David Foot (journalist)
English journalist and historian
David Foot (24 April 1929 – 25 May 2021) was a British journalist and historian who wrote extensively on English cricket and the West Country.
Foot was born in the Somerset village of East Coker, living as a child in a cottage without electricity or running water, and spent most of his life in Somerset and Gloucestershire. He began his journalistic career with the Western Gazette in Yeovil before moving on to the Bristol Evening World, where he was the drama critic, at this time cricket being only a minor part of his writing. After the paper closed in 1962 he worked largely as a freelance, and even appeared as an extra in the TV series Softly, Softly. In the national press he contributed primarily to The Guardian from 1971 to 2011, writing chiefly on Somerset and Gloucestershire cricket, together with some football reports and theatre reviews. He also wrote a weekly column for the Western Daily Press for about 20 years. According to Scyld Berry, he was one of the last regional writers. It was "not only the quality of his work, but the speed" with which he wrote that was remarkable.
Foot's book Beyond Bat & Ball won the Cricket Society’s Book of the Year award in 1993. Reviewing it in Wisden, Geoffrey Moorhouse agreed with the opinion of Dennis Silk in the book's foreword that as a writer Foot "is as good as Robertson-Glasgow at his best".
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55609110. VIAF identifies the subject as 94479527. The Library of Congress control number is n78081807. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 2021, 1962 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Foot (journalist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.