Blowers, Bubbles & Balls

About Henry Blofeld

Cricket has been at the centre of Henry Blofeld''''s life since he first leaned to play the game at the age of seven. He somehow managed to pass an exam to get to Eton where he played cricket against Harrow at Lord''''s when he was fifteen. Until he was seventeen he played with some success as a wicket keeper and an opening batsmen and was in the Eton eleven for three years from 1955 to 1957 the last year as captain. In 1956 at the age of sixteen he score a hundred for the Public Schools against the Combined Services in their annual two-day game at Lord''''s joining Peter May and Colin Cowdrey as the only other two schoolboy players to have done so. Then in June the following year came a severe road accident when he gallantly took on a bus with his bicycle and took no further interest in this world for 28 days. He made a remarkable recovery but never played cricket with such promise again. He went to King''''s College Cambridge where he never scored a run against the examiners and was kicked out after two years. He somehow blagged his way into the Cambridge side in 1959 and had the luck to play in first-class matches against Denis Compton and the great Australian all-rounder Keith Miller making a first-class hundred against MCC at Lord''''s. After a two-and-a-half year spell in the City of London bowler hat and all he decided to see if he could write about cricket. However the first article he ever wrote was about a second eleven football match in 1956 for the Eton College Chronicle. It earned him a robust interview with the headmaster for being rude about Bradfield School which was not a particularly auspicious omen for a career in journalism. The Times decided to use Blowers as he is affectionately know as a freelance cricket writer in 1962. The following year The Guardian decided that they would find a home for his cliches and he remained with them as a freelance until The Independent set up shop at the start of the eighties. By then the Sunday Express also provided a home. He also wrote for the Observer and the Daily Telegraph. In 1975 he joined BBC''''s panel of cricket commentators when he joined the famous Test Match Special team for two one-day games against Australia. His years were spent watching county and a certain amount of Test cricket in England - there was only one year when he commentated on every Test for TMS - and in the winter he toured the cricket playing world. He probably watched more neutral series overseas than those involving England and he often worked for more than one newspaper and often the BBC as well. Blowers began to write books in 1970. He has written in excess of fifteen titles mostly about cricket as well as two autobiographies. His theatrical career began in 2002 when Dudley Russell a theatre agent and husband of poet Pam Ayres thought he would be able to do a one-man show. Although cricket inevitably forms a part of these shows they are really more about the extraordinary life he has led and the fascinating people he has bumped into along the way.