Book Review - Silence of the Heart by David Frith

 Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides by David Frith

Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company, 2004          ISBN 184018406X

What a strange, compelling, yet ultimately unsatisfying book! Probably only David Frith, with his stern views and dogged determination could have written it, but I do wonder whether even he might have lost heart at times during this project.

There is no doubt that as a sport Cricket is very different to most. A team game that relies uniquely on the performance of individuals, where base chance plays an inordinate part in success or failure, and where there is ample time even during a game to reflect on one's own performance, a thoughtful person could begin to wonder whether in the right circumstances depression over performance could lead to suicide.

At first it seems Frith might be on to something, as in the preface he states that Test cricketers have committed suicide at twice the rate of the rest of the population (in the UK), and goes on to show that they have killed themselves at seemingly higher rates than top-flight participants in other sporting codes.

What then follows is over 200 pages of people who have played cricket at first-class level (some only one game) across the world (although the book focusses mainly on England and Australia) who took their own life. Frith shows enormous dedication in delving not only into each person's cricket history, but also into their personal lives and (obviously) into their deaths. While some lives are short and some are boring, others are a fascinating insight into the mores and times in which they lived.

There are names with which I'm familiar (Stoddart, Trott, Wills) and others that I will no doubt never read about again. As suicides however, the stories are mostly depressingly familiar: usually those in this book killed themselves (and sometimes others) for the "usual" reasons; money, gambling, love, illness, old age. Their methods are mostly familiar as well - gunshot, gas, poison, drowning, jumping to their deaths (it might have been interesting for Frith to do a statistical analysis of the types of death - are cricketers more prone to one way of killing themselves than another?).

As Mike Brearley writes in the Foreword, we can never really ultimately know why someone chooses to take their own life, but as Frith states in the final chapter most of the suicides of which he has written occurred for reasons other than cricket (in fact pretty much the only ones he can definitely pin down to the game are those of fans rather than players). Frith then goes on to speculate whether, rather than cricket "causing" suicides, people who are more prone to depression are drawn to cricket. As Brearley said, it's really unknowable.

On a final note, another unique thing about cricket is the literature is has spawned. This book is one of the more curious.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell