David Hodgkiss
David Michael William Hodgkiss OBE (June 1948 – 29 March 2020) was a British administrator and chief executive officer, who was the chairman of Lancashire County Cricket Club (LCCC), a professional English cricket team, between April 2017 and March 2020. He had been chief executive of a steel fabrication company, William Hare Group, for which he was awarded an Order of the British Empire for his services to the manufacturing and exporting industry. Hodgkiss was awarded the OBE in June 2014. His OBE was awarded as part of the Queen's Birthday list. After he gained his own honours , he continued to applaud others in the field of cricketing, for example, praising Clive Lloyd, when Clive was knighted as a CBE. Hodgkiss worked for over 20 years at Lancashire Cricket, which was nicknamed the "Red Rose" from Lancashire's historic symbol. He rose from being a board member, to treasurer and vice-chairman, until he became chairman in 2017. He joined the committee as a member in 1998, made second in command to Michael Cairns OBE in 2013, and elected chairman in 2017. In addition to running his own companies, Hodgkiss had served on the boards of 33 corporations , of which he was still a director of four of them as of March 2020. He died at the age of 71 after catching COVID-19 in March 2020 during the disease's global pandemic. He was the first member of the Commonwealth cricket community to die from the coronavirus illness, according to Farokh Engineer, who lauded Hodgkiss as "he best and the most popular chairman LCCC ever had."