Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Sports commentator best known for horse racing commentary, also covered football, motor racing, and Olympic events.
On the island
Eight records
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:08In what part of the country were you born?
I was born in Newport, in Monmouthshire.
Presenter asks
0:14What was your first ambition?
I don't know, quite honestly, since the theatre has always been my first ambition, but my parents decided I should get a good general business education, so I took a degree in commerce at London University and became an incorporated accountant, which of course is now the same as a chartered accountant.
Presenter asks
0:28What sort of parts did you play [in amateur theatre]?
I played all sorts of parts. I played Lobb in Dear Brutus. I played the lead in Pirandello's The Mask and the Face. I played in Shakespeare.
Presenter asks
0:46How did broadcasting come into things?
I don't know. They suddenly found a young man of 19 who seemed to be doing good things in the local theatre, and I was asked to 5WA in Cardiff in 1926, given an audition, and a part the following week.
Presenter asks
2:23When did you start sports commentating?
Oh, that wasn't until I got to Northern Ireland, actually, in 1935, when they opened up Big New Transmitter.
Presenter asks
6:36Has anyone ever worked out how many words a minute you utter at full speed [commentating]?
Yes, indeed. As a matter of fact, Seymour de Lotbiniere, when he was director of Outside Broadcasting, did it on the occasion that we broadcast our first Greyhound race.
“It certainly wasn't. You were lucky if you got more than a guinea for an evening show, according to the length of your part, and half a guinea in children's hair.”
“I joined it as the lowest form of BBC life — an announcer.”
“I did motor racing to start with and when we went on to football during the first season of league football, because the Irish league were then much more cooperative than the English league were in those days.”
“I just went through the horses in the paddock, and as I was doing so I memorised the colours they were wearing, just out of pure fancy, that's all. Then, duly, as they cantered down to the post, I handed the microphone over, and the broadcast was going along swimmingly, when about halfway through, I suddenly realised I'd got nothing on my earphones. Well, of course, as this was a check on the broadcast, I looked down at my plugs. I couldn't see anything wrong with those. Then I turned to my pal and found him holding the microphone, his mouth moving open and shut, just like a sort of dying duck in a thunderstorm, but nothing coming out of it. He dried up. He dried up completely. So all I did was to pinch the microphone from him and finish the commentary.”
“That was at an average speed of three hundred and twenty words a minute.”
“I think it's principally a photographic memory.”