Thursday, 25 February 2010

John Arlott and The Little Master

Yesterday, Sachin Tendulkar became the first man to hit 200 in a One Day International yesterday, and it made me think of the great John Arlott whose birthday it would have been today.

The man's mellifulous tones were the sound of summer when I was growing up. He had a wonderfully poetic phraseology and had marvellous gift for evoking magical moments in cricket.

The pleasure of watching Test Match cricket, with the sound turned off and the radio on was inestimable.

In the 1940s, he went to South Africa and condemned the apartheid policy. When filling in an immigration form, which required him to declare his race, he wrote "human".

He was a humanitarian and great Liberal standing as a parliamentary candidate for Epping in 1955 and 1959.

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