Thanks, Johnners: An Affectionate Tribute to a Broadcasting Legend. Jonathan Agnew

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 Brian’s life, and neither he nor his brothers and sister could ever bear to talk about it. To the ten-year-old Brian, 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,