by Mayukh Ghosh
The Cricket Society newsletter for 1972 contained a note stating that Robert Brooke and Dennis Lambert wished to form a statistical group within the Society's Midland Branch.
They received little response.
Undeterred, Brooke then turned to The Cricketer.
The October 1972 issue carried the following advertisement:
"STATISTICIANS. Anyone interested in formation of 'Cricket Statisticians Association' contact Box No. 226"
This time it worked.
There was a meeting arranged next April.
Irving Rosenwater opposed the idea. So did a few others. But they lost by ONE vote.
And 'The Association of Cricket Statisticians' was formed.
Robert Brooke got his first Playfair at the age of nine.
And at sixteen, he had the first taste of Wisden.
"Once I discovered that I was completely hooked."
Brooke, even at that age, was not very sure of the earlier records.
He even doubted the records of the likes of Grace and Hobbs.
Not quite adhering to the" Guilty, M'Lud, to fiction if it serves a higher truth" ideology....
Aged 19, Brooke compiled an eleven page statistical survey of the Warwickshire v Worcestershire match series.
Then, more than a decade later, ACS happened.
Meanwhile, he formed a friendship with Rowland Bowen.
"We became quite friendly- I think I may be about the only person who was on first-name terms and exchanged Christmas cards with him, although that didn't stop him shouting down the phone at me."
Both of them shared a distrust of cricket's received version.
Brooke kicked off his career by undertaking the monumental task of finding the 'fall of wickets' in English FC cricket.
Wisden ignored it till 1952.
Brooke's book reviews were often as caustic as Bowen's.
And so were his jibes at people who failed to conduct perfect research.
In the early 1970s, Leslie Duckworth was entrusted with the job of writing a history of the Warwickshire CCC.
Duckworth relied on the club's statistician for all the numbers.
The statistician merely copied the old numbers without checking them himself.
Brooke made a memorable attack on Duckworth and co. for presenting the wrong numbers.
Much later, Wisden (Queen Anne Press) published Bill Frindall's 'Wisden Book of Cricket Records'. It was Brooke who helped Frindall find all the usually elusive numbers.
It was Brooke who intervened in the eleventh hour to make 'Wisden Book of County Cricket' a factually correct book.
Brooke could create magic with cricketing numbers.
Years later, the same man wrote a brilliantly researched book on Frank Foster.
His cricketing hero?
Not Hollies. Not Foster. Not Amiss. None of the Warwickshire CCC greats.
But John Edward Shilton.
Shilton's Wisden obituary reads: " Shilton was personally quite a character., but though he had his faults, this is not the place in which to dwell upon them."
Enough to excite Brooke.
He read the obituary, then the next day walked to his grave in Sheffield.
And then, more than 80 years after his death, found his relatives in a pub in Yorkshire.
" Soon after watching Neil Fairbrother's 366 at The Oval in 1990, I realised that he had made a hundred in each session., wondered if anyone had done that before, and was able to find that it was a first. That sort of discovery pleases me."
Robert Brooke in a nutshell.
Tony Woodhouse summed him up well:
"When I first saw him, he seemed that he had strode out of a Dickensian cricket novel. He seemed to be a Mr. Dick ( David Copperfield), a teenage Rowland Bowen and Captain Cuttle ( Dombey and Son) rolled into one cricketing fanatic."
Woodhouse later found no reason to change his view.
Robert Brooke had a stammering problem.
He overcame it.
He had no friends.
He needed none once he found that he could immerse himself in cricket's numbers.
Eccentric, moody and often uncompromising.
But Robert Brooke was perhaps the finest statistician the game has ever seen.
Almost forgotten.
Perhaps this frantic age has no place for the true fanatics...
Robert Brooke was born on May 5, 1940.