When, two decades ago, the cricket historian David Frith published his study of cricketing suicides, By His Own Hand, the book carried a foreword by Peter Roebuck. As an opening batsman, Roebuck had represented Millfield School, Cambridge University and Somerset, where he was the club captain. In his second life he proved to be a quirky, provocative journalist, initially for the Sunday Times and eventually for several newspapers in Australia, where he lived by choice. Now he too is dead, at 55, by his own hand.
What is it about cricket and suicide? In his research Frith found more than 80 cricketers who snuffed out their life-light, including some of the most celebrated men who have adorned the game. Arthur Shrewsbury, immortalised by W.G. Grace in his ringing phrase ‘give me Arthur’, blew his brains out in 1903. Albert Trott, who played for both England and Australia, and once struck the ball over the pavilion at Lord’s, also ended his life with a gun, as did A.E. Stoddart, who captained England in Australia. More recently, David Bairstow, who kept wicket for Yorkshire and England, hanged himself at home.
Bairstow, the most ebullient of men, died in 1998. Since then Mark Saxelby, who used to play for Nottinghamshire, has poisoned himself, so Roebuck, who was found dead outside a Cape Town hotel last Saturday, was following a well-trodden path. No other sport has been so disfigured by suicide. How is it that cricket, a game described by John Arlott, one of its finest commentators, as ‘human chess’, drives so many players out of their minds?
One reason might be that the game takes so much more out of those who play it than any other. County cricketers spend six months of every year cooped up with their peers in dressing-rooms and hotels. Test players spend a similar amount of time on the road, where they form friendships and associations that are impossible to replicate.
The former England coach David Lloyd has admitted that, after retiring at the end of the 1983 season, he returned to Old Trafford the following spring, unable to think of himself as anything other than a Lancashire player. ‘They had to tell me to leave,’ he has said. ‘And it was hard for me to take. I was a cricketer. It was my life.’ Lloyd filled his hours by umpiring, then coaching, then talking about the game. Many others, longing for another team they can join, take to drink or worse.
Roebuck, who wrote a history of Somerset cricket, is following in one of the county’s macabre traditions. R.C. ‘Crusoe’ Robertson-Glasgow, who played for Somerset as a bowler before he became one of cricket’s most elegant essayists, died of an overdose in 1965. Rather more tragic was the death of Harold Gimblett, the club’s finest native-born player, who took his life in 1978, just as Roebuck was taking his first professional steps at Taunton.
Like Roebuck, Gimblett was an opening batsman. A superb striker of the ball, he was good enough to play three times for England, an honour Roebuck could not quite attain. Yet his fame did not spare him the periods of depression that accompanied him in retirement. After spending time in mental institutions, he ended up living in a mobile home in Dorset, where he swallowed the pills that put him out of his misery. In one of his last letters, quoted by David Foot in his superb biography, Harold Gimblett, Tormented Genius Of Cricket, he had written: ‘I simply could not get on with Somerset or cricket any more.’
Gimblett, from Bicknoller in the Quantock hills, was one of those country boys that Somerset traditionally rears. Perhaps he was not cut out for the life of a prominent sportsman. In that respect he was not alone, then or now. Marcus Trescothick, the club’s current opening batsman, stepped off the international carousel five years ago, suffering from a depression that the thousands of runs he makes each summer could not assuage. Trescothick remains the best batsman available to England, but, as he revealed in an award-winning autobiography, Coming Back To Me, he can’t trust himself to rejoin his old team-mates.
At least Trescothick turned his promise into partial fulfilment. Mark Lathwell, another Somerset opening batsman from country stock, played twice for England as a 21-year-old, and then simply faded away. The young Lathwell was a joy to watch. He had the gifts to be a world-beater. Yet, on his own admission, he preferred to play darts in the village pub, and live a quiet life at home, untouched by fame. By 29 he had drifted into obscurity.
Nobody is suggesting that either Trescothick or Lathwell is a potential suicide. Roebuck, on the other hand, was. When news of his death came through shortly before midnight last Saturday few people who had observed him over the years in dressing-room or press box were surprised. He was a highly intelligent, unusually sensitive man, who found the world a hostile place, and — the crucial bit, from which everything else follows — never came to terms with his homosexuality.
It was that inability, amplified by an anti-Englishness which spoke volumes about his self-loathing, that corrupted his personality. He could be kind (I shared long days with him in the sub-continent), but there was no warmth. Even his intelligence was cold. He could be stimulating, but he was never ‘good’ company. There was too much darkness.
Nevertheless he was admired for his robust writing, less so for his radio work, where he acquired an unconvincing Aussie accent and a manner of speech (‘jeez, these poms’) that was frequently embarrassing. Few Australians fell for such playing to the gallery, and English colleagues found him absurd, particularly when he sounded off, as he seemed to do every month, about Sir Ian Botham, with whom he had played at Somerset. Roebuck, who lacked the gift of friendship, could not understand why people loved him.
Ultimately his tragedy was a failure to find his true vocation. The son of teachers, and much influenced by R.J.O. Meyer, his headmaster at Millfield, he longed to be an instructor himself, and loved to take adolescents under his wing. In South Africa, where he spent part of the year, he did much good work assisting the education of children from modest backgrounds. However, the methods he used to keep these young men in order (‘fetch the cane’, he told a group of teenagers entrusted to his care) brought him before Taunton Crown Court in 2001 when he was found guilty on three counts of causing actual bodily harm. The sentences were suspended, and the humiliated man turned his back on England for good, settling in Sydney, though he was unable to fit in properly anywhere.
There is no general rule where suicide is concerned. The circumstances are different in each case. In the eyes of the world, Roebuck had succeeded — a double first in law at Cambridge, a decent career in cricket, then a golden one in journalism. The best of his work stands comparison with Robertson-Glasgow. With a bat, or a ball, or a pen in their hands, they were free men. Beyond the boundary they faced a foe that neither runs nor wickets, nor the laughter of comrades, could defeat. And if history tells us anything, it is that Roebuck will not be the last cricketer to knock down his own wicket.
Comments