Frank Foster's Motorcycle Accident — Career Ended at 26, 1915

Foster's 1911-12 Ashes contribution had been 32 wickets at 21.62 and 226 runs. He was viewed as the most complete English left-armer since Briggs.

He was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery and posted to a depot in England, where dispatch duties involved riding military motorcycles between barracks.

Foster was the brilliant young all-rounder of the immediate pre-war years — he had captained Warwickshire to their first County Championship in 1911 at the age of 22, and the following winter had taken 32 wickets in the Ashes series in Australia. By 1914, when first-class cricket stopped, he had taken 718 first-class wickets and scored over 6,000 runs. He enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery. In August 1915, while on dispatch duty on a military motorcycle, he was thrown from the bike in an accident the precise nature of which is no longer fully recoverable. His leg was badly injured. After repeated operations and a long convalescence, he was discharged from the army in 1917 unfit for further service. He attempted a comeback in 1919 but it was clear within a few innings that the leg could no longer cope with the demands of bowling. He did not play first-class cricket again. His later life was marred by mental illness and bankruptcy, and he died in a psychiatric hospital in 1958. The accident took one of England's most promising cricketers permanently out of the game at 26.

“He was the finest left-arm bowler I ever played with.”

Foster spent the post-war decades in declining health and circumstances. He died in 1958 having lived for forty years with what his career might have been.