David Foot (journalist)
David Foot (born 1929) is an English journalist and historian. He has written extensively on cricket and the West Country.
Foot was born in the Somerset village of East Coker and has spent most of his life in Somerset and Gloucestershire. He began his journalistic career with the Western Gazette in Yeovil, moving on to the Bristol Evening World, but since 1962 he has worked largely as a freelance.[1][2][3]
Foot's book Beyond Bat & Ball won the Cricket Society’s Book of the Year award in 1993.[4] Reviewing it in Wisden, Geoffrey Moorhouse agreed with the opinion of Dennis Silk in the book's foreword that as a writer Foot "is as good as Robertson-Glasgow at his best".[5] Silk also said: "If the cricket lover is not quite clear about why he loves the game, he will become much clearer after reading this book."[6]
The sport journalist Frank Keating called Foot's biographies of Harold Gimblett and Wally Hammond "imperishable classics in cricket's canon".[3]
Foot lives in Bristol with his wife Anne.[1]
Books
- Ladies' Mile by Victoria Hughes (1977; edited)
- Gardening My Way by John Abrams (1978; edited)
- Famous Bristolians: And Others Having Strong Associations with the City (1979)
- Viv Richards by Viv Richards, with David Foot (1979, 1982)
- From Grace to Botham: Profiles of 100 West Country Cricketers (1980)
- Zed: Zaheer Abbas by Zaheer Abbas, with David Foot (1983)
- Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket (1984)
- Learn Cricket with Viv Richards: A Young Player's Guide by Viv Richards, with David Foot (1985)
- Cricket's Unholy Trinity (1985)
- Sunshine, Sixes and Cider: The History of Somerset Cricket (1986)
- Viv Richards (1987)
- Country Reporter (1990)
- 40 Years On: The Story of the Lord's Taverners (1990)
- Strange Dorset Stories (1991)
- Somerset Cricket: A Post-War Who's Who (1993; with Ivan Ponting)
- Beyond Bat & Ball: Eleven Intimate Portraits (1993)
- Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why: A Biography (1996)
- Fragments of Idolatry: From "Crusoe" to Kid Berg: Twelve Character Studies (2001)
- Shep: My Autobiography by David Shepherd, with David Foot (2001)
- Sixty Summers: Somerset Cricket since the War (2006; with Ivan Ponting)
- Footsteps from East Coker (2010)
References
- "David Foot". Fairfield Books. Retrieved 8 July 2018.
- Richards, Huw (27 November 2010). "Footsteps from East Coker by David Foot, A Last English Summer by Duncan Hamilton – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 July 2018.
- Keating, Frank. "Raise a glass to the monarch of the counties". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 December 2018.
- "The Cricket Society/MCC Book of the Year". The Cricket Society. Retrieved 8 July 2018.
- Geoffrey Moorhouse, "Cricket Books, 1993", Wisden 1994, p. 1307.
- Dennis Silk, Foreword to: David Foot, Beyond Bat & Ball: Eleven Intimate Portraits, Aurum, London, 1993, p. 9.