by Arunabha Sengupta
A report from 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 archaeologist 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.”
17 years after excavating the baths, Brodribb wrote Roman Brick and Tile, a 178-page volume that remains a key work on the subject. At that time he was 72.
If Gerald Brodribb touched a topic, he had to probe deep. And be religiously accurate to the facts. That set him apart from a horde of cricket writers. Even—or should I say especially—the most revered ones.
A study in contrasts
In 1945, Manchester Guardian carried a story by Neville Cardus about the great romantic’s first sight of Gilbert Jessop.
“I can remember the first time I ever went to Old Trafford, on a June morning in 1899, Lancashire were playing Gloucestershire … I saw a refreshment room. As I was thirsty, as only a boy of nine can be on a hot summer day, I stood on tiptoe and reaching up at the counter asking for a glass of lemonade. There was a sudden explosion of mirrors and bottles and other hardware… As I shrank from flying splinters a cheerful Lancashire voice reassured me ‘It’s alright sonny,’ said a man in a cloth cap. ‘Don’t worrit thiself, it’s only Jessop just coom in.’ Jessop did not score many runs at Old Trafford that day … Tom Lancaster was one of the Lancashire eleven and I think Jack Sharp scored 60, and at the day’s end HEB Champain and Wrathall began Gloucestershire innings.”
When he repeated the story in Autobiography, the lemonade had become ginger beer.
In the 1951 Wisden, the month had changed to July and the day had suddenly become dull. In this version, Jessop had left no impression on the young Cardus.
In Cricket all the Year written in 1952, it was back to June.
In the Guardian, 1957, the month shifted back to July, and Cardus turned hungry rather than thirsty. It was neither lemonade nor ginger beer, but a halfpenny bun.
In Play Resumed with Cardus, Jessop, who had left no impression on him that day, was busy cutting good length balls and hitting perfectly pitched off-breaks for six in front of his fascinated young eyes.
In 1899 Gloucestershire did not visit Old Trafford till 24 July. The day, we can determine, was sunny with a slight breeze. Jessop did bat and score 30, but Jack Sharp scored just 9. The innings was started by FH Bateman-Champain (not HEB Champain) and Harry Wrathall, but they did not start batting at the end of any day.
There was no off-break bowler in the Lancashire side for Jessop to cut.
So much for Cardus and his ‘chronicles’ Now let us turn to Gerald Brodribb.
“My first visit to a county match was almost my last. As I entered the Hastings ground I saw a ball soaring in the air in my direction; it passed overhead, crashed on the Town Hall, and brought down a shower of slates around me. It was the most exciting moment of my nine years’ life. All about me everyone was buzzing and laughing, and an old man kept murmuring happily, ‘Just like Jessop, sonny, just like Jessop.’”
It was Maurice Tate who was hitting the ball that day. The scorecard reveals Hampshire playing Sussex starting 6 August 1924. Tate, after capturing 5 for 114, scored 164 in two and a half hours with 21 fours and 4 sixes.
Brodribb’s reaction was to get hooked on to cricket for life, and to find out all about Jessop from cricket books and magazines.
In 1974, fifty years down the line, he published The Croucher, the long-deserved biography of this excellent all-round cricketer Gilbert Jessop. The excerpt above is from the prologue of this magnificent piece of work.
AA Thomson and his romanticising tribe generally attached a sketchy appendix of figures (usually compiled by someone else) with the deprecating qualifier ‘Some statistics for ones that must have them’. Cardus never wrote a biography to necessitate such a travesty.
Brodribb’s book on Jessop ended with a chapter which sketched the entire career of the cricketer and specifically analysed the incredible rate of scoring through a fascinating array of figures. That made it invaluable in terms of substance.
Diligence
Brodribb researched painstakingly to get every fact correct, every detail accurate.
By the way, he also wrote the biography of Maurice Tate. As also a detailed study of Cricket at Hastings.
He made it a point to document facts, study figures and turn them into invaluable accounts of what actually took place. Not multiple contradicting accounts of what did not while masquerading as a chronicler.
Teacher, archaeologist and researcher, Brodribb did not just pen the biographies of Jessop, Tate and the story of Hastings. His work was prolific, especially given the depth of research involved in each of them.
Perhaps the best of them all was the brilliant Felix on the Bat. It contains the treatise of Nicholas Felix on the art of batting, the immortal work of the great polymath who was also one of the premier cricketers of his era. The bit written by Felix, including the drawings and the documentation of his bowling machine
Catapulta, is preceded by a detailed account of the life of this fascinating man by Brodribb himself.
Brodribb started writing for Roy Webber’s Cricket Book Society. His first cricket piece was Some Memorable Innings, in the foreword to which he thanked county secretaries for permission to inspect county scorebooks. That already distinguished him as a class apart. He actually checked facts and scorebooks.
In 1951 he published All Round the Wicket, a collection of 36 essays, some of which previously published in The Cricketer and The Field. The essays stretched from Charles Dickens in cricketing context, to an analysis of how often batsmen were out in each manner of dismissal. In a word, it was delightful for the ones who lay emphasis on detail.
After this Brodribb published his first major work. Next Man In was a survey of cricket laws and customs, and the way it is written with its veritable platter of delicious incidents and anecdotes is testimony to the author’s extraordinary attention to detail and depth of forays into cricket literature.
Hit for Six was compiled painstakingly, and the author visited many cricket grounds in England in order to check the facts about historical big hits that he had obtained from match reports.
Besides, his diverse interests in things cricketing went further.
In 1948 he published a collection of writings on cricket as an anthology, titled The English Game.
In 1953 he produced an anthology titled A Book of Cricket Verse.
And then, in 1956, there was the fantastic account of Henry Sayen. This Yankee gentleman became England’s Good Mascot in 1953 as Len Hutton’s team successfully regained The Ashes.After several discussions with Sayen, Brodribb crystallised it into A Yankee Looks at Cricket.
A regular contributor to a host of cricket magazines, one wonders whether Brodribb was always credited with a byline for some of his works. For example, Weber’s Cricket Book Society had a series of Miscellany columns which had very evident Brodribb touch.
It was therefore not really a surprise that Rowland Bowen would be attracted by a man with such scrupulous approach to historical accuracy. Much of his rigour was utilised in the articles of Cricket Quarterly.
By the 1990s, he was getting on in years. But that did not stop him from producing a primer on underarm bowling in 1997. Written when he was 82, The Lost Art lacks the meticulous depth of his other books but remains one of the important books on the subject and was a key source for this series.
In 1710, Jonathan Swift analysed human nature accurately enough to state: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Another quote, attributed to Mark Twain, reads: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” (In a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, this quote is actually not by Mark Twain but is widely believed to be so).
Thus, less than two decades after his death, hardly anyone remembers Brodribb. However, the deformed-through-stretching Cardus versions of the facts are often treated as gospel, with the same disdain for scorecards as demonstrated by that patron saint of careless reportage.
“[Brodribb’s] work in cricket was painstaking — but alas almost unrecognised now, in this frantic age,” says David Frith.
However, for the ones to whom cricket matters in its diligent details, as verifiable chronicles of a sport, rather than mythical creations of fertile imagination, Gerald Brodribb is a name to be celebrated.
He was born on 21 May 1915.