by Mayukh Ghosh
India, 1981/82.
The journalist covering for The Times can be seen carrying a largish bag everywhere with him.
It is full of toilet rolls.
It is something worse than 'Delhi belly'.
Afterwards, he visits the London School of Tropical Medicine on multiple occasions.
At the same time his concern to minimise the weight of his luggage leads to a trail of screwed-up pages from paperback novels, as he tears them out as soon as they were read!
This man, though, is charming and well liked.
David Frith, who was there in India with him, sums it up: "Dick Streeton was an old-fashioned, loud-voiced and immensely likable chap."
Richard Streeton's father was a manager at HMV and then at BBC.
Streeton wanted to become a journalist fairly early in life and in 1958, after working in some regional newspapers, he joined Reuters.
He covered a wide range of sports.
Then, in 1969, he joined The Times and concentrated mostly on rugby and cricket.
Over the next 25 years, he travelled to all Test playing nations.
His last assignment for them was to report on India's first visit to South Africa in 1992.
In 1987 he became the first president of the Association of Cricket Statisticians.
At a time when no one in the organisation knew what the role of the president was.
Streeton, along with chairman Tony Woodhouse made sure the association was in good shape. He oversaw the buying of the premises on Radcliffe Road and even wrote a history of the ACS on its 21st anniversary.
Richard Streeton had two great passions in life - cricket and Sherlock Holmes.
He was part of and headed many of the societies dedicated to the great detective. Many of his cricket pieces for The Times mentioned Holmes and all sorts of things related to him and his creator.
When, in 1997, he retired from the post of president of the ACS, they presented him a figure made of Sherlock Holmes, complete with cricket pads, the Hound of the Baskervilles, and a broken cricket stump!
Streeton was very helpful to other journalists, in a world devoid of breaking news, click baits and 'hits'.
Eric Midwinter recalls: "I knew Richard quite well but fairly late on in his career – his Fender book is a model biog. I knew him slightly through our sons being at the same school. A small world.
A veritable gentleman. He was the first and very long-serving president of ACS over which he presided with aplomb. He then persuaded me to take over the presidency, for he retired and moved to the coast, but remained very supportive until his death. Curiously I first met him in the press tent in Hove – I was doing the life of Ken Farnes for the Dictionary of National Biography– Sussex were playing Essex, for whom K.Farnes played – Richard was the only one in the press tent at lunch time, and I asked him if he knew whether K.Farnes had, as I suspected, a brother – he didn’t, of course, know but he pointed out to me Trevor Bailey, who was quite helpful but unsure."
But Streeton is not really remembered for all these.
His best, though, rather ironically, was produced when The Times was shut for 11 months during the industrial dispute in the early 1980s.
At Brighton, in 1978, he announced about his dream project. A book on Percy Fender.
He didn't get much time in the next 12 months but then, when the chance came, he used it well.
He spent hours with the eighty-eight year old cricketer to record memories of a lifetime.
Some days were dull- Fender talked all sorts of things that didn't help Streeton's project. But Streeton started to like Fender so much that, at one point, he didn't care about the book. He just wanted to spend time with Fender.
The book came out in 1981 and won the Cricket Society Book of the Year award.
Richard Streeton was born on Nov 4, 1930.