David Foot

David Foot (24 April 1929 – 25 May 2021) was a British journalist and historian who wrote extensively on English cricket and the West Country.

Foot was born in the Somerset village of East Coker, living as a child in a cottage without electricity or running water, and spent most of his life in Somerset and Gloucestershire. He began his journalistic career with the Western Gazette in Yeovil before moving on to the Bristol Evening World, where he was the drama critic, at this time cricket being only a minor part of his writing. and even appeared as an extra in the TV series Softly, Softly.

Foot's book Beyond Bat & Ball won the Cricket Society’s Book of the Year award in 1993. 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". 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."

The sport journalist Frank Keating called Foot's biographies of Harold Gimblett and Wally Hammond "imperishable classics in cricket's canon".

Books

Game for Anything (1972; David Foot with Alan Gibson and Derek Robinson) 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) Footprints – David Foot’s Lifetime of Writing (2023; collected and edited by Stephen Chalke)