Life taught Neil Dansie there were no guarantees and so he took every opportunity that came his way.
In cricket terms that meant he played more Sheffield Shield matches than anyone before him and spent the decades after retiring teaching others, administering the sport and spreading the rich lore of the game.
His playing career was bookended by the greats. At the beginning in 1948, he batted with Bradman in the Don’s final club game and by the end in 1967, he partnered a teenaged Greg Chappell.
In between he saw everyone. ‘Taking Don out of it, Neil Harvey was the best batsman, Ray Lindwall the quickest and Richie Benaud the best spinner. The greatest cricketer was Garry Sobers because it was like having a team of thirteen players. He could bat, bowl quick or slow and field so brilliantly, he was three players in one.’
Dansie was at the non-striker’s end when Sobers played NSW quick Alan Davidson off his back foot, launching a mighty blow that put the ball into the Adelaide Oval scoreboard atop the hill.
“Biggest hit I ever saw. That was the best team I played with: Les Favell, John Lill, Ian McLachlan, Sobers, Ken Cunningham, Ian Chappell, Barry Jarman, Neil Hawke, Rex Sellers and Brian Hurn. We won the Shield and Sobers took 50 wickets and scored 1,000 runs.”
Cricket was a family tradition. Sam Dansie played against W.G. Grace and his English tourists in Broken Hill and later organised his four sons and their cousins into an XI known as ‘the Dansies’. Neil’s father was one of them and gave his two-year-old son a tiny wooden bat that ignited a lifetime love of the sport.
His father was a schoolteacher in the Barossa Valley where the strains of looking after more than 70 students while studying himself was overwhelming. After a breakdown he moved his young family to Adelaide so his children could go to better schools. It was at Norwood High that Neil Danise flourished and soon was playing football for the Redlegs and cricket at Kensington.
It was at Alberton Oval that he joined Bradman at the crease.
“He met me at the wicket and said, ‘I will let you have a look for a while son’ and I never faced a ball for the first seven overs. I just ran. He hit one ball that stopped two yards from the boundary and the fast bowler chased it and we ran four. He said, ‘that will take a yard or two off his pace’. If you moved the field, then he hit the ball where you moved the field from, he was just so good. First ball after drinks he got the slightest of nicks and the umpire gave him out. There were hundreds of people there and they booed the umpire, clapped him off and all went to the Alberton Hotel. We never saw them again.”
Dansie gathered cricket folklore like he accumulated runs. Sometimes he was the centre of the episode while other times he was a spectator. He disliked sledging but adored the story of batting with Favell against New South Wales in 1961 when the dreaded devil’s number arrived.
“Hey Favelli, you are on 87,” growled Norm O’Neill from the field.
“I will be on 91 after this ball,” shouted back Favell, only to be out caught hooking instead. A day later when South Australia’s openers emerged for their second innings O’Neill said “Hey Favelli, you are still on 87!”
During a match against the West Indies in November 1960, players from both teams went to the Wayville Showgrounds on Saturday night for a harness racing meet. Danise had made 106 and so was feeling good. Fast bowler Wes Hall was about to put £5 on interdominion champion ‘Young Pedro’ when Dansie intercepted suggesting a better punt would be on a horse called ‘Interpretation’. After Young Pedro won, Dansie hurriedly disappeared from the race meet.
He couldn’t hide from Hall when he emerged to bat on Monday. The Barbadian ran from the fence near the scoreboard to remind Dansie about his bum steer and threatened retribution. The first ball Dansie faced from Hall hit him in the leg so hard he thought it was broken.
“The next one, as he ran in, I moved my bat and everything went right. It went like a tracer bullet over backward square leg for six. Les Favell turned away and wouldn’t look at him and I said, ‘sorry Wes, a mis-hit’. From then on, every time we met, I would get four or five bouncers per over.”
In the mid-1950s on the advice of Arthur Richardson, Dansie played two seasons with Todmorden, outside Manchester, to broaden his cricket experience. The club straddled the border of Lancashire and Yorkshire with the county line running through the middle of the ground.
“You would start a run in Yorkshire and finish it in Lancashire. When I got there, it rained for 32 days straight, we were out there with bags trying to mop it up. Some matches there would be 10 or 12,000 there because Everson Weekes was playing and so they would all go watch him.”
Given his recall of events and love of stories, there is a small irony that Dansie’s nickname came from a time when he was silenced. Against Western Australia in Perth in February 1955 he went to bat on a rain affected pitch. A sharp delivery caught him in the face and badly broke his jaw.
“Phil Ridings came in and took block in a pool of blood on the pitch. He faced a few balls and they called the match off for rain.”
The South Australians visited their teammate in hospital where his jaw had been wired shut. He was given straws to eat and drink with and a pair of pliers for an emergency. If he started choking, he was told to cut the wires to save himself. He listened to the doctors and then his teammates, all the while furiously nodding at everything that was said. Barry Jarman began calling him ‘Nodder’ and the name stuck.
It wasn’t the vagaries of cricket form or fortune that made Dansie appreciate life, it was that so many were taken away so early in theirs. His father, having recovered from his breakdown, passed away aged 63. His mother was 48 when cancer took her and then the disease claimed his wife Gwenda when she was 56.
“I adapted, and my four children were very good. Every day I reminded myself that today is a bonus. It makes you ask what it is that you value most? For me that is the friends that I have made through sport.”
In his final Sheffield Shield season, Dansie took 26 wickets and made 405 runs including 112 against Queensland on Boxing Day 1966. Against Victoria that summer he became the second player to compete in 100 Shield matches – the first was Ken ‘Slasher’ Mackay. His final tally was 124 First class games for South Australia during which he made 7,543 runs (18 centuries) and took 90 wickets.
“At some stage if I played for NSW, I reckon I would have got a game for Australia because you could hardly find a player from SA who got picked. Toward the end I was in the higher run getters in Shield cricket. There were better players than me at the time, but I still think I would have had a better chance if I played for NSW.”
In 1967 his second act for South Australian cricket began with his work off the pitch. He served on the SACA Board for 25 years and was a selector for 30. In between he coached hundreds of young players. While in England in the 1950s, Dansie had visited a cricket school in London run by former England player Alf Gover. There he learned how to instruct new players, a lesson he repeated over and again. One of his longest coaching assignments was at St Peter’s College and an annual tournament featuring Saints, Toowoomba Grammar School, Knox Grammar College and Camberwell Grammar is named in his honour.
In between cricket Dansie coached amateur football, Norwood Reserves, was elected to the City of Campbelltown Council, served as President of the Australian Sportsmen’s Association and founded (with Gwenda) the Newton Jaguars Netball Club – all while working full time as Bursar at his old High School. Such was his commitment and longevity; a training facility was named the ‘Favell-Dansie Indoor Centre’ while the Neil Dansie Medal is awarded annually to South Australia’s best male player.
He was christened Hampton Neil Dansie and known across the generations for various roles as ‘Nodder’. It is those who have benefitted from his passion and who enjoy cricket in South Australia who should be nodding – in appreciation of a lifetime of service to the sport.