The Character of Cricket
Page 20
Also by Tim Heald
Just Desserts
Murder at Moose Jaw
Masterstroke
Red Herrings
Brought to Book
Business Unusual
Denis Compton: The Authorized Biography
Brian Johnston: The Authorized Biography
Tim Heald
Brian Johnston
THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY
How did it work, exactly, that Johnners magic?
Brian Johnston was arguably the most distinctive and best loved voice in British broadcasting. Elder statesman of the Test Match Special team, he was also Britain’s most entertaining commentator with an irrepressible and infectious sense of humour. Johnners also had an enviable talent like few other broadcasters of making his listeners feel like close, personal friends.
Drawing on Brian Johnston’s own papers and other previously unpublished sources as well as conversations with an enormous selection of his friends and colleagues, Tim Heald’s fully authorised biography brings to us the many different sides of Johnners and encapsulates brilliantly his truly remarkable life.
Prologue
May 16th 1994. It was a typically early cricket season sort of day: no rain to interfere with play, but enough crispness in the air for sweaters. It was the sort of weather Brian would have associated with the first match of the summer tour at Worcester.
Half an hour before play was due to begin, the queue stretched hundreds of yards back from the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. It snaked all along the railings into Parliament Square and it contained the great and the good and the plain ordinary, which was just how he would have wished it. The Secretary of MCC, Roger Knight, and the President of MCC, Dennis Silk, alighted from their taxi at 11.30 at almost exactly the same time as a tousled David Gower, grinning in that characteristically sheepish way as he walked to the back of the queue.
‘How did you know him?’ I asked my neighbour as we shuffled towards our pews.
‘Oh, I didn’t,’ he said, ‘but I admired him.’
Brian would have enjoyed the ties, for he had a penchant for old-fashioned meaningful stripes. There were rhubarb and custard MCC ties, and duck egg and black Old Etonian ties, and Lord’s Taverners ties and Eton Ramblers ties and hundreds of others signifying membership of cricket clubs obscure and famous. ‘I thought of wearing my MCC tie,’ confided the Prime Minister a little later, ‘but I thought it might look like showing off.’
The Abbey Church was packed out. Indeed it was a mightier congregation than you would find at most county championship matches these days, especially on a Monday morning in May.
The service itself was billed as a ‘celebration’, so that although it had its solemn moments there was laughter and fun as well, which was surely as he would have wished. The band of his old regiment, the Grenadier Guards, played the ‘Eton Boating Song’, and provided the most affecting moment of the service when two soldiers, one on fife and one on drum, slow marched the length of the church playing that soulful regimental lament, ‘The Grenadier’s Return’. Each of his three sons, Barry, Andrew and Ian, gave readings – verses by his old friend William Douglas-Home, a passage on the meaning of life from his own book, Someone Who Was, and a foreword to another of his books by Bud Flanagan. Colin Cowdrey and John Major both spoke. Trollope was invoked. And the Grantland Rice poem which ends with the sentiment that it matters not who won or lost – ‘but how you played the game’. Lord Runcie, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, led us in thanking God for him; Richard Stilgoe recited some verses he had composed specially for the occasion; Michael Denison read Neville Cardus on the Long Room at Lord’s; and Melvin Collins read his own poem – ‘Johnners – From a Blind Listener’. The service ended on a characteristically Johnstonian note. It must have been the first time that the theme from Neighbours and ‘Underneath the Arches’ were played in the Abbey church. Brian’s musical tastes were always catholic. The Dean had agreed to these selections, on condition that he didn’t actually have to process down the aisle to the tune of an Australian soap opera.
Afterwards a host of his friends adjourned to the Banqueting House in Whitehall for a jolly lunch. Pauline had asked that ladies should wear ‘bright clothes’, and she herself set a good example by wearing vivid pink and also making a festive speech of thanks of which Brian would have been proud.
The room was full of laughter and at the end of the buffet meal strawberry and banana messes, the traditional Eton summer pudding, were handed round.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ someone asked Brian’s old friend, Denis Compton, the greatest living English cricketer, who was limping heavily on a single crutch.
‘No thanks old boy,’ said Compton. ‘The Prime Minister’s getting me one.’
And, sure enough, Mr Major presently appeared with a glass of red wine from the bar.
It was an exchange which Brian Johnston would have enjoyed. It was all too easy to imagine him chortling at the idea of the Prime Minister being Compton’s personal wine waiter. He relished that sort of mild and wholly English absurdity, just as he relished life in all its richness and variety, always taking rough with smooth, though kidding the rest of us that there was no such thing as rough.
Once or twice in that convivial throng someone said something which brought back a memory of ‘Johnners’ so vividly that for a second or so there were tears amid the laughter. That seemed right too. They were wiped away quite fast, but it was meant to be a poignant occasion as well as fun.
The great sadness was that he was not there to share in the jokes and the reminiscences and the fondness of friendship recalled. And yet, of course, he was there, lingering on in everyone’s mind, that utterly distinctive voice and character, symbolising so much of what was good about England, especially on a summer’s day. Few others ever have so effectively talked their way into the nation’s affection, and for those thousands who, through his broadcasting, came to think of him as their personal friend he’ll never really be that far away. As another Etonian writer put it,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,
For death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
Brian himself might have thought that a little far-fetched and over the top. In any case, he would probably protest, you couldn’t possibly say his voice was like a nightingale’s – more like an amusing auk or a humorous macaw.
But I think, deep down and perhaps without even acknowledging it, he would have known what I mean.
Published by Dean Street Press 2015
Copyright © 1986 Tim Heald
All Rights Reserved
The right of Tim Heald to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1986 by Pavilion Books in association with Michael Joseph
Cover by DSP
Illustrations © 1986 Paul Cox
ISBN 978 1 910570 27 2
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk