Gerald Brodribb
Arthur Gerald Norcott Brodribb (21 May 1915 – 7 October 1999) was a cricket historian and archaeologist.
Born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Brodribb graduated from Oxford, where his tutor had been C.S. Lewis, and became a schoolmaster. From 1956 to 1968, he owned and ran Hydneye House, a prep school in East Sussex.
Brodribb was a descendent of the Victorian actor Sir Henry Irving and a founder member of the Cricket Society. His best known work in cricket is Next Man In which "took cricket's Laws, and re-examined them all with an eye to their quirks, oddities and exceptions". Among his other famous works are Hit for Six, a compendium of the big-hitters in cricket, and The Croucher, a biography of the early twentieth century cricketer Gilbert Jessop.
Later in his career, he took an interest in archaeology and was awarded a doctorate in 1985 for his thesis on Roman building materials. His Roman Brick and Tile (1987) remains a key work on the subject. He took a particular interest in the Classis Britannica iron-working site at Beauport Park.[1] Although he never published anything on the subject, he was also involved in researching the Roman roads in the area, especially the road leading north from Beauport Park.[2] His use of dowsing to locate archaeological sites was not always well received in the archaeological community, a fact that was highlighted when archaeological television programme Time Team excavated at Beauport Park.[3]
Works
Cricket
- English Game (anthology) (1948)
- Cricket in Fiction (1950)
- All Round the Wicket
- Next Man In (1952)
- The Book of Cricket Verse (1953)
- A Yankee Looks at Cricket
- Hit for Six (1960)
- The Art of Nicholas Felix
- Cricket at Hastings (1989)
- The Lost Art: A History of Under-arm Bowling (1997)
Biographies
Archaeology
- Roman Brick and Tile. Stroud: Alan Sutton. 1987. ISBN 0-86299-363-6. (Available on Google Books)
References
- ^ Obituary in Wisden 2000 (accessed on April 9, 2006)
- Obituary by the Society of Antiquaries, London (accessed on May 8, 2008)
- ↑ The Classis Britannica Bath-house at Beauport Park, East Sussex, 1988, Britannia Volume 19, p. 217.
- ↑ Working papers, Battle Museum
- ↑ http://www.channel4.com/programmes/time-team/episode-guide/series-6/episode-7
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