Born on 10 February 1941 in Thurnscoe, Hampshire came from a cricketing family. His father, John, played for Yorkshire in 1937. His younger brother, Alan, also played for the Yorkshire in 1975.

Hampshire made his debut for his native Yorkshire at the age of 20 in 1961, where he had a twenty-year career with the club.

Between 1969 and 1975 he played 8 Tests for England, scoring 403 runs. On his debut against the West Indies at Lord's, he made a dashing 107 and he appeared set for a glittering Test career. He was the first Englishman to score a Test hundred on debut at Lord's. Strangely, he was dropped after the next match, and faded away from the Test arena, making just half-a-dozen more Test appearances for England.

After the ousting of Geoff Boycott from the Yorkshire captaincy, Hampshire captained the club for two seasons from 1979 to 1980. The two had previously clashed, and in the last season of Boycott's captaincy, Hampshire had staged a 'go-slow' at Northampton – which cost Yorkshire a bonus point – as a protest against slow batting by his long-time rival. He left Yorkshire in 1981 during one of the county's then almost perennial bouts of civil war, and during the winter played for a Leicestershire team as a guest in Zimbabwe. In 1982 he joined Derbyshire where he stayed for three years.

Hampshire played for Tasmania for five years under the captaincy of Jack Simmons.^[10] He made his Sheffield Shield debut with Tasmania in their first season in 1977–78.^[8] He was a member of Tasmania's 1978–79 Gillette Cup-winning squad.^[11]

Hampshire was a powerful stroke maker in the middle order, especially strong off the front foot. He scored 28,059 runs in 577 first-cla