R. C. Robertson-Glasgow

Robertson-Glasgow was born in Edinburgh and educated at Charterhouse School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.[1] He was a right-arm fast-medium bowler who played for Oxford University and Somerset. During his career, which lasted from 1920 to 1937, he took 464 wickets at 25.77 in first-class cricket, with best innings figures of 9-38.

Convivial, popular and humorous, he subsequently won acclaim for his writing, in which his strong sense of humour shone through.[2] In 1933 he became cricket correspondent for the Morning Post. He later wrote for the Daily Telegraph, The Observer and the Sunday Times.

He retired from regular cricket writing in 1953. He was Chairman of the Cricket Writers' Club in 1959.[3]

His nickname of "Crusoe" came, according to Robertson-Glasgow himself, from the Essex batsman Charlie McGahey. When his captain asked McGahey how he had been dismissed, he replied: "I was bowled by an old ----- I thought was dead two thousand years ago, called Robinson Crusoe."[4]

He committed suicide during a snowstorm whilst in the grip of melancholic depression.

His cricket books include:[5]

• Cricket Prints: Some Batsmen and Bowlers (1920-1940) (Werner Laurie, 1948)
• More Cricket Prints: Some Batsmen and Bowlers (1920-1945) (1948)
• 46 Not Out - an autobiography (1948)
• Rain Stopped Play (1948)
• The Brighter Side of Cricket (Arthur Barker, 1950)
• All in the Game (1952)
• How to Become a Test Cricketer (1962)
• Crusoe on Cricket: The Cricket Writings of R. C. Robertson-Glasgow (1966)

He also wrote the following non-cricket books:

• I was Himmler's Aunt (1940)
• Country Talk: A Miscellany (1964)

• Cricinfo profile
• R.C. Robertson-Glasgow at Cricket Archive
• Wisden obituary