by Mayukh Ghosh
"Just like Jessop, sonny, just like Jessop.", shouted the old man seating beside the nine-year old.
Maurice Tate had made a roof-wrecking blow and it had brought down a shower of slates around the kid.
All this happened in the Hastings ground.
Fifty years later, he wrote a book on Jessop. Another two years and there was his book on Tate published.
A decade or so later, there was a book on cricket in Hastings.
Gerald Brodribb never forgot anything from his first visit to a county match. The result was these three books.
But Brodribb was famous even before all this.
In 1952, Next Man In: A Survey of Cricket Laws and Customs was published. It made him well-known in cricketing circles. But the humble researcher was not satisfied. Some of his letters to the editor of The Cricketer made it clear- he was there to find more about the laws of the game.
Then, in 1997, he wrote a book on underarm bowling. He had gone through all possible books and journals to find references of lob bowling and listed down all that in the book.
"His work in cricket was painstaking - but alas almost unrecognised now, in this frantic age.", is what David Frith has to say about Brodribb.
Then there's this report in The Times, dated September 23, 2007:
"A ROMAN bath house with remains of plunge pools, steam rooms and clothes lockers is for sale in the town of Battle, East Sussex. Built for officers of the Roman navy in about AD90, the baths are on the market for a modest £300,000.
The baths were excavated in 1970 by Gerald Brodribb, an amateur archeologist who identified the remains with divining rods and set about digging with a team of 40 enthusiasts
Brodribb found remnants of two steam rooms, three plunge pools and two changing rooms with lockers."
All this resulted in a book on Roman Brick and Tile in 1987. He was a brilliant researcher irrespective of the subjects he dealt with.
A charming man by all accounts.
He wrote a book on six-hitting. In the mid 1990s, a Somerset supporter named Barry Phillips read about Arthur Wellard's exploits in that book. He contacted Brodribb who was kind enough to share the interviews he took of Wellard.
All the material from Brodribb got Phillips going and resulted in a very readable biography of Wellard.
Gerald Brodribb, born May 21, 1915, is a forgotten man.
The sad part is that even the serious aficionados of the game no longer value his contribution.