A gentleman who relishes a game which truly reflects character

	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 the pavilion balcony when W G Grace made 140 for London County at Forest Hill in 1907, as a lad of nine he watched the glow in the sky over north London announcing the shooting down of a first world war German Zeppelin near Cuffley, Herts, and as a highly excited 12-year-old he visited the Oval in 1919 to see his beloved Surrey play Yorkshire and to fall hopelessly in love with cricket.

Eight decades, 23 books, an estimated eight million words (most of them as cricket correspondent of The Daily Telegraph) and countless hours at the microphone later, his ardour for the game glows 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, near the Kent coast, you settle back in a leather chair, savour that melody of ice rattling on crystal glass and luxuriate in the sound 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 BBC radio series recalling the many highlights of his career and a celebration 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 opinion of John Major. "Not just his Telegraph articles . . . but his books, as well, some of which I think are classics."

But for a summary of his life (so far), including tales of Bradman`s final innings, of heroes like Compton and Sobers, of adventurous sea voyages and flying boats, of the grim years as a POW, of how he came to miss the Bodyline Series, of his abomination of coloured clothing, of Basil d`Oliveira and his hatred of apartheid, of his ill-concealed distaste for Kerry Packer and Ian Botham, of the celebrated rows with Raymond Illingworth and Enoch Powell, 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 the scene in our garden when I picked up a cricket bat for the first time. I must have been four or five I suppose because I can remember the buses were still drawn by horses. My father suffered from very bad eyesight - in fact he couldn`t get into the first war so he became a special constable - but he was treasurer of Forest Hill Cricket Club in south London. My mother helped look after the teas, as ladies did in those days - and still do, thank God - so I grew up on the boundary ropes. At 14 my father made me a junior member of Surrey and I saw the Test match between England and Australia at The Oval in 1921 from the pavilion, which was a marvellous thrill. As it happens, I`ve just completed my 76th year as a member of Surrey."

A life vice-president of the MCC, founder of The Arabs touring team and arguably the most famous and influential non-Test playing cricket personality in the world, E W Swanton was born of an era when journalists at Lord`s were equipped with an assistant to dictate their copy (and another to fetch the ice for their cocktails) and when writers on overseas tours would take dinner in evening dress. "We had a few firebrands in the old days, but sports writing is completely different now. Very much sharper and less kind. Directly after the war, everyone was looking for heroes. That`s why Denis Compton was a hero like none other. He was what every mother wanted her son to be. The writing then 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, Frank Woolley were all nature`s gents. That feeling has rather gone now and I feel the press has become far too intrusive."

Not that E W Swanton hesitates to meet controversy head-on when the occasion demands. He was bitter in his condemnation of South Africa over the d`Oliveira affair, launched a withering attack on Enoch Powell in the letters page of The Spectator after the politician`s notorious `Rivers of Blood` speech, engaged in a prolonged feud with the then England captain Ray Illingworth - who had accused the scribe of "being such a snob, he doesn`t even travel in the same car as his chauffeur" - and dismissed Kerry Packer as "the anti-Christ".

Officially, he retired in 1975 but remains nothing if not opinionated. In Last Over, Allen notes: " . . . at various times he [Swanton] has been called `overbearing` and `pompous`. During one 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 with affection, however, for E W Swanton truly is the voice of cricket. "Ours is a slow-moving game and as such holds up a clearer mirror to character than most," he wrote in From Grace To Botham: A Century Of Cricket Fame. "We want to admire the stars for what they are as well as for what they do - which is why the exhibi- tionist antics of a few in recent times, giving the worst of examples to the young watchers on television, are so particularly abhorrent."

He has been present at every great moment in cricket history, such as Bradman`s last innings when he was bowled by Eric Hollies and thereby denied the four he needed for a Test average of 100 - "I thought that [Jack] Fingleton and [Bill] O`Reilly were going to have strokes in the press box, they were horribly unkind to the Don" - except the notorious Bodyline tour of 1932-33, which he missed after being cricket-writing career.

"I`d been covering a match between Yorkshire and Essex at Leyton in which Yorkshire, in the persons of Holmes and Sutcliffe, put on 555 for the first wicket. A world record. The Evening News, the Standard, an agency and The Star had to share the one public telephone and old Swanton was the last. I missed the edition and the editor at the time said, `Well, if the young fool can`t get us a story from Leyton, what`s he going to do from Melbourne and Sydney?` So he deselected me and selected a chap called Bruce Harris - the lawn tennis correspondent. Utter ignominy. When the monumental row started because we cheated, Bruce Harris latched on to Douglas Jardine and Jardine was sensible enough to see he`d got 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 believe they were doing what they were doing and since Bruce Harris got syndicated absolutely everywhere, everyone in England got the impression the Australians were squealers. It was an appalling thing."

Yet this has been a life of precious few disappointments, rather a life spent describing great deeds in great words. Hark unto Swanton on Sobers, his "favourite modern player . . one of a large family from a little wooden house such as they have in Barbados 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 a run-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 the best thing about him was that he never put a foot wrong. He played the game hard and tough - as it should be - but scrupulously fairly."

Here, among his memories of Sobers and his collection of Wisdens stretching back to 1879 (including the battered 1939 version he kept with him in a Japanese POW camp), we must take our reluctant leave of E W Swanton for there is much work to be done before he can flee the winter to enjoy his annual holiday in Barbados. As we crunch down the snowy path, from the drawing-room can be heard the piano of his wife Ann, 85, an accomplished pianist who has performed with Sir Noel Coward and Sir Donald Bradman, while from the office E W Swanton is dictating his latest thoughts; and, yes, sounding remarkably like "a great uncle with a partiality for brown Windsor soup and gentleman`s relish".