Personal Style
Ingle was a well-liked captain, according to David Foot's history of Somerset cricket, and unlike some Somerset amateurs got on well with the limited numbers of professionals the county employed. The life of a Somerset captain in the inter-war years was rarely easy, because the county rarely had more than half a dozen professionals, and the team was perennially made up of an itinerant band of amateurs of variable talent. In one of Ingle's more successful seasons, 1936, Somerset played 34 different cricketers in the County Championship matches. Ingle himself missed some games most seasons because of chronic hay fever which, according to Foot, he maintained was made worse by long train journeys: he told Foot that he would travel in the luggage rack to get some sleep and some respite from the dust.
Ingle was famously the captain when Harold Gimblett arrived at Frome as an unknown for his legendary first-class debut. Players such as Arthur Wellard, Horace Hazell, Wally Luckes and Bill Andrews played as professionals for Somerset for many seasons and developed under Ingle. Ingle, wrote Foot, "had a gift for what today is rather glibly known as motivation". But he could also be a disciplinarian, suspending two of the professionals for a couple of matches for misbehaviour and warning an amateur off for providing the professionals with duff horse-racing tips.
Read more about this topic: Reggie Ingle
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