"The Fields Were Sudden Bare"

ONE hundred years ago, Warwickshire won the county championship for the first time.
In 1911, it was hailed as a pretty special achievement, the title at last having been wrested from the 'Big Six' (Yorkshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Midlesex and Kent). The triumph was rightly acclaimed as highly notable.

But how, 100 years on, does it rate now?

Well, with the benefit of a century's hindsight, the Bears' inaugural championship triumph can be seen truly for what it was: One of the most remarkable sporting, never mind cricket, successes of all time. Orchestrated and inspired by one of the most remarkable sportsmen - Frank Rowbotham Foster.

Foster ranks among the all-time best English cricketers - and certainly is Warwickshire's best. Capable of brilliance whether bowling left-arm medium-fast, attacking with the bat, fielding in the slips or hatching an outlandish scheme as captain.

But as a man? Complex. And some of those complexities were dark. Foster's attainment of greatness on the field depended upon his immense talent liberating itself through a personality harbouring more dark recesses than any ancient castle.

Digbeth-born and Solihull-educated, Foster made his Warwickshire debut, aged 19, in 1908. At 22, in early 1911, he announced his retirement to concentrate on the family business.

Warwickshire then began that championship season with a humiliating defeat to Surrey at The Oval. They were a shambles. So Foster was begged to return, what's more as captain. He agreed - and promptly led an ageing, hitherto under-performing bunch of mavericks, who had muddled along low in the table for years, to the title.

Foster led the way with bat and ball but, most importantly, he united and inspired his team by force of personality. When, the following winter, his 32 wickets helped power England to Ashes victory in Australia, he became a national as well as county hero; handsome, charismatic, wonderful at his sport and successful.

Fast forward to October, 1946. The minutes of a Warwickshire committee meeting state: "It was reluctantly decided, in view of his disgraceful conduct on several occasions during the past season, notably towards amateur players and members of the coaching staff, that F.R.Foster be refused admission to the ground in future."

Four years later, Foster appeared before Southend magistrates to face 13 counts of larceny and intent to defraud. He was put on probation on condition that he became a voluntary hospital patient and taken to St Andrew's Psychiatric Hospital, Northampton. There, eight years later, he died.

The path which took this extraordinary man from Warwickshire and England icon to criminal, pauper and 'lunatic' has just been chronicled in a book - "F.R.Foster: The Fields Were Sudden Bare" - by cricket historian and former custodian of the Bears library Robert Brooke. It is a slim volume, just 132 pages, yet contains one of Engish cricket's momentous stories and tragedies. Here is the starkest evidence of how thin is that line between greatness and self-destruction.

Although Foster's cricket career was ended by a motor-cycle accident in 1915, it is hard to believe that his self-destruction would not have kicked in sooner rather than later. Here was a man who could score 305 in 257 minutes (against Worcestershire at Dudley, 1914) and take 53 five-wickets hauls in 159 first-class matches but could never be relied on to turn up for start of play. To say the least, he liked a drink. When Warwickshire played Middlesex in 1913, Foster, out on the lash the previous night, had a Turkish bath and a game of snooker in the morning before turning up late on the final day to find his side, nought for one overnight, 20 for eight..

"The Fields Were Sudden Bare" does not give a complete and definitive account of Frank Foster's life because such an account is impossible to compile. His later years were a rambling mess of gambling, booze, debt and a declining grasp of reality. Correctly, Brooke makes no attempt to plug the gaps in the story with waffle, as some authors might. He simply relates what his diligent researched has unearthed. Foster surfaces here and there - at several addresses in London, at Bournemouth, back in Birmingham on the Hagley Road, in Leigh-on-Sea - before ending his days, alone and forgotten, in Northampton Asylum.

Foster's death in 1958 prompted only the most perfunctory obituaries. With mental illness, in those days, still a giant taboo, he had been virtually airbrushed out of Warwickshire's - and English cricket's - history and conscience. His feats on the field lived on, as they always will, in the history books but the sporting world had done it's level best to forget the tragic figure behind them.

Now, with this excellent book, Foster's story - and Foster the man - has at last been fleshed out again in all his deeply-flawed glory. It is a story which not even the most ambitous fiction-writer would make up.

* "F.R.Foster: The Fields Were Sudden Bare" is available, priced £12 plus £1 p&p, from Robert Brooke, 3a Wilsons Road, Knowle, Solihull, B93 OHZ.