his father, a highly decorated army officer, must have been an absolute hero. How can the young boy have felt as he stood helplessly on the shore and watched his father drifting slowly out to sea? A few weeks after the Colonel’s death, his own father – Brian’s grandfather – died from shock.
The whole dreadful saga was made even more complicated by an extraordinary turn of events. Only a year later, Brian’s mother, Pleasance, remarried. Her second husband was none other than Marcus Scully, whose rescue attempt had failed to save Brian’s father. There had been some gossip about the pair having been on more than friendly terms before the Colonel perished. However, it seems more likely that Scully, who was the Colonel’s best friend, suggested that he take on the family in what appeared, to the children at least, to be a marriage of convenience. In the event, it did not last long, and when they divorced Brian’s mother reverted to being called Mrs Johnston.
Interestingly, Brian’s recollection of his father’s death in his autobiography differs from this, the official account, in one crucial respect. As Brian told it, it was Scully who found himself in trouble, not Brian’s sister Anne, and it was a heroic attempt to rescue Scully by the Colonel that cost him his life. This version of events appears to have been a typically charitable act by Brian in order not to distress his sister, who, the family privately agreed, was at fault for ignoring warnings not to swim too far away from the beach, and got into difficulties. Brian could not bring himself to blame her for their father’s death in print, and so concocted a different story for his book.
Brian’s education had started at home with a series of governesses, then at the age of eight he was sent away to boarding school. Temple Grove, located in Eastbourne in Brian’s day, sounds rather an austere establishment, with no electricity or heating. Brian, who was a rather fussy and predictable eater throughout his life, found the food particu -larly awful, and supplemented his diet with Marmite. Years later, I remember him asking Nancy, the much-loved chef whose kitchen was directly below our commentary box in the Pavilion at Lord’s, for a plate of Marmite sandwiches as a change from his usual order of roast beef, which he used to collect from her every lunchtime. Brian appears to have remembered Temple Grove for two reasons: the matron had a club foot, and the headmaster, the Reverend H.W. Waterfield, a glass eye. How did he know he had a glass eye? ‘It came out in conversation!’
Although cricket was Brian’s first love, it seems that he might have been more successful at rugby, in which he was a decent fly-half. He kept wicket for the first XI in his final two years at Temple Grove – he always referred to wicketkeepers as standing ‘behind the timbers’ – and was described in a school report as ‘very efficient’ and unfailingly keen. His batting appears to have been rather eccentric, and he was a notoriously poor judge of a run. This might explain his excitement during commentary on Test Match Special at the prospect of a run-out, and especially at the chaos invariably created by overthrows, which he always referred to as ‘buzzers’. This appears to be very much, although not exclusively, an Etonian expression. Henry Blofeld, like Johnners an Old Etonian, remembers ‘buzzers’ rather than ‘overthrows’ being the term of choice in matches involving the old boys, the Eton Ramblers. Like Johnners, Henry always describes buzzers with particular relish.
From Temple Grove, Brian went on to Eton, which he loved, and remembered as being like a wonderful club. It was there that he discovered he could make people laugh, and also where it is believed he started his unusual habit of making a sound like a hunting horn from the corner of his mouth. We often heard this from the back of the commentary box, usually in the form of two gleeful ‘whoop whoops’ whenever he detected even the faintest whiff of a double entendre in the commentary, or just to amuse himself. ‘It’s amazing,’ Trevor Bailey observed once of an excellent delivery from the Pakistani fast bowler Waqar Younis, ‘how he can whip it out just before tea.’ Rear of commentary box: ‘Whoop whoop!’
As was the case at prep school, cricket was Brian’s particular love at Eton, although he still seemed to be more successful at rugby. He proudly told the story of being surely the only player in the history of the sport to score a try while wearing a mackintosh. This occurred while he was at Oxford. He lost his shorts while being tackled, and had retired to the touchline and put on the coat ‘to cover my confusion’, as he put it. The ball was passed down the three-quarter line and Brian out rageously reappeared on the wing, mackintosh and all, to score between the posts. Oh, to have seen that.
Inevitably, Brian’s dream in his final summer at Eton in 1931 was to represent the first XI and to play against the school’s great rivals, Harrow, in the traditional two-day showpiece at Lord’s. This was almost as much of a date in the calendar of the social elite as it was a cricket match, and it was the ambition of every cricketer at both schools to make the cut. But Brian never did, and as would be the case with his sacking from the BBC television commentary team many years later, he deeply resented the fact, and often spoke quite openly about it. He laid the blame firmly at the feet of one Anthony Baerlein, who had kept wicket for the Eton first XI for the previous two years. Brian always held the firm belief that Baerlein should have left school at the end of the summer term, allowing Brian a free run at his place behind the timbers in his final year. But according to Brian, Baerlein, with an eye on a third appearance at Lord’s, decided to stay on an extra year, and dashed Brian’s hopes. (Records show that Baerlein was indeed nineteen and a half years old when he, rather than Johnners, played against Harrow in the summer of 1931, but also that he had arrived at Eton in 1925, and was therefore in the same year as Brian. He would go on to become a novelist and journalist before joining the RAF in the Second World War. He was killed in action in October 1941, at the age of just twenty-nine.)
During his time at the famous old school Johnners made many lifelong friends, and the Eton connection would provide him with invaluable contacts later on; not least – and most conveniently – Seymour de Lotbiniere, who happened to be head of Outside Broadcasts when Brian applied for his first job at the BBC. Brian was late for the interview, which was very unusual for a man who in my experience was a fastidious timekeeper. It turns out that he had been given the wrong time for his appointment, but the Old Etonian ‘Lobby’ gave him the job anyway.
At the time Brian left Eton, everything seemed to be pushing him towards the family coffee business, but he already knew this was not for him. He was not particularly enthusiastic about university, but managed to secure a place at New College, Oxford. He claimed this was achieved more on the back of his father having been there than because of any academic merit or even potential. At least it meant delaying the apparently inevitable career in coffee, which would also mean a lengthy spell living in Brazil. He read History at Oxford, gained a third-class degree and very obviously had a good time. Cricket featured highly, but so too did practical jokes, which usually involved his partner in crime William Douglas-Home, who had been at Eton with him and whose older brother Alec would later become Prime Minister. The pair would dress up, often disguising themselves, and cause various degrees of mayhem, not least when Douglas-Home lost his driving licence and, as an emergency, hired a horse and carriage and appointed Brian his groom. (Douglas-Home’s offence, incidentally, was no more than parking without sidelights, suggesting, possibly controversially, that traffic wardens have mellowed over the years.)
What a sight it must have been as the mischievous pair steered this contraption through the middle of Oxford. The first proper outing involved being taken by ‘Lily’ – named after the Lady Mayor of Oxford – to buy a newspaper; it ended in chaos when they found it impossible to turn the carriage around, and caused a major traffic jam. In time and with practice, Brian and Douglas-Home became adept at handling Lily and the carriage, and they even travelled to lectures in this manner. Lily became a familiar figure in Oxford, and the police gave her precedence at crossroads.
The comical image this conjures up is Brian to a T: larger than life, outrageous and definitely slightly ridiculous, but also more than sufficiently confident to pull it off. These traits would all manifest themselves when it came to performing in his regular live radio slot in Let’s Go Somewhere in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Brian was
