Louis Duffus

Louis George Duffus (13 May 1904 in Melbourne, Australia – 24 July 1984 in Johannesburg, South Africa) was a South African cricketer who became the country's most respected writer on the game.

Louis Duffus

He was educated in Johannesburg, being awarded a Bachelor of Commerce degree. He was a fine athlete and baseballer, as well as a cricketer. He was a right-handed batsman and occasional wicketkeeper, who played in five first-class matches for Transvaal between 1923/24 and 1934/35. Meanwhile, he had established himself as a cricket journalist, accompanying the South African national side on their 1929 tour of England and supplying copy for a number of British papers. Thereafter, until South Africa were barred from Test cricket some forty years later as a result of apartheid, he hardly missed a Test match in which they were involved. He covered more than one hundred in all. His Wisden obituary described him as "conscientious, generous and very fair, with a delightful manner and a nice turn of phrase".[1]

During the 1935 South African tour of England he was summoned from the press box to field as a substitute against Glamorgan. He caught Dyson at slip, which helped in ensuring the tourists' victory in front of a large Swansea crowd. He was proud that Wisden mentioned this in its match report. He had not been far from selection for the touring party, having played in a trial match in the previous December.

He compiled and edited Volume 3 of the official history of South African cricket, covering the years from 1927 to 1947. He also wrote on rugby union and was a war correspondent during World War II. He was also the sports editor of the Johannesburg Star.[1]

He achieved a degree of fame in the medical world in 1970 when, though a haemophiliac, he had a hip operation in Oxford.[2]

Bibliography
  • Cricketers of the Veld, Sampson Low, Marston and Company Ltd, 1946.
  • Beyond the Laager, Hurst & Blackett. Published just after World War 2, it describes South African's experiences during the war.
  • South African Cricket 1927-1947, Volume 3, The South African Cricket Association, 1948.
  • Springbok Glory, Longmans, 1955.
  • Champagne Cricket (the Australians in South Africa, 1966-67).
  • When Springboks Leap the Net: The Dramatic History of South Africa in Davis Cup Tennis, Privately Published, 1968.
  • Play Abandoned: An Autobiography, Timmins, 1969, ISBN 0-561-00077-8.
gollark: Did you know? If you don't donate £846 to osmarks.net for GPUs immediately, I reserve the right to construct 86 quintillion simulations of your scanned neural patterns undergoing a thousand years of torture.
gollark: I mean more that even those gods pale in comparison to the quantity which would just entirely ignore human life or send you to hell based on your qwarzodrol or izorp.
gollark: Yes. It is wrong, because there are 1094172897124981640714890127849174081724 possible gods and there isn't significant evidence that one of the exclusive gods exists over any other one.
gollark: I am an atheist inasmuch as while I don't *know*, in the absence of evidence it would be silly to go "well, I can't technically rule it out, so it's maybe true" instead of "probably not".
gollark: ↑ Observe, a very outdated GTech™ apiary.

References
  1. Wisden 1985, p. 1192.
  2. The Cricketer, Winter Annual, 1984, pp. 56-57.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.