Radio days

Ruminating here a couple of weeks ago on those whom the wretched reaper had gaily swiped down last year, Christmas deadlines had a trio of significant hall-of-famers missing: both the Oz horseman Scobie Breasley and the British runner Sydney Wooderson died on 21 December, and a week later the oldest surviving English Test cricketer, Norman Mitchell-Innes, unbuckled his pads for the last time. By coincidence, each of them was aged 92, born in the 1914 summer (of dreaded portent) and therefore members of just about a final generation oblivious of a boyhood surrounded by the incessant jabber and rabbit of round-the-clock sports broadcasting. Scobie, the midget 16-year-old prodigy from Wagga Wagga, had not even known the existence of live ‘wireless’ commentary of horseracing on Sydney’s 2VW station till he had actually ridden the winner, Chagford, of the big city’s 1930 Metropolitan Cup. The same revelation probably hit the spindly, myopic young Wooderson four years later only when friends told how they had heard a BBC voice cheering the unknown, unlikely Brit to a silver medal in the Empire Games mile race at London’s White City. A summer later, in 1935, and Mitchell-Innes’s only Test match innings — against South Africa at Nottingham (he scored five and was never asked again) — was not broadcast.

Such contemplation leads (tortuously, I agree) to a notable anniversary this coming Monday. Eighty years ago, on 15 January 1927, the fledgling BBC radio service conducted its first live running commentary of a sports event — the full 80 minutes of England’s victory over Wales in a rugby international at Twickenham. So well received was the experiment that the very next Saturday, 22 January, another live run-of-play transmission was delivered from Highbury stadium of Arsenal’s 1-1 draw with Sheffield United in the football league.