So clear you see these timeless things
That, like a bird, the vision sings.
Arlott wore his deep literary knowledge lightly, in fact, during his commentaries – and in his cricket writing for the Guardian too – but he was familiar with and to many of his contemporary writers, poets and artists—Betjeman, Edmund Blunden, Cyril Connolly, T.S. Eliot, Osbert Lancaster, John Piper and Vita Sackville-West amongst them. He became a collector not just of books and, subsequently, of wine but also of aquatint engravings – he was an expert on these too – and of other objects as diverse as Sunderland glass and herbs from the Himalayas. It was his poetry that led him to Geoffrey Grigson, a BBC West of England producer, who gave him his first chance to broadcast. He was told that he had ‘a vulgar voice but an interesting mind’. It was true, yet the voice became one of the most imitated there has ever been outside politics, not least in my schooldays by myself.
Towards the end of the war he began to feature on various talk radio programmes until, in the summer of 1945, he was appointed literary programme producer in the BBC’s overseas service, a position formerly occupied by no less a literary talent than George Orwell. Rather like Brian, but in quite a different way, the war proved to be a watershed in his life, but perhaps there was hardly anyone of a similar age for whom that was not so. He remained on the BBC staff until 1953, for the last two years as an instructor in the staff training unit, but he operated as a free-lance for the broadcasting, cricket commentating and writing that increasingly occupied his time. Although for the rest of his life he was busy and in demand – even in retirement on Alderney – he never quite lost the feeling of insecurity common to most people who work only for themselves and their families.
His first opportunity to commentate on cricket (as opposed to contributing talks on the subject) came when the Indians toured in 1946. No one could fail to notice his flair for words or the distinctive slow pace with which they were used and the deliberate, rough voice, always glibly described as a Hampshire burr but actually unique. From 1947, when he commentated again on the South Africa tour and on county cricket, he became an established part of the BBC commentary team. It missed the point that John’s accent was so different from the more stereotypical BBC voices around him, notably those of Swanton and Alston. It was talent, his unhurried, measured style of delivery and his breadth of general knowledge, not the Hampshire accent, that made him so famous so quickly and for so long.
He had played just enough cricket to be able to interpret what was going on with insight and he knew enough of the players to be able to add an extra ingredient to his natural – indeed police-trained – eye for detail. He superimposed knowledge of the history of the game and of the character of those he was describing to a grateful unseen audience. He loved the players and they loved him to the extent of making him President of the Cricketers’ Association. His innate liberalism – and actual support for a Liberal party for whom he stood as candidate for Epping in both the 1955 and 1959 General Elections – gave him an awareness of public affairs, and a knowledge about the procedure of institutions and committees.
He was therefore especially useful to the Association when debates raged over the two great issues of his later years as a journalist and commentator, and of my early years. These were, of course, cricketing relations with South Africa and the schism in world cricket over television coverage of the game in Australia. Professionals were pushed into one of two camps by Kerry Packer’s two-year programme of international matches, using players whose services he had bought for salaries vastly greater than those they had previously been earning.
If John was broadly neutral in the battle between Packer and the establishment he was emphatically and implacably opposed to the South African Government and its pernicious apartheid policy. He had seen and abhorred it at first hand on the England tour of 1948/9. If his commentary role did not allow him to express much personal comment on that subject, other than when it was raining, his better-paid role as cricket correspondent of the Guardian enabled him to enlighten readers of a like mind.
He kept up a prodigious work rate in and out of the cricket season. He produced numerous character sketches for various publications and his books included a wonderfully astute study of Fred Trueman, with whom he worked happily in the TMS box for his last seven years. Later he also wrote for the Guardian on wine which had the added advantage, no doubt, of adding some free bottles to the major collection he had in the cellars of the Old Sun, only some of which was shipped across to Alderney, although there was never a danger of his falling short of supplies there.
Policeman he may have been but I never heard him say that he never drunk on duty, unlike Jonathan Agnew, who quite rightly spotted the signs of a little too much levity, leading to a lack of professionalism, on the part of some. Arlott, however, could take it and I never saw the extremely large glass of red that he liked to have late in the morning affect his performance, with one notable exception, or near exception, in his final year, 1980, when he had announced his retirement in advance and was feted at every ground he attended. During the interval of the Test at Nottingham that year I remember the sales manager of Ansells, the brewery that owned the Trent Bridge Inn, getting up to say what a great privilege it had been to have John at their lunches for so many years. In truth he had not needed much condescension, and nor did I, to eat their best beef and drink their finest claret!
In the Lord’s Test of that summer he gave his usual immaculate description of the play in the last twenty minutes before lunch – if, perhaps, a little more ponderous in pace and tone than he had been in his prime. The moment, however, that he said his last words – ‘And for his summary of the morning’s play it will be Fred Trueman’ – he slumped forward on the desk in front of him and went instantly to sleep. This was a matter first of concern, then of amusement to the rest of us in the box, but Fred, eyes fastened on the players coming off the field in front of him, was blissfully unaware until some two minutes later he completed his not uncritical comments on the England fast bowling with the words ‘That’s my opinion, anyway. I don’t know what you think, John?’
He turned to see Arlott’s heavy form slumped unconscious across the desk beside him and with wonderful presence of mind – despite a look of some horror on his face – he added: ‘Well, John is nodding his head vigorously, and with that, back to t’studio.’ Some weeks later, at the Test at Lord’s to celebrate the centenary of Australia’s first official Test in England, John, famously, refused to make any dramatic farewell and simply handed over to the next man (who happened to be me) as the final act of his career as a Test commentator. He was not unaware, however, that it was a moment of national importance and when the public address announcer, Alan Curtis, said at the end of the over that John Arlott had just finished his last stint as a Test commentator the great man himself was visible, making his way out of the box at the top of the pavilion. The players turned towards him and joined a standing crowd in a generous ovation.
It was a moving tribute and one that Brian would certainly have received too had he chosen his moment to go. It was his natural friendliness, after all, and the atmosphere of gaiety and fun that he brought to his radio commentaries when television was unwise enough to say that it no longer wanted him in 1970, that expanded the range and, definitely, the popularity of the programme. Hudson, the wise head of OBs at the time, snapped him up by simply creating space for four commentators instead of three at each match. By then he was fifty-eight, only two years away from his official retirement with the BBC. Already he had been working for them for twenty-six years, the result of his yearning to be an entertainer – originally, he hoped, on the stage – and a chance meeting with two OB stalwarts, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and Stewart MacPherson, when they were reporting on the Allied advance towards the end of the war.
Invited for a voice test by the respected head of outside broadcasts, his fellow Etonian Seymour de Lotbinière, alias Lobby, Brian impressed him when,
instead of going to Piccadilly Circus to produce a five-minute written report on what he had seen, he recorded one instead by going into a record shop and using the ‘record your own message’ service. His second test was to interview passers-by, in Oxford Street, under the supervision of Vaughan-Thomas. The result, by Vaughan-Thomas’s reckoning, was ‘gloriously uninhibited’.
He soon made his mark in a pioneering department of the Corporation. His love of musicals and the music hall gave him the pleasant job of sifting plays and comedy material for broadcasts, then introducing and linking excerpts from West End shows. It brought him into contact with comedians he revered such as Arthur Askey and Bud Flanagan, whose ‘Underneath the Arches’ Brian later performed with the great man and with anyone else who would sing with him in years ahead. He carried in his head a tremendous stock of material from those days, especially of the music hall double-act variety. Example: ‘Excuse me, do you know you’ve got a banana in your ear?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I said did you know you’ve got a banana in your ear?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear a word you’re saying: I’ve got a banana in my ear.’
He was as likely to come out with something like this on the air at appropriate moments as he was in private. He had already made his mark on listeners by the time that he was invited to revive a feature called ‘Let’s Go Somewhere’, started by John Snagge before the war, as part of the Saturday night Home Service programme In Town Tonight. Starting with a visit to the Chamber of Horrors after dark at Madame Tussauds he made a tremendous success of an enormous variety of features, from serving in a fish and chip shop or broadcasting from the driver’s cab in a tube train, to quite dangerous stunts such as being shot sixty feet in the air up a vertical tunnel by a pilot’s ejector seat (microphone attached), riding bareback on a circus horse or feigning a robbery and being attacked on a padded arm by a police Alsatian.
It was his old friend Ian Orr-Ewing who, as head of outside broadcasts in the BBC’s fledgling television service, first recruited him for cricket commentary. Working with Jim Swanton, Robert Hudson and, a little later, Peter West, on home Tests, he, and from 1964 Richie Benaud, paved the way for the former Test cricketers who now have almost a monopoly as television commentators. As ever Brian was sunny of voice and mien, a pleasure to listen to and charming company whenever his face appeared at intervals in the match. Gradually too, he began reporting on tours overseas, both for radio and television and in 1963, to his great pride, he was appointed the BBC’s second cricket correspondent.
Such was his energy that in 1993, still loving his work and claiming that his five children and, by now, several grandchildren, needed his financial support, he undertook a series of one-man autobiographical shows at provincial theatres (thirty-two in all, over nine months) that must have been both mentally and physically demanding. Invariably An Evening with Johnners played to full houses, and always to delighted ones. He loved cricket, he loved life and he himself was greatly loved both by everyone he knew and a huge array of listeners whom he never met. The cakes sent to him in the commentary box to keep him – and us – going were but one symbol of that affection.
Brian’s death in London on 5 January 1994, a few weeks after a severe heart attack that had affected his brain but, even then, not his spirit, was the signal for widespread expressions of affection and tribute. His status was such that a few days later Raymond Gubbay organised a tribute at the Royal Albert Hall, which I presented at short notice before a large audience. There was an incredible feeling of warmth and affection towards him that Sunday afternoon as there was at the service of thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey, five months after his death.
As Arlott and Johnston were paired in the memory, so up to a point, I suppose, have been myself and Henry Blofeld. We got to cricket commentary at almost the same time (I in 1972, ‘Blowers’ a season later although he was well established as a cricket reporter by then) and before long we were joined by a more experienced broadcaster at the time than either of us, Don Mosey, who flew the northern flag with resolution. I had always imagined that I got on well with Don, who was a highly professional wordsmith inclined to be a little slow on the ball when things that he was describing happened quickly, but we all have strengths and weaknesses. It transpired when he wrote his autobiography that he harboured various grudges, including one against myself for, in a nutshell, becoming cricket correspondent before him despite being younger. Don got his chance when I resigned the job in 1980.
At least Don was content with a single book about his career. Henry, by contrast, is well ahead of most in the autobiography stakes, having reeled off a series of books with the apparent ease of a conjuror pulling rabbits from a hat. Recently too he has emulated Brian by travelling to theatres all round the country, talking about his life. He even hired the Albert Hall to celebrate his seventieth birthday in 2009.
He has had several different agents, a policy that has worked well for him, and has dashed off columns for many different newspapers. In his time he has been ‘big’ on radio in the West Indies and Australia, where they were intrigued at first by what might be called his ‘broad Etonian’, and very big in the smaller pool of New Zealand, where for a time he was also the host of a television chat show. Unlike Chris Cowdrey, whose quick wit was missed on TMS when he switched to talkSPORT, Blowers was forgiven for leaving Test Match Special for a time to do television commentary for Sky, who offered better rewards, in monetary terms at least. It was in that role during an England tour of India that he informed newly joining viewers that during the tea interval there had been a minute’s silence to ‘celebrate’ the assassination of Mrs Gandhi.
We have all had moments of embarrassment like that and in his life generally Henry has had his ups and downs, including the argument with a bus towards the end of his time at Eton that set back an extremely promising career as a cricketer. As a schoolboy wicket-keeper and batsman he had scored a hundred at Lord’s against the Combined Services in 1956 that promised fame as a player. He still played for Cambridge (averaging a very respectable twenty-four in first-class matches, including a hundred against MCC at Lord’s) and time and again in his life he has shown the same remarkable resilience.
If the gift of the gab is the first essential for a broadcaster, Blowers has never been found wanting. His other great gift was his voice which seems to make women of all ages melt down the airwaves, especially if they come from the same social background as himself. He has never made any secret of his high society origins in Norfolk, nor the education at Eton and Cambridge that separates him from the great majority of his listeners. Most of them rather like his plummy accent, although for this and other reasons he probably divides opinion more than most.
No one would accuse Henry of overdoing his research but he has always used his experience cleverly, not least when it comes to the identification of one Sri Lankan cricketer from another. It was a standing in-joke that when the relatively easily pronounced John and de Silva were playing for Sri Lanka they seemed to do all the fielding between them while Blowers was at the microphone.
In fact he has an excellent memory for anything other than names and will turn his hand to talking or writing about most things, especially if someone will pay him for it. While most of his TMS colleagues settle for a break at lunchtime, Blowers will often dash round to someone’s box to sip a glass or two and chat to the clients.
He never fails to amuse me when he recounts, at great length, the occasion when he mistook the entrance door of a hotel room for the bathroom door as he went to answer a call of nature in the night. Thus it was that he found himself in the nude in the middle of a corridor with the door locked behind him and no key. The consequences were the hilarious stuff of an Ealing comedy. Unlike Brian, however, he is not always as amusing an entertainer of a live audience as they expect him to be. Despite that, his roadshow continues to be in demand because he is a genuine eccentric and has a fund of anecdotes. He also has extraordina
ry energy. I asked him once whether he really needed to work as hard as he does. In a rare moment of revelation about his real – as opposed to public – personality he replied: ‘If I didn’t I know I would simply stay at home and drink myself to death.’ It is a wise man who knows himself.
If his voice and its effect on women have been the chief secrets of Henry’s success, members of the fairer sex have also caused him plenty of problems over the years. He got out of the habit of marrying after three attempts but for years whenever one saw him at the start of a new season, he would declare that he had fallen in love again, usually, so it seemed, with a wealthy widow who had one comfortable house in somewhere like Gloucestershire, another in Chelsea and a third in a desirable place in the sun. Recently he has found genuine happiness with an Italian widow and his commentaries seem to have revived as a direct result.
For most of our time together in the commentary box Henry and I were shrewdly guided by Peter Baxter, producer of TMS for thirty-four years. Peter is a gentle soul although the sometimes impossible demands of his job would occasionally drive him into foot-stamping rage. His general approach was to allow the programme to evolve naturally but that is not to say that he was afraid of change. It was in his time, for example, that the idea of the commentators chatting through the rain became a habit, one that was greatly appreciated by our listeners. The tradition started by accident when the lightest possible rain began falling on the Saturday of the England v.West Indies Test at Lord’s in 1976, but seemed unlikely to hold up play for long. Until then it had been the custom to go back to the studio for some Bach, Berlioz or Beethoven when there was no play – this being in the days when ball-by-ball commentary was transmitted, somewhat incongruously, on Radio Three.
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