re twelfth in the table.” Now in 1962 the whole of Hampshire has woken up, and the county is back in the familiar territory of tenth or twelfth place. It will be another six years before they even finish in the first eight. “There was a certain amount of despondency in the camp,” Alan remembers, “but I think people were aware that ’61 was a bit of a one-off. If anybody other than Ingleby had been captain that summer, Hampshire would probably have finished about halfway.”

For this year’s Yorkshire match Butch White is nursing a groin strain. With fast bowler Malcolm Heath out since early July with a damaged hamstring and Bournemouth’s Dean Park a spinner’s wicket, the opportunity is there for Alan’s much-anticipated debut. ‘As Second XI supporters know,’ the Southern Echo reports, ‘he looks a good prospect for the future.’

Yorkshire’s openers take strike at half past eleven, and two wickets are down at one o’clock when the fifty comes up. ‘Padgett’s was the first, hitting over an intended drive. Then John Hampshire, a deep chested fellow with a natural style, was caught and bowled in Burden’s first over.’

This is August 1962. The economy is booming as Hire Purchase deposits on TV sets and washing machines are reduced from 20 to 10 per cent. For the overseas traveller, a pound can be exchanged for 14 francs or 11 marks.

Dean Park, Bournemouth. Cliff Richard and the Shadows are filming their travels across Europe in a bus.

‘Everybody has a summer holiday,

 Doing things they always wanted to.’

But for many the English South Coast is still the limit of their holiday ambition. Yorkshire cricketers always spend the second half of August on a fortnight’s tour down South, and their supporters ask nothing more than some sunshine and a county championship title.

‘Fun and laughter on our summer holiday,

 To make our dreams come true.’

 “That particular game the majority of the crowd were Yorkshire folk.”

The holiday-makers settle in their deck chairs and on the green wooden benches to watch Hampshire’s Derek Shackleton bowl as tidily as ever with the new ball. Not a hair out of place, not a ball off length. “There were times you could see the red patch where he landed it all day.” Thirty-eight years old, he will bowl more than 1700 overs in this summer of 1962, all between the first championship match on the fifth of May and the last day of the Hastings Festival on the fourth of September. Thirty-four three-day matches in seventeen and a half weeks, and benefit and exhibition games to fit in on Sundays. What a contrast with 1998 - when the championship programme begins in mid-April and reaches its climax twenty-three weeks later on the 20th of September. “We’re in the middle of the football season by the time it ends now,” Alan says. “I think it created more interest when it finished in August.”

But Dean Park is a spinner’s wicket, and within the hour Mervyn Burden and Peter Sainsbury are in tandem. Off-spin and slow left arm. Alan finds his way into the scorebook when ‘Sharpe tried to hit Sainsbury back over his head’ and Alan holds the catch at deep mid-off, and at lunch Yorkshire are 91 for three, Stott at the wicket with Close. “Prior to that game,” Alan recalls, “these people were only names to me - Close, Illingworth, Sharpe - but Bryan Stott was an idol of mine. I remember seeing pictures of him and his equipment when I was really getting into cricket. He had these boots that laced all the way up, and I thought, ‘I must have some of those.’”

Back in 1959 Alan was signed up at the age of just 16, without even a formal trial. Arthur Holt was in charge of the Colts, and the fast bowler Malcolm Heath remembers Arthur that day. “He was grinning like a Cheshire Cat. ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found him,’ he was saying. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘A new fast bowler?’ ‘No, no. I’ve found a real leg-spinner.’”

Leg spin. Before the war, they say, the leg-break bowler was as certain of his county place as the wicket-keeper, and even in 1949 England went into a Test match with three of them. Yet, between Tommy Greenhough’s last Test in 1960 and Ian Salisbury’s first in 1992, England’s only specialist leg-spinner will be Robin Hobbs, with seven Tests. For cricket’s traditionalists Alan is like a rare gem.

But Alan is a youngster who wants to be up with the times. “I was a bit of a teddy boy,” he confesses. “In those days you wore the county tie in a tight Windsor knot. But most of the time mine was down here. And I had these slight drainpipe trousers.” Desmond Eagar is the Secretary, a man whose own career spanned the Second War, and his desk is at the top of the Southampton pavilion. “We had this wonderful relationship. At least twice a week the window used to go up. ‘Where’s Castell? I want to see him in my office. Immediately.” Alan remembers one conversation involving the Club President, Harry Altham, author of the definitive History of Cricket. “‘Ah, yes, Castell,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about you. I want to come and watch you bowl.’ And reputedly I said, ‘Oky, doky, mate.’ Desmond Eagar was standing there. ‘Oky what? Oky what? This is the President. You don’t say ‘Oky doky, mate.’”

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