Former Australia middle-order bat and two-time Test skipper Brian Booth MBE has died, aged 89.
Booth, who played 29 Tests from 1961-66 and also represented Australia in hockey at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, is survived by his wife Judy and four daughters, and is remembered as one of the sport’s true gentlemen.
A Bathurst product originally, the right-hander made his way down to Sydney and soon established himself at St George, a club he continued to have a close association and later earned a Life Membership, and from which he went on to represent New South Wales and Australia.
A relatively late arrival on the Test scene, Booth earned a place on the 1961 Ashes tour as a 27-year-old, having impressed at the back-end of the previous home summer with two hundreds for an Australian XI against Tasmania and Western Australia.
He played in the final two Tests of that Ashes series, won by the visitors 2-1, though with Australia not hosting Test cricket in the 1961-62 season, he had to wait more than 16 months for a home debut.
His performance – 112 and 19no against England at the Gabba – proved very much worth the wait, and he followed it up with a second hundred in the next Test in Melbourne.
Brian Booth
Australia (Tests): 29 matches, 1,773 runs at 42.21, five hundreds
NSW (first-class): 93 matches, 5,577 runs at 43,57, 11 hundreds
Australian fans saw the best of Booth through that summer and the next, when he scored another two hundreds, this time against South Africa (169 in Brisbane, 102no in Sydney), his batting average at that point hitting 62.41 after 11 Tests.
On Australia’s tour of the Caribbean in 1965, against the fearsome pace of Charlie Griffith and Wes Hall, Booth (117) shared a 220-run stand with Bob Cowper (143) for the third wicket in a drawn match in Trinidad.
The following home summer, in which Booth twice captained in the absence of regular skipper Bob Simpson, a low run of scores and the stunning arrival of another kid from country New South Wales, Doug Walters, led to him being squeezed out of the side on Simpson’s return.
He played his last Test as captain, and later revealed he received a letter from then selector Sir Donald Bradman in which he apologised for his axing.
Booth played another two summers for New South Wales, passing 5,000 first-class runs for his state in the process. In 1982 he was awarded an MBE from the Queen.
Through his coaching at St George, he maintained a link to some of the game’s contemporary domestic stars such as Trent Copeland, Moises Henriques and Kurtis Patterson, the latter acknowledging Booth’s influence after he scored his maiden Test hundred in 2019.
“Brian was really good to me, ever since I was an up-and-comer at St George,” Patterson said. “He’s a wonderful person and he’s been a really nice help for me.”
