ALAN MORTON RIP - Funeral Details

Date: 13th March 2017

Tribute to one of Southport and Birkdale's finest.

Warm tributes have been paid to the former Southport and Birkdale batsman, Alan Morton, who died on Friday after a short illness.

Despite spending a summer at Ormskirk, Morton will always be associated by most followers of the Liverpool Gin Liverpool Competition with Trafalgar Road, although only the more mature spectators will remember him at his best. He was a member of the S&B sides which won the championship in 1975 and 1979 and was one of the best opening batsmen in the league. He played well over 200 games for the club he joined in 1967 when he began to teach at Edge Hill.

But there was far more to Alan Morton than cricket and far more to his cricket than the games he played in the Liverpool Competition.

He served his apprenticeship in the Birmingham League with the West Bromwich Dartmouth club in the 1950s and later spent three seasons playing for London University on the Motspur Park ground, a venue he recalled with particular fondness.

He then returned to the Birmingham League in the era when most teams employed an overseas professional of the highest class and he also played for Warwickshire’s second team in 1964 and 1965. There was even a possibility that Morton would make a career out of the professional game but he chose the path of higher education teaching and moved north.

He did not finally stop playing until he was in his seventh decade but by then he had served S&B with distinction as perhaps the most thoughtful and painstaking chairman of selectors the club has ever known. He remained a regular visitor to the Trafalgar Road ground and confessed there was barely a day when he did not think about cricket, the opportunities he had taken and those he may have missed.

Afternoons with Alan Morton were never wasted. He was an accomplished artist and a lover of classical music; he could talk with insight about both these interests. Yet it was cricket which remained the pursuit closest to his heart and anyone who spent even ten minutes chatting to him about the game will realise what a loss S&B members feel this spring.

Alan is survived by his wife, Pat, and by his three children, Alison, Chris and Sarah, and his five grandchildren, Eva, Ethan, Fraser, Fergus and Julia.

The funeral will be at Southport Crematorium on Monday 27 March at 11.20.