Gerald Brodribb

Arthur Gerald Norcott Brodribb (21 May 1915 – 7 October 1999) was a cricket historian and archaeologist.

Life and career

Born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Brodribb was educated at Eastbourne College and read classics and English at University College, Oxford, where his tutor was C.S. Lewis. He became a schoolmaster, and from 1956 to 1968 he owned and ran Hydneye House, a prep school in East Sussex.[1]

Brodribb was a descendant 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".[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5]

Works

Cricket
  • Champions of Cricket, etc. (1947)
  • The English Game (anthology) (1948)
  • Cricket in Fiction: A Bibliography (1950)
  • All Round the Wicket: A Miscellany of Facts and Fancies of First-Class Cricket (1951)
  • Next Man In: A Survey of Cricket Laws and Customs (1952)
  • The Book of Cricket Verse (1953)
  • A Yankee Looks at Cricket (1956)
  • Hit for Six (1960)
  • The Art of Nicholas Felix (1985)
  • 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
  1. "Arthur Gerald Norcott Brodribb, M.A., Ph.D." Society of Antiquaries of London. Retrieved 8 February 2018.
  2. "Obituary in Wisden 2000". Cricinfo. Retrieved 29 April 2006.
  3. The Classis Britannica Bath-house at Beauport Park, East Sussex, 1988, Britannia Volume 19, p. 217.
  4. Working papers, Battle Museum
  5. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2013-01-27.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)


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