To be apparently always affable, a person everyone is pleased to see, ‘dear old Johnners’, as it seems was the broadcaster Brian Johnson, takes a nerve of steel, and that is apparent in this slightly awed biography by his son.
Perhaps it is true, as Barry Johnson suggests, that the early death of Brian’s father — swept out to sea off Cornwall in a swimming accident when Brian was ten — left him insisting for the rest of his life on a world of japes and jokes. Certainly, insist he did, with astonishing persistence.
First there was Eton, where he played jokes and cricket, then there was Oxford, where he did the same, life one gloriously extended house-party. Then, reluctantly, a couple of years in Brazil with the family coffee firm — and even that he contrived to make fun — from which he was rescued by the second world war and the Grenadier Guards (more jokes and cricket). But also there was his Military Cross, something about which he refused to speak (‘came up with the rations’ sort of thing). However, the citation for that award is interesting. He seems to have been given it for ‘his dynamic personality, untiring determination and cheerfulness under fire’. In other words, for being the man he was, or had chosen to be. Those who choose their parts and play them consistently are always the toughest. A comrade at the time, now General Sir David Fraser, said of him, after his death:
He was renowned throughout the Guards Armoured Division. Irreverent, gallant, irrepressible, impertinent to the exalted in a way which every recipient of the impertinence enjoyed … impossible to mention his name to anybody, in any context, without an answering grin.
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