Dudley Doust

John Hopkins writes: Those of you who remember Dudley Doust, the enquiring and engaging American who was the golf correspondent of The Sunday Times immediately after the great Henry Longhurst until I took over in the autumn of 1980, may not have seen that Dudley died of cancer in January. The funeral was held in Butleigh Church, Butleigh, Somerset.
 
Dudley would have been 78 had he lived four days longer. As it was his death was celebrated appropriately. The old church in this old Somerset village was packed. There were a lot of locals from the village and a good turn-out of former colleagues. Robin Rhoderick-Jones read from the Book of Revelation. Chris Smith, the photographer whose work on The Sunday Times often accompanied articles by Dudley, read from Heraclitus by William Johnson Cory, Scyld Berry, cricket correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph and a fellow inhabitant of Somerset, read from Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken after telling us that Robert Frost was Dudley’s favourite poet. And Mike Brearley gave a gentle, short and insightful eulogy. Interspersed among these were some of those great British hymns and psalms that we sang lustily: The Lord is my Shepherd, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory.
 
A reception was held at the Rose and Portcullis in Butleigh afterwards at which we stood around and reminisced about Dudley. His penchant for red socks was commented on, so were his bushy eyebrows and the book he wrote about Seve. Most of all we talked about his remarkable ability to dig and dig and dig. He once telephoned a source 14 times in three days to find out more detail. Doust stories nearly always contained one anecdote that had never been told before or an observation about the interviewee that helped give a mental picture to the reader – a scare under the left eye, a back that needed a red hot compress to be placed upon it (Mike Brearley). The words on WC Fields’s gravestone are supposed to be: “On the whole I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” On Doust’s grave the following would be appropriate: “Ok, last question.”
 
In his capacity as the chief sports writer of The Sunday Times he once tracked down Ivan Lendl, introduced himself and said, “How long have I got Ivan?” Lendl’s responded: “Until you ask the first stupid question.”  Ninety minutes later Lendl leaned forward and said: “Dudley, I’m afraid we are going to have stop. I am on court in ten minutes.” 
 
It was remembered that Dudley sometimes rode a bicycle to get to and from his accommodation when covering a tournament. He used to hang his washing from the crossbar of said bicycle when he was going to a launderette en route to a tournament. 
 
As I drove home the following thought occurred to me: that morning a man who had not been born in Britain but whose name meant a lot in Britain was buried in Auckland Cathedral. I refer to Edmund Hillary. That afternoon a man who was not born in Britain but whose name meant a lot in journalism in Britain was buried in Somerset. That man was Dudley Doust.

Born – 17 January, 1930

Died – 13 January, 2008

See also https://peoplepill.com/people/dudley-doust/