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Foreword

by Stephen Fry

Whenever I worry that the growing vulgarity, coarseness, ignorance, roughness, meanness, pessimism, miserabilism and puritanical stupidity of England will get me down, I invent a certain kind of Englishman to put all that right. He is entirely a fantasy figure of course. He must be charming, gallant, funny, courteous, kindly, perceptive, soldierly, honourable and old-fashioned. But old-fashioned in the right way. Not in terms of intolerance, crabbiness or contempt for the new, but in terms of consideration, amiability, attention and open sweetness of nature. Able to walk with kings nor lose the common touch, as Kipling put it. On top of that, this paragon must also, to please me, have a love of laughter, theatre and the world of entertainment. He should, of course, know, understand and venerate cricket.

Impossible that such an ideal could ever exist in the real world; and yet he did, and his name was Brian Alexander Johnston. Gallant? Certainly: the Military Cross is more than just a ‘he turned up and did his bit’ medal; it is an award only ever given for ‘exemplary acts of gallantry’. Johnners won his in 1945 after taking part in the Normandy landings. Naturally, if you ever tried to talk to him about it, he gently glanced the subject to leg. Funny? You don’t need me to remind you of that. I have his ‘Stop it, Aggers!’ moment as a phone ringtone, and I turn to it whenever I feel homesick or unhappy.

The fact is, Brian Johnston was the most perfect and complete Englishmen I ever met. His education at Eton and New College, Oxford, and his commission in the 2nd Battalion, the Grenadier Guards might mark him out in your mind as one of a class who expected to rule and to be respected and obeyed as a matter of course, as a birthright. He had no such pompous expectations. Life was good to him, but it dealt him hardships too. Aggers will take you through those; they tested him as few of us would want to be tested.

I first met him when I was invited to appear on the Radio 4 quiz game Trivia Test Match.

‘Ah, Fryers!’ he cried as I entered the pavilion of the cricket club where the show was to be recorded. ‘Welcome. This is your first time, so perhaps we ought to have a net.’

‘Fryers’? Only he could convincingly abbreviate my name by doubling its letter-count.

Within seconds of meeting him, I felt we were . . . not friends, that would be silly . . . we were the kind of warm acquaintances who would always be glad to see each other again. We spoke of Billy ‘Almost a Gentleman’ Bennett, Sandy Powell, Robb Wilton, George Robey and other music-hall stars, most of whom he had seen many times, and some of whom he knew personally from his old In Town Tonight days. The greatest light came into his eyes when he told tales of the Crazy Gang, his favourites from the golden age of British stage comedy. It was a mystery to many of his TMS listeners as to why he always referred to a Pakistani cricketer called Mansur as ‘Eddie’. Only aficionados of the Crazy Gang would know that the craziest of the gang was always called ‘Monsieur’ Eddie Gray.

To bump into Brian at Lord’s, in the part of London I shall always think of as St Johnners Wood, was the greatest pleasure of a British summer. With him passed something of England we shall never get back.