Bob Crisp

Robert James Crisp (28 May 1911 – 3 March 1994) was a South African cricketer who played in nine Test matches between 1935 and 1936. He appeared for Rhodesia, Western Province, Worcestershire and South Africa. Though his Test bowling average lay over 37.00, Crisp had a successful first-class cricket career, with 276 wickets at 19.88. He is the only bowler in first-class cricket to have taken four wickets in four balls more than once.

He went on to a career in journalism and writing, publishing several accounts of his career in World War II and earning a reputation as an adventurer.

Cricket career

Domestic debut Crisp was born in Calcutta, Bengal in British India. He made sporadic appearances for Rhodesia between 1929 and 1931, taking only seven wickets before moving to Western Province for the 1931–32 season. He took 33 wickets that season at 14.93, including an eight-wicket haul against Griqualand West. He returned to South Africa to take nine expensive wickets at 45.33 – seven of these in four Test matches against Australia before returning to England once more and taking a four-wicket haul in a first-class match that summer.

Crisp was also noted for his womanising, "crooning in the nightclubs" of Alexandria and his wide-ranging travel – including climbing Mount Kilimanjaro (he is the only Test cricketer to have climbed it twice) and swimming Loch Lomond. He went on to a career as a journalist, writing for Wisden and several newspapers. He helped found Drum for black South Africans, sailed Greece, farmed minks in England and wrote for the East Anglian Daily Times.

During the 1970s, Crisp was diagnosed with cancer and responded by walking around Crete for a year, supporting himself by selling his account to the Sunday Express. He remained outspoken on apartheid, advocating "a federation of semi-autonomous states, black and white" and arguing that "nothing else is feasible". The end of segregation "startled" him. He lived to see South Africa reintegrated into the international Test scene before dying in 1994.

Books Crisp wrote a number of books, including: The Gods Were Neutral: A British Tank Officer's Very Personal Account of the Ill-Fated Greek Campaign in WWII, 1959 Brazen Chariots: An Account of Tank Warfare in the Western Desert, November–December 1941, 1959, WW Norton, New York The Outlanders: The Men Who Made Johannesburg, 1964, Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance, 2015, Bloomsbury compiled from his travel journalism serialised in the Daily Express in the 1960s and 1970s.