by Mayukh Ghosh

David Foot admired Raymond Robertson-Glasgow (Crusoe). He wanted to write like him but admitted more than once that it was unattainable.
He was modest. Much like Robertson-Glasgow, Foot was often at his best when he did pen portraits. He wrote some fine biographies too.
And this is just cricket. He wrote on many other subjects, often with the same passion and creativity.
When he passed away a couple of years ago, Stephen Chalke, his friend and publisher for over two decades, decided to collect some of his best writings in a single volume.

He met Foot’s son Mark and Scyld Berry to find homes for Foot’s books. And there they discussed this project.
Chalke was to go through all of Foot’s published works and the newspaper archives. Mark was to sort out all of his father’s papers.

Mark began separating the various elements of his father’s writing into large storage boxes. There was so much. He needed eight boxes, all ended up jam-packed!
Theatre, cricket, football, reviews …
Chalke found himself drowned in an ocean and he had to find the best out of this lot.
The most difficult task in this seemingly straightforward book was the selection of the pieces.

Chalke says:

“I had a number of factors to weigh in choosing what to include:

The quality of the writing
The subject matter of the writing.
Achieving a good range of types of writing.
Including work that helped to tell the story of his writing life.
Not having too much from those of his books that are widely available.
The layout of the chapters.

“A bit of David’s journalism was workaday, not worth including, but there was much more of his writing that I could have included without in any way lowering the overall quality. I started with the idea that the book would be 256 pages (eight 32-page sections, if you are familiar with printing), and four times I found myself adding another 32 pages. Even then, after I had filled the 384 pages, I discovered a Guardian article, telling the inside story of a production of Henry V by the Bristol Old Vic, that was much too good to leave out, and I had to make cuts to other pieces to fit it in.”

Fixing on the right layout too was tricky. Given that so much on so many different topics were to be included, striking the balance was important.

“I wanted each chapter to have its own completeness so that it could stand alone. But I also wanted the chapters to be in an order that followed the story of his writing life for those who wanted to read the book right through. This meant that the cricket was light in the first half of the book, then became increasingly dominant. I figured that readers could make their own choices with that. They could speed-read or skip parts that didn’t interest them, but there would be plenty for everybody.
“I was lucky enough to have a team of readers ahead of publication, and they all commented on my selection. Two of them wanted the cricket to be a higher proportion of the whole, but the other five were strongly of the view that I had got the balance right. By this stage I was committed to the mix I had so it would have to have been at least 5-2 the other way for me to revisit the issue.”

But things were hardly ever set in stone. Shuffling of pieces among the chapters kept on happening until Chalke found the right combination.
“I worked on the book for several months, during which time the structure changed a fair bit. ‘Going Freelance’ and ‘Allsorts in a Busy Working Life’ were chapters that did not exist early on, the material in them appearing elsewhere. It was all rather like doing a large jigsaw where you have an indeterminate number of pieces and you have to fit them together in ways that work. I always enjoy books like this, where the layout plays a part in the decision making. Summer’s Crown was another one. Sometimes I would have a space to fill and be looking for a little extra; other times I would be having to cut something.”

At the end of the day, it was Chalke’s selection. And there was no one worthier for this job. He knew him well, he knows his work well, and, above all, he has been an exceptional writer and publisher for 25 years.
“If you or anybody else had been through all of David’s work, you would have made different choices. But I followed my heart and chose what appealed to me. That was the number one criterion. Mark, David’s son, was totally happy with what I did; he made suggestions but he never disagreed with my decisions. That was also important to me.”

After Robertson-Glasgow passed way, Alan Ross edited a similar book called Crusoe on Cricket. Frank Keating rated it as the best cricket book he’d ever read.
For Foot, Stephen Chalke did the job. With much more care and personal touch.
Maybe a few decades later someone else of note would rate this one as his/her favourite cricket book.