Happy birthday to the old curmudgeon and the original "hard man." A true Yorkshire great. Has there ever been a tougher cricketer?

One of my earliest cricketing memories is trying to get Brian Close's autograph at the Scarborough Cricket Festival around 1983 or 1984. At the end of the day's play he sat in front of the pavilion with a cigarette in his mouth and bellowed at a load of bemused 12 and 13 year-olds words to the effect of - "Right, if you want my autograph then bloody well queue up and if anybody asks for it more than once then I'm off back inside".

He still scares me now when I see him. Happy Birthday you miserable old bugger.

In the 80s he used to work in the same office block as me and I used to bump in to him usually popping out somewhere for a fag whilst he tried to find out the cricket scores or racing results. I used to ask him if he knew the score but in those days you tended to have a vague idea already that we would be struggling

Quite surreal seeing him away from a cricket ground as he was one of the last people I expected to have an office job.

Who did he work for and what did he do?
I can't imagine him doing anyhting but play cricket and glower. Was he in charge of industrial relations or PR...?

i think he worked for an insurance company of some sort - Albany Life springs to mind but it may be my mind playing tricks on me.

Not sure what capacity but you could imagine his approach to HR and the politically correct world we now live in at work as well as non-smoking offices we have now.

Close is still rather imposing. Sometime in the last 2 seasons Brian was standing outside the sponsors tent at Scarborough smoking a cig. I'm sure that the area wasn't one of the smoking areas in the ground, but no one dared to inform Mr Close of this fact.