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The death of E.W. Swanton in January 2000, at the age of 92, brought to an end a remarkable life that almost spanned, and in many ways symbolised, the whole of the twentieth century. He was best known as the doyen of cricket correspondents, reporting for the Daily Telegraph, editing The Cricketermagazine, summarising the day's play for the BBC's radio coverage in his mellifluous baritone, and publishing over twenty books.


But there was much more to him. Captured in the fall of Singapore, he spent several years as a prisoner of the Japanese on the notorious Burma-Siam railway - a traumatic experience that regenerated his lifelong Christian faith. He was an outspoken critic of the cricket establishment's appeasement of apartheid South Africa. He knew everyone among the great and the good, from prime ministers to governors-general, in every country he visited. He even watched the great W.G. Grace play - from his pram. A confirmed bachelor until the age of fifty, he then enjoyed forty years of happy marriage. Some
thought him opinionated, arrogant, even snobbish ('He is quite prepared,' went the joke, 'to travel in the same car as his chauffeur'), but countless others, from the young cricketers he encouraged to local people in his home county of Kent whom he helped in times of trouble, testified to his limitless generosity for all his dignity and grandeur, to everyone who knew him he was simply 'Jim'.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Rayvern Allen's career has embraced television, radio and books. He was, until 1993, a full-time radio producer for the BBC (he continues for them freelance), and has won many awards for his work, including the prestigious Prix Italia. He is also the author or editor of over twenty books, among them The Punch Book of Cricket, An Illustrated History of the Game, a biography of cricketer, actor and film star C. Aubrey Smith and five anthologies in collaboration with John Arlott. His biography of Arlott won the Cricket Society Jubilee Literary Award in 1994.

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