I attended as a boarder from the age of eight, there was a small television in the room in which you sat while waiting to see matron in the adjoining sick bay. She was a big one for dispensing, twice per day for upset tummies, kaolin and morphine, which tasted utterly disgusting, and then, as a general pick-me-up, some black, sticky, treacly stuff which was equally foul. Despite that, my best pal, Christopher Dockerty, and I would rotate various bogus ailments on a daily basis in order to get a brief look at the cricket on her telly – even just a glimpse of the score was enough. Matron never twigged that Christopher and I were only ever under the weather during a Test match. Incidentally, Chris was a brilliant mimic who could bowl with a perfect imitation of Max Walker’s action while commentating in a more than passable John Arlott. He was also the most desperately homesick little boy in the school. His later life would take an unexpected and ultimately tragic turn. As Major Christopher Dockerty he became one of the most senior and respected counter-terrorism experts in the British Army. Posted to Northern Ireland, he was a passenger on the RAF Chinook helicopter that crashed on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994, killing all twenty-nine people on board.
My first cricket coach at school was a woman. Eileen Ryder was married to an English teacher, Rowland Ryder, whose father had been the Secretary of Warwickshire County Cricket Club in 1902, when Edgbaston staged its first Test match. The R.V. Ryder Stand, which stood to the right of the pavilion before the recent redevelopments, and where I used to interview the England captain before every Test match there, was named after him. Mrs Ryder was patient and kindly, and along with my father was the person who really taught me how to bowl at a tender age. Like him, she reinforced the image I already had of cricket as a happy and friendly occupation.
A couple of years later we had our first professional coach when Ken Taylor, a former Yorkshire and England batsman, professional footballer and wonderful artist, moved to Norfolk. A gentle and quiet man, he might well have played more than his three Tests had he been more pushy and enjoyed more luck. It has been said that he was an exceptional straight driver because of the narrowness of the ginnells – those little passageways that run between the terraced houses of northern England – in which he batted as a child. I suspect some of the ginnells might even have been cobbled, which would have made survival seriously hard work.
The privileged boys of Taverham Hall, in their caps and blazers of bright blue with yellow trim, must have been quite an eye-opener for Ken. I saw him for the first time in the best part of forty years when Yorkshire CCC held a reunion for its players in 2009, and one of his paintings was auctioned to raise money for the club. It was the most lifelike image one could imagine of Geoffrey Boycott playing an immaculate cover drive. I regret not buying it now, given my close connections to both men. In any case, I managed to encourage Ken onto Test Match Special, and memories of hours spent in the nets with him at Taverham came flooding back.
A trip to London in those days was considered by my dad to be quite an outing, but he booked tickets for the two of us to watch Lancashire play Kent in the 1971 Gillette Cup final at Lord’s. He was still reeling from a disastrous attempt to find Heathrow airport by car at the start of our recent family summer holiday. Utterly lost and desperate, he flagged down a passer-by who kindly offered to take us there, but instead directed us to his house somewhere in London, whereupon he jumped out, leaving us stranded. We opted for the train this time.
The whole occasion had a profound impact on me. The smell and sound of Lord’s was captivating, and it was a good match. I was thrilled by the sight of Peter Lever, the Lancashire fast bowler, tearing in from the Nursery end from what seemed to me an impossibly long run-up. Sitting side-on to the pitch in the old Grandstand, I had never seen a ball travel so fast, and Peter immediately became my childhood hero. The Lancashire captain Jack Bond took a brilliant catch in the covers, and David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd scored 38; these ex-players are all now friends of mine. Dad took his radio, but with an earpiece so I could listen and gaze up at the radio commentary box high to my right in the nearest turret of the Pavilion. All the usual suspects were on duty, and it is surprising to remember now that Brian Johnston, then aged fifty-nine, was only one year away from compulsory retirement as the first BBC cricket correspondent. I suppose I might have wished that one day I would also be commentating from that box, with its wonderful view of the ground. Twenty years later, I would be doing just that.
I moved on to Uppingham School in Rutland in 1973, and one year there was great excitement amongst the boys because Brian Johnston was coming to give a talk. These events usually took place in one of the smaller assembly rooms, which were commonly used for concerts and such things, or in the school theatre. Guest speakers did not normally arouse much excitement among the boys at Uppingham, and those who did come were usually untidily bearded professors and the like. But this was different, and any boys who were not aware of who Brian was, would have been told firmly by their fathers to attend. In the end, such was the demand that Brian addressed us in the vast main hall, which spectacularly dominates the central block of the school’s buildings and which could seat all the pupils and staff – a total of close to nine hundred people. It was almost full. I remember Johnners wearing a grey suit, and standing very tall at a lectern in the middle of the enormous stage. If he had any notes, they can have been little more than a few scribbled jottings. He certainly did not read from a script.
I was sitting about a third of the way down the room, and assumed that Brian would talk purely about cricket, but this was the moment I started to realise that there was more to his life than just cricket commentary. Typically, he was more interested in getting laughs during his well-honed speech than he was in telling us about the more interesting and intimate aspects of his life. That would also be the case when we worked together, because for Johnners everything simply had to be rollicking good fun; almost excessively so. Significant and poignant events in his life, such as the unimaginable horror of watching his father drown off a Cornish beach at the age of ten, or being awarded the Military Cross in the Second World War for recovering casualties under enemy fire, were absolutely never mentioned. Is it possible that his almost overpowering bonhomie, which some people could actually find intimidating rather than welcoming, had been a means of coping with the impact of his father’s sudden and tragic death when Brian was a youngster?
The annual summer trip to Bude was a Johnston family tradition that had been started by Brian’s grandmother, and even extended to their renting the same house every year. The Johnstons were a large family with a very comfortable background as landowners and coffee merchants. Reginald Johnston, Brian’s grandfather, was Governor of the Bank of England between 1909 and 1911, and his father, Charles, had been awarded both the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross while serving as a Lieutenant Colonel on the Western Front in the First World War. At the end of the war he returned to the family coffee business, which required him to work long hours in London. As a result Brian, the youngest of four children, saw little of his father, and consequently they did not enjoy a close relationship. Brian’s early childhood was, nonetheless, a happy time, spent on a large farm in Hertfordshire, and with the war over, he and his family had every reason to feel optimistic about the future.
All this was destroyed in the summer of 1922, when the Johnston clan, together with some family friends who were holidaying with them, settled down for a day on the beach at Widemouth Sands in north Cornwall. Ironically, Brian’s father had been due to return to London that morning, but had decided to stay on. At low tide, they all went for a swim. The official version of events is that Brian’s sister Anne was taken out to sea by the notoriously strong current and, seeing that she was in trouble, the Colonel and his cousin, Walter Eyres, swam out to rescue her.
Anne was brought to safety by Eyres, but Brian’s father, who was not a strong swimmer, was clearly struggling as he battled against the tide to reach the shore. A rope was found, and one end was held by the group on the beach while another member of the party, Marcus Scully, took the other end, dived into the water and desperately swam out in an attempt to save Colonel Johnston. But the rope was too short. Scully could not reach the Colonel, who was swept out to sea and drowned at the age of forty-four.
The tragedy was clearly a devastating moment in
