Stories Behind Books: No Coward Soul

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In May 2003, Stephen Chalke's book with Keith Andrew was published.
On the last page, there was a section about books due to be published later that year.
The first name there was A Bloody-Minded Yorkshireman - The Remarkable Story of Bob Appleyard.

The book was available to the public on November 7th 2003.
By then the title was changed and the first page had these lines:

"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere;
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shine equal, arming me from fear
."

Last lines written by Emily Bronte before her death from tuberculosis in 1848.

Appleyard overcame tuberculosis.
His is a remarkable story, brilliantly told by Stephen Chalke.

And it was by sheer chance that he got involved in this project!

This is what he had to say about the origin of this book:
“Bob Appleyard was also on Geoffrey Howard’s tour, and he too was influenced by my having written At The Heart of English Cricket (published in 2001).

“The origin of his book was more complicated, however, as Bob had been working on a book on and off for some years with Derek Hodgson. For various reasons, not least that Derek was seriously ill for some of this time, they had not made great progress. In fact, with no publisher interested, the book had died a death when I heard about it.

“I had not met Bob, but I was always fascinated by his career and how little had been written about his story. I told Frank Keating about the book, and he said, ‘Hoddy on Appleyard, that will be good.’ So I revived the project, saying that, if they got the book finished, I would publish it.

“They set to work again, but the chemistry wasn’t there between them. It’s nobody’s fault; sometimes it happens that way. Bob was a perfectionist, and he wasn’t happy with the resulting manuscript. He summoned me to a meeting at his house, at the end of which it was decided that I would start it all over again. Nobody fell out over it, and I gave Derek a billing as joint author. He didn’t write any of it, though, and I did all the research afresh. But, if he had not got it started, I’d never have got involved.”

The book is often regarded as one of the finest cricket biographies. Appleyard’s story was worth telling and no one could have done it better than Chalke.
It won the Wisden Book of the Year award in 2004.
The book had a second edition in 2008, with an additional chapter.

It occasionally appears on Amazon and AbeBooks. There is a greater chance of getting a copy ( a signed one ) from the specialist cricket booksellers in the U.K.

At this point, the author himself has a copy, available from http://www.fairfieldbooks.org.uk/