Born On This Day: 23rd March

Neil McCorkell was born in Portsmouth in 1912, During the 1920s Hampshire’s regular wicketkeeper was Walter Livsey, while they could also call on the extraordinary all-rounder George Brown, who would stand in for Livsey, and also  ‘kept’ for England. Livsey retired after the 1929 season, by which time Brown was in his forties, so they needed a new wicketkeeper.

McCorkell had learned to play in school and church teams in Portsmouth and was spotted in a match against Hampshire’s Club & Ground side in the city. He played in the second match of the 1932 season and thereafter was pretty much a permanent fixture, broken by the war, for twenty years.

During his first season, he dismissed 68 batsmen and was awarded his county cap. In 1933, he made his first half-century (v Yorkshire) and two years later he was promoted to open the batting; there was a gradual improvement in that aspect of his game, and later that season he made his maiden century v Lancashire at Southampton (154*) followed by a second v Northamptonshire at Bournemouth.

When his career ended after the 1951 season, there had been 17 centuries, all in the Championship, and including in those days, a rare double century, 203 at Gloucester in 1951. Towards the end of his career, he sometimes played as a batsman.

In his 14 playing seasons, he scored 15,833 runs for the county at 25.87 and dismissed nearly 700 batsmen, with a higher percentage of stumpings than any of his successors in the Hampshire side. Only Bobby Parks has more dismissals for the county and John Arlott (1957) said of McCorkell that “he kept equally well to fast bowling and slow and, season in, season out, missed very few chances”.

He passed 1,000 runs in nine seasons with a best of 1,871 in 1949 and was perhaps an early example of the current fashion for ‘keepers’ who can bat. It was sometimes felt that he was unlucky never to win a Test cap, although he was in the Players XI v the Gentlemen at Lord’s in 1936, and toured India with Tennyson’s side in the winter of 1937/8.

At the end of the 1951 season he retired and moved to South Africa to pursue a coaching career, after which he enjoyed a very long retirement, becoming just the second Hampshire cricketer from their Championship days to reach his personal three figures.

It is a salutary thought that since McCorkell, very few Hampshire cricketers from Portsmouth pursued a career of any length with the county – and unlike McCorkell, any that did were privately educated. He died in South Africa, approaching his 101st birthday.