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LONDON — The civil war that beset Somerset cricket more than 30 years ago was all the more remarkable because of the unimposing, bespectacled figure at its centre. Peter Roebuck would not have immediately struck a casual observer as a man capable of going to war. An unconventional loner, gauche even with close friends, he did not meld easily with either the old-fashioned administrators in charge of the club or the imposing superstars, Ian Botham, Viv Richards and Joel Garner, who would eventually be expunged from a Somerset dressing room that had fallen on hard times.

As a cricket writer, in his later years, he wrote a lot about Zimbabwe Cricket and the country, and was a very vicious critic of the game’s leadership in the Southern African country and occasionally poked his pen into the politics.

Maybe, the conflict that took hold of the sleepy market town of Taunton throughout the summer of 1986, which dominated the sports pages in a way that now is hard to imagine, probably also explains his negative attitude towards Zimbabwe.

Until now, it has only been possible to hazard a guess at Roebuck’s state of mind as he became the principal hate figure for rebel supporters who were campaigning against the county’s decision to release their great, long-serving West Indians, Richards and Garner and as a consequence, accept the ensuing departure of Ian Botham in protest.

Previously unpublished diaries, which were not made available to the authors of the excellent Chasing Shadows: The Life and Death of Peter Roebuck in 2015, have now revealed the full extent of Roebuck’s mental anguish.

Condemned by his critics, increasingly reviled by Botham in a rift that would last a lifetime, and often left to flounder by Somerset’s archaic administration, he presents himself as an honourable man who made his choice and forever fretted over the consequences.

“Lots of people are asking about my health,” he writes as Somerset’s warfare reaches its height.

“I suspect they are waiting for a crack-up.”

Somerset comfortably won the vote to let go of Richards and Garner at an emergency meeting at Shepton Mallet in November 1986 and Roebuck took the spoils, but his life would never be the same again.

Even as victory approaches, he rails at English society as “mean, narrow and vindictive” and falls out of love with the country of his birth for the rest of a life that was to end in tragic circumstances 25 years later.

By the time he wrote his autobiography, “Sometimes I Forgot To Laugh”, in 2004, Roebuck was able to tell the Somerset story with relative calm. Not so in his diaries, typed out contemporaneously in obsessive detail, complete with scribbled adjustments.

Three unseen chapters of a book called “1986 And All That” have been discovered and placed on the family website.

“The truth can finally be told,” is how the family puts it.

Roebuck was in his first season as Somerset captain, regarding himself as a more relaxed figure, at 30, than the intense batsman who had written the self-absorbed study of life on the county circuit, It Never Rains, a few years earlier.

That self-ease soon departed.

In midsummer he was informed at an emergency meeting of the management and cricket committee that Martin Crowe had been approached by Essex.

Crowe was fast becoming an international star and he had filled in handsomely for Richards during his absence on a West Indies tour.

He had long been eyed as a future signing.

Crowe, Roebuck writes, was “a man of brilliance rare in the game, a man of standards rare in the game”. Roebuck’s yearning to reshape a failing, ageing Somerset side has youth and work ethic at its core and encourages him to support the majority preference on the committee to sign Crowe and release Richards and Garner after many years of loyal service. One wonders how Botham will respond to Roebuck’s allegation in the diaries that Botham viewed Crowe at the time as little better than a good club player.

In Somerset, Richards and Garner were far more than overseas players. They were part of their limited-overs folklore, as much a part of Somerset as scrumpy or skittles.

Tabloid journalists descend upon Taunton, enquiring about his relationship with the young cricketers he houses on an annual basis.

He would have a similar house for Zimbabweans and South Africans in South Africa.

Fifteen years later, his belief in the educative value of corporal punishment was to lead to a guilty plea, to his instant regret, to three charges of common assault against South African teenagers.

Roebuck’s insistence that he will not surrender to “moral blackmail” is one of the most revealing passages in these freshly discovered chapters.

The Roebuck family website goes as far as to suggest “a causal connection” between events at Somerset that fateful summer and the manner in which his life came to a tragic end many years later.

You would have to be a believer in chaos theory to accept this conclusion without reservation.

Another 25 years elapsed before Roebuck fell to his death from a Cape Town hotel window in 2011 while being questioned by police about an alleged sexual assault, which remains unproven.

A police statement at the time said that Roebuck, by then a celebrated author and journalist, committed suicide, a version of events that was accepted by a closed inquest, before last month South Africa’s Director of Public Prosecutions responded to family lobbying and agreed to review the findings. — Cricinfo/Sports Reporter.