by Mayukh Ghosh
"It was the sale of Wally Hammond's mementos in Cheltenham. By then he had died, leaving little money, and his second wife and others were selling up. Everyone seemed to be moving around the lots with a guilty step. It was a truly poignant tableau of acrid reflections on a gifted life that drifted into virtual anonymity in South Africa. I had attended as a freelance journalist, working as it happened for 'The Guardian'. When the sale was over- and some of the items had gone too cheaply- I walked back to my car and cried in my solitude. Does that make me a bad journalist? "
Not the first time he doubted his credentials.
He was barely eight years old when he had sent his superficial psychological tale to the then famous Strand Magazine.
The magazine's regular contributors included the likes of P.G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, Max Beerbohm.
But this child had no idea about such names. His contribution had been written in a school exercise book in red ink.
He imagined the reply would be accompanied by a modest cheque. The reply came in within four days but there was no cheque. Instead, there was editorial rebuke in a letter.
"Just don't waste our time with rubbish like this. And at least make some effort in presenting it properly."
The magazine closed in 1950. Our subject, by then 21, shed no tears. He had already started his career as a journalist.
When the Bristol Evening World closed in 1961, big-time Fleet Street seriously wooed him. He preferred to be a freelance.
He chose to stay in the part of England where he grew up and not to seek his fortune on the national papers in London. He doesn't regret that. The essence of his work is his provincialism, his roots in the west country.
" Cricket writing was always to me more about the man than his runs. I chased Tom Graveney across golf courses to try to discover the volume of his dissatisfaction for Tom Pugh, the Old Etonian who was being brought in to lead Gloucestershire at Tom's expense. Stamina too often came into the job. I spent days chasing round the country trying to locate that lovely Pakistan batsman, Zaheer Abbas, the subject of another of my ghosting exercises. Apart from any other considerations, I had no journalistic regrets at being held along with my wife at gunpoint in Lahore. Who rightly says that the most enthralling sport is away from the ground?"
The two books of essays ('Beyond Bat and Ball' and 'Fragments of Idolatry') and those two superb biographies ( on Wally Hammond and Harold Gimblett) are good enough to place him among the best cricket writers.
Stephen Chalke sums it up really well:
" I have always been fascinated by cricket’s history and, before I started writing about the game, I would often read books about players of previous generations. Too often, with the books published at that time, the characters in these books didn’t quite come alive in my mind. There would be batting and bowling performances, but I didn’t often get a sense that I was there and that the cricketer was a real person with human characteristics.
”Then I discovered David Foot, and I was immediately fascinated. He wrote about my own west country with such a sense of time and place. He brought alive the mental side of the game, the oddities of the individual players. The prose was suffused with such a rich sense of humanity. Yet there was also a tinge of melancholy running through it, that it was a world that was now gone.
”Without the inspiration of David Foot’s writing, I’m not sure I would have taken up writing about cricket."
David Foot was born on April 24, 1929.