CMJ

by Christopher Martin Jenkins

  Rex was a dear, benign fellow, an athletics Blue who captained Bedfordshire at cricket and who, with his spectacles, trim figure and sharp features, looked every inch the schoolmaster he had been at Bedford before and during the war, prior to making his name after it as a cricket, rugby and athletics commentator. He lived into his nineties, having taken a cold bath every morning until late in a life that was accidentally ‘ended’ prematurely by The Times. In 1986 they published his obituary by mistake after John Woodcock, prompted by the news that Rex had been taken to hospital – as it turned out with mere food poisoning – phoned the paper to make a small correction to the obit that had been filed for future use. It makes a pleasing story that Rex, waking the following morning in hospital, feeling much better, discovered his decease whilst reading The Times as he munched his toast and marmalade. As soon as he could he rang the paper and asked to be put through to the obituaries’ editor. ‘This is Rex Alston speaking’ he said. ‘Would you kindly explain why you have published my obituary this morning, albeit a very generous one?’ To which the dumbfounded editor, confident of his newspaper’s infallibility, replied: ‘Where are you speaking from?’

  Robert Hudson, never a man to over-egg any pudding, wrote to me after the audition to say that ‘we felt you made a very good first attempt’. Coming from him, I believe that was quite high praise. I was given another trial run the following year but wheels turned slowly and it was not until the first one-day international to be played in England, at Old Trafford in 1972, that I was let loose on an unwary public. Bob Burrows had by then taken over from Angus Mackay and had to give written permission for me to be released for the day so long as I returned to London ‘fairly smartly, to prepare for Sports Report and Sport on Two the following Saturday’.

  I had been reporting Test matches for Sports News programmes all that season so the established pillars of the commentary box, Brian, John Arlott and the young scorer, Bill Frindall – and their friendly but world-weary producer, Michael Tuke-Hastings – were all familiar to me. Nevertheless it was a tremendous thrill to dine with Brian, John Woodock, Michael Melford and Jack Fingleton at the Swan Inn at Bucklow Hill the night before the match. ‘Fingo’ got into a furious lather over what he believed to be England’s deliberate preparation of a spinner’s pitch for the Headingley Test and it was evident from an article in The Australian newspaper as the Australia v. England series began to generate extra heat in 2011 that many of his compatriots still believe that the fuserium disease that afflicted the Headingley square in 1972 was a foul Pommie conspiracy to allow Derek Underwood to bowl them out. But ‘Fingo’ was in a relaxed mood the following day and I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the commentary on what, fortunately, was a memorable game played on a lovely sunny day. Dennis Amiss made the first hundred in a one-day international in England and ever since these games have been used to blood both cricketers and commentators.

  My performance at Old Trafford apparently met with general satisfaction. To my great good fortune I have been part of the commentary team in every season since. The pleasures are twofold: the actual business of cricket commentary, a delight in itself; and the interaction with those who listen. They include some very interesting and important people, as guests on our Saturday lunchtime programme, Beyond the Boundary, regularly prove. But it was still a pleasant surprise when, as TMS producer and cricket correspondent Peter Baxter and I were summoned to lunch at Westminster a few years ago.

  Sir John Major was ‘only’ the First Secretary to the Treasury then but, like many MPs, he was concerned about a threat to the future of TMS. Cricket commentaries had not until then struck me as being the sort of issue that might be debated in the House of Commons. Bodyline, the 1970 South Africa tour, and more recently cricketing relations with Zimbabwe, have all been legitimate political issues, but was the question of whether or not cricket commentaries might be interrupted by football really a matter of national importance?

  To the future Prime Minister there was no question that it was. Over a convivial lunch round the corner from Parliament, the amiable future president of Surrey and MCC committee member, and his Lancastrian political ally Robert Atkins, also now knighted, left us in no doubt about how strongly they felt the need to preserve the programme’s individual identity.

  The interplay between commentators and listeners both then and now suggests that he was right. People of all ages and types love the combination of cricketing know-how and friendly chat in an atmosphere of relaxed enjoyment. The threat that was worrying followers of TMS then was that ball-by-ball commentary on Radio Three was destined to take its chance with other sport on a wavelength carrying a burgeoning news and sports service called Radio Five Live. The Government had decreed that in 1990 the BBC would lose two of its eight wavelengths and the plan was for Radio Five to take the Test match commentaries under its wing the following year, or as soon as the old Radio Three medium wave disappeared.

  In 1989 no fewer than 140 MPs signed a motion deploring the proposed changes. Gillian Reynolds supported them in the Daily Telegraph, calling TMS ‘a piece of radio which is very British yet which transcends class, age and gender’. The Times reported a spectator at Headingley, Denis Read from Ramsbottom in Lancashire, as saying of Test Match Special: ‘It’s cricket and it’s England and it’s marvellous. It wouldn’t be the same without it. It just makes me feel good and it always has done.’

  Happily, and thanks largely to the public outcry, a solution was found, namely to reposition TMS on Radio Four long wave. Now we also transmit to a growing audience on Radio Five Live Sports Extra, in the crystal clear digital quality of DAB.

  From Howard Marshall through John Arlott and Brian Johnston to Jonathan Agnew and Henry Blofeld; from Norman Yardley and Freddie Brown through Trevor Bailey and Fred Trueman to Mike Selvey, Vic Marks, Geoffrey Boycott and a wide choice of overseas summarisers, the programme has carefully mixed its characters, never ignoring the cake and champagne but, touch wood, never taking its eye off the ball. All of us are forever reliant on the wonderful variety and unpredictability of cricket to keep a devoted audience interested; sometimes even enthralled.

  It may seem just the same as it was in the Arlott/Johnston era, when ‘Blowers’ and myself were cutting our teeth and Frindall was already established as the statistical pillar of the programme. In truth, however, the approach has gently and subtly changed, maintaining its light-hearted, civilised, authoritative approach to a day’s cricket, with no holds barred on any topic thrown up by events in the middle and on the fringes, but gradually developing a sharper journalistic edge without ever abandoning its core role: to tell the listener what is happening in the match and why.

  Listeners to Test Match Special of a certain age – and there are many still about – look back with nostalgia to the days of the 1960s and 1970s when Johnston, the jester, and Arlott, the poet, jointly built the programme’s reputation. John became a treasured companion in the commentary box and Brian a personal friend, despite our difference in age.

  A mix of voices and personalities has always been part of the attraction of TMS. The two most famous and fondly remembered commentators proved it. In voice and character alike they were poles apart; but as a professional act (although in both cases they were natural broadcasters who never needed to act) they were as complementary as cornflakes and milk.

  They were linked by their talent, their love of cricket, the freedom offered them by the burgeoning OB department in the years after the war and the affection and admiration in which they were held by grateful listeners.

  They were separated by much more. Where Arlott was often sombre and serious, Johnston was skittish and comical; where Arlott paced himself like an Oriental spinner, Johnston rushed in like an Aussie fast bowler; where Arlott treasured words like the poet he was and mulled them over as if he were testing the nose of a vintage Château Lafite, Johnston used them with gay abandon, without art or pretension. One was the student of the game who became a professor; the
other the eternal schoolboy who believed that every day’s cricket might, at its dawn, become the greatest and most exciting he had ever witnessed. One was sometimes maudlin, heavy as a brooding cloud, the other invariably light as a soufflé. One carried and dwelt upon the burdens of life; the other cast them aside as quickly as he could.

  Both were original, completely true to themselves. If Arlott was more troubled by self-doubt and insecurity, deep down he knew that he was a man worthy of his calling. Johnston never doubted it: he could not believe his good fortune at finding a medium that suited him so well. If Arlott’s performances as a cricket commentator were less even than Johnston’s he was capable of truly virtuoso performances of inspired description. The occasion I remember best was the one when the BBC’s managing director, Ian Trethowan, came into the box during the World Cup final in 1975. Clive Lloyd was batting majestically and John knew that there was an influential audience. Besides that, like all of us at Lord’s on that glorious day, he was enjoying himself.

  ‘The stroke of a man knocking a thistle top off with a walking stick’ was his description of one majestic Lloyd pull to the Grandstand. Equally graphic was his portrayal of little white-capped Dickie Bird, with his hunched back, catching the excitement like everyone. ‘And Umpire Bird is having a wonderful time, signalling everything insight, including stop to traffic coming on from behind.’

  Brian was not capable of such imagery but in their contrasting way both were consummate broadcasting professionals. To listen to them was a delight and to work with them an extraordinary privilege for me, in John’s case from 1972 until he retired to a quieter, contemplative life on Alderney in 1980, and in Brian’s until he had a fatal heart attack while still working hard at the age of eighty-one in 1993.

  It was not possible to be their colleague for so long without becoming immensely fond of them both. I knew Brian longer and better; often during Lord’s Test matches staying with him and Pauline, his pretty, forceful, sometimes impetuous but always staunchly supportive wife. Exactly ten years younger than her beloved spouse, she still lives in the house at Boundary Road in St. John’s Wood that succeeded the family home a few hundred yards away, at Hamilton Terrace, one of the most elegant streets in London.

  ‘B.J.’ was wonderful company, as funny in private conversation as he was on his feet after dinner on a public occasion. He loved to pun, and gossip, not least, of course, about people in cricket. All his huge fund of stories became familiar in time but it was his flair for entertainment, both in private and in public, that made them genuinely funny every time. Barry Johnston, his eldest son, recalled in his biography of his father how, sometimes, his reaction to something that had amused him on television – a bad piece of acting, perhaps or the way that someone had said something, would start Brian giggling and soon have the whole family overcome by tears of laughter too, sometimes without even knowing what had started it.

  The famous ‘leg-over’ incident with Jonathan Agnew, a classic example of why live broadcasting is so often more interesting or amusing than recorded, was a case in point. What created the uncontrollable mirth, of course, was the very professionalism of them both: the desperate attempt to keep going. Aggers soon became speechless but the old trouper did his best to carry on.

  Everyone listening loved it and of course the giggles were utterly infectious. I wish there had also been a recording of the day that Brian and I simultaneously collapsed into similarly uncontrollable laughter during a meaningless World Cup match between England and Canada to which practically no one can have been listening. On that occasion there was simply a long silence as Brian, unable to believe the name of the Canadian player that I had just identified for him, Showkhat Bash, retreated from the microphone to try to regain his power of speech. The hiatus seemed to us interminable. In the studio in London the engineers thought the line must have gone down. I have got the giggles on air only once since, in 2008 when, commentating as Stuart Broad bowled to New Zealand’s captain, Daniel Vettori, I said:

  ‘Broad runs in, he bowls, and this time Vettori lets it go outside the off stump. It was a good length, inviting him to fish, but Vettori, so to speak, stayed on the bank and kept his rod up.’

  Jeremy Coney, my summariser, offered no assistance as I realised the double entendre. According to a report in the Evening Standard, ‘seconds later listeners could hear the veteran commentator . . . struggling to keep his composure. His voice got steadily higher as he said: “I don’t know if he’s a fisherman, is he?”’

  It’s as well Brian was not there. It did not matter what age you were with him. He simply loved company although on the rare occasions when he allowed himself a holiday he was no less happy relaxing in a deck-chair with a book. Pauline was a professional photographer and one of her most memorable images of her husband was taken in just such a pose on the Greek island of Lefkas, with a floppy sun-hat on his head, the prominent nose and ears in profile and the sea lapping at the frame of the chair.

  As a young and impecunious married man I found dining with John, as I sometimes did at hotels during Test matches, at once stimulating and somewhat daunting. Not because one knew one was out of one’s depth as far as knowledge and experience were concerned but because John, the gourmet and wine expert, would choose what he fancied and say to the head waiter – ‘split the bill between all of us if you will’. It was worth it for the conversation, which might range anywhere, always with the great man directing it. Hotels were one thing, however; an invitation to lunch at his wonderfully spacious house in Alresford – Hampshire, of course – quite something else. You could forget plans to do anything else for the rest of the day.

  When his second wife, Valerie, was alive, a woman as intelligent and bibulous as himself, they were as hospitable as each other and I cringe still at my state of inebriation when I left their company at about five o’ clock one late autumn afternoon, having stayed ‘for a spot of lunch’. I had already been several times to the loo but the first thing I did after turning my car in the direction of Sussex was to find the nearest hedge in a country lane for further relief.

  By then John was wearing a black tie every day – as he did for the rest of his life when a tie was necessary dress – as penance for the decision to give his beloved eldest son, James, a sports car which, tragically, he drove beneath a lorry having fallen asleep at the wheel after a new year’s party. No one who loses a child can ever be the same and John could not, even for a day, forget the loss.

  Brian had known tragedy too. He was only ten and in his second year at prep school in Eastbourne when his father was drowned in rough sea off Bude in Cornwall, the traditional venue for Johnston family holidays. In the space of three months, indeed, Brian lost his father and his shattered grandfather, Reginald, who had been Governor of the Bank of England. As a consequence both the home where he had been brought up and much of the family’s financial security were lost too.

  Not, however, young B.J.’s inclination to go through life as the joker. The truth, I think, is that he was one of those rare human beings (my daughter, happily, is another) who simply have a God-given gift for sharing their pleasure in life. How misguided was the retort of his subsequent housemaster at Eton, A.C. Huson: ‘You won’t get anywhere in life because you talk too much.’ But there was a much more perceptive verdict from the same source in a report later in his school career, when he had become captain of games. ‘He has been if anything more conscientious. I cannot recall one single instance of his not being present to encourage, and instruct, any one of his teams, when it was even remotely possible for him to be there. It is a great gift this of Bri’s, being able to keep up his enthusiasms . . . he has a very great power over his fellow creatures.’

  These gifts were wasted to a large extent in his brief period in the coffee business before the war but as a Guards officer who gained a Military Cross for his ‘dynamic personality, coupled with his untiring determination and cheerfulness under fire’ they were very much to the fore and they came
across throughout his BBC career.

  Born two years later, in 1914, John had a very different upbringing. Having left Queen Mary’s Grammar School at his home town of Basingstoke after a dispute with his headmaster, he worked for a time at the local town planning office and then as a diet clerk, calculating food allocations, at a mental hospital. In 1934 he joined Southampton police force and remained with them for the next eleven years, starting on the beat. When the war came he worked for Special Branch, screening aliens. His first marriage, in 1940, was to Dawn, a cheery looking hospital nurse who bore him two sons, James and Timothy. John himself was a good-looking fellow in his youth, solidly built and naturally strong. He kept his hair, and a pair of prominent eyebrows that added to his aura of wisdom, into old age.

  Encouraged by John Betjeman and Andrew Young, he began to write his own poems, many of which have found their deserved way into anthologies, not least – but by no means only – cricketing ones. His lines on Jack Hobbs, the master, were themselves masterful. His own gravestone on Alderney contains lines from his poem to Andrew Young that neatly encapsulate his own sharp eye for the human drama of cricket, so evident in his commentaries: