For generations, the path to journalistic success in Britain has run almost inevitably through London. David Foot, who has died aged 92, broke the rule and achieved a high reputation as an outstanding writer, for the Guardian above all, without ever deserting his Bristol base and not often leaving his beloved West Country.
Among his cricket-writing colleagues in particular, he had a unique reputation that combined respect for his elegant writing and remarkable affection for his gentle good nature. No one was a more welcome sight at the door of a county press box. A Footy day meant shared wisdom, zero malice and his delicious chuckle.
His work on the Guardian spanned four decades, from 1971 to 2011, on cricket predominantly, with a leavening of football and theatre reviews. Mostly he did the small occasions, but he feasted on the rumbustious days of Somerset cricket with Ian Botham and Viv Richards in the 1970s and 80s.
He was also at Edgbaston in 1994 to watch the great West Indian Brian Lara become the first batsman to pass 500 in a first-class innings, which he reported with his customary skill and empathy. “By his shimmering standards, he scratched at the start, shivering in Friday’s cold, looking weary, as if suddenly confronted by the reality of county cricket’s unrelenting pragmatism.” Foot was a freelance – “a jobbing writer,” as he put it – throughout those decades, so he understood pragmatism.
There was no silver spoon. David was born, to Frank and Margaret Foot, in a thatched cottage in the poetic Somerset village of East Coker. His father was an estate worker at Coker Court, and young David once fell out of a tree in the grounds into the path of a startled Queen Mary. He played village cricket (taking seven for six against Evershot) and went to Yeovil grammar school but left after school certificate to join the Western Gazette, the Yeovil weekly. He lasted seven years, two of them spent in the RAF, then headed for the comparatively bright lights of the Bristol Evening World.
The World was regarded as the sparkier of the city’s two evening papers (its youngsters included Tom Stoppard and Frank Keating) yet when the two contracted into one in 1962, it was the World that folded. Foot could have gone to Fleet Street all right, but, with a wife and two small children, chose to stay at home and ploughed his own journalistic furrow.
Quick, versatile and amenable, he found plenty of work, not necessarily well paid. With his pleasant voice, he worked regularly on regional and local radio, reading the morning news, which he did perfectly except (a lifelong problem) when failing to cope with the technology. He fronted programmes for regional television, wrote columns for the surviving Bristol papers and interviewed all the passing celebrities, including Michael Foot (no relation), an ailing Harold Macmillan, whom David had to prop up in the lift, and Noël Coward and Frankie Howerd, both of whom let their hands wander hopefully towards his inside leg. Foot always inspired confidence in his interviewees; it was not normally quite so misplaced.
Above all, he was a natural Guardian man, and regarded the paper with the exasperated love that traditionally afflicts its longest-serving writers. In his case it was largely requited, particularly by two sports editors, John Samuel and Mike Averis. He never moaned and he never let them down.
Foot also wrote around 30 books, some of them pragmatic, but as he grew older and worried less about making ends meet, he was able to devote time to subjects that beckoned him. This well-balanced man was particularly fascinated by tortured souls and focused on two of them: the Somerset batsman Harold Gimblett, before he took his own life, had left Foot tapes recording his innermost thoughts, enabling him to write a biography, published in 1982, subtitled Tormented Genius of Cricket, a groundbreaking study of sporting anxiety.
Later came Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why (1996), an honest appraisal of another complex West Country man, making good the failings of earlier biographies that glossed over the messy bits. He published two other books of long-form profiles of his sporting heroes, many of them troubled. “He was the master of the long essay that really captured a cricketer,” said his good friend the cricket writer Scyld Berry.
In 2004 Foot was awarded the Peter Smith award by the Cricket Writers’ Club “for services to the presentation of cricket to the public”, recognition more often reserved for the likes of Lara and Steve Waugh, and never otherwise to a county cricket writer. In 2009 a large crowd of the club’s members descended on Bristol to give him a surprise 80th party, one story he failed to sniff. A year later came his last book, Footsteps from East Coker.
Thereafter he began to suffer from vascular dementia, which left him intermittently lucid though inclined to wander off mentally. He retained his trademark self-deprecation: “I still love words,” he told Berry, “but I can’t remember them any more.”
Foot was sustained by a strong family life. He married Anne Stacey in 1955. She was an adult education teacher who later became chair of the Bristol magistrates. Their home was almost alarmingly hospitable: pop in for morning coffee and it was impossible to leave without a marvellous lunch.
Anne survives him, along with their children, Mark and Julia, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
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