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| John Arlott commentating on the cricket match between Gloucestershire and the New Zealand touring side in 1949. Photograph: Haywood Magee |
My hero:
David Allen on John Arlott
John Arlott's Hampshire burr stood out like a marrow in an orchard of plums among the cut-glass vowels of postwar broadcasting
Friday 28 March 2014
T
he voice was unmistakable, the Hampshire burr that stood out like a marrow in an orchard of plums among the cut-glass distorted vowels of immediate postwar broadcasting. John Arlott, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this week, had easily the most unconventional path to the microphone of any regular practitioner: clerk in a mental home; wartime policeman screening conscientious objectors; published poet who became a friend of Dylan Thomas and John Betjeman; literary programmes producer at the BBC in succession to George Orwell. He espoused the cause of the common man with an unabashed liberalism – twice as an aspiring Liberal MP – and after a visit to South Africa, where he answered "human" to an immigration officer who inquired as to his race, became an outspoken opponent of the apartheid regime. He was later instrumental in the "rescue" of the so‑called Cape Coloured Basil D'Oliveira, which led to a cricketing schism.
