Ted Corbett, who died on Wednesday in Huntingdon, the UK, aged 82, took pride in his lowly beginnings.
Born in Birmingham in 1935, he and his sister were brought up by their mother, a village school headmistress.
Chance found him working as a tea boy at the Yorkshire Evening Press . He had told the man teaching the paper’s young journalists that he wanted to be a cricket reporter. “Don’t be ridiculous,” was the reply. “Those jobs are like gold dust.”
Good luck sent him to Japan on his National Service, another lucky break put him in charge of Japan News , the paper for the British forces in Korea.
Back in England, he rose through the ranks of sub-editors. His progress through the Daily Herald , the Sun and the Mirror took him to the Daily Star where, “thanks to another scrap of good luck”, he was their cricket man for seven years.
Thirty years later, he had achieved his ambition to take on “the most envied job in newspapers” as cricket correspondent of a national paper.
“When the Star tried to get rid of me, I walked out of the office and set up my own freelance agency, helped by some good friends and a generous pension plan,” Corbett once said.
With his partner, the TV and radio scorer, Jo King, Corbett turned Cricket Direct into a highly professional agency, reporting on cricket, from the Outback in Australia, the back of a swaying and bouncing bus in a dangerous South African township and with rainwater lapping round his knees during a thunderstorm in Zimbabwe.
“We had a wonderful time, viewing the wildlife in all 10 of the cricket-playing countries, making friends and never missing a day’s work through illness,” he had said.
Corbett retired from the travelling side of journalism in 2008 but continued to write his columns for The Hindu and Sportstar well beyond his 80th birthday.
