Doug Insole
Essex and England cricketer and administrator who excelled as a batsmen when facing fast bowling
DOUG INSOLE, the Essex and England cricketer who has died aged 91, scored a pile of runs as an amateur after the Second World War and proved a successful county captain. Later he played an important role as an administrator, encouraging brighter cricket and helping to see the game through the crisis created by Kerry Packer’s World Series. His services to the game were recognised by his appointment as president of MCC in 2006-07.
Insole the player believed that his batting profited from the fact that his natural instincts had never been cramped by sustained coaching. He worked out his own style, adopting an open stance, with his bottom right hand dominant in all stroke play, which greatly favoured the on-side. He was the sort of player capable of turning good length balls outside the off stump to the fine leg boundary.
Thanks to his wonderful eye and strong will, he succeeded in turning this unorthodox approach to highly profitable account. In particular he excelled against fast bowling, showing himself to be one of the very few batsmen of his time who could deal convincingly with Fred Trueman in full fury.
Yet Doug Insole never dominated in Test cricket as he did for Essex. First selected to play for England against the West Indies at Trent Bridge in 1950, Insole was bamboozled by Sonny Ramadhin’s spin, and had to wait five years for another chance at international level, against South Africa at Headingley. This time he did better, sharing a fighting stand with Peter May in the second innings as England went down to defeat. He did not hold his place, however, and failed again in 1956 when recalled against Australia.
Insole batted well, however, in South Africa in 1956-57, when he served as vice-captain to May. His defiant 110 not out in the second innings at Durban, against the ferocious Neil Adcock and Peter Heine, and the great off-spinner Hugh Tayfield (who took eight for 69), saved England from defeat in the third Test. Insole ended the series top of the England batting averages, on 39.00.
Back in England, though, another encounter with Ramadhin in the first Test against West Indies at Edgbaston discouraged the selectors, and he never played for England again. In nine Tests he had scored 408 runs at an average of 27.20.
Douglas John Insole was born at Clapton, Middlesex on April 18 1926, though his family moved to Highams Park, near Chingford, when he was four.
His father taught him the rudiments of cricket on the concrete passageway alongside their house, and when Doug was seven co-opted him as scorer for Highams Park Cricket Club. The boy could remember listening to almost inaudible cricket commentaries from Australia on Radio Luxembourg during the Bodyline Series of 1932-33.
At Sir George Monoux Grammar School, Walthamstow, his cricketing talent was soon evident, and at 13 he appeared both for London and for Essex. Schoolboys. His brother, eight years younger, would also excel, captaining London Boys at both soccer and cricket; he developed tuberculosis, however, and died at the aged of 23.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Sir George Monoux School was evacuated – so that Insole found himself in quick succession at Maulden (in Bedfordshire), Colchester, Bromyard (in Herefordshire), and finally at Leominster. Opportunities for cricket were limited, but when the school returned to Walthamstow in 1943, Insole turned out for Chingford, scoring, as he put it, “the very occasional century”.
In 1944 he appeared for the first time at Lord’s, for the Air Training Corps against the Army Cadets, and was out first ball. “Always play forwards at Lord’s,” RW V Robins, a former England captain, advised when he returned to the pavilion. “This is a bloody fine time to tell me,” the 18-year old Insole riposted. He made a century in the second innings.
Insole served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, when he went up to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. When he attended freshmen’s trials at Fenners in the spring of 1947, the coaches at first considered that he would never succeed in first-class cricket, on account of his propensity to play across the line. Nevertheless, Insole made runs in the middle, and when selected to play for the university against Yorkshire scored a creditable 44.
He went on to make 161 not out against Hampshire, won his Blue, and in July made his debut for Essex. In August he underlined his potential with a century against Lancashire.
In 1948 Insole showed his versatility by keeping wicket for Cambridge, though he did not much enjoy the experience. The next year he captained the Light Blues, and, against the odds, led them to victory at Lord’s. Insole was a fine leader, raising the standard of fielding to new heights, and combining quick repartee with a warm heart in dealing with his players.
He also batted superbly for Essex in that hot summer of 1949, winning his county cap after scoring 219 not out against Yorkshire, and averaging 65 in the county championship.
Meanwhile Insole had also made his mark as a footballer. While still a teenager he played inside-right for Walthamstow Avenue, and at Cambridge he won a soccer Blue in all three years, captaining the side in 1948, and being chosen as a reserve for an England amateur international trial.
In that same year he was a founder member and the first captain of Pegasus, whose players were drawn from Oxford and Cambridge soccer Blues. The club would win the FA Amateur Cup in 1951 and 1953 (albeit without Insole), but was disbanded in 1963. Insole also turned out for Southend United.
The peak of his career as a footballer came in 1956 when, representing the Corinthian Casuals against Bishop Auckland in the Amateur Cup Final at Wembley, he used the outside of his right foot to take a corner and saw the ball curl off a teammate’s head into the back of the net. Though this effort was very much against the run of play, Corinthian Casuals managed to hang on to their lead to within 12 minutes of the final whistle. Bishop Auckland won the replay.
In cricket, Insole succeeded T N Pearce as captain of Essex in June 1950, maintaining his usual cheerful front through a difficult season in which the county finished with the wooden spoon. Performances improved in the later 1950s, and from 1957 to 1960 the county were generally in the top half of the table, reputed especially for their outstanding fielding. Thereafter Insole resigned the captaincy to Trevor Bailey.
He was always a popular figure at Essex, not least on account of his ready wit. “Was I run out or bowled?” he demanded of the umpire after his wicket had been shattered by Tony Lock’s faster ball, which always seemed more like a throw than an orthodox delivery.
As captain he struck terror into his players only when behind the wheel of his car, which he drove at alarming speed. Dickie Dodds, the Essex opening batsman and a devout Christian, was his preferred passenger: “He prays while I drive,” Insole explained. He published Cricket From The
Middle in 1960. When he retired from the game in 1963 he had played in 450 first-class matches (345 of them for Essex) and scored 25,241 runs (including 54 centuries) at an average of 37.61. Three times, in 1951, 1955 and 1959, he made more than 2,000 runs in a season. An occasional medium-pace bowler, he took 138 wickets at 33.91 apiece. His 366 catches reflected his brilliance in the field.
Insole was for 19 years an England selector, serving as chairman from 1965 to 1968. Determined to promote a more positive approach, he dropped Ken Barrington from the England side after that batsman had spent more than seven hours making 137 against New Zealand. Two years later he provoked decades of whingeing when he meted out the same treatment to Geoffrey Boycott, who had scored a painful 246 not out against India.
As chairman of the Test and County Cricket Board from 1975 to 1978, Insole kept a cool head in the crisis arising when the Australian tycoon Kerry Packer, baulked of the television rights for a Test series, enticed the world’s leading players away for his own World Series.
Insole was also chairman of the TCCB’S cricket committee from 1969 to 1987, and of its international committee from 1988 to 2000. In addition, he headed the European Cricket Council. He twice managed tours to Australia, in 1978-79 when England triumphed under Mike Brearley in 1978-79, and in 1982-83 when Bob Willis led a less successful campaign. Somehow Insole combined these duties with his position as marketing director of Trollope & Colls between 1975 and 1991.
He was made a life vice-president of MCC in 1995, having served on the committee from 1955 to 1994; in addition he was trustee between 1988 and 1994. His long association with Essex cricket was crowned when he became the club’s president in 1994. He was appointed CBE in 1979. Doug Insole married, in 1948, Barbara Ridgway, who died in 1982; they had three daughters, one of whom predeceased him.
Doug Insole, born April 18 1926, died August 5 2017