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
- Felix on the Bat (1962)
- The Croucher (1974)
- Maurice Tate (1976)
Archaeology
- Roman Brick and Tile. Stroud: Alan Sutton. 1987. ISBN 0-86299-363-6. (Available on Google Books)