Harold Gimblett - Health Problems and Later Career

Health Problems and Later Career

Throughout his life, Gimblett's personality was inclined to be morose and depressive, and there is evidence from across his cricket career of a gulf between his entertaining cricket style and his own personal negativism. Alan Gibson, the cricket writer who himself suffered from bouts of mental illness, wrote of him: "Most of those who watched him, or even met him, took him for a cheerful extrovert. This was wrong. He thought a lot, worried a lot, fretted a lot, all the more because he struggled to present a calm, bold front to the outer world."

David Foot, the author of Gimblett's biography, wrote in his history of Somerset cricket that Gimblett "retained obsessive complexes about class, money and health". In the biography, Foot writes of discovering the depth and the variety of Gimblett's different hatreds: "The hate – his uncompromising word – was spread over a wide area." He appears to have found congeniality difficult and resentment easy, and there were periods of depressive illness. These culminated at the end of the 1953 cricket season in what appears to have been a full-scale breakdown.

Gimblett's own words, quoted in the Foot biography, tell the story. "I couldn't take much more. I was taking sleeping pills to make me sleep and others to wake me up. By the end of 1953 the world was closing in on me. I couldn't offer any reason why and I don't think the medical profession knew either." In the winter of 1953-54, Gimblett spent 16 weeks in Tone Vale Hospital, a psychiatric institution, where he was given electro-convulsive therapy, and was released in time to join the Somerset team for the start of the 1954 season. He played in the first two county matches of the new season, but was not fit enough mentally to continue and – though the details vary – Somerset agreed to give him time off. He did not appear in first-class cricket again. Later in the 1954 season, according to Gimblett's own report, he went to Somerset's Taunton ground to watch some of the cricket, and was "ordered out of the ground".

Out of first-class cricket, Gimblett took a job as a cricket professional with Ebbw Vale Cricket Club in South Wales. He then applied for and got a job with his old Somerset captain, Jack Meyer, who was headmaster of Millfield School. The link with Meyer gave rise to continuing rumours of a possible comeback for Somerset across the 1950s, but it did not happen. In 1959, however, he appeared in a few Minor Counties matches for Dorset. At Millfield, Gimblett helped with the cricket coaching, ran the school shop and did other tasks around the school such as driving minibuses. In the end, his mental and physical health problems – he suffered from arthritis – meant he fell out with Millfield in the same way that he had with county cricket, and he retired to live at Minehead; he was involved in a minor way with coaching and fund-raising for Somerset, but his behaviour was sometimes unpredictable and he found it hard to reconcile his former fame with his reduced circumstances.

At the time of his death, Gimblett had moved from Minehead to a mobile home at Verwood, Dorset. He died after taking an overdose of prescription drugs. He was survived by his wife, Marguerita (Rita), whom he married in 1938, and by a son.