Arthur Gerald Norcott Brodribb (21 May 1915 – 7 October 1999) was a cricket historian and archaeologist.

Life and career

Born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Brodribb was educated at Eastbourne College and read classics and English at University College, Oxford, where his tutor was C.S. Lewis. He became a schoolmaster, and from 1956 to 1968 he owned and ran Hydneye House, a prep school in East Sussex.^[1]

Brodribb was a descendant of the Victorian actor Sir Henry Irving and a founder member of the Cricket Society. His best-known work in cricket is Next Man In which "took cricket's Laws and re-examined them all with an eye to their quirks, oddities and exceptions".^[2] Among his other famous works are Hit for Six, a compendium of the big-hitters in cricket, and The Croucher, a biography of the early twentieth-century cricketer Gilbert Jessop.

Later in his career, he took an interest in archaeology and was awarded a doctorate in 1985 for his thesis on Roman building materials. His Roman Brick and Tile (1987) remains a key work on the subject. He took a particular interest in the Classis Britannica iron-working site at Beauport Park.^[3] Although he never published anything on the subject, he was also involved in researching the Roman roads in the area, especially the road leading north from Beauport Park.^[4] His use of dowsing to locate archaeological sites was not always well received in the archaeological community, a fact that was highlighted when archaeological television programme Time Team excavated at Beauport Park.^[5]

Works

References