England cricket’s chairman of selectors Doug Insole had a penchant for dressing up as Inspector Clouseau and, although he was a central figure in two of the biggest misadventures in the history of the sport, he was no bumbling fool. He was a highly regarded administator who was more a victim of difficult circumstances.
His stickiest wicket — and the one with which he will be forever associated — was the Basil D’Oliveira affair in 1968. He chaired the meeting of Test selectors at which the all-rounder was excluded from England’s tour of South Africa, only for him to be reinstated after an injury to another player.
A Cape Coloured (as they were known) who was barred from playing for South Africa by the apartheid regime, D’Oliveira had come to England, taken citizenship and become a successful Test cricketer. In the winter of 1968 MCC was due to send a team to South Africa and D’Oliveira was a strong candidate for selection. However, despite making 158 in the final Test of the summer against Australia, he was not chosen. The selectors, Insole in particular, were widely criticised.
Insole’s insistence that D’Oliveira’s omission was for purely cricketing reasons cut little ice — and there was a further twist. Tom Cartwright, who had been selected, dropped out and D’Oliveira was brought in. As Cartwright was a bowler and D’Oliveira primarily a batsman, this made little sense and contradicted the original selection. What none of the selectors, nor Colin Cowdrey, the captain, would say publicly was that D’Oliveira’s carousing on the West Indies tour the previous winter had caused concern.
The South African government seized on the volte-face to accuse MCC of bowing to anti-apartheid pressure and declared that D’Oliveira would not be acceptable. The tour was cancelled. Insole was a man of integrity who found himself in an impossible position. Accusations of racism and betrayal hurt him deeply.
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He described the episode as the worst few months of his life. “Doug was drained by it, but he would not have had any regrets,” said David Acfield, who succeeded him in administrative roles. “He always maintained that D’Oliveira was initially left out on cricketing grounds. Would he have told me and Keith Fletcher, our close friend, about anything further that was said in the selectors’ meeting? I am not sure he would have done.”
John Woodcock, the cricket correspondent of The Times in this period, said: “I don’t think we shall ever know anything more about what went on. Doug was very discreet.” The minutes of the meeting went missing and were never recovered.
This was not the only demanding episode during Insole’s long, unpaid career as an administrator. In 1977 he was chairman of the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB) when it emerged that Kerry Packer, an Australian tycoon in dispute with his country’s board of control over rights for televised Test matches, was setting up an unofficial series of his own and recruiting many of the world’s leading players. Packer’s initiative presented a direct challenge to the traditional game. The International Cricket Conference, the global governing body, in tandem with Insole’s TCCB, delivered an ultimatum to the defectors that they would be banned from Test and first-class cricket unless they withdrew from their contracts with Packer.
The Australian took the case to the High Court, where Mr Justice Slade found that the proposed bans were an “unreasonable restraint of trade”. The cricket authorities had to pay the costs, estimated at £250,000 (about £1.7 million today). After conceding that “we’ve had a good stuffing”, Insole was forced to admit that the TCCB had made mistakes.
The episodes involving D’Oliveira and Packer overshadowed Insole’s many years of service to cricket, which were given in his spare time while pursuing a career in business.
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Douglas John Insole was born in Clapton, east London, in 1926. His family moved to Highams Park, northeast London, when he was four. Unusually for a pillar of MCC, he was a grammar school boy, educated at the Sir George Monoux School at Walthamstow, where he showed early promise as a cricketer and appeared for London Schoolboys and Essex Schoolboys when he was 13. His younger brother captained London Schoolboys at football and cricket, but died of tuberculosis at the age of 23.
After National Service, Insole read history at Cambridge University and soon excelled as a cricketer. He was awarded a blue three years in succession. He played football as an inside forward or winger for the university, Pegasus FC (of which he was a founder member) and Corinthian-Casuals. He was on the losing Casuals side in the Amateur Cup final at Wembley in 1956.
After university he played cricket for Essex. In 1949 he hit 219 not out against Yorkshire, which was to be his highest first-class score. The next year he was appointed Essex captain at the age of 24. He lifted a side of moderate resources to respectable positions in the county championship.
There were doubts about his batting style. His open stance and prominent use of the bottom hand were not out of the textbook, and one of his fiercest critics was the pontifical EW Swanton in The Daily Telegraph. However, he had a good eye and once set could score quickly.
In 1947 he became one of the few players to score more than 1,000 runs in his first season. His nine Tests were spread over seven years. He made his debut against West Indies in 1950, scored 21 in his only innings, and was dropped. He was not chosen again until 1955, a season in which he scored 2,427 runs with nine centuries. Again, it was a solitary Test, as was the case when he appeared against Australia the next season. This made him a surprising choice as Peter May’s vice-captain for the 1956-57 tour of South Africa. He vindicated the decision, playing in all five Tests, making 110 not out at Durban and heading the batting averages. His final Test was against West Indies in 1957.
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When he retired in 1963 he had made 25,241 runs, with 54 centuries, including at least one against every other first-class county, at an average of 37.61. As a bowler he took 138 wickets.
In 1955 Insole began his long stint as a cricket administrator. He joined MCC’s committee and become a Test selector in 1959 and chairman in 1965. While leading MCC, he was not daunted by his grammar-school background. “Doug liked pricking pomposity and did not like waffle,” said Acfield. “He had a great, dry sense of humour.”
He certainly needed these qualities when he underwent heart surgery in old age. Insole was about to be taken into the operating theatre when a clerical assistant came round the door, told him what the (considerable) bill would be and asked how he intended to pay.
Insole particularly enjoyed dressing up as the French detective Clouseau at fancy dress parties, usually on Christmas Day, while on tour. Graham Gooch, who became the Essex and England captain and who was regarded by Insole as the son he never had, always called him “Inspector”.
As chairman of selectors, Insole dropped Geoffrey Boycott for slow-scoring against India in 1967. When the obdurate Yorkshireman returned to the England team, he had to meet Insole over dinner on the eve of the Test. “The atmosphere was strained,” Boycott recalled later. “Doug tried hard to be natural and put me at my ease, but his eyes wandered and that put me on edge. They were among the most uncomfortable moments of my life.”
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Insole was chairman of the TCCB from 1975 to 1978. He managed two England tours to Australia, in 1978-79 and in 1982-83. He also had two spells as chairman of Essex and later served as president. All the while he was pursuing a career with Trollope & Colls, the construction company, of which he was marketing director from 1975 to 1991.
Insole married Barbara Ridgway in 1948 and they had three daughters: Susan worked in the BBC’s drama department and was the girlfriend of the thriller writer and screenwriter Ian Mackintosh, who wrote most of the series Warship and The Sandbaggers. In 1979 they were in an aircraft that disappeared over the Gulf of Alaska and were not heard from again. His two other daughters are both married. Anne works for the mental health charity Mind, while Gwenda is a librarian. His wife died of motor neurone disease in 1982. Insole is also survived by his partner, Norma Palmer.
Away from sport, Insole was an aficionado of jazz as well as the films of Peter Sellers. “We used to listen to jazz in Soho, but the problem was that it did not start until 10.30pm and I’d be nodding off by then,” Gooch said. “Doug was my cricket guardian. He was a sportsman in the true sense of the word.”
Doug Insole, CBE, cricketer and cricket administrator, was born on April 18, 1926. He died in his sleep on August 6, 2017, aged 91