Lives in Cricket No 18 - FR Foster

would a Warwickshire newspaper, The Observer , have commissioned an article entitled ‘Cricket Fitness’ under his name for its 9 July 1920 issue? The reader is told that natural talent notwithstanding, it is best if a cricketer gets himself fit and stays keen. Such stating of the obvious, and so unmemorable is it in both style and content, one wonders whether Foster did any more than put his name to the article. Lest it seem that his post-accident career was spent in idleness, this was not the case – at least not officially. When Foster’s father died in 1914, W.T.Webster, having been joint managing director of Foster Brothers became the sole managing director. Elizabeth Foster, Frank’s mother became the company chairman and, on Webster’s death in 1918, Harry Foster, Frank’s oldest brother took over as managing director. Meanwhile another brother, Edgar, with two others, gave practical help with the day-to-day running of the business and in 1936 Edgar became a director. The remaining brothers, Frank and Arthur, also became employees of the company – nominally at least. Frank was superintendent of ten shops, for which he was paid £4,000 per annum. 57 He also owned £5,000 of shares in 1921, subsequently given to his mother in return for which she cleared gambling debts for him. Given Foster Brothers’ success this was Frank’s big chance, but he blew it. In 1928 he left the firm – for reasons unspecified – but was granted an annual allowance of £2,000. This was reduced to £1,400 in 1930 when his marriage broke up. Serious cricket was of course out of the question, but he is believed to have turned out in various ‘scratch’ matches involving ‘Foster’ teams, once at least with his son David. During the years from 1914, Frank seemed to change his address with regularity. In 1914 he is found at ‘Innesscrone’, Stratford Road, Hall Green, and after his wedding at ‘Tralee’, Woodlands Road, Moseley, just a short distance from the family home, Mel Valley. Later he and his wife were living at Lode Lane, Solihull, but they then seem to have returned to Mel Valley. This would appear to have been a mixed blessing for Frank’s mother. The drinking sprees there of Frank and brother Arthur became a family legend; on at least one occasion their mother begged eldest son Harry to go and sort things out, since she feared that the drunken brawl in which they were involved would result in damage to her home, and serious injury to themselves. In the 1920s Arthur Foster was also supposedly employed by the family business but seems to have done no work. He began selling motor cars and was a notorious womaniser, despite being married and having sexually transmitted diseases. He could almost have been a model for the unlikeable rogue Jack Favell in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca . As the 1920s went by, Frank Foster paid only lip service to the responsibilities of being a husband, a father, and a business executive. The following, which appears to have been written by Foster himself, and intended for inclusion in the unpublished second volume of his memoirs, War and the 1920s 93 57 The equivalent of £84,000 at 2011 values, surely an extraordinary amount in the early 1920s.