Lives in Cricket No 18 - FR Foster

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Brooke was born in Solihull in 1940, elder son of a journeyman builder who was later to be proprietor of a transport café, and had previous stints as a boxer, butcher, credit-round collector, farm worker in Ontario and chauffeur in Chicago, and of a former domestic worker once employed by C.S.Riddell, who had earlier employed Frank Foster. Both Robert Brooke’s grandfathers were coal miners; the paternal version was a founder member of the Independent Labour Party and a union activist blacklisted after the 1926 General Strike. His mother’s father tried to forget how he earned his living by becoming organist and choirmaster at St Peter’s Church, Hednesford, Staffordshire, and sometimes drinking too much. He died aged 36. Robert has no sympathy with those who seek to find romance in coal mining. Robert, a life-long stammerer and depressive, passed his eleven- plus, went to Grammar School in Birmingham and is still in broad agreement with a system which examines children in the fifth or sixth year and is open to all classes, creeds and colours. After five reasonably contented years in the Civil Service he resigned and for the remainder of his working life flitted from job to job and did a fair bit of cricket writing and research. ‘Getting on’ in life or becoming ‘somebody’ never had any appeal however. In 1972 he and Dennis Lambert coined the idea of an Association of Cricket Statisticians while in the White Lion pub in Hampton-in- Arden, Warwickshire and he has never yet missed an AGM of that organisation. Robert Brooke’s other interests include music, especially Wagner, and the poems of A.E.Housman and W.H.Auden; he is a member of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director’s Circle, the Campaign for Real Ale and a life member of the Royal Society of St George. He lived with his mother until shortly before her death aged 93 in 2008 and has since been in sheltered accommodation in Knowle, Warwickshire. He has never married and has no children, but is proud of his five great nieces and great nephews.