David Foot column: Could anyone have looked more like a farmer and less like a county cricketer than Billy Neale? Yet he played 452 times for Gloucestershire – often doing the milking before motoring off to the match.

Eighty years ago this summer he worked out that there wasn't really too much money in looking after his Berkeley Vale livestock and surprised many of his farming friends by also becoming a professional batsman. Up to then he'd been appearing as an amateur.

He was part of the locally well-known Neale 'dynasty', a familiar figure on the hunting field with the Beauforts, at the local markets or herding his cattle around the winding lanes on their way to his farm at Breadstone, just off the A38.

His family was an intriguing mix

His near-family was an intriguing mix of varied talents, most of them sporting if not agricultural. Hastings was a lover of the arts and a part-time boxing referee. Maurice played rugby alongside CB Fry for Blackheath and the Barbarians, And 'Tiny' Neale, a policeman and rugby six-footer for Clifton, kicked the penalties and conversions

Billy was by comparison a quiet man. He batted at No 6 for Gloucestershire, admired for the stubborn way he propped up the middle order and good enough to score a memorable hundred against Hampshire at Southampton, quickly followed by another against Essex in Bristol.

He was, above all, a team player. Those big farmer's hands held on to 228 catches, many of them in the deep off the nagging spin of Tom Goddard, who regularly hitched a lift from Neale on the way to Nevil Road. Nor should Billy's under-rated leg breaks be entirely ignored.

Once in Bristol against the county's neighbourly rivals, Somerset, who were digging in at the time, he was surprised to find himself brought into the attack. He immediately found a length and in four beguiling overs took six wickets for nine runs.

Billy was Wally Hammond's closest friend among the West Country players. They had been fellow boarders at the small, co-ed Cirencester Grammar School. They did well as schoolboy cricketers and liked to spend their holidays together, squelching their way through the farmyard mud.

In the years that followed, they talked cricket or merely listened to the age-old tales for hours – either in front of the winter log fire as the cider mug was passed around, or at the bar of their favouirite pub, the Prince of Wales, just down the road from the farm.

During his time as England's captain, Hammond was a worrier. The late Andy Wilson, Gloucestershire's diminutive wicketkeeper, would on occasions be invited to join the Neales as they reminisced. He told me: "I remember Wally, a seemingly lonely figure, pacing the Breadstone orchard and pondering the tactics. For all his expansive gifts as a batsman, captaincy never came easily or naturally to him."

Despite his often misunderstood social aspirations, Wally was perhaps happiest of all in the company of the Neales and their rural mates.

For their part, they admired the way he could sink the potent scrumpy made on the farm.

Billy Neale remained, until his death in 1955, one of Hammond's most intimate confidants. Some would argue it was Wally's influence that brought county team-mates, Alf Dipper and Reg Sinfield, their sole Test appearances. That kind of elevation wasn't going to come Farmer Neale's way, however. He was just a good, solid, reliable middle order player and claimed nothing more.

He retired in 1948. His summers as a cricket pro probably didn't too generously augment the family budget. Even his benefit game was rained off. But all those championship fixtures offered him a lifestyle which he only dreamed about as he sat in the next desk to Hammond at Cirencester.

Farmers often made talented cricketers. Som- erset's perfect example was J C White, who twice did the double, captained his country and passed 100 wickets in a season 14 times. Once at Worcester in 1921 he took all ten in an innings.