Background
He was born in Colne, Lancashire.
He was born in Colne, Lancashire.
During his career, he played for Somerset County Cricket Club, and made a total of 48 first-class appearances for the county. Hall was a right-arm fast or fast-medium bowler and a right-handed tail-end batsman. Some measure of the relative merits of his batting and bowling is that he took more first-class wickets than he scored first-class runs.
Unusually for a fast bowler, he wore spectacles.
He played Lancashire League cricket for Colne Cricket Club from the age of 15. In 1959 and 1960 he appeared in second eleven matches for Lancashire in both the Second Eleven Championship and the Minor Counties Championship.
He also played in three County Championship matches that 1961 season without success. In the 1962 season, Hall played in more than half of Somerset"s matches, usually opening the bowling.
He took 46 wickets at an average of 34.04 in the season.
His best bowling performance of the season was to take the first four Hampshire wickets in the second innings of the match at Southampton. The match immediately before that one, he had produced the best batting performance of his career: a not out 12 against Yorkshire in a high-scoring draw at Taunton. Injury to Palmer in 1965 and Rumsey"s Test calls led to more matches for Hall in 1965, and with 41 wickets at an average of 24.48 he had his best season in first-class cricket.
Against Cambridge University in June, he took five wickets for 33 runs, the best performance of his career to that point.
And he then bettered that with six for 60 in Nottinghamshire"s first innings in the match at Worksop, a game in which he also had to hold out at the end as a batsman to save the match, which he did by courtesy of being dropped at backward short leg in the last-but-one over of the game. Hall played only three limited overs matches, but was prominent in two of them.
His first match, against Nottinghamshire in the Gillette Cup in 1964, was the first to be decided on the basis of the winning side having lost fewer wickets. Hall left Somerset after the 1965 season.
He played Minor Counties cricket for Cumberland in 1966.
He died at Braunton on 2 November 2009 after suffering from prostate cancer.