County Archives

County Ground Generals led by the returns of 'Shacks' Continuing our new series, respected cricket writer Paul Edwards looks back on the County Championship winners of 1961, Hampshire, and their leading seam bowler, Derek Shackleton

He is a bowler. In Patrick Eagar’s great photograph of him he is just coming into his delivery stride. The left arm is about to be raised in the conventional fashion, but it is the right arm that commands the eye. The forearm is thick, the wrist cocked and the fingers grip the ball down the seam.

But if the expression on the face is any guide, this bowler may not have finally decided which type of ball he will deliver. He holds the batsman in his shrewd, hawk-like gaze, which is a little remarkable when one realises that he only has good sight in his right eye. The shirt and flannels are white as communion cloth. The boots are heavy-soled and protect his ankles. There is not a speck of sponsorship in sight. Every hair on his head is in place; you might think he has a comb at the back of his mark.

If George Beldam’s timeless photograph of Victor Trumper ‘Jumping Out’ or Herbert Fishwick’s snap of Walter Hammond’s cover drive encapsulate attacking batsmanship, Eagar’s picture is the most perfect representation of a seam bowler. His name is Derek Shackleton, but no one calls him ‘Derek’.

For as John Arlott wrote in his lovely tribute to the player he must have watched on countless occasions: “In the dressing rooms, simply ‘Shack’ is enough. To the First-Class cricketer, the name means shrewdly varied and utterly accurate medium-pace bowling beating down as unremittingly as February rain.”

It was not raining at Bournemouth on September 1, 1961 when, at 4.08 in the afternoon, Bob Taylor chanced his arm against off-spinner Peter Sainsbury and was caught on the mid-wicket boundary by Danny Livingstone for 48. That wicket completed Hampshire’s 140-run victory and it brought them their first County Championship after 66 seasons of trying.

They were only the tenth county to win it, remarkable perhaps, when you consider that ten different counties have won the Championship in the last 20 seasons; but less so when you learn that Hampshire’s triumph was achieved in the middle of a long era in which Yorkshire and Surrey dominated the domestic game. In the 26 peacetime seasons between 1937 and 1968, Yorkshire won 11 outright titles, and Surrey seven.

And what did Shack do on that famous afternoon at Dean Park? His figures in Derbyshire’s second innings were 24-10-39-6, on a pitch which was not doing very much. The last of those wickets took his tally for the season to 150.

Such an abundant harvest was not unusual for Shack. He took at least a hundred wickets in each of the 20 seasons from 1949 to 1968. No other bowler has matched that precise level of consistency, and only Wilfred Rhodes took a hundred wickets in a season more frequently. In 647 First-Class matches, Shack took 2,857 wickets. He stands eighth in the all-time wickettakers’ list, and only two of those above him were seamers. After retiring in 1968, he returned for one match against Sussex at Portsmouth in 1969. He took two for 37 from 23 overs and five for 58 from 24.5. He celebrated his 45th birthday a few days later. He was still taking more wickets than anyone else for Dorset in Minor Counties cricket when he was over 50. “Hampshire without Shackleton will be like Blackpool without its tower,” wrote Wisden.

A contemporary comparison may offer the merest shaft of illumination here. Lancashire’s Glen Chapple has played 315 matches and taken 985 wickets. But, of course, Shack played in an era when a county’s programme consisted of nothing but three-day cricket. It was another time.

Hampshire played 32 Championship matches in 1962 and won 19 of them. It was the last-but-one season in which the title had to be decided by average points per game – nine counties chose to play a paltry 28 games – and it was also a summer in which the follow-on was abolished to encourage targets to be set and ‘brighter cricket’ played.

No one embodied that principle with more gusto than Hampshire’s captain, Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie – a gregarious Old Etonian who, so the famous tale has it, laid down one of sport’s more original curfews: he decreed that his players should be in bed before breakfast. Some, like the Barbados-born opening batsman, Roy Marshall, took him at his word. Shack was not amongst them.

The follow-on was reinstated for the 1963 season, but its absence probably suited a captain like Ingleby-Mackenzie, for whom draws were anathema.Yet only three of Hampshire’s victories in 1961 were achieved after their opponents had declared and the ten wins secured after the eventual champions had declared and set a target reflected well on the ability of Ingleby-Mac’s bowlers to dismiss sides twice.

Old Yorkshire players may have fulminated in later years about, “silly declarations,” but the better explanation for Hampshire’s success in 1961 was that they were the best side in the country. Their success was popular on that account, and also because it broke the ‘big counties’ domination of the only trophy English cricket had on offer.

One did not need to be a Hampshire man, as Arlott was, to agree with his assessment in the club’s 1962 handbook that the title-winning team was “deep in run-making power, soundly equipped at all points of attack and [one] in which every man was worth his place – a true Championship side.”

Glancing at the averages, which may not have been something Ingleby-Mackenzie did too often, justifies Arlott’s judgement. Two batsmen, Marshall and Henry Horton, scored over 2,000 runs and Jimmy Gray, whose dependability offered a perfect complement to the attacking brilliance of his opening partner, Marshall, rattled up 1,950.

Peter Sainsbury added 1,459 runs to the 54 wickets he bagged with his slow left-armers, and both Danny Livingstone and Ingleby-Mackenzie passed 1,000 runs for the season. The skipper was a buccaneering left-hander who seized a challenge with the same enthusiasm he might display when accepting an invitation to a shooting party, or an offer to stay with Lord Belper during the Doncaster St Leger.

Ingleby-Mackenzie’s one century in 1961 was scored at Cowes, and it helped his side recover from 35 for four when they needed 241 to beat Essex. Hampshire still needed 206 when the fourth wicket fell, and there were two hours and 50 minutes left for play. Ingleby-Mackenzie made 132 not out and his side won with a quarter of an hour to spare. Another time.

While Hampshire’s bowling that season frequently needed spinners like Sainsbury, Mervyn Burden or Alan Wassell to tempt stubborn opponents into indiscretion, the attack was led by Shack and David ‘Butch’ White. The latter bowled something like 15 mph quicker than his metronomic partner, and specialised in short destructive spells such as the one which removed four Sussex batsmen in five balls at Portsmouth. The explosive White was the perfect partner for Shackleton, and assisting them both behind the wicket was Leo Harrison, who added 51 catches and eight stumpings to his 511 runs in that summer. Hampshire’s close fielding was outstanding.

That paragraph had just been written when the news broke this week of the death of Jimmy Gray, aged 90. It was accompanied by the announcement of the passing of Vic Cannings, aged 97, a Hampshire seamer who opened the bowling with Shack in the 1950s. It followed the death of Harrison, aged 94, on October 12. As Rod Bransgrove, the Hampshire chairman, observed, it has been the saddest month for the county’s cricket.

The greatest tribute we can pay to such men is to remember them in

Such an abundant harvest was not unusual for ‘Shack’ – who took at least 100 wickets in each of the 20 seasons from 1949 to 1968

their highest feather. In the case of Shack, who was born in Todmorden and arrived for his Hampshire trial as a batsman who could bowl erratic leg-spin, it means returning to grounds like Bournemouth’s Dean Park, where he took 337 wickets. It means recalling a run-up and an action which were as grooved as the movement of a Swiss watch, and a bowler whose accuracy was quite as trustworthy. At ath in 1968, he began the game bowling down the leg side; the stumps had been incorrectly aligned. It only sounds The apocryphal.pace was never more than the medium side of medium-fast but the late swing, the movement off the pitch and the yorker were sufficient to make him one of the most feared bowlers in county cricket. He only played seven Tests, but it was the era of Bedser, Statham, Tyson and Trueman. They probably thought his lack of pace would count against him.

We have a little help in our quest, though. On Youtube there is a black-and-white clip of Shack bowling a single ball at Bournemouth in 1962. They say his run-up was 12 paces, but on this grainy film there are nine, long, easy strides.

“He didn’t leave any foot marks,” said his teammate, Neville Rogers.“It was as though he bowled in slippers.”

The slow-motion film of Shack lasts 21 seconds. But you could watch it for hours...