A bumper collection of the work of award-winning West Country journalist and author David Foot, Footprints spans the full range of his work – from cricket, football and boxing to theatre, local history and murder.
With an observant eye, a fascination with human nature and a felicitous way with words, David Foot – who died in 2021 at the age of 92 – wrote with insight and freshness on a wide cast of characters: from cricketer Viv Richards and rugby star Carwyn James to actor Peter O’Toole, politician Harold Macmillan and poet Siegfried Sassoon.
As a cricket writer for the Guardian and in a string of books, he won multiple awards, developing a style all his own. His biography of Harold Gimblett, breaking new ground by exploring the mental turmoil of the Somerset and England batsman who committed suicide, regularly features high in lists of best cricket books of all time.
As a drama critic for the Bristol Evening World and the Guardian, he was the first to review a Harold Pinter play and the last to review a George Formby performance.
As a historian of Bristol’s past, he dug into hidden corners, tapping into memories of a lost world of working-class boxing booths and, through a lady lavatory attendant, the sad and sordid nightlife of the Downs in the 1930s.
As a working journalist for more than 60 years, he reflected on the changing world of newspapers, notably in Country Report, a beautifully evocative and often hilarious account of his apprenticeship in Yeovil.
Footprints contains all this and more, some of it – like extracts from his biography of WG Grace rejected by publishers in the 1960s – never previously published. There is also private writing: from perceptive teenage diaries, right through to poignant late-life reflections on memory loss.
The result is a highly original book. It is both a collection of writing by a superb wordsmith and also the intimate story of how a boy from humble rural roots in Somerset overcame setbacks to become a writer not only of beguiling prose but of wisdom, compassion and humanity – a writer, in the words of one reviewer, ‘of deep perception and rate sympathy’.
Stephen Chalke, the author and editor of this book, is an award-winning cricket writer and publisher. He knew David Foot well, publishing his last four books, and has been given full access to David’s papers by his family.
The book has a foreword by Scyld Berry, former cricket correspondent of the Observer and Daily Telegraph, a close friend of David, and a preface by Mark Foot, David’s son.
Footprints, published by Charlcombe Books in association with Fairfield Books. RRP £22 (ISBN: 978 1 7399293 4 3)