LIves in Cricket No 31 - Walter Robins

ABout tHe AutHor As a schoolboy, Brian Rendell enjoyed his first test match at lord’s in 1946 and during the ‘golden summer’ of 1947 watched Walter robins leading Middlesex to their first county championship for 26 years. After such a fortunate introduction to top-class cricket he has remained a student and lover of the game at all levels for over 65 years. Following his retirement after thirty years in newspaper and magazine publishing plus ten years in local education, he set out to further his research into cricket history, in particular the Bodyline controversy, and obtained exclusive access to the private letters written by Gubby Allen during the Mcc tours of Australia in 1932/33 and 1936/37. He is the author of ‘Gubby Allen: Bad Boy of Bodyline’ published by cricket lore in 2004 and ‘Gubby under Pressure’ published by the Acs in 2007. He followed these with his first contribution to the ‘lives in cricket’ series, the biography of Fuller Pilch, the great cricketer of the nineteenth century. He is a member of the Association of cricket statisticians and Historians, the cricket society, the Friends of shakespeare’s Globe and the christopher Marlowe society. His other interests include english and spanish football, the shakespeare authorship debate, and the rolling stones. Married with one daughter, he and his wife Marilyn celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 2010.