E.W. Swanton was the doyen of English cricket writers and of cricket writers in English. He attended the Lord’s Test of 1930 and declared to the end that it was the best cricket match he had seen, graced as it was by hundreds from Percy Chapman and Duleepsinhji and a double hundred by Don Bradman. And all but seventy seasons later he was still attending Lord’s, and writing columns for the Daily Telegraph, which remained the embodiment of cricket common sense.
He was High Church and, occasionally, high-handed. When he was at the peak of his powers, he would deliver a close-of-play summary on Test Match Special which was as lucid and authoritative as his prose. Before delivering it, he needed to lubricate his throat with a whisky on the rocks, and woe betide the cricket ground which did not have any ice. His summary – sometimes after he had done ball-by-ball broadcasting during the day, but his sole contribution by the end of his radio career – was usually prefaced by a solemn ‘it has been an absorbing day’s play and I shall start by reading the card’. Denis Compton was always ‘Cumpton’ and Geoff Boycott was ‘Boycutt’ – and sometimes names a good deal worse.
Swanton, who played a handful of first-class matches for Middlesex as a batsman in the 1930s, got his first major cricket job on the Evening Standard. He nearly went to Australia in 1932–33, and claimed that Bodyline – the bowling of fast short-pitched balls at the batsman’s head some forty years ahead of its time – would never have happened if he had been there, instead of lesser mortals who could not report the game to readers in England with his lucidity and authority.
During the Second World War, he was taken prisoner in Singapore and was said to have behaved with bravery and dignity in a Japanese PoW camp from 1942 to 1945 while some around him did not. He had a battered copy of a 1939 Wisden to cling to during his imprisonment, if cricket was not a large enough part of his life already.
After the War, he became the Daily Telegraph’s cricket correspondent – and in some style. There was more than his whisky and ice to consider for the young men (and, more rarely, young women) who were employed to be his amanuensis. When he travelled to the West Indies, for instance, he alone of the cricket correspondents had to have a bunk bed on the flight to North America. Pakistan and India were not countries he toured: when England went there, the late Michael Melford of the Sunday Telegraph had to cover for him.
On arriving in the West Indies for M.C.C.’s (or England’s) 1953–54 tour, he began his first story with the words: ‘L.E.G. Ames (manager), L. Hutton (captain)’ with a list of all the players to follow. Then: ‘The above have arrived in Barbados.’ J.J. Warr, sometime correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, likened Swanton’s style to ‘a combination of the Ten Commandments and Enid Blyton’. As with many comments about ‘The Doyen’, it needed to be taken with a pinch of humorous affection.
The West Indies and their cricketers – Garry Sobers and the three Ws of Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott, in particular – were his especial love. For a time, he had a second home in Barbados before selling it and holidaying at Sandy Lane, where he indulged in another of his affections, golf. His closeness to the West Indies helped him to take a more progressive line on South Africa at the time of the Basil D’Oliveira affair than many of his colleagues. He raised and managed a couple of his own touring teams to the West Indies in 1956 and 1961, including some famous cricketers like Frank Tyson. His first cricket books were mainly records of England tours to Australia and the West Indies. As he grew to be older and ever more The Doyen, the titles of his books reflected his importance: Swanton in Australia for instance, and As I Said At The Time, or The Essential E.W. Swanton.
He would advise his amanuenses and any other prospective young cricket-writers to aim for clarity above all else and advocated the reading of Winston Churchill’s prose to this end. While his memory may have lapsed a little with age, his columns in the Daily Telegraph never fell from their high standard, even though he continued to write for twenty-five years after his retirement in 1975.
It would have been fitting if he had been elected president of M.C.C. after his decades of service on various committees, most latterly the arts and library, but while his great friend Sir George (‘Gubby’) Allen was elected, ‘Jim’ never was. His avuncular style and unrivalled knowledge would have been well suited to the post, and he was after all cricket’s establishment personified.
One of his many amanuenses was John Woodcock, who accompanied him by ship to Australia in 1950–51 before becoming cricket correspondent of The Times: he now succeeds to the title of ‘doyen’. Another was Daphne Surfleet, who became Mrs Richie Benaud. I, too, filled the job, if only for eight days in 1973, though not for any want of patrician kindness on his part.
He married Ann in 1958 and lived for the latter half of his life in Sandwich, Kent, but died without issue. Probably nobody has written more published words on one subject than he did over seventy years, and certainly not with such clarity and perception. For cricketers and readers about the game of games, this century is already poorer than the last.
Ernest William Swanton: b Forest Hill, London, 11 February, 1911; d 22 January, 2000