Robert Phillip on EW Swanton

Robert Phillip05-Feb-2008
A sort of a cricket person © Getty Images
Inches of snow have fallen on the garden beyond, but tucked away here indoors the voice is that of golden-rayed summers long gone by. EW Swanton CBE – `Jim` to his global family of friends – will be 90 next month, but his thirst for fun is as undiluted as the gin and so-called tonic he proceeds to pour.He has been told he was a five-month-old baby in his pram on thepavilion balcony when W G Grace made 140 for London County atForest Hill in 1907, as a lad of nine he watched the glow in thesky over north London announcing the shooting down of a firstworld war German Zeppelin near Cuffley, Herts, and as a highlyexcited 12-year-old he visited the Oval in 1919 to see hisbeloved Surrey play Yorkshire and to fall hopelessly in love withcricket.Eight decades, 23 books, an estimated eight million words (mostof them as cricket correspondent of The Daily Telegraph) andcountless hours at the microphone later, his ardour for the gameglows with the same schoolboy intensity. When E W Swanton admits you into the office – part library, part museum, part den – of his idyllic 18th-century town house at Sandwich, nearthe Kent coast, you settle back in a leather chair, savour thatmelody of ice rattling on crystal glass and luxuriate in thesound of his master`s voice. And, oh, what a voice it is. As David Rayvern Allen describes it in E W`s latest book, Last Over: A Life In Cricket: “That beautifully produced brown, treacly voice with ecclesiastical overtones was – and is – compelling. A friend of mine, hearing the Swanton vowels for the first time, remarked that it reminded him `of a great uncle with a partiality for brown Windsor soup and gentleman`s relish`.”The imminent arrival of his 90th birthday – an improbable anniversary for so sharp a mind and so active a body – will be marked by all manner of tributes, most notably a three-part BBCradio series recalling the many highlights of his career and acelebration dinner in the Long Room at Lord`s blessed by the attendance of a veritable Who`s Who of cricket. He is, after all,”one of the great cricket writers of this century” in the opinionof John Major. “Not just his Telegraph articles . . . but hisbooks, as well, some of which I think are classics.”But for a summary of his life (so far), including tales ofBradman`s final innings, of heroes like Compton and Sobers, ofadventurous sea voyages and flying boats, of the grim years as aPOW, of how he came to miss the Bodyline Series, of his abomination of coloured clothing, of Basil d`Oliveira and his hatred ofapartheid, of his ill-concealed distaste for Kerry Packer and IanBotham, of the celebrated rows with Raymond Illingworth and EnochPowell, I have great pleasure in handing you over to E W Swanton.”I`m a sort of curiosity, that`s what I am. I can picture thescene in our garden when I picked up a cricket bat for the firsttime. I must have been four or five I suppose because I canremember the buses were still drawn by horses. My father sufferedfrom very bad eyesight – in fact he couldn`t get into the firstwar so he became a special constable – but he was treasurer ofForest Hill Cricket Club in south London. My mother helped lookafter the teas, as ladies did in those days – and still do, thankGod – so I grew up on the boundary ropes. At 14 my father mademe a junior member of Surrey and I saw the Test match betweenEngland and Australia at The Oval in 1921 from the pavilion,which was a marvellous thrill. As it happens, I`ve just completedmy 76th year as a member of Surrey.”A life vice-president of the MCC, founder of The Arabs touringteam and arguably the most famous and influential non-Test playing cricket personality in the world, E W Swanton was born of anera when journalists at Lord`s were equipped with an assistant todictate their copy (and another to fetch the ice for their cocktails) and when writers on overseas tours would take dinner inevening dress. “We had a few firebrands in the old days, butsports writing is completely different now. Very much sharper andless kind. Directly after the war, everyone was lookingfor heroes. That`s why Denis Compton was a hero like none other. He was what every mother wanted her son to be. The writingthen was more benevolent, but a great part of cricket`s mystique when I started was that the public liked to admire cricketers for what they were. Len Hutton, Jack Hobbs, FrankWoolley were all nature`s gents. That feeling has rather gone nowand I feel the press has become far too intrusive.”Not that E W Swanton hesitates to meet controversy head-on whenthe occasion demands. He was bitter in his condemnation of SouthAfrica over the d`Oliveira affair, launched a withering attack onEnoch Powell in the letters page of The Spectator after thepolitician`s notorious `Rivers of Blood` speech, engaged in aprolonged feud with the then England captain Ray Illingworth -who had accused the scribe of “being such a snob, he doesn`t eventravel in the same car as his chauffeur” – and dismissed KerryPacker as “the anti-Christ”.Officially, he retired in 1975 but remains nothing if notopinionated. In Last Over, Allen notes: ” . . . at various timeshe [Swanton] has been called `overbearing` and `pompous`. Duringone commentary, when white smoke was seen billowing from a distant chimney . . . John Arlott turned to his colleagues and said,`Ah, I see Jim has been elected Pope`.” Arlott was speaking withaffection, however, for E W Swanton truly is the voice of cricket. “Ours is a slow-moving game and as such holds up a clearermirror to character than most,” he wrote in From Grace To Botham:A Century Of Cricket Fame. “We want to admire the stars forwhat they are as well as for what they do – which is why theexhibi- tionist antics of a few in recent times, giving theworst of examples to the young watchers on television, are soparticularly abhorrent.”He has been present at every great moment in cricket history,such as Bradman`s last innings when he was bowled by Eric Holliesand thereby denied the four he needed for a Test average of 100 -“I thought that [Jack] Fingleton and [Bill] O`Reilly were goingto have strokes in the press box, they were horribly unkind tothe Don” – except the notorious Bodyline tour of 1932-33, whichhe missed after being cricket-writing career.”I`d been covering a match between Yorkshire and Essex at Leytonin which Yorkshire, in the persons of Holmes and Sutcliffe, puton 555 for the first wicket. A world record. The Evening News,the Standard, an agency and The Star had to share the one publictelephone and old Swanton was the last. I missed the edition andthe editor at the time said, `Well, if the young fool can`t getus a story from Leyton, what`s he going to do from Melbourne andSydney?` So he deselected me and selected a chap called BruceHarris – the lawn tennis correspondent. Utter ignominy. When themonumental row started because we cheated, Bruce Harris latchedon to Douglas Jardine and Jardine was sensible enough to see he`dgot a spokesman for his views. I think if I had gone, I can`t believe I wouldn`t have condemned it. None of us wanted to believethey were doing what they were doing and since Bruce Harris gotsyndicated absolutely everywhere, everyone in England got the impression the Australians were squealers. It was an appallingthing.”Yet this has been a life of precious few disappointments, rathera life spent describing great deeds in great words. Harkunto Swanton on Sobers, his “favourite modern player . . one ofa large family from a little wooden house such as they have inBarbados and I saw him aged 17 playing his first Test in Jamaica.He aver- aged 57, I think it was, in Tests but if he`d been arun-grabber, if he`d put himself in at No 4 all the time instead of down the order, he`d have averaged 70, I expect. But thebest thing about him was that he never put a foot wrong. Heplayed the game hard and tough – as it should be – but scrupulously fairly.”Here, among his memories of Sobers and his collection of Wisdensstretching back to 1879 (including the battered 1939 version hekept with him in a Japanese POW camp), we must take our reluctantleave of E W Swanton for there is much work to be done before hecan flee the winter to enjoy his annual holiday in Barbados. Aswe crunch down the snowy path, from the drawing-room can be heardthe piano of his wife Ann, 85, an accomplished pianist who hasperformed with Sir Noel Coward and Sir Donald Bradman, while fromthe office E W Swanton is dictating his latest thoughts; and,yes, sounding remarkably like “a great uncle with a partialityfor brown Windsor soup and gentleman`s relish”.