While it is not yet fully understood as to what made Peter Roebuck consider all outcomes bleak enough to launch himself from the sixth floor of a Cape Town hotel last Saturday, one thing that is certain is that the fall ended a life as troubled as it was rich with talent, former England bowler Derek Pringle wrote in his column for The Daily Telegraph.
Those who knew Roebuck, 55, since his youth had a hunch that the former Somerset player will take his life, according to Pringle. Roebuck, however, always predicted he would never commit suicide. In his foreword for the reprint of David Frith’s book on cricket suicides, Silence of the Heart, Roebuck had written: “Some people have predicted a gloomy end for this writer. One former colleague said so to my face in September 1986. It will not be so. The art is to find other things that matter just as much as cricket, which stretch you just as far. Certainly a man needs beliefs. Principles are not enough.”
Roebuck wrote that early in 2001, a few months before the scandal of him caning three 19-year-old boys in his care in Taunton came to court and he was forced to admit common assault. Like his controversial move in 1986, when he replaced Somerset’s overseas players Vivian Richards and Joel Garner, a tempestuous time that saw him branded as ‘Judas’ by Ian Botham, who left Somerset in protest, the stain never really faded. “Time usually dilutes such things but with Roebuck, who shunned England as a result to become an Australian citizen based in Bondi, one sensed these were seminal moments in which the shame and controversy were accreting with age not dissipating,” Pringle observed.
Pringle said the suggestions that Roebuck was gay circulated since his playing days, but he never acknowledged it to anyone. “In any case, he did not crave partners on an equal footing but followers,” he wrote.
Pringle, who described Roebuck as an intense, driven man, said he was never destined to have an easy life and in a way he resented those who did. “He despised sloppiness of any kind, though that contradicts his hero worship of RJO Meyer, the controversial founder of Millfield School in Somerset, which Roebuck and his younger brother, Paul, attended on scholarships. Meyer, a former Somerset cricketer, would think nothing of gambling school fees on the stock market or a horse race, any winnings providing extra bursaries for the talented but less well heeled. Roebuck acquired Meyer’s educationalist zeal, setting up scholarships for the underprivileged in South Africa,” wrote Pringle.
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