Johnston - Another Slice of Johnners

by the same authors

An Evening With Johnners

Letters Home 19261945

A Delicious Slice of Johnners

also by Brian Johnston

Lets Go Somewhere

Stumped for a Tale

The Wit of Cricket

Armchair Cricket

Its Been a Lot of Fun

Its a Funny Game

Rain Stops Play

Brian Johnstons Guide to Cricket

Chatterboxes

Now Heres a Funny Thing

Its Been a Piece of Cake

The Tale of Billy Bouncer (with Tony Hart)

Brian Johnstons Down Your Way

Forty-Five Summers

Someone Who Was

I Say, I Say, I Say

(with Peter Baxter)

Views from the Boundary

More Views from the Boundary

For Clare, Andrew, Ian and Joanna

MY FATHER ALWAYS considered himself very lucky to be a cricket commentator. But sometimes he felt a little embarrassed that just a game, as he once put it, had played such a large part in his life. I often wake up, he said, and think, Gosh! Youve been talking for years about a bit of wood hitting a little bit of leather!

Brian first began to take an interest in cricket when he was about six. One day his eldest brother Michael threw him a tennis ball and shouted, Im Jack Hearne, youre Patsy Hendren. From that moment on Patsy became Brians hero and he had embarked on a lifelong love of the summer game.

Brian was captain of the Second XI at Eton. He was a good wicket-keeper and an enthusiastic, if slightly unreliable, batsman. At Oxford he kept wicket for New College but was not quite good enough or, perhaps, serious enough to win a blue. Contemporaries have said that he would try to put the batsman off by telling jokes and was even known to wear a false nose and moustache.

After Oxford Brian went into the family coffee business in the City but continued to play cricket for the Eton Ramblers whenever possible during the summer. When he was posted to Santos in Brazil for eighteen months, the first thing he did on arrival was to organise a local cricket team.

At the outbreak of war in 1939 he joined the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards. But even war could not dampen his enthusiasm for the game. In between training exercises, he played in cricket matches against the other battalions, until going with the Guards Armoured Division to Normandy after D-Day. His first letter from Germany to his mother, after VE Day in 1945, asked her to send him a parcel containing: Wicket-keeping gloves, 3 cricket shirts, 3 prs white socks!

Brian was demobbed in 1945 and really wanted to go into the theatre, but a chance meeting with two BBC types in the Guards Club led to a job in the BBC Outside Broadcasts Department. Then a friend with whom he had played club cricket before the war was put in charge of restarting cricket on BBC Television . He rang Brian to ask if he would like to have a shot at cricket commentary. Brian could hardly believe his luck.

That telephone call started him on a remarkable career as a cricket commentator, which was to span twenty-four years on television and a further twenty-four years on radio. He officially retired as a member of the BBC staff in 1972, but then went freelance and continued to work for the BBC until his death at the age of eighty-one in 1994.

A Delicious Slice of Johnners was an anthology of Brians two volumes of autobiography published in the 1970s, along with a collection of his favourite cricket stories. In Another Slice of Johnners I have edited together three more of his books from the 1980s and this time the spotlight is firmly on sport and cricket.

Chatterboxes My Friends the Commentators is an affectionate and humorous account of his former colleagues in the BBC Outside Broadcasts Department. In the original book Brian included several all-round broadcasters such as Richard Dimbleby, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and Gilbert Harding. But for this anthology I have concentrated on the many radio and television sports commentators with whom he worked, before he retired from the BBC in 1972.

This was a time when the BBC ruled the airwaves in sport. BBC commentators such as John Arlott, David Coleman, Henry Longhurst, Dan Maskell and Peter OSullevan were all household names and were the voices of their individual sports. In the book Brian recalls their personalities, their strengths and their weaknesses and, of course, some of their classic gaffes and howlers.

Commentators are a unique band, he wrote. There are very few of us, and in spite of the travel, long hours, the stresses and the working conditions often too cramped, too hot or too cold we should all be extremely thankful for having such a wonderful job.

The second part of this anthology, Brian Johnstons Guide to Cricket, was first published under the title All About Cricket in 1972 but was revised and updated by Brian in 1986. The various chapters cover the history, organisation, laws and techniques of the game, as well as a summary of his favourite players and Test matches. I have included what I consider to be the highlight of the book, in which Brian vividly describes the six most exciting Tests he ever saw and one extra Test which he always wished he had seen.

The final part of this trilogy is Its Been a Piece of Cake A tribute to my favourite Test cricketers which was published in 1989 when Brian was seventy-seven. As a result he decided to write about seventy-seven of his favourite Test cricketers. For this anthology I have had to whittle them down to fifty which means I have had to leave out some eminent names such as Les Ames, Bill Edrich, Brian Close and Bob Willis. As a guide to whom Brian himself would have chosen as his Top Fifty I referred back to his original list of forty-two all-time favourite cricketers in the Guide to Cricket.

Brian died in 1994 and so more recent cricketing heroes such as Michael Atherton, Brian Lara, Steve Waugh and Courtney Walsh are not included. Many of the original statistics have also been superseded since the books were written, as more Test records continue to be broken, so I have updated them all to the present day.

Brian loved his cricket but above all he enjoyed the camaraderie of the game. Far more indelible than memories of games played or watched, he wrote in Its Been a Piece of Cake, are the happy recollections of countless friendships resulting entirely from a mutual love of cricket. Beyond my wildest dreams, when I joined the BBC in 1946 and became a commentator, Test and county cricketers gave me their friendship. I shall always treasure this. It has made my time in the commentary box a supremely happy one, and I shall always be grateful to them, and to all my colleagues in the commentary box.

Here are some of the great voices of British broadcasting and some of the most unforgettable cricketers who ever walked down the pavilion steps at Lords. I hope they will help you to relive many of the classic moments in cricket history. Simply tune the radio into Test Match Special, pop open a bottle of champagne, and help yourself to Another Slice of Johnners.

Barry Johnston

March 2001

ON SATURDAY 27 December 1980 I was invited to be the studio guest in BBC Radio 2s Sport on 2 programme. During the afternoon the presenter, Mike Ingham, suggested that I might like to try out his job, and cue over to the commentator at the various sporting events around the country. I did not do it very well, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself because I found that I knew them all personally.