Lives in Cricket No 18 - FR Foster

Chapter Eleven And winter fought her battle strife and won St Andrew’s Hospital, Billing Road, Northampton is a psychiatric hospital, of some 600 beds and cares for all forms of mental illness. Founded in 1838 as the ‘Northamptonshire County General Lunatic Asylum’, it is these days run by a non-profit-making charity. Over the years there have been distinguished patients, additional to Frank Foster. Sir Malcolm Arnold, amongst the finest of English twentieth-century composers had treatment there in 1979 for depression and alcoholism. Josef Hassad, rated by good judges the greatest violin genius for 200 years when a teenager, died there in 1950, aged 26. The architect George Gilbert Scott and poet James Kenneth Stephen, a relation of Virginia Woolf, were other residents but the most relevant to the Foster story, was the ‘Peasant Poet’, John Clare, who spent his last 23 years there and whose poem Remembrances , written while he was a mental patient supplied the inspiration for the title of this book. The question may be asked from what specific mental illness Frank Foster suffered. A psychiatrist’s report read to the Recorder at the final court hearing suggested senile dementia. This may be the case but perhaps there could be doubt, especially when Foster’s history is examined. I was told by former Warwicks and England wicket-keeper, Tiger Smith, in his nineties, that Foster’s downhill slide began on a night in Melbourne during 1911/12. Smith did not, or would not elaborate on the matter but given that Foster was almost certainly sexually promiscuous, one feels that Smith referred to a dalliance with a woman – and an unhealthy one. One also remembers that in his writings, published and unpublished, Foster expressed great sympathy for Warwickshire batsman Sep Kinneir, who most certainly suffered from syphilis early in his cricket career. This, and the treatment, left him with deep-seated and permanent physical and mental damage. Then there was the inarguable fact that, from the early 1920s, Foster’s behaviour became progressively more eccentric and erratic. That surely could not be passed off as senile dementia. Also sexual disease was ‘in the family’. His ne’er-do-well brother, Arthur, received treatment for gonorrhoea and syphilis during his First World War army service. Finally, although the death certificate gives ‘cardiovascular degeneration’ and ‘chronic anaemia’ as causes of death, I cannot believe there was not more to the matter. Though not really qualified to offer an opinion, I do have views. I feel it is possible that in later years, Foster suffered from general paralysis of the insane (known as GPI) and although understandably he does not wish to be named, an acquaintance, a 114