I've been a long way from relevant cricket of late (if you discount Worcester II v Essex II at Barnt Green last week), but perhaps I can offer one last oddment from this summer's reading:
"One unforgettable spectator [at Lord's] was 'Yorkshire Annie', whose allegiance was divided between her native Yorkshire and her adopted Middlesex. She was built like a sightscreen, less mobile and normally dressed in black, which could be disconcerting if you went out to bat on a hat-trick. She would boom oaths across Lord's, offer advice to batsmen at the quietest moments of a match, and bait umpires and officials alike with any comments that crossed her mind."
(Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, Cricket and All That, Pelham Books, 1978, p. 26.)

Is that the same Anne, who dressed in black, that Geoffrey Boycott spent his time with as a younger man (even though she looked old enough to be his mother!) I think she ended up in Poole, Dorset in her latter days.

I think this one would have been old enough to be his grandmother, the one who "could have caught that in her pinny". Compton and Edrich are talking about the 30s and 40s.

I've always wondered how efficient it would be to attempt a forward defensive with a stick of "roooobarb". I can see it being perfectly effective for a late cut, but I think soft hands could be an issue..

I suspect your late cut's going to end up in the wicket-keeper's gloves, unless you have a very big and solid stick of rhubarb.

As a resident of the Golden Rhubarb Triangle, i feel sure that a stick of yorkshire's finest would be sufficient to guide the ball to the boundary.
I assume you mean the wicket keeper's pinny?

Ah, is the triangle still there? Can you still see fields of rhubarb from Tingley gasworks?

Sweeping plains of golden scented and curiously coloured vegetables.
Or is it indeed a fruit?

Fruits have seeds, veg doesn't and so Rhubard should be a veg.
That's probably a very simplistic observation that I remember from primary school and no doubt I'll be shown an exception to the rule very shortly. Not tomato though, I know that's a fruit despite it's nearest relative being a potato.

A tomato is a berry, like a banana. However, the plant that a banana grows on is a herb. Isn't this a Yorkshire Cricket forum?

"Yorkshire Annie" sounds like the sort of person who would have had an opinion on this question, though sadly we'll never know it.
Just to bring us back to cricket, in the same book, Compton talks of Tom Goddard, the legendary Gloucestershire off-spinner. It's standard practice in today's commentary boxes and newspaper columns to ridicule Monty Panesar for his appealing and apparent lack of knowledge of the lbw law, but consider the following:
"Tom Goddard... was the number one appealer in the game before and after the war, bawling 'howzat' for lbw irrespective of the ball's direction, height or anything else."
There's also quite a section on Walter Robins' "gamesmanship" (i.e. sledging). Perhaps cricket hasn't changed as much as we think. And it's good to hear about the rhubarb. I thought they'd ploughed up half the fields to build the White Rose shopping centre.