Lives in Cricket No 18 - FR Foster

meeting’ in Leicester Street when he saw Norah plying her trade. He did not speak to her and she did not see him. The coroner remarked that it was as well that she failed to see him since the cheque had been returned that afternoon marked ‘Refer to Drawer’, there being no funds in Foster’s account. Asked if he had ever been to the shop where the girl was found, or had a key, he replied in the negative. He said the first he knew of the murder was when he read about it on 3 October. When he was shown a photograph of the dead girl he recognized her. Also in court was one Frederick Field, a sign fixer, who claimed he had been engaged to do some work at the empty shop. He then handed over the shop key to ‘a man in a plus-four suit’, who subsequently ‘disappeared’. Field was cautioned and sent for trial, but nothing was proven against him. As a postscript, in April 1936, Field, by now an airman stationed at Hendon, was convicted of murdering 48-year-old Beatrice Sutton. Before being sent to the gallows he confessed to having murdered Norah Upchurch. So, if Field’s confession is accepted, Frank Foster was innocent of murder, but could the word of a notorious liar and fantasist be necessarily true? He had nothing to lose, so why not become even more famous by claiming to be a double, rather than single, murderer? Revelations during the case showed the low life to which Foster had sunk; the fact that a £10 cheque bounced said much for his financial situation. He no longer lived in the real world and would have been capable of anything. Foster was not quite finished with cricket however. In 1932, Douglas Jardine was asked to take the MCC tourists to Australia to try and regain The Ashes. It was regarded by many as a thankless, if not impossible task, for the simple reason that Australia possessed, in the diminutive Don Bradman, the most effective match-winning run machine cricket had seen, or was likely to see. Jardine, however, was not a man to shirk a challenge; rumour had it that Bradman was uncertain, perhaps even flinched, against pace directed at his leg side and Jardine decided this was worth pursuing. It was known that Frank Foster had done extremely well in Australia in 1911/12 bowling left-armed leg-theory – doubtless this knowledge provoked Jardine into meeting Foster in Foster’s Belgravia flat, where the main discussion was apparently the type of field Foster set in Australia. This is, this writer feels, something of a mystery since the field used in 1911/12 was no secret and plans had been published at the time, and subsequently. I would not have the impertinence to attempt to match 100 The shambolic 1930s Ryder Street, St James in 2010. Foster lived here in the early 1930s.